What the fuck kind of bullets do you use against existential dread: Las Vegas, Day four

Day four started off as kind of messy. I drove out to Red Rock after saying bye to Bri. I had two shoots back to back, and I was nervous. Not to do the shoot by myself, but kind of to do the shoot by myself. My ankle is still fucking bad (hopefully I'll be getting my MRI any day) and running back and forth from my perch to the lights to the model to adjust shit was going to be a nightmare on my ankle, and I was also worried I wouldn't be able to control the light. 

But it ended up not really mattering, because when I got to Red Rock, the wind was so fucking intense that I had to reschedule my shoots. 

There was no way a wings shoot was going to work in that kind of wind, my wings are very fragile. Thankfully both models agreed to reschedule for the next morning, but I was looking at a freshly free morning where I had otherwise expected to be busy, so I decided this was the perfect time to go to MeowWolf. 

But I had something to do first. 

On my way out of the hotel that morning, I stopped at the front desk to talk to them about checking out that day and possibly getting a small refund on what had already been spent. The gentleman at the front (the joyless one who was not amused at my love of boobies) told me the manager would be in later, he didn't know when, and he couldn't help me with getting checked out or getting any kind of refund. I popped back in after my cancelled shoots to see if the manager had arrived...she had not...and he still had no idea when she would be back. So I said I would be out on shoots until three. 

And then I made my way to Meow Wolf, and had a complete breakdown of reality on the drive there. 

I was first introduced to Las Vegas when I was 13 years old. I didn't necessarily love it because I was 13, I had been kind of more or less kicked on a trial basis, I was not in a space to understand a new city and get to know it. My dad did his best to show me the place he had been living with his then wife Cheryl (a total troll, and I honestly hope she's dead), and there were certain things I enjoyed. Vegas had this shine to it. Going down the strip dazzles you, the lights are bright, the shows being advertised look larger than life. Back in the late 90s, there was still an old world Vegas feel to Vegas. It looked the way it was supposed to look: gaudy, over the top, completely fucking kooky and without reason. Vegas only had one directive: be as nuts as possible. And it was. Even at 13, I could see that much.

I didn't get back to Vegas until I was 15, and I had turned into a different person. A lot more depressed, sure, but a lot more ready for whatever adult delights Vegas had to offer kids on the cusp of adulthood with a dangerously low amount of supervision. I found a lot more love for Vegas this go around. I made friends with Steffie. She's a year older than me, and we explored a lot of Vegas together. We got into very adult situations as children, were in sexually alarming situations that were dangerous that we ended up laughing off, all of this against the backdrop of a city that displayed itself exactly as it seemed to be. Glitzy, gaudy, sexy, and indulgent, but also cheap and sleazy and tacky. But in a way that was charming and fun. 

I left Vegas for several years and moved back when I was 21. I was finally old enough for Vegas, and I truly fell in love with everything Vegas was. Once you're old enough to really take part in the Bosch levels of delights in Vegas, it takes on a whole new shine. Penny machines are a good way to get fucking loaded on the cheap, there is no shortage of really decent buffets where you can get all the prime rib you want, when you're 21 and broke and living with your boyfriend on stretched income, Vegas is actually pretty fucking rad. I was enamored. When I got pregnant with my daughter and had to leave, I was depressed about leaving what I thought of as my city. I felt connected to Vegas, because Vegas and I were the same. I was also gaudy, glitzy, and sexy in a way that feels tacky, gross, and kinda shameful. 

I wouldn't return to Vegas for another three years, and Vegas felt different. Allen and I agreed that it wasn't our city anymore. We were older, we had a baby, we had adult jobs, we were no longer frivolous kids getting by on love and fumes. We had a good time, but some of my favorite buildings had been taken down, Vegas was changing. Buildings like The Aria were making their way onto the Strip, and they're soulless, boring buildings that prefer to look sleek than to look interesting. We had outgrown each other, Vegas and I. 

That was 2009. I haven't been able to make it back to Vegas since, and while I've had the on and off desire to...every time I date someone and it got serious, I would want to take them to Vegas because I did several versions of growing up there, and I wanted to show it off while describing who I used to be and where I used to be that person to someone who loved the version of me I turned into. So it's been a little under 20 years since I've been to the city I used to understand and love so much. 

Meow Wolf is in a place called Area 15. To get there, I had to drive on a back street that I was deeply unfamiliar with. The hotel I was staying at, The Lexi, was off of Sahara, on a side street I didn't know, and I feel like The Lexi should have been my first clue that something was...wrong...about Vegas. When I was looking into the hotel before booking, it looked super cute. A little cookie cutter and I assumed it was going to have bad beds bought in bulk and be vaguely uncomfortable, but it seemed otherwise fine. The reality of The Lexi when I arrived was very much not that. I think the kindest way to describe it is a building that someone really and truly loved once, a long time ago, but is now completely and totally rotten underneath, and the decay is being hidden under a cynical patina of Ikea level "luxury". 

The Lexi is the crown jewel of the street I had to drive down to get to Area15. It only got worse from there. 

I've always assumed I knew what Vegas was. Vegas is a lie, really. Vegas promises Bosch levels of debauchery, but really it's kinda like Goya. You come to Vegas for the Garden of Earthly Delights, but you get Saturn Devouring his Son, and you are charmed by this. You really are. Vegas CAN consume you, Vegas CAN end your shit in a horrific way, but mostly you're just watching the horrors and going, glad it isn't me! Great use of color here, though! People who know Vegas and have loved Vegas as I have have this kind of detachment from the truth about what Vegas is, but as I drove to Area15, it was like further drawing back the veil, and seeing what was BEHIND the Goya. Seeing an empty canvas that is its own black hole on the outskirts of time. 

The first thing I noticed that rattled me was the lack of unhoused people. This silent back alley of Vegas was missing its most ignored demographic, and while generally, they are overlooked, they're never  MISSING. They are always there, demonstrating not just the capability of Vegas to chew you up and spit you out, but capitalism as a whole. The empty side street had not a single person walking, sitting, laying down. It was just me, my car, and the empty buildings. Building after abandoned building passed by me as I drove 25 miles per hour down the street. Every building abandoned was a strip club once upon a time. I thought maybe I was making light of the moment in my head, but no, truly every building that had been given up on used to be home to naked titties and drunk voyeurs. While I support sex work (in a complicated way...it is legitimate work, but it is still rooted in patriarchy and capitalism and therefore cannot be anything other than deeply exploitative), and I have worked my fair share of sex jobs, strip clubs by their very nature are still sad. I was struck by not knowing what was sadder to me...that there used to be a literal block of city street blocks of strip clubs back to back, or that there is now an entire street of back to back strip clubs that are sitting empty; shells of what they once were. 

I drove past the last empty strip club...the largest of them all, and noticed that the large photoplex sign at the front was still there. It hadn't been torn down, or altered in any way. It had an afterglow of its final image burned into itself...the ghost of a long gone model shoving her tits up with her arm and sucking on a lollipop. We aren't meant to see this, I thought to myself. We are not supposed to see the ghosts of sin and vice staring at us while we're still alive and aware. 

As I was driving down this street, I was so fucking unnerved that I didn't even want to get my camera out to take photos. I left this empty side street exactly where I found it, because I am still not convinced I was ever meant to see this. I feel like I drove down this street in a cosmic accident, so I left it to ephemera. The street, that corner of Vegas, it's already gone. 

Vegas is a city that relies on you not really understanding it. It's an act. And before I drove down that street, I was convinced I had seen all of Vegas for what it was. When you've seen an unhoused woman wash her pussy on a bus bench and in the same second turned around to see an unhoused man taking an earnest shit against the side of a building; when you've been unhoused there yourself and slept behind a library because of choices that feel bigger than you and out of your control, there truly can't be much of a veil to draw back. I was wrong in that assumption. 

There's a story called There Will Come Soft Rains that is haunting as fuck, and I felt like I was driving through that story in Vegas instead of Allendale. Vegas is an otherwise cacophonous city that relies on its visitors not seeing it for what it really is. I'm not sure what I did to earn a visit to Vegas at its most honest, but here I am...waxing poetic about how Vegas is a real life Meow Wolf....a large, wholly decorative place that is overwhelming and fun to look at, but when you rip the veneer away, it is soulless, empty, and dark.

I've been rattled by that long, slow drive ever since. 

I arrived at Area15 and was thrown back into the Vegas I could contextualize, thank goodness. 

SCAN ME!

Area15 is an entertainment complex that houses Omega Mart and about 18 thousand other things to do, all in dayglo with a fuck ton of noise.

Natural colors? Never heard of 'em!

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! I have been so excited to visit Omega Mart! And I was finally here! So brace yourself for a metric fuck ton of photos from the exhibit. I did not engage in the storyline because I only had a few hours, and Convergence Station took me and Derek about 9 hours total (but Convergence Station is about three times the size of Omega Mart), but I still explored everything. I engaged with enough of the story that I think I have a rough gist, but not enough to feel confident that I got it. Anyway, off we go!

One of our cats is named Torple, so seeing this just totally sent me. I laughed and laughed. 

I sent these photos to Derek and told him I found our new cat naming schema. It's the product bottles from Omega Mart. 

The zucchinis were little kaleidoscopes! 

I ended up buying myself a purple beanie that boasts the Rose Beef logo on it. 

Before projections....

During!

So you can climb into that fireplace, and of course I did. It takes you up and up and up....

....via a fucking rope....

...to the second floor. I wanted to take video of the climb, but could not, for obvious reasons. 

All of the stats made me laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. I was totally delighted. 

I am always thrilled to see Demotivation posters in the wild!!!

Oh don't worry, I won't. 

Oh yay! My first "hidden" door!

Unfortunately, none of the numbers I dialed went to other phones where people could pick up and talk to me. 

I'm trying, but I have ADD. 

I do not know if people coming here remember Demotivation posters, or if they're thinking these posters are the creation of the Meow Wolf artists? 

Omega Mart has characters!!! The little crop of neon green hair belongs to a DRAMCORP employee that I interacted with. They did a great job leading me to asking the kind of question they could interact with, and were hilariously stonewalling me until I asked, "well what is a secret?" and then they wanted to send me on an adventure with my friends. I had to report that I had no friends, so they found friends for me. They sent all of us into the laser room and gave us the task of covering all of the lasers to hear something quiet. There weren't enough of us to do it, it would have taken about 15 people and there were only seven of us. But we could definitely hear whispering.

This fucking filing cabinet in the middle of the god damn room houses a fucking door I never figured out how to fucking open. I waited and waited and waited and waited for someone to open it from the inside, or to learn how to open it from the outside. Never happened. SHOW ME YOUR TREASURES, MEOW WOLF. 

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand the power boxes on the wall were real and not a part of the interactive display. 

I have about twenty minutes of video of me playing with the noise making parts of that thingy. I had a delightful time. 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand I'm back at where I started. Time to head back downstairs!

Little pieces of mystery all about the thing!

Oh boy, was this fun. I have that exact textbook, because I took an astronomy class in undergrad. 

Taking this passageway leads you back to the Product part of the Mart, so here we go! Time for the funniest shit in the space. 

These are actual products. I considered buying one for all three kids, but none of them drink fizzy water, and I figured they would get lost in the upcoming move, so I left them on the shelf. 

I ended up buying this blanket for Vivi. She loves it. 

I bought one of each of these posters because they made me laugh.

Rhyann's gift was a thing of Tattooed Chicken.

My beanie!

I do quite enjoy the Liquid Death variety of waters, but a cereal flavored one was beyond the pale for me. 

I bought this for Derek.

I REALLY wanted to buy this for myself instead of the beanie, but I figured I'd get more utility out of the beanie. 

Admittedly this is one of the only things I did not climb into. There was one more space upstairs that had a lot of flashy lights and noise and I decided I didn't need that. Not climbing in here was not intentional, I just didn't notice it until I had all of my merch in my hands. 

And that was it! My trip to Meow Wolf: Omega Mart was great. I can't quite speak to the mystery, but I did love the anti-consumerist bent on the place, which makes it all the more ironic that I've never spent as much at any other Meow Wolf as I did here. 

I did have one interaction on my way out where a man stopped me and told me that I needed a Rated R warning on my body, and I was like, "uh, the fuck does that mean?" because I thought he was trying to make a pass at me, but then he told me it's because there are bare titties on my left arm sleeve. I was like, "well if kids don't know boobs exist, that's not on me" and walked back to my car. 

I took a different route back to the hotel. A longer route, on the highway that bothers me enormously, but I did not want to drive back down that street. 

When I got back to the hotel, there was a new person at the desk that I hoped was the manager. It wasn't. I went and talked to her, she gave me shit about not wanting to leave the room and I was like, ma'am, I am autistic, asking that is a lot, and she looked at me like I was crazy and was like, "my son is autistic" and I was like, "ok, then you should TOTALLY understand how disruptive it is to tell someone to change their plans when they have been steeling themselves for how something is supposed to be going, and regulating is a struggle, and you are beyond overwhelmed" and I started crying. I did not mean to, but I got very upset because real talk, all of that IS hard. I had been on the road for 21 hours, in places I didn't know, with things that didn't work, in a place that was sending random men up to my room at all hours of the night, and it was all a lot. It's also irritating when you bring up being autistic and suddenly EVERYONE has an autistic son, but still looks at you like an asshole when you explain how being autistic is making an experience hard for you. That happens to me a LOT. It's almost like these people are fucking lying about having an autistic whatever relation. WEIRD. 

I went back up to my room after telling the person at the desk that I was leaving, and I needed to be called by the manager because I did not want to spend another second in this hotel, and I didn't want to charged for the day, either. At that point, I was fine with paying for the first two days, but anything from that day onward I would not be paying for. She promised I would be called by the manager. I went on my way to the room and started packing all of my shit into the car. It took about an hour, and then I made my way to my little VRBO. It was way out in Summerlin, far from the strip, and I immediately felt calmer when I got there. Look. How. Fucking. CUTE. 

ADORBS. And the light in that place was fuckin to die for. So I unpacked my shit, and I FINALLY got a call from the manager at The Lexi. She was the most professional person I had talked to, and she really listened to me when I told her the entire interaction didn't make me feel heard, it made me feel unsafe, because I'm just a tiny little baby al alone in Vegas with some random man coming to my room at almost midnight when I had already been told no maintenance was one staff, he could have been ANYBODY, nobody warned me, it was all very unprofessional. I was bawling over all of this. I explained to her as well that I am autistic, and this was more than an inconvenience to me, I had spent months prepping myself to be in this space, for this amount of time, and all of it went to shit and I didn't know how to re-regulate myself on the spot in a place I was so wholly unfamiliar with. Funny, she ALSO had an autistic son (did she, though), but she did listen. And I finally felt believed and heard. So she promised me a full refund, which she delivered, and I was free from my The Lexi nightmare. 

I settled in to my new digs and finally felt comfortable. I made my dinner, and fell asleep hella early. I had a big day the next day, it was two shoots at Red Rock Canyon, WPPI, then four shoots, then Jinya.

Busy day for real

Right as I was drifting off, I got an email. My fourth shoot was cancelling. Which I honestly was expecting. She had been weird the whole time, dodging emails and saying it was all because she was ill. Some people do get sick all the time, I get it, but I got a weird vibe from it. So I was disappointed, sure, but I wasn't shocked. I WAS shocked when my 10am shoot for that day had cancelled a day prior, but it ultimately worked out. I do not know that I could have handled seven shoots in a day.