RAT Ultimate Vacation Destination

[NOMADMONAD@aol.com]

Vegas is the Ultimate Vacation Destination.  

At UVD you vacate, void, depart, quit, and abandon your relationship to time 
and place. Here is a city that continually summons you to strip away all your 
disciplines (authorities) to indulge in the anarchy of competing desires.  
Money is flesh here.  It walks and talks, invites you up to its room to see 
its etchings. You wake alone in bed the next morning, but on the pillow next 
to you is a phone number.  Ring up room service for another day because at 
UVD only the tourists are there for the escape of the One Night Stand.  The 
locals are all artistes or alchemists in this vanguard city of Late Capital. 
At the Bellagio Gallery and Casino you walk through owner Steve Wynn's 
expansive personal collection of art including works by Picasso, van Gogh, 
and Monet.

In this city the homeless play better poker than those with rooms.  And those 
with rooms play better poker than those with homes.  ManWithVan could easily 
exist forever in the back parking lots of this generous city of lost hopes.

************
Cowboy Junkie

She periodically holds court at Binion's Horseshoe, busting the broncos out 
of all the wannabe Marlboro Men.  She has chain-smoked all the cowboys out 
the Wild Wild West, inhaling their essence into the myth of her self. She 
blows smoke rings into the billowing clouds that complete the cruel blue 
desert sky.  ManWithVan is the last of the desperados that can follow her 
sign.  Her exuberant need is her power.  And he hunts her need as if it were 
his destiny.  

*************
The play Pericles peripherally informs me in my travel.  One says so many 
good-byes in their life, some being more heartfelt than others, but all of 
them rehearsals for the final tempest. The tentative mechanical nature of the 
RatMobile increases my awareness of the journey. I realize that the movements 
out of stagnation in my life are not so much dependent on some stockpile of 
food/fuel or "machine" in place, but more on a willpower that surrenders to a 
Grace that the road bestows on those pure to the journey.  

The food/fuel is so cheap in Vegas that it's always hard to find a reason to 
leave.  Grace is sometimes just as sexy as Lady Luck, but she is harder to 
woo.

Breaker, breaker.  Cowboy Junkie, are you out there?