Desert Sun Over Las Vegas #1

After all-u-can-eat Sushi we drive back, through traffic light after traffic light, stripmall after stripmall, neighbourhood after neighbourhood, and I can’t tell anything apart, each wall, each roof, each column and terrace the same terra cotta material, the same desert architecture, less than thirty years old, built to absorb and decrease the desert heat and yet each story inside, I want to say, I really, painfully want to say, must be completely different in terms of narrative, plot, character, conflict, and resolution. But after a quick, maiden run (for me) to Costco earlier in the day with my brother, man, I just don’t know. In the evening hour, in the dead, black heat of the Las Vegas night, we sit on the back patio, hashing and rehashing my childhood, sipping non-alcoholic beer, laughing, thinking, processing, farting, laying down bridges and pulling them up again, somehow connecting through the emotional fog of my father. Before we get up to go inside, my brother’s girlfriend flicks on a blacklight torch, a tool I didn’t know we needed, scans for scorpions, a threat I didn’t know existed. I place my socked feet on the wooden, Walmart coffee table, slide my hand inside a giant bag of Himalayan salted crisps and secretly hope to feel the shelled and spidery legs of a scorpion.