Nau speak: Vegas: Summer nights and nostalgia part 5

Late at night at some slumped shouldered corner in a bar somewhere in Vegas, definitely off-strip but not more than 15 or 20 minutes away from the epicenter of the city, you're quite likely to hear a cynical and begrudging local ranting about how this city is a black-hole: for money, your soul, your life. I've certainly been guilty of it myself from time to time, as the constant churn of consumption and rejection can wear on even the most resilient of psyches. There's a magnetism to Las Vegas, a certain sort of gravitational pull that seems to get its hooks into people and become exponentially more difficult to detach from as time goes on. Like the imagery of the charming devil at the crossroads, sliding his silky red hands tight around your most prized possession and coercing you into surrendering it before you knew what hit you.

And then, the time starts to fly by. In the endless twilight of the casinos, day and night blur into a blanket of fuzzy edges, the poorly defined vignettes of interaction bleeding one into another. The longer you linger, the harder you have to fight to crawl your way out of the desert sands and sin that threaten to engulf you in their ever warm, alcohol-numbed embrace. If you're one for indulgence, it's even easier to get lost and wind up just another hollowed out shell, baked into bitter acquiescence by the unrelenting sun. Not only do the casinos themselves offer near-bottomless booze to all players, there's a glut of dispensaries and free-lance substance slingers hawking their wares eagerly on the streets to satisfy any craving. Anything to take the edge off, to thrill and entice. Adventure and excitement are always on offer here. This is Las Vegas, after all, the entertainment mecca of the Mojave desert, and we'll be damned if we don't enthrall. Those fat American dollars (along with all currencies, readily exchanged) are needed to keep resources pumping into our little slice of oasis.