Vegas: Ad Octavum Circulum.
This week I have found myself in Las Vegas, Nevada. I've never hated a place more. It is an altar for human addiction: money, gambling, alcohol, sex, status, shopping. Crossing into it feels like stepping into the Eighth Circle of Hell where the whores and the panderers wear sequin. The bolgias, or 'resorts', each house a different 'aesthetic', screaming “glamour” but it’s a hollow howl — thin walls, weak water pressure, all architecture of a cut-rate empire. Grandeur here is a numbers game: how many bodies can be crammed in and still call it luxury.
All human senses are under attack here. Bright lights, blaring music, weed and tobacco permeates the atmosphere. Inside or out, there is no respite for the nervous system. Workers hunt the hallways, shoving “offers” into your hands, voices like carnival barkers. Vegas shrieks LIVE, LIVE, LIVE while siphoning you dry in the same breath. Hours dissolve without warning but not as fast as your money. The food is overpriced and mediocre — a parody of indulgence. I almost walked into traffic after paying $12 for a coffee that was mostly foam.
I almost hate myself for being unable to enjoy a place engineered for pleasure. Here I am again: the same boring old girl who knows not what to do with herself. My closest brush with debauchery was buying a vibrator and a bar of dark chocolate from the Target at the Strip. With ferocious discipline, I refused to buy clothes, knowing they’d do nothing for me but hang limp in the closet and make me feel bad about my finances. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
But really, even the slot machine faithful don't seem happy. At 6AM, they are already anchored to their chairs — slack-jawed, swollen, pressing the same button with the same expressionless devotion. No joy. No hope. Dead-eyed livestock sacrificing their coin.
Vegas has made me itchy, irritable, unsexy. It has stripped me of charm, patience, and even the will to pretend. I have never hated a place so much — a gilded Inferno that calls itself paradise. My only minute joy is that my promised and his father seemed to have a grand time in their artificial intelligence conference.