Finding What Really Matters When It All Shifts for the Worse
The Vegas mid-day sky is strangely dark and slightly orange. The sun, ordinarily a blazing hot laser that has this amazing hostility in the desert, is muted. I can stare right at it and see it’s perfect circle. It is the stuff of a Ridley Scott dystopia.
At this moment, my mind goes to the end of the world place. I know the haze comes from California currently on fire in so many places that the smoke has drifted as far as Kansas but is still thick here. It smells like a Webber charcoal grill just before the steaks go on. I wonder if the clothes I’m wearing are my apocalyptic outfit, the costume of my End of Days character. I’m not sure if the shoes will hold up to Cormac’s Road but the jeans have some staying power, I think. The vest, at least, will look cool as the planet descends into galactic irrelevance.
If this is it, that minute when it all goes to shit, did I remember to tell my mom I love her? Was my last kiss on my wife’s lips worthy of being our, you know, last kiss? Will I remember, months from now as I scavenge cold canned food out of abandoned grocery stores to survive, the feast of a club sandwich, fries, and a Dr. Pepper as bounty?
Did I write about things and ideas worth reading and soon, long after the digital footprint is erased by the absence of electricity, will anyone remember them?
I grew up reading about the demise of civilization. King’s The Stand was among my favorite books. Movies about the nuclear holocaust destined to come, pandemics devastating humanity, zombies hoarding through empty cities. The inhumanity of humans balanced with the kindness of survivors. Hard choices following devastating loss.
Yeah. I think what makes my specific brand of optimism potent is the always present knowledge of impermanence. Mortality is never far from my thoughts although it is not the fear of death or pain that permeates the brainstew. It’s the billions of distractions spent eating up the life being lived just before the end that fascinate and horrify me.
This too shall pass is both a salve for those in troubled times and a warning for those whose heads are stuck so far up their cakeholes that they miss the importance of significant but easily discarded life.
I’d like to believe that if we all were a bit more in tune with the fact that the party eventually ends we might be the slightest bit more grateful for that last Solo cup of beer and that final bite of cheese. We’ll feel pretty fucking stupid taking for granted a hug when there is suddenly no one left to embrace.
I stare at the sun for that beat and the moment passes. I head back into the casino for more of the bizarre, the mundane, and the simple weird day-to-day of managing the swing shift in a casino at the end of the world. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, my ass. The fractured lives of gamblers on the ass end of broke-dick is more like it.
On a corner slot machine sits Ted. That isn’t his name as far as I know but Random Addict Homeless White Guy Mumbling to Himself is too burdensome for an essay so Ted will do. Ted has been here before. Ted could be thirty-five years old or somewhere north of sixty. Who knows? The desert sun has a way of fossilizing age.
My general manager has tossed him from the place for refusing to wear a mask. I physically threw him out in the parking lot when he decided he was going to get a free drink and scream his ass off in order to get it. When I tried to get him out the door, he started screaming “Don’t you put your hands on me!” My response was “Or what?” His reaction was to try to break the glass on one of the exit doors. I grabbed him by the back of the shirt and shoved him onto the pavement.
As the Nice Manager or the Manager of Multiple Chances I figure as long as he’s not bothering people or acting up, he’s fine to play his found two dollars for a beer and a chance to get out of the heat. He has a tall boy beer in his pocket. “Yo. Don’t open that beer on the casino floor or I’ll have to chuck it in the can.” He nods in a frenetic way and continues to slowly push the penny bet button.
I remind him to wear the fucking mask (really a red bandana but who quibbles in a pandemic?) and he haphazardly pulls it up. I register a sour smell from him. A combination of weeks of sweat dried, booze, and something else unpleasant.
A few minutes later, he’s up at the cage trying to cash in cash vouchers for $0.03 and $0.11 that he has found in machines abandoned by players who couldn’t be bothered with the small change after losing. This practice, known as ticket surfing is forbidden so it’s time for Ted to head out for the day.
He takes the news better this time as me booting him from the property is now semi-routine. He points to the machine he was playing. “Someone left those cigarettes. Are those yours?” he asks.
“Not mine. I smoke but not cigarettes. No one seems to want them so if you do, they’re yours.”
“You don’t want them?”
“Nah. Menthol. You couldn’t pay me to smoke menthol.”
“I can have them?”
“Yup.” I hand him what looks like three-quarters of a pack of Newports.
Another moment. A microcosm expanded.
The look on his face—surprise, gratitude, sadness, desperation—freezes time.
How did Ted go from being an eight-year-old boy just like I once was and end up, in this moment, here? What was his journey in this descent?
The feeling in my core isn’t pity or empathy. It isn’t some virtuous need to demonstrate kindness or a need to save him. It’s almost a clinical interest in his story. A desire to understand his path and how it diverged from my own. Looking at a disaster and wondering how I avoided the same. Genes? Upbringing? Dumb luck?
At once I am struck by the things I fail to appreciate in my life. In the midst of the frustration with so much of society, with the struggles with the needs and complaints of so many, I recognize the absolute necessity in reflection. Staring for a moment in the mirror, not at myself in the narcissism of the social media age, but at the people and things around me that keep me from walking those footsteps of the apocalypse, from dancing the sad death spiral Ted seems to be on.
This too shall pass.
A Las Vegas friend with ties to Chicago made an odd comment recently. He was commenting on his enjoyment of Johnny Depp films and said “I’m truly fascinated by the work of those who have been cancelled. Depp, you...”
Wait. I was cancelled?
I suppose, in some ways, I was. My frame is that Chicago was as done with me as I was Chicago but no one can present themselves from within their own lens. Everyone sees everyone else the way they choose to and if some see my trajectory in that way, I suppose it doesn’t change things for me.
It’s that lens thing that gets to the point, right? The world is as you choose to see it. Not so much as a frame for truth (because that whole “I’m living my truth” is some ego-driven prattle) but as a guide for how one behaves.
There are always going to be people who will take advantage you. Always. You can choose to then see everyone as a potential grifter or choose to avoid assigning guilt before specificity. The choice will determine how you approach every relationship you enter into. It will dictate how you treat strangers. It will stipulate the terms of your own social contract.
We are living out big history right now. The events we are enduring are going to be taught in history classes for hundreds of years. For those folks living in 2120, the COVID pandemic of 2020, the reign of Donald Trump, the results of decades of climate change, will all be chapters in the book.
In Brian DePalma’s Vietnam film Casualties of War there is a moment that sticks in my mind. This is certainly a paraphrase so don’t get your little girl panties up in a wad about accuracy but at one point a character looks at Michael J. Fox and states that nothing matters in the conflict. That with the horrors surrounding them, no one is looking at the brutal behavior of single individuals so who cares.
Fox’s character’s response is simply that maybe, when no one is looking, when the world is on fire, maybe it is even more vital to do the right thing. When everyone is angry and misunderstanding everyone else, when war envelopes us all, maybe that is the exact time to be kinder and less angry.
This too shall pass and we will still be here. The world feels like it’s ending a lot more than it did when I was reading The Stand and listening obsessively to Maynard Ferguson. Perhaps the immediacy of knowing at every second what everyone is doing and feeling has something to do with that. I don’t know.
I suspect that the world will never end, at least not in the way our active dreaming envisions it. The world, whether it includes us or not, will continue to turn. Each day will follow the next. Maybe it takes the form of a Mad Max world or a dystopia where Kevin Costner is the postman hero. I can almost guarantee that the momentary vitriol and infighting over identity, over politics, over whether to wear a mask or how we fund college will not be on the radar.
At this particular end of the world it’s that kiss and on my wife’s lips, that FaceTime call to Mom, that fucking dry-ass club sandwich that matter. It’s the fact that I had the privilege to take a hot shower, that I’m remarkably COVID-free, and I own more than one pair of shoes (despite wearing the less durable pair today) that count.
We have bigger fish to fry and even those, too, will pass.
When it comes, at least I’ll be wearing this cool ass vest.
