Just Murder, Dissect, And Bury!

Now that I have cable television powers again, I am totally enthralled by the cheap commercials that sell completely worthless crap to Little American heathens, who breathlessly clutch their credit cards and have a phone next to the couch so they can make sure not to miss out on the Completely Fantastic Deals that will expire as soon as the commercial ends.

These people have to have some mad dialing skills. By the time I see the phone number, there's only like six seconds left on the countdown. I also know enough about inbound telephone sales to know that there is no way these call agents have any way of knowing that a commercial just aired, and that the countdown is a total gimmick, because idiots will pay $19.95 for a galvanized horse rectum if there's a time pressure involved. I know this because I was just over at Jimmy's house and his mom's living room looks like a souvenir shop.

My very favorite part of these commercials is the fact that they make using their product sound easy, even though what they ask you to do is usually totally not easy at all. The All-In-One Garden Digger Thingy, for instance, tells you that removing weeds is "as easy as sticking the Thingy into the ground", twisting, and removing a huge puck of earth including the weed. Um... no? Nice try, dipfuck. I once had some weeds and I pretty much just set them on fire, removing an entire yard full of weeds and grass and trees and stuff in one fell blow. No sticking of Patented Dig And Twist Action gimmicks anywhere, except far up the overexcited announcer's ass. Hah. I wonder what I'd manage to pull out.

Still, Jimmy's mom has one of these things, and she makes Jimmy use it all the time to remove things from their yard, even dead patches of grass, which is pretty much what his yard is made of. So, I'll be walking by, and there's dumbass Jimmy, digging out plugs of dead grass all day long from the nigh-impenetrable Las Vegas rock dirt, while wearing some TV special beer helmet full of gatorade, while his mom is visible through the window using this Fast Action VacuPack thing to seal individual cookies. I don't know how some family lines manage to continue. I seriously don't.

A Mistake Anyone Could Make

[2:11pm]teleolurian:BURGER AND JAVASCRIPT TIME

[2:11pm]d:lol

[2:11pm]d:later

[2:55pm]teleolurian:fuck

[2:55pm]teleolurian:burger and javascript time?

[2:55pm]teleolurian:is that what i said i was doing?

[2:55pm]teleolurian:i meant "DRIVE AROUND EATING HOT FRIES AND THEN GO TO A BAR"

[2:56pm]teleolurian:just a minor misspelling

Proletariat Power

Last night, I wanted to go to a bar so I could get some Long Island lovin'. I ended up gloriously inebriated at Michael's Pub on Flamingo and Rainbow, mere inches from my house. But first, the lead-in:

I've been screwed over by 'beer bars' before. A beer bar is just like a normal bar, except there's no liquor. I don't even know how these places can be legally called bars. You can go into a freakin' Chipotle's and get a Corona or a Dos Equis. I used to work across the street from a bar called Money Plays, which sold nothing but beer, and I only went there on lunches because they had a shuffleboard table. There were like six liquor bars within walking distance. When lunch breaks were over, you could literally build a cabin out of all the drunk working-class gents lying all over the sidewalk.

I never go to bars alone, because that would make me an alcoholic, probably; so I invited my female poor, Nelly, to go with me. I told her I was looking for a bar that actually served sweet, life-preserving booze. She instructed me to go to Michael's.

Now, let me tell you something: Nelly apparently knows the man who INVENTED bars. As soon as we got inside, she was dropping names like locust shit in a plague. The bartender, who apparently knew how to make exactly one drink (it was the Long Island; his whiskey sour was crap) just sat there, stunned, as Nelly rattled off pretty much the entire administrative and supply team for the bar. Hell, I was impressed.

Meanwhile, a biker from Seattle let a hilariously drunken woman use his cell phone to call a man who had apparently snubbed her and bitch him out for the better part of fifteen minutes. Some gay dude at the other end of the bar proudly confessed that he'd escaped Tuscaloosa or something (I don't know, some place in the south where they hate queers) to come to tolerant Vegas, where men are judged solely by their alcoholic fortitude and bankroll. In essence, it was just like any other dive bar, except nobody knew how to make a fucking electric lemonade.

The Sound Of Music

iTunes is magical, because it has Apple authority, and everybody knows that Apple knows what's best for you. Once I tried to buy a computer online and sent Apple my money; they never sent me the computer because, in my heart, they knew I didn't really need a new one.

According to the Most Played smart playlist that comes with the iTunes, these are my favoritest songs ever:

Neko Case [Hold On, Hold On]   Play Count: 105

I apparently can't argue with this, since I end up hearing this song every day (it's on most of the CDs I burn for the car). Sexy country noir (which is WAY better than country), totally awesome lyrics, the prerequisite drug reference [valium], and to top it all off, it's less than three minutes long. Spot number two on my list is Neko's I Wish I Was The Moon at 82 plays. She has a disgustingly wonderful voice.

Ladytron [Seventeen] Play Count: 73

An electronica dance song with 29 words, repeated over and over. This song is like the opposite of everything I love about music, which explains why I listen to it so frequently. Sometimes the opposite of what you like is totally awesome, like Bizarro World and the Soviet Union.

Calexico [Sunken Waltz]  Play Count: 62

If you haven't listened to Feast of Wire yet, I will cut you with a gun that shoots bullets, because it's the most wonderful album ever. It has tons of stuff I thought I hated - mariachi influenced trumpets, folksy guitar, the works. Calexico is proof that Arizona is better than Nevada, except the part with my house, which is better than the whole rest of the US and is about to be declared a commonwealth so I'm not allowed to vote anymore.

Millencolin [Farewell My Hell]  Play Count: 61

For a self-styled punk rocker, it's pretty gay that the first punk song on my list is at number 5. And that it's skate punk. And that the band isn't even from America, where music was invented. This is a fantastic song, with pretty awesome lyrics considering it's made by illegal aliens.

Men Are From Seattle, Women Are From Broadway

My girlfriend has some really bizarre ideas about entertainment, and I'm pretty sure she's getting scalped pretty heavily on tickets by some hard-hitting kneecap-breaking gentlemen. In part, I blame all you Las Vegas Californians; shows like O and Mystere and Zumanity and stuff being thrown constantly in our faces when all we want to do is drive down to the Strip and do a little solicitation.

This last time, she waved this letter about some stupid show called Speeding Ticket in my face. As soon as I saw it, I was remembering the huge fiasco that came up from the time she wanted to watch Rent. For some reason, even though I made it absolutely clear to her that I didn't want to see thespian queers running around crossdressing and singing about roaches, she said that we were committed to something or other and that if I didn't cough up a thousand fifty on the spot, something unspeakably horrible would happen. Honestly, I didn't really pay much attention until she explained that she'd somehow gotten us into this situation where if I didn't pay for the tickets, my internet access would apparently suffer, drastically. I think she's a drug user- she's always coming up with excuses for me to pay this exact same amount every single month. I definitely know that it's way more than the price of tickets; I went to the show's website and saw that they were seating people for twenty-one times cheaper than what she said. Unfortunately, all my pills come from her, so I knew I was pretty much stuck paying so I could get my meds.

Anyways, I totally didn't want to see this Speeding Ticket show, which I assumed to be some ripoff of Taxi Driver or The Fast And The Furious or whatever. I asked her how she even found this show, and she said something about me being in Scottsdale, Arizona, and how there were cameras on the freeway. I knew she didn't trust me, driving around in my car. I didn't even tell her I was going to Scottsdale. So now, not only do I have to pay two hundred dollars for some show I have no intention of seeing, I have to tear apart my car and figure out where the hell she hid the X-10 spy cam.

Las Vegas Has The Worst Zoo Ever

The Southern Nevada Botanical Zoological Blah Blah is officially the worst zoo I have ever seen. It's like somebody went out of their way to come up with a way to make a zoo somehow physically assaulting to the senses. I'm guessing that they got their city funding, bought a couple of fishtanks, and then spent the rest on hookers and blow.

First off, I have no idea where "Botanical" comes into play, unless you mean the pot growing behind the chicken coop. Yes, chickens. Like, the kind I used to see all the time in Puyallup. I understand that I come from a pretty rural area and shouldn't expect urban people to have the same animal experiences as I've had. No, wait. I grew up in Seattle. You've heard of it? The one with all the buildings? Of course you have. The major differences between Vegas and Seattle are as follows:

• Seattle doesn't suck.
• We have Mexican immigrants too, we call them "Chinese people".
• Woodland Park Zoo makes the SNZBP look like a doghouse, except without the dog part.

Seriously. The SNZBP has a snakehouse, which would be pretty damn cool if people ever went in there and maybe, you know, cleaned up all crap on the floor. Right now, it's just a place for teenagers to make out. One time I went into the snakehouse and there were some tubby goths getting seriously worked up over the Gila monster, regardless of the fact that we live in the middle of the Mojave Desert and Gila monsters are only slightly more numerous than rocks.

The best time I've ever had at the SNZBP is when I went to check out the ostrich and it peed an entire bucket of waste in like half a second. It was amazing, like the bird suddenly opened some magical trapdoor to its butt. I got all excited and sat there for half an hour waiting for it to pee again, but apparently it only does that like once a day, and the rest of the time it just tries to bite people with hats.

There was a talking bird in the aviary once which was pretty cool; it said "Look! That bird can talk!", then it would start laughing like a maniac. It was the perfect example of what happens when people too dumb to breed get a mynah. I laughed for hours at that damn bird, but mostly because nobody else got the joke and because while I was standing there I went through about six amyls. The bird would start laughing, and then the people passing by would start laughing, then they would walk on and I'd pop a capsule, and then the bird and I looked at the people walking away like they were complete idiots. That bird isn't there anymore. I think it killed itself out of shame for being used as an attraction. I remember the last time I saw it; I gave it a hit of acid so it wouldn't be bored all the time and it flew down to the ground and rolled over on its back so I could pet it. I couldn't reach through the bars, so I just walked away, but it kept lying there like it was waiting for me to find something to reach through the bars and pet it with.

But apart from that one bird and the ostrich, everything else at SNXRZBQPL is a total snooze. Just go to the Discovery Channel instead.

Ceci N'est Pas Une Pub Crawl

9:30 PM

In bed, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. The little GiR icon on my screen starts bouncing. It's Fancy, at my front door, messaging me from his iPhone. He's managed to dump Devin Danger off on some unsuspecting ball of estrogen, and wants to go out. I call Sonny, who works at PT's. Sonny is asleep, and works at the PT's on Water and Boulder Highway at midnight. I express concern, because Water is way out in Henderson, where nobody lives and the zombies rise up at night in search of Pilsner.

9:45 PM

Calling around frantically for somebody - anybody - to go out drinking with us. I briefly consider each of my friends, then my wife's church friends, then my wife's church friends' parents, then her parents, then my mother. Fancy informs me that Joolz is spent from the night before. He looks panicked as he realizes that the inability to form a drinking party is the first sign of senility.

9:50 PM

In desperation, Fancy suggests we go play the ponies, since it's the cheapest way to drown yourself in high-grade alcohol. I explain to my puzzled wife what an electronic horse racing machine is. She seems to think it's the exact same thing as the kids' carnival game at the Excalibur. I patiently explain that a group of drunken adults are unlikely to play a gambling game in order to win a plastic viking hat. The entire point, the summation of the experience (if you will), is in the drinking, since playing the ponies is equivalent to paying 25c per rum-and-coke.

10:05 PM

Frazzled, desperate, and watching his youth fade away like those guys who drank from the wrong cups in Indiana Jones And The Jesus Cup Thing, Fancy orders me to get in the car so we can head to the Inn Zone. There is an extremely bad cover band there. They look like overaged metalheads, except they're playing Georgia Sattelites covers. We charge the bar to begin our pathetic pub crawl. Fancy goes for rum and coke; I sip a shot of Ouzo. I remember that I have already started this afternoon off with about three glasses of gin and orange juice. Fancy is whispering a mantra to himself.

10:25 PM

The Inn Zone sucks. It's mostly a place for extremely mannish women to flock together and congregate. It's impossible not to meet the potential love of your life at the Inn Zone, as long as you don't have an aversion to thoroughbreds. Looking at the shuffleboard table is reminiscent of the starting line at the Kentucky Derby. Fancy and I weigh our options, and flee to the PT's across the street. Sonny is still probably not even awake.

10:30 PM

PT's is dead. A somber pair play pool upstairs; there are a smattering of couples sitting around the bar; the bartender is only four days employed. We decide on Newcastle. We talk about drugs. When the gin cries out from my stomach, I suavely wander out to vomit in the parking lot. Fancy finishes my beer.

10:50 PM

The New York Bar & Grill has reached the point where only the regulars are seated at the bar. Two couples are playing eight-ball. I wonder aloud if any of them are attractive. None of them are. The bartender is a short, round woman from the South. She's got the tough streak that so many Southern women have when they run bars, or so I assume from watching Gunsmoke. She has a truly frightening pair of breasts, the kind that make you remember dreams of suffocation. I order a rum and coke simply because I can handle hard alcohol far easier than beer. Miraculously, I'm sobering up, but am starting to get bored. Steve orders one beer, then another. The bartender warns us that we need to go out the back door, since there's apparently a crazy guy at the front door.

Things are looking up. A crazy guy means I could potentially get into a fight. When we're ready to leave, we head out the back door, then wander around to the front, since that's where we parked anyways.

An old guy comes out of the entry chamber, presumably after being denied entry. He calls the bartender a rude name under his breath. He isn't worth getting in a fight over. Fancy drops me off at home, then heads off to cry.

Bugnuts

The Consumerist just posted a link to a fantastically ironic scenario - apparently, a New York shop selling a $25k chocolate sundae got shut down by the health department for hosting what appears to be a horde of vermin.

It's enough to give me the shivers. I may be pretty darn awesome, but that doesn't mean I don't have my own fears. I've already written about how a moth once broke me down into tiny girl tears. Well, let me regale you with another tidbit:

Last year, I was a slum enforcer. What this means is that the owners of certain low-budget properties needed someone to live in their apartments to keep the previous renters (who'd usually stopped paying) from breaking back in. For several months, I slept with a baseball bat and prayed for a shotgun. I was doing this for a measly $5 a day, but at least it sort of counted as negative rent.

And there were infestations. Oh, goodness, were there infestations. My foray into slumwatching came at approximately the same time as the United States federal government banned my favorite neurotoxic insecticide, Diazinon. So, instead of barging into these filthy hovels like a Texas Ranger with a trusty six-gun by my side, I'm sleeping in rooms where I've literally doused the carpet with malathion. Whenever another idiot roach walked into my Super Poison Field, I'd scream like a fairy princess in a boxwood derby and start swinging my baseball bat, completely oblivious to my nearsighted lack of aim.

Eventually, I stopped being such a prissy little whiner and into more of a grim soldier with a twisted sense of humor. I started hoping that leaving little impaled corpses behind would have all the effect of heads on stakes. Right about when it started to become a cruel game, I completely lost my sense of fear. Cool, huh?

Obviously, I've regressed, but that's mostly because moths are really, really scary, and I hope I get earmuffs for Christmas because I am scared to death that they will lay their filthy moth eggs in my tender ear holes.

The REAL Las Vegas on $40 a Day

Day 1

Drop all $40 into a nickel slot machine, hoping to earn dinner. Win nothing. Curl up into a ball on the CAT bus and cry.

Day 2

Today will be better. Buy a $7 book on beating the blackjack system from the hotel gift shop. Win $200 at the table, then blow it all on trying to get the girl who blew on your dice to come to the motel with you. Earn a comped meal at the buffet; stuff yourself silly. Take the bus to the casino reputed to have the "loosest slots in town". Lose $20. Spend the rest trying to win at blackjack again.

Day 3

Wake up at 2am. Grab three 97 cent breakfasts at Arizona Charlie's. Once eating is no longer a problem, learn to get free drinks by playing the longest lasting, cheapest games ever. Welcome to electronic horse racing machines. Stumble out at 10am with $33 in pocket. Become overwhelmed by the sun. Upon entering the next casino, be accosted by a man who will "totally hook you up". Do a line. Wander back and forth on the sidewalk for hours counting people who pass by and sorting them by hair color. Go back into casino; win $50 playing video poker. Look for that guy again. Go up and down the Strip looking for drug dealers. Discover Sin City, where everyone is a drug dealer, even the nice couple with the pram who just want to earn "enough money for a taxi ride home". Chase the dragon in your motel room, illuminated by yellow light.

Day 4

You're starting to be a pro at this. Disdain Arizona Charlies for an even cheaper 88 cent breakfast downtown. Begin to recognize that 'lucky feeling'. Play the ponies until lucky feeling multiplies by several orders of magnitude, aided in no small way by single-malt scotch. Assume that Circus-Circus, because of its gaudy and frankly scary theme, is actually the best place to gamble. Learn that this isn't true after 2 hours and $20. Score free popcorn. Drunkenly stumble across the street to the Riviera, where your first quarter in the slot machine nets you $10. Try to play Blackjack. Win more money. Play roulette. Make even more money. Lose it all at the craps table. Become frustrated when the pawn shops close and you cannot hock your wedding ring.

Day 5

Breakfast; ponies; drunk. Hock wedding ring for $50. Prepare to make your last day in Vegas count. Make a small profit at the tables. Get bored with gambling. Look for a prostitute. Wonder why 'she' doesn't do straight sex. Go along with it anyways. Develop canker sore in sensitive area a few hours later. Give up and head back to the airport. Buy cheap lookalike wedding ring in McCarran duty-free shop that seems to carry nothing but knockoffs of wedding rings, pearl necklaces, and prosthetic limbs. Get on plane to fly back home. Become outraged when you realize that you have to pay for your drink. Try to sleep. Realize you can't sleep without the sounds of gunfire, drug deals, and slot machines.

Who's The Bomb?

This is, apparently: a color photograph of the French (of all people) detonating an atomic bomb as part of their Licorne thermonuclear test. Licorne is French for unicorn, because they obviously needed to think of something pretty while dumping enough radioactive sauce into the French Polynesia to guarantee that the people who bottle our expensive drinking water could purify it with the sheer Cherenkov radiation glowing from their eyes.

As Americans, obviously, we can't say too much about the French playing with nukes (except that they might, you know, blow up all their white flags). Between 1945 and 1992 we split so many atoms for no reason whatsoever that we should all be horribly dead several times over. Here in Las Vegas, the fashionable thing to do was to go to the top of one of our founding skyscraper-casinos, where one might sip on an Atomic Cocktail and watch for the blinding flash and mushroom cloud out in the western desert, mutating cockroaches and warping our minds.

And now, here we are in the Las Vegas of today, where the poor Wynnmaster has some creepy tunnel vision disease and everyone is oddly hostile. No wonder the tourists keep coming here. I'm pretty sure our radioactive roulette tables are pumping out enough addictive gammas to give them serious withdrawals. All the things we do to keep them from enjoying themselves (All those urban legends about Vegas? All true) doesn't seem to do much.

I mean, yes. I admit it. We stuff dead hookers in mattresses (we know enough to check for them before we sleep on the beds), sometimes bums break the bank at a casino, somebody found a finger in a bowl of chili, people kill themselves by leaping off of hotel skyscrapers, yadda yadda yadda. What can I say? Our economy is driven by gambling and by finding creative ways to get rid of bodies. 

You can't just go out and start digging in the Mojave Desert. Do you even know how many corpses you'd unearth trying to get rid of yours? One time my friends and I went out to the desert to blow holes in things with shotguns (which everyone in Vegas does always), and one of us hit a cactus. The cactus exploded, and like six midgets fell out. They were the acrobats who died during training in Cirque du Soleil. Every time one of them dies, apparently, there's a casino employee whose entire job is to drive their corpses south past Sloan, under a pile of fake grass, and then stuff them into cactuses out in the desert. Look, folks: People die. We hide the bodies. For some reason, radiation caused all of this. Check your mattress. End of story. 

Part Of The Family

Reading Joolz' recent posts reminds me why I'm not working with Mike. Mike works at a very large internet apparel company whose name rhymes with Zappo's, and they work very hard to make you feel like part of a big, utopian corporate family.

I hate family. I don't talk to my family, I am horribly confused about what to do around my wife's family, and if the place where I work doesn't want me to go bugnuts at the very mention of me being a part of theirs then I'd better be working for the fucking mafia. The way I see it, all the time companies spend coming up with little get-togethers and team builders to bring people closer together can be used for something much more important- supporting my raging drug habit so I have something to be grateful for.

Where did team-building exercises come from? Well, let's say you work at the most obvious sort of establishment you can possibly work at here in Las Vegas (not the fucking brothels, losers). Let me tell you, working at a corporate casino is the epitome of living your life in total fear. You are reminded how little you mean to the company every day. They have reduced the concept of a pay raise to that of a beautiful insult; they will literally tell you the average pay raise percentage per year and give you less out of spite. The reason they do this is because the corporate casinos could care less how much you bust your ass for them; they care about something called seniority, which is business-ese for "rewarding the people who don't work enough to hate their jobs after ten years".

One day long ago, during the Golden Age of Corporate Fear, your best option was to work for a huge corporation, because people needed benefits to survive. At some point, a company tried a team building exercise which nobody liked, then asked each employee to say how much they gained. Each employee, afraid of losing their lifelines, painted the whole process with glowing praise, and this result was written down as Law in the annals of business history.

Let me tell you something. After three years of being told how expendable I was as a person, I quit my job on the spot and got a job at a small company with zero benefits and paychecks which sometimes disappeared when the business was going through rough patches. I was paid more than I'd ever made previously in my life just because I knew Perl. I never met more than four people who worked outside of the programming department and company rules were that non-programmers had to treat us like gods among men and harbingers of ill fate. I'm sure it sucked for everybody else, but when you're literally being paid to go across the street to the bar and get smashed for six hours straight before coming back and cranking out an application (projected time was always about twenty times how long it took to actually write it), you cease caring about other people. You cease even acknowledging other people have names. And if someone has the audacity to address you by name when they are far beneath your station, you start to do some pretty crazy things. Like inventing team-building exercises to punish them.

Travelers Guide: Las Vegas, Part I

At A Glance

Las Vegas is the jewel of the desert, an oasis of pulse-racing gambling and random sexual encounters with people who have only recently become women. Founded in 1946 by mayor-for-life Frank Sinatra, it is the second birthplace of Elvis and the holy site where his followers believe his Second Coming will occur. It is known as the birthplace of late night diners, and the place where 'all the buildings light up and there's real purty womens'.

Districts

Las Vegas Greater Metropolitan Area is actually much, much larger than the tiny actual town of Las Vegas. Around it are several county-designated townships with extremely generic names and completely different personalities, though unlike Phoenix, you won't be able to tell when you've left one area and entered another. Here is a quick rundown:

PARADISE - If you think you are in Las Vegas, you are probably here. Paradise is a catch-all category for Las Vegas. Look for: silly attempts to look like a bigger city.

ARDEN - Some people are afraid of North Las Vegas, but still want to buy drugs. Arden is the place to do it. Just wait until after dark and approach anyone riding a bicycle. Most people from Arden are dumber than bricks, so you can't use 'street slang', most of which is completely different in Vegas anyways. Exception: All slang for methamphetamine is accepted. If nobody knows what you are talking about, you will end up with methamphetamine. Sometimes, you will receive methamphetamine when the cashier at 7-11 runs out of quarters.

ENTERPRISE - Enterprise is a banged up, shitty area of town known for its cheap government housing tracts, bizarre strip-mall businesses that cannot possibly receive more than one customer a year yet still manage to stay open, and the subsection of Mexican immigrants who angrily yell at you if they cannot understand you.

WINCHESTER - Winchester is where people live when they want to feel like they live in Las Vegas, except they want to live in an actual apartment and not some outrageously expensive condo. You can walk to at least three major casinos from any point in Winchester, and can see one from every window in your shitty apartment. Scary old men stalk the apartment grounds after dark, looking for ripe virgins to take back to their studios. This is the area of town with the most lower-middle-class new citizens, and therefore is the area of town where people won't shoot you for waving hello on the sidewalk. ATMs in Winchester still give $10 bills.

NORTH LAS VEGAS - North Las Vegas is completely different than anywhere else in "Vegas". Everyone who lives here will fucking kill you. The policemen do not get out of their cars, ever, but will tell you where the best drug havens are if you ask them politely. Gas stations sell chinese food which is actually made of cleverly molded tumors from dead cancer patients. It is possible to disappear between your front door and your doorstep. The appropriate response, when you hear gunfire, is to learn how to ignore the sound of gunfire. The Mexicans that live here are extremely nice, but will rip you off if you look like you don't understand the word 'drogas'. If you buy drugs at random on the street, you will likely receive bits of wax.

INDIAN SPRINGS - Named exactly the same as another place in Nevada, and is therefore very confusing. Indian Springs the far-away place is named after a Paiute slinky and is the location of a prison. Indian Springs actually-Las-Vegas, apparently also called Eastland Heights, is a part of North Las Vegas that suddenly became a desirable location to live. The land is dirt cheap, the houses are big, and one of your neighbors shoots porn in the backyard. Mexicans in Indian Springs are affluent. You can trace their ancestry simply by looking at the little family decal and the Mexican state name (i.e. Sinaloa) on the back of their SUVs. Some of the little family drawings will trace a family all the way back to the Aztecs.

HENDERSON - Henderson is not a part of Las Vegas, nor is it a city. Nobody actually lives here. There are never any cars here. On the occasion you actually do meet someone who claims to be a resident, they will be rubbing sticks together trying to light a cigarette or perhaps hunting for their dinner with a particularly sharp stick. The city center is about a block from the edge of Henderson, and is immaculate and architecturally inspiring. Bars in Henderson are always empty, but the extremely hot bartender girls will tell you where to find drugs. Only one bar in Henderson is allowed to do Flaming Dr. Peppers, and nobody knows where it is.

LAS VEGAS - A very small area full of casinos that you will never set foot in, except accidentally. Everything is owned by the mob. All of the restaurants are excellent. All of the casinos are named after their non-corporate, crime-family owners. You are safer here than in any other part of Las Vegas, even the rich parts. The streets are one-way. It is against the law to mention the mob, unless you are a member of the mob. One out of three people you see here is.

GREEN VALLEY - Green Valley is where people move when they want to look more affluent than other people, but aren't really. Teenage mothers with tattoos march their aryan children like ducklings across lush gated communities. The drugs are especially good here. You can get high just by finding a strip mall late at night, walking behind it, looking for an open door, and inhaling deeply. Everyone swims in clean apartment pools. Apartment offices have fax machines, exercise equipment, and gold-rimmed glory holes which are manned 24 hours a day. All apartment complexes are extremely competitive, because all the poor people want to live there and there's a fucking airport right outside your window.

SEVEN HILLS - Seven Hills is where people from Green Valley move when they want to look more affluent than other people in Green Valley. Twentysomething mothers with tattoos drive their elementary school children to soccer practice in hulking vans. Everyone is required to visit Starbucks twice daily. There are roads in Seven Hills which actually go on forever, and where you may see your older self driving in the other direction. To get drugs in Seven Hills, you must visit a hospital and know the prescription name of your drugs; however, you must not show any actual physical signs of ailment. There is one OB/GYN in Seven Hills. He is an extremely busy man.

SPRING VALLEY - Spring Valley is where people move when they accidentally move to Green Valley, then realize that everyone there is a complete fucktard. Some streets are extremely nice and suburban; others look like the results of disastrous riots. You can choose any ethnic cuisine in the world and find five restaurants that serve it within two blocks of your home. Police will randomly patrol your street, just to be nice; however, this only happens on the nice streets (every other street). If you want drugs in Spring Valley, you buy them from another township. Nobody on the nice streets understands the concept of race, because Mexicans that live on the nice streets are either rich or fifth-generation Americans. Nobody on the bad streets understands the concept of race, because they are all newly immigrated from Mexico.

SUMMERLIN - Summerlin is where rich Mormons live. There are no Mexicans in Summerlin. Nobody in Summerlin can name an illegal drug other than marijuana or valium, because they all get religious highs at the LDS temple, though the LDS temple is on the other side of the city. Children are issued cellphones upon birth. Every other block is actually a park. There are no streetlights; instead, every intersection is a roundabout.

SUNSET - Sunset is where you live if you are either poor and Mormon, or don't know where Summerlin is. Everyone owns a horse ranch. You can get drugs simply by walking to your nearest low budget housing unit and looking for men who dress like they still think it's the eighties, especially if they are dripping Jheri Curl. Unlike all other areas of Las Vegas, no prostitutes live here. Nobody even knows what a prostitute is. People who live in Sunset think the town is even smaller than it actually is; they think of 'bad areas of town' in terms of avenues within Sunset.

RHODES RANCH - Rhodes Ranch, Rancho Circle, and Spanish Trail are where the mafia actually lives. You will never find any of these areas unless someone who lives in town tells you where they are. The exception is Rhodes Ranch, which always has about nine thousand Porsches waiting at the gate to get in. These cars are backed up all the way down Durango Avenue. The Mexicans who live here are in the Mafia, and you do not fuck with them. If you want drugs, you have them muled in from Colombia. Prostitutes are equally easy to find; all houses come with guest rooms which are fully stocked with prostitutes and beer. You must wear Hawaiian shirts everywhere, even to the shower. The first rule of Rhodes Ranch/Rancho Circle/Spanish Trail is you do not talk about Rhodes Ranch/Rancho Circle/Spanish Trail.