Viva Old Las Vegas

It's all still there, the old strip those of us of a certain age remember.



It lives on like an open time capsule, north of the glitter that attracts crowds from all over the world, few of whom make it down here.



It's a bit grimey, seedy, faded, an old road trip in an age of international flights and package deals.



"You can get anything you want at..."

No, not Alice's Restaurant, Arlo, but you can sure find it here, in old Las Vegas, including a lot you might not want, as well.



If this were an archeological dig (which someday it will be), you'd have to cut your way carefully through the new strip, which is monstrously huge in all ways to get down here to a time when gambling, skimming, prostitution, and crushed dreams all somehow seemed more accessible on a human level.



There's nothing polished here, nothing upscale, really.



So, yes this is the real deal, and you can find luxuries here that don't exist uptown any more, like showing off.



Here you can see a gold limo.



The Golden Gate in cubes, swaying back and forth like dice dressed up as hula dancers.



You can get married.



You can get divorced, and marry somebody else.



You can have it annulled and become a cowboy riding a sign.



Maybe you'll be famous.



Maybe you'll become rich.









Looking is free.



Meeting is not.



Fantasy never dies here.



It just slinks out of town on a bus, only to return again somewhere on down the road to ruin.

-30-

How it all will end

There be may no better place on earth to glimpse the awful power of nature over us weakling humans than Death Valley.



Even getting there is an ordeal, though nowhere near as much so as it was 150 years ago, when pioneers tried to migrate its cracks and valleys to reach a better world.



I wonder how many of them ended up as simply another pile of bones here in Death Valley.



This is an awful, lovely place, where mirages and illusions lead you on, only to betray you cruelly in the end.



There is no potable water here, only "badwater."



All around, the austere beauty of the place mesmerizes. The patterns in rocks and the whiteness of crystallized salt urges you on, as if you face no mortal danger.



But you do, and something deep inside confirms that this is not a place to linger.



As he fierce sun burns into this place, raising temperatures above 120 degrees, your mind becomes confused, you start seeing things where there is nothing but a sweet siren, beckoning, urging you on. "Come to me," she sings sweetly upon the hot, dry dead air.

Your thirsty lips curl into the kiss of death.



Meanwhile the vultures keep a watchful eye, measuring your girth, imagining the meal to come. Their eyes make me shudder.



There are very few remnants of human habitation here, and none who tried to live in this place lived to tell its tale. They all died.



Rather, this is a valley of ghosts.



This is the lowest place in the Western Hemisphere, hundreds of feet below sea level.



There is no one here, only the echoes of what might have been.

***

Dear Reader:

And all of this time, you thought I was describing Death Valley? Come now, that is only the story of the picture, not the soul. What I was actually describing was Silicon Valley, where fools reign, where emotional idiots call the shots, where arrogant asses, full of themselves, carry on, oblivious that very soon, their world will come to ruin, just as did this, the deadest of earth's many dead places.

And who will mourn this unworthy class? Not I, my lord, not I. May their bones rot and whiten under the unforgiving sun, and may black crows gather to peck out their eyeballs, as the less privileged people move on, stepping gingerly over their rotting flesh as it devolves into the mere soil under all of our feet that represents the ultimate fate of all people, rich or poor, throughout all of planetary history.

_30-

Leaving Las Vegas

I've been remiss not blogging from here these past few days. But I will upload a ton of great photos from yesterday's drive through Death Valley, plus a few more from the strip.

What's not to like about this place?

Like all of the other high-growth parts of the country, Vegas is hurting from having grown too fast. Housing values are plummeting; foreclosures are very high; people are leaving town.

But, gambling never dies. There is always one next roll of the dice.

-30-

Hello from the Strip

David's Annual Report on the State of the Yiddish Dialect

It is estimated that there are only around 3 million speakers of Yiddish left in this world, and I'm guessing that most of them are stand-up comedians. Compare this with the number on the eve of World War II -- roughly 12 million Yiddish speakers, not so many comedians, maybe, but a big number, nonetheless, because there were far fewer human beings overall back then.

We all know what happened during WW2, but in addition to the Halocaust, assimilation and the one-language credo of the Zionist movement has sent the number of speakers plummeting during my lifetime.

Humor is in short supply as well, I'm sorry to report. Everyone's too worried about the economy. The few surviving old humorists who played the Borsht Belt in my youth (not that I ever made it to the Catskills, mind you, I was stuck wandering the cornfields of Michigan like a disoriented character in a story by Sholem Rabinovitsh (better known as Sholem Aleichem), who is also known as the Jewish Mark Twain, and whose work you, my dear reader, have long known well. Perhaps not the original טבֿיה דער מילכיקער but certainly as the romanticized Fiddler on the Roof.

Now, where was I?

Oh yes, my annual Yiddish Report, one of those features you can only access here, at Hotweir World Headquarters (HWH).

Listen, on the subject of wanderers, stars or not, did you hear the one about the guy who kept meeting women on Montrose Avenue in L.A., I think it was, or maybe in Brooklyn, whatever, and this guy kept getting rashes afterward? After the third such episode his doctor told him to start trying the women on La Cienega.

So we're thinking of going back to our roots here at HWH, which will require us to reveal our own origins as part of the little-known wandering DeVeres. Among other things, there are those who postulate that the queerly massive vocabularies many of us DeVeres possess from childhood are evidence of literary genius or at least literary genes.

I'm not touching that one any faster than I'd touch one of those rashy women on Montrose Avenue. A meshugener I am not.

I'm lost again. Oy, the state of Yiddish. Can you name the only three countries where Yiddish is an official minority language recognized by the state?

Quickly!

Time's up.

There's Moldova, of course, where 26% of the population speaks Yiddish. That was the easy one. The other two are The Netherlands and Sweden, where nobody speaks it but they are extremely sensitive to the issue of "Youish Guilt."

What else can I tell you, my darlings? Okay, here's one: In the U.S. where are most Yiddish speakers? Quick, quick, quick.

Time's Up.

New York, Florida, California, and Pennsylvania. There's a handful of others, mostly in the Midwest (we have 20 more speakers in Michigan, than you do, Ohio -- take that!), and Arizona plus a few tiny northeastern states, mainly suburbs of New York.

In the end, this population is miniscule -- maybe 178,000 American Jews. And mostly over 65.

So the next time you ask yourself, why isn't anything funny anymore, you might consider this: גוּט טַק אִים בְּטַגְֿא שְ וַיר דִּיש מַחֲזֹור אִין בֵּיתֿ הַכְּנֶסֶתֿ טְרַגְֿא, i.e, if nobody is hawking our prayer books, who's going to have a good day after synagogue? (A very, very rough translation.) I'm not sure what that even means, but you get the point.

Don't ask me for anything more: I'm only a disoriented non-star, which frankly, in my book, is a better translation of what טבֿיה דער מילכיקער (Tevye the Milkman) represnets, but then again, who's asking what I think?

-30-

So You Want to be a Writer?

It's that time of the year again. My royalty check from my days as a Hollywood screenwriter arrived. This time, we scored seventy-one cents.

Wow, seventy-one pennies. We'll have to be careful not to spend that all in one place!

You'll be glad to know I paid my fair share of taxes on these earnings: forty-six cents. That's 30 percent.

To be a journalist with a 40-year career in America means to be vectoring steeply toward poverty. Or, alternatively, it means a new chance to start over, etc. Today a sudden wind blew a tiny blossom from the plum tree in my backyard eastward to me, standing on my back deck (or decky, really, it's a tiny thing.)

I picked up the fragile mini-flower and though to myself, there on the decky, in a few months this tiny blossom would produce a large, ripened plum, soft and firm, begging to be sucked.

Or at least it would have had it not just been blown off the tree. Now, it is a piece of art, a tiny reminder that we all have a future --

-- until / unless we get blown away.

-30-

North, then South

All photos by Julia.

Today we said our goodbyes to our family members up north, and my youngest and I drove off into the rain, a horrible task, up along I-5 trying to see our way forward despite the heavy rains and the invisibilities only trucks can create.



But we did it, and we the faced delays in the airport (Seattle) where our flight home (San Francisco, for now) was complicated by bad weather up and down the west coast.



We made it home.



But it's not easy being the youngest of six children in a family like ours, with a Dad so old most people mistake him as her Grandpa.

Neither she nor I appreciate that error. Oh, we are invariably polite, but other people's expectations do not meet our needs. I'm 61, she's 10. And we are best buds. Screw everyone who can't deal with that!

-30-

p.s. She is a great navigator, which is what every driver in strange territory needs most.