Last week I did everything I normally did, but I did them all in and between Las Vegas, Chicago and several dusty Iowa towns with endless faith-based billboards urging me in various ways to get right with eternity. Yawn. Since I�m anti-narrative by temperament and incapable of telling a straight story by nature, let me categorize:

TRAVELLING

Of the 173 hours I spent on the road, approximately 24 hours in total were spent in airports or in those parabolic conduits between airports that we call airplanes. At the height of the parabola there was bright sunshine and the backs of clouds, on the up- and downslopes there were degrees of complexity in the patterning of the ground. When I got back home I could see retinal images of farm grids and suburban neighbourhoods whenever my I closed my eyes. In the course of one week I passed through the Minneapolis airport a total of four times, growing more and more tired at each pass of the endless concourses between gates. One walk between gates was so long that we arrived at our gate just as the plane was boarding. Between airports we drove minivans over interstates and through downtowns, avoiding industrial parks and secondary roads. Between our destinations we held our bodies over in Holiday Inns, Sheratons, Westins, each with varying degrees of luxury expressed primarily in the comfort of the bed. If you travel this much in a short span of time your body adjusts remarkably quickly to the weird disruptive rhythms of flight schedules and strange hotel rooms. Then your brain becomes imprinted with this pattern of stop-and-go, 2000-miles-in-a-day life and suddenly you can�t remember living in your own apartment. The streets of your city become just as confusing and capricious as the ones in Chicago, or St. Johns, or Waverly, Iowa. And just as predictable.

SLUMMING

No matter which city I visit, I�m guaranteed to hit every kind of neighbourhood, so eventually I�ll get to see or stand around in some of the poorest, crappiest spots imaginable. In Vegas we left the strip and drove north to visit a guy who lived in the crappiest trailer in a crappy trailer park right next to the air force base, where ear-piercingly loud jets roared up in quintets into the clouds every couple of hours or so. The guy we interviewed there, a sword swallower and fire eater, worked occasionally in a nearby auto salvage yard about 30 metres from the bombing range, watching as the ground exploded with coloured smoke while cars were gathered up and pressed into cubes. Somehow he�d kept his hearing, even though his teeth were falling out from pyrea (an affliction common to fire eaters). After the interview we ate a Thai restaurant anonymously deposited in a strip mall just down from the trailer park. The food was fantastic, which brings me to

EATING,

which is the only real pleasure afforded on the road, with the possible exception of having HBO in your hotel room. For a decent meal every other consideration is put aside. Crucial interviews with important and busy people are delayed if a promising restaurant turns up on the way. Thai eateries in strip malls aside, you will not find much food in Las Vegas that is worth making time for. I say this with the authority of one who has spent three days on the strip, walking up and down in search of any place that wasn�t an overpriced steakhouse featuring slabs of inferior antibiotic-laced US beef. On the first night we gave up and entered such a place, a den of mid-level Vegas celebrities gladhanding their ways around the room and accented waiters zipping from kitchen to table. I ordered a soup that sounded promising but turned out to be a consomme with little cubes of beef floating amongst the celery. The beef appeared to come from several different cuts of meat. I had no idea from one spoonful to the next whether I would be chewing absently or furiously. After Gourmet Surprise Soup I had the chopped salad. If you haven�t had it before, let me warn you now: chopped salad does not have any of the attributes of any salad you may have had in the past. It is not �leafy,� �healthy� or �salad�. At this restaurant, chopped salad is a moulded mass of mayonnaise or sour cream holding together kernels of corn and avocado wedges wrapped in a slimy mass of lettuce. I saw chopped salad on the menu of a little Mexican take-out place the next day, so either it�s a dish native to the area or the cooks of Las Vegas are a sadistic bunch of bastards. At the Harley Davidson Caf�, which is pretty much a Hard Rock Caf� with motorcycles instead of classic rock memorabilia, the men�s washroom was located on an entirely empty and quiet second floor. Inside the washroom I found: chrome highlights, metallic red piping, black-and-white tile floors, and an impossibly old black guy who would squirt soap into your hands for a buck. Even at current exchange rates, that�s a total deal.

WALKING

In most of Las Vegas people walk normally, but on the strip two gaits predominate. Men lean their torsos in the direction they want to go and allow their feet to stop their torsos from crashing to the ground. Sometimes this propels them from side to side, but most often they make surprising headway. For proper balance a king can of Miller Lite is held in the left hand, a small sheaf of pornographic leaflets in the other (given out on every corner by a gauntlet of people wearing bright yellow T-shirts with slogans like "Escorts direct to you in 30 minutes!" and whatnot). Women perfect a kind of totter, the result of skintight jeans and stiletto heels. The overall effect is infantilizing, as their faces assume the vulnerable anxiety of a toddler over their own powers of balance.

More later.

parode - exode