As I was driving into Vegas on the freeway I had noticed I had gotten an email from one of the guys I am working with on the project. He referenced some Slack messages he sent me, needing some instructions from me on how to see up the app. After I got in my room, I replied to messages with a big long string of patient documentation. I love patient documentation. I love relieving the burden of confusion from others. I know where they are going to stumble, so I point out how they need not stumble. It's fun, and people appreciate it.
By that I was hungry. No room service. The restaurant was open. The sign said to wait to be seated. I hung around at the host's stand. Only a few people were dining, and only a few were on the floor as staff, and they could barely see him. I took as a sign to find food elsewhere, so I walked out into the night.
The last thing I wanted to do was head for the Strip. I went the other direction, under the Interstate and up along the side road into the industrial strip mall area. I saw bright lights in the night. Usually it means a "gentlemen's club", but in this case the flashing letters that greeted me were B-B-Q. It was in a small complex next to the offices of a low power Christian radio station. This is what I was looking for!
Inside it is lively. Wearing a mask sucks. I order a plate with two meats and one side. I sit at one of the picnic tables. A big screen is showing an NFL game. Football may as well be an unknown sport to me now. Two hispanic men, one obese and wearing the hat of the Raiders, which is now the hometown team, watch the big screen while eating.
It is a nice atmosphere. As I finish my meal I see that the decor references the state of Arkansas. On the tables are bottles of Arkansauce.
When I ordered my drink, I asked if that had soda water. The young woman was very confused. I gave and went with regular water. Turns out they do have soda water. When I left I took my soda water out in the night and stood in the dark under the elevated off ramp that comes off I-15 there. It reminded me of hanging out under I-5 in Portland when I worked down in Albina. You can feel pulse of the country, standing under one of the great Interstates. I drank my soda water while standing behind an electrical box that shielded me from the light of cars and people walking by in the dark. I looked up at the hotel where I was staying, the golden letters in the sky. I thought about the people who put the electrical cables into the streets of Las Vegas to make it all work. I felt great love for them.
Then I decided to keep walking north along that dark street, and then loop back. It turned out to be a very long walk, because of the train tracks---the Union Pacific railroad. I kept walking in the dark but there were no streets to cut back the way I came. I knew there had to be one eventually so I kept going. I was greeted by some street people in the dark, and saw all manner of the businesses that exist on the gritty edge of the Strip, which are the real Las Vegas, stripped of all its glamor, but just the plain city that works and the vice-feeding outlets that provide people with the things they want. Gentlemen's clubs---many shuttered, tatoo parlors, and marijuana dispensaries were the most common. There were also regular businesses---heating and cooler, and an engineering firm in a dirty little brick building from the middle of the Twentieth Century. A crematory in a nice new strip mall. A place where you can shoot machine guns. Lots of warehouses with trucks, carrying who knows what, that makes the city operate.
Finally I was able to loop back across train tracks. By that time I has walked almost as far north as the Stratosphere Tower. On the other side of the tracks is a wide well-lit avenue running south, exactly the direction I needed to go. My hotel was straight in front of me. I passed the back of Circus Circus, which is an RV Park, and the crummy Manor rooms, which were obviously once a motor hotel of their own and were acquired by Circus Circus, and cut off from the street they faced. They are considered the worst rooms on the Strip (even though they aren't really on the Strip of course). I thought about the brave people staying in the rooms and felt pity for them.
ll I had to do was keep walking. At one point the sidewalk ceased because they are putting in a brand new one. So I had to walk on dirt. I didn't mind. A cabbie with a Bangla-type bear stopped and solicited me as a passenger. I know all the places to go, he said. I'm sure you do I said, cheerfully. But I don't want to go to any of them. Vegas makes me appreciate my own vices as being small burdens compared to the ones others bear.
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