Leaving Las Vegas
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| 32nd floor, 64-year-old shooter, Route 91 Festival, at last count 58 dead... Give me a 7. C'mon, 7. |
For no reason. I wasn't planning on going, it was just a time-wasting exercise, like Googling the weather forecast for a place you are marginally interested in or have visited in the past, but have no intention of (re)visiting anytime soon.
The cheapest flights were $94 round-trip on Frontier, or for a bit more, if you didn't want to get up at 4 in the morning (that early, I generally just find a comfortable chair at the airport the night before), a combination of Frontier and United.
Today I checked the same flights, now especially for no reason, in particular those departing Denver for Las Vegas tonight, and they are holding at the same price. Identical price Denver-Las Vegas tomorrow, matched by an additional carrier, Spirit. Same thing if you wanted to fly out on Wednesday, and witness our President witnessing the carnage. No special event surcharge, as would occur with, say, a championship boxing match, viewed on an IMAX screen in our new performing arts center.
Generally, flights go up drastically, day of. I was surprised they hadn't been cut in half. Actually, I'm surprised every commercial form of transportation into Las Vegas hasn't been cancelled. (Actually, I'm not surprised. Facebook posts indicate tourists were back feeding the slot machines in Mandalay Bay this morning. I mean, someone has to pay for all those ambulance runs, all those autopsies.) A friend told me they were physically ill, hearing the news. You want sick? I asked. Wait until you see the pictures.
Something about young, otherwise healthy adults lying motionless and contorted, especially with the backs of their legs streaming rivulets of blood, that makes me instantly queasy, generating an immediate need to turn away, save myself from further puzzlement brought on by continued exposure. Blood dripping from the forehead, streaming along the margin of a nostril, fine, no problem. That was Catalonia yesterday, all part of the democratic exercise. You can Clockwork Orange me all day on that stuff.
But last night while most of us were sleeping, another excruciating exercise in second-amendment rights played out across the street from Mandalay Bay for nearly ten minutes (again, let me repeat - FOR NEARLY TEN MINUTES. How could any human being survive the stress of suddenly finding themselves a fishbowled target in a twisted live-ammo gunfire arcade for more than 10 seconds, or witness a non-enemy non-combatant, perhaps a loved one or co-worker, double clutch and slump to the ground beside them, and not immediately stroke out?), and the pictures of the massacre make it such that I never want to find myself within thinking distance of a cheap flight to Las Vegas ever again.
During drive time, we got to hear dispassionate experts drop phrases like "soft targets" and "expanding the kill zone" into their analysis. If this is now how we play, f'real, we need to have, instead of fire drills, something like "live fire" drills. Our schools, synagogues, movie theaters, any confined space that invites the schizophrenic or brilliantly-troubled to solve their unsolvable equations with automatic gunfire, need to be exited as comfortably and quickly under duress as Kim Kardashian dumped Kris Humphries. Seriously, we've got to practice, especially learn how to distinguish fireworks from .308 caliber bullets, because lives were lost, as they always are, in the confusion. Plus there should be a rule that all TV coverage of mass casualties be reported in the first 24 hours only by survivors and close relatives of the deceased. It would involve a lot of crying and shock-related perseveration interrupted by mucous-y wails, with some probably holding the microphone awkwardly and staring off camera, in violation of all rules of broadcasting or hostage negotiation because viewers would be left confused and angry instead of blandly reassured by pap that "life goes on", when for those who actually live it, it increasingly doesn't, but it would definitely not leave us so effing desensitized and complacent to the point of convincing ourselves in the moment it was okay to keep driving, to not pull off the road and vomit up a lung, that it was okay for the sports talk shows, so completely out of their element, to "take our mind off something" we hadn't even started brushing the surface of our mind on.
The stock market rose, although gaming stocks fell. Just another late-night shooting to add to the list, a night terror, really, folks, and we'll open up the phone lines now, so feel free to call, but please, just tell us your thoughts, this is not the time to bring up issues surrounding gun control. ("Hi, I'm Larry. Right now, I really think I'd like to talk about lunatics being allowed to collect arsenals capable of taking a village CLICK) Okay, here's a puzzler that should get past your screener. Do you transport all of these rifles up to your suite at once, in a golf bag, say, or would that be too obvious, or too heavy to even lift? (Sorry, I don't exercise guns.) Or do you transport them one at a time, in a tactical padded case you keep displaying, then emptying, each trip, as if you were carrying the same gun up and down, up and down? Are Mandalay Bay desk clerks that jaded? And further, if guests can't open these windows, have no business opening or breaking them out except for criminal mischief, why not release a powerful cascade of water every 90 seconds from the top floor (Bellagio does this to music), or randomly windshield-wiper a long guillotine blade back and forth every half-hour or so, to potentially dislodge gun barrels stuck out in an attempt to shatter the current mass murder record?
Am I familiar with the area? Of course. We all are, this is the Las Vegas strip, for god sakes, America's Mecca (which is why it's so funny ISIS already took credit for his conversion, as if a 64-year-old retired white asshole Nevada gambler required a lesser God). But man, if you're not, look at the distance between the shooter's 32nd-floor suite and ground zero of the so-called Las Vegas Village, where the country music festival was being held. Imagine the sight line (or wait a few months and you won't have to, as this will become Fremont Street's hottest VR attraction). Either that's damn fine point and clicking, or 'Merica manufactures a whole nother level of weaponry and ammo then it did when Charles Whitman gained access to the observation deck of the UT tower in 1966.
I generally don't frequent Mandalay Bay, because I find their table minimums too high, but two weeks ago, I won 100 bucks in 20 seconds of work up the strip a ways at New York-New York, and then gave it all back (and more) over the course of an hour at the Trop, just north of the outdoor concert venue. On that same trip, I drove a rental car through the shooter's retirement home of Mesquite on the way to St. George, and was pleasantly surprised, ranking its visual assault on good taste (as revealed to interstate traffic) low compared to other Nevada border towns with no reason to exist other than being near a border. On the way back, I found (in their guest book, no less, so you can go and look it up if you don't believe me) the charm and functionality of their visitor's center well beyond that of other straddle-pretenders like Wendover or Jackpot or Laughlin. The shooter's family claims he was a multimillionaire. Perfect. It will take all that and more to rub Mesquite streets clean of his mildewy dick-smell. I'm not assigned to the story, but if I was, I'd visit his shooting range, ask if he was a regular, find the pitcher's mound he practiced from.
Once again, the pop-pop-pops still echoing, we assemble for the all-too-familiar debriefing, take solace in gathering up (or requisitioning) heroes, comforted by Sarah Huckabee Sander's emotional promise of their sacrifices serving as "an eternal reminder that the American spirit cannot and will not ever be broken."
Okay, maybe, but unlike most American grads, I can do the math. 28,000 more random Kill-Cons like last night's, and the number of unmaimed left to drench themselves in chanson will sure bend a little. Hell, 5,000 more vapid-chatterbox mornings like today, I'll be so deadened, any barista not catching my name the first go will understand real dislodgement.
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