The House Always Wins, Which is Why I Rent
For someone who doesn’t drink, gamble, shop, eat at restaurants branded with the bloated visage of a television personality, enjoy staring at undulating water displays, wear my mask below my nose, or is willing to stand in a line in 100 degree heat in order to purchase a bag of M&Ms with my face printed on them, I sure go to Las Vegas a fuck of a lot. What can I say? Trash is my muse.
A barren desert exists between it and I which takes hours to cross; when my car is parked and the doors to one of its interchangeably garish casinos open, I am immediately overwhelmed by stimulus, a cacophony of lights and sound designed to whip me into a fervor. Choosing to abstain from giving it what it wants — choosing to observe, not participate — is how I win.
The city is a gilded con job, a garish display of the horrors of capitalism; it is antithetical to my entire ethos and that is why I love it so. It feels nice to be completely surrounded by people who desire something you do not, nice to be othered in an environment that is wholly emblematic of why the terrorists hate us.
Delusional degenerates flock to it like moths to a flame, enamored with the illusion that they could be the one who hits it big, that this time won’t end like the last. They never are and it never will, but at least they enter with hope. Watching the elderly pump their Social Security checks into infantile machines might sound depressing to you, but at least they have Social Security to squander.
Here are some of my favorite photographs I’ve taken there over the past few months.