According to a halfhearted web search I just did, there are 58 places in the world called “Las Vegas.” The furthest one from here is on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, some 70 miles off the coast of Morocco. A tourism site describes that Las Vegas as a “rural hamlet,” and I’d probably love to be there right now. Currently “in” on Tenerife island: rockrose, traditional architecture, walking trails, sweeping ocean views, volcanic formations. Currently “out” in Las Vegas de Tenerife: taxpayer-subsidized stadiums, murdered out Cybertrucks, “ultimate fighting” and divorced dads lighting off fireworks at midnight year-round. That island-situated Las Vegas has prehistoric cave dwellings that weren’t dug with a sewer drillbit and a hermitage that you can’t lease on AirBNB for a one-of-a-kind Crypto event. I imagine its residents sleep soundly anyway.

I live in the Las Vegas you’re familiar with. I relocated here from Orange County back in the summer of 1990, taking advantage of Vegas’ dirt-cheap rents. In May 2002 I moved away to Seattle and stayed there just a few days shy of a decade. Then I moved back to Vegas, which wasn’t something I expected to do, and I stayed, which really isn’t something I expected to do. When I landed in a friend’s DTLV apartment in April 2012, my whole thing was “oh, we’ll give it a year.” And I gave, and gave, and gave some more.

With 22-odd years of Las Vegas under my belt, you might reasonably assume that I’ve become expert in the only city where I feel at home—which, I’ll hasten to add, is not always the same thing as feeling comfortable. But here’s the thing: I fear that I know less about Vegas than I did 10 years, even five years ago. Some of that can be ascribed to growing older, of course— rarely go to Strip casinos or nightclubs anymore, not if I can help it—but I can’t help but wonder if the real problem is that Vegas has split, perhaps irrevocably, into two discrete places with two distinct identities. If you’re reading this outside of Nevada then you’re likely most familiar with the capital-V Vegas, the Vegas in the Elvis song. I live in the other Vegas—a young, insecure desert town that has yet to figure out how cities work.

Our Valley’s unhoused population is steadily increasing in number, up 36% over a two-year period. That in and of itself is an unconscionable moral failing in a city where thousands of investment properties, timeshares and hotel rooms sit empty every night. (Additionally, and as I’ve learned that too many Las Vegans respond to city problems only when you appeal to their selfishness: Unhoused people are collecting in Downtown neighborhoods in the process of redevelopment. The City of Las Vegas has addressed this problem by criminalizing it, aspiring towards a former mayor’s goal of shipping the unhoused to a abandoned prison.)

Hey, can I talk to you about rapid transit for a second? Because Vegas is embarrassingly deficient in rapid transit for a metro of 2.3 million people. We have a 4-mile monorail line that’s useful only to conventioneers, a bus rapid transit line that’s two years away from completion, and an Elon Musk Teslas-in-tunnels boondoggle that he’s building without public input or proper government oversight. (Also, it couldn’t be considered a rapid transit solution by any serious measurement.) Talk to locals about this and they roll their eyes; the average Las Vegan would rather drive a mile than walk a foot.

We’re still scratching around for a second industry, by the by. The pandemic shutdown put the fear into us; without hospitality, that giant, glitzy cruise ship parked in the middle of the Valley, we’re dead in the water. We tried tech, but we didn’t have the schools to feed it. We can’t go with heavy manufacturing; that requires water resources we don’t have. We’re going after film production next, which may stick—Warner Bros. and Sony have promised to invest billions if Nevada offers them a tax incentive, an easy W for our pointlessly antagonistic governor. But even that won’t be enough to save our asses if we’re hit with another tourism downtown, be it sudden or gradual. Without Vegas 1, there’s little reason for Vegas 2 to exist.

And and and our school district is an underfunded, smoking wreck. We’re experiencing one of the worst heat island effects in the nation; this past summer was the hottest in this city’s history. Even with our outstanding water reclamation efforts, we’re in danger of running the tap dry. Sprawl, traffic, brain drain … Sorry, I gotta stop this. I wanna enjoy the rest of my weekend.

What most concerns me is what Las Vegas does consider forward progress. We’re buying sports franchises from Oakland at a giddy pace, ignoring or marginalizing the taxpayer expense that will linger long after the Raiders move their residency somewhere else. We’re pinning our hopes to a high-speed rail line that almost goes to LA and comes frontloaded with a luxury ticket price that’s almost certain to doom it out of the gates. And even the swell news that Las Vegas is finally getting a standalone fine art museum (respect to you, Marjorie Barrick) is qualified by the fact that we couldn’t do it without LACMA holding our hand. All of our recent attempts to shape and reinforce our civic identity are bought or borrowed from other cities.

I’ve been cheerleading for this town since 1994. Even when I lived in Seattle, I still found a way to up my beloved Vegas. But these past few months—admittedly a difficult time for me, and it ain’t over yet—have got me wondering if I ever properly understood this place. I despise the summer heat and I have never sat down at a gaming table, not once in 22 years. The two things I love about most Vegas are the way it strives (and fails) with more ambition than any other city in the world, and the communities that can form here when the right people find each other. Those communities are proper glue. They stick tightly together; they keep Vegas from falling apart.

Last Friday I took a quick drive through the Fremont East Entertainment District, which I haven’t done in a long while. Fremont East—popularly and erroneously known as “East Fremont Street,” even though there is no West Fremont Street—is a block of nightclubs and bars that are mostly owned by my former boss Ryan Doherty. Until recently, the tall plaster walls of Fremont East hosted a stunning outdoor gallery of works by some of the world’s best street artists—Bicicleta Sem Freio, D*Face, Felipe Pantone, dozens of others—curated over the span of a decade for the annual Life Is Beautiful music and arts festival by the JustKids collective. They were the festival’s other headliners, and they played year-round.

Earlier this year, the festival was purchased by Penske Media, a corporation that buys up failing publications and runs them primarily as brands; Life Is Beautiful is nestled underneath their Rolling Stone umbrella. The festival, usually a multi-day event boasting dozens of artists and taking up multiple city blocks, is now a two-night party in a parking lot. Several of the murals created for the festival, including a Shepard Fairey piece decrying corporate greed (“Corporate welfare? Be a maker, not a taker!”), have been painted over in recent weeks—and a fresh mural of Donald Trump has gone up, seemingly to mock their disappearance. The American flag is melting into him, and a superhero cape is draped over his right shoulder. Just inside an adjacent doorway, there are a pair of unnecessary captions: “Get on the Trump Train.” “Make Downtown Beautiful Again.”

Fuck you.

Now, these things likely aren’t related. The El Cortez hotel, the only Vegas casino to live long enough to make it to the National Register of Historic Places, chose to repaint their buildings as part of a property-wide remodel; that’s their right. And that Trump mural, while prominently placed, hopefully doesn’t speak for a state that’s gone for every Democratic presidential candidate since Obama. (Yes, even Hillary.) But the juxtaposition angered me, because goddamn it, is no one paying fucking attention in Downtown Vegas, or anywhere else in this town? What would have been lost by keeping some of those gorgeous Life Is Beautiful murals? And what is gained by giving a mural to the single biggest threat to American democracy, the world’s most overrated failure and the galaxy’s hundredth-biggest billionaire chode? ARE WE FER CORPORATE GREED OR AGIN’ IT?

I feel increasingly doubtful that I can talk about this town objectively, is the thing. I don’t mean the whole hospitality angle; I haven’t had a perspective on that stuff in years, and I was never willing to cultivate the network of PR flacks and casino reps you absolutely need to write about Vegas tourism. (Though I suspect that if ever I decided to cover the tourist angle, I’d do pretty well by it, babe. Finger guns.) We’re headed down some bad road, barreling towards gridlock, heat death and economic ruin. And we’re complaining that some of the lanes are coned off while we expand our capacity to fuck this place up beyond repair. Not for nothing does Vegas show up in nearly every post-apocalyptic disaster movie.

Now, here’s the M. Night Shyamalan twist: I’m depressed for reasons entirely unrelated to this town. Laura has been in LA for nearly two months, dealing with a medical issue. (It’s going well!) It’s been just me and the doggo since early August, and the loneliness is weighing on the both of us. It’d be much more difficult if not for that glue I mentioned before—my friends, the Vegas community Laura and I have built. Friends check in on me, send me encouraging texts, offer to take me to dinner or drinks. They ask what they can do for Laura while she’s in LA, and what they can do for the both of us when she comes home. Shit, when I complained about the Trump mural, no less than a half-dozen friends suggested they might go deface it.

No matter how stupid Vegas gets, no matter how short-sighted or greedy, its people jump to attention and do the work when the proverbial chips are down. They fed essential workers and cared for traumatized victims in the days after the October 1 mass shooting. They opened up food pantries during the Coronavirus shutdown, when most of this town was out of work and without prospects. They hold local government officials to account when they get high on their own supply.

This is the Vegas that I came home to in 2012, with only a couple of suitcases and no car to drive. “I’m comin’ in hot, no parachute,” I told my friends, only half-joking. Within a day three friends offered to accommodate me for as long as I needed, and a friend I hadn’t seen in years picked me up at the airport. For 12 years, I’ve had the good fortune to live among people who’ll pad my landing and graffiti big rubbery phalluses onto the faces of our shared enemies. And sure, I’d love to be in the Canary Islands right now. But without this fucking glorious community, it’d be Las Vegas only in name.