A Day in the Life of Chaos

Road trips, especially in the Mountain and Southwest states always serve to remind me how big America is.  In the past days I have been on a journey that has taken me from Oregon to Texas.  Along the way we passed through some of the most beautiful landscape America has to offer stopping over in Canyonlands, Arches and Mesa Verde National Parks.  America’s National Parks are the jewels of the nation.  They are precious monuments to a wild and beautiful unsettled land.   Two guys at Mesa Verde, National Park As the miles slip away and we wind our way through miles of land with scarcely a single human present it reminds one of how empty and unsettled America is.  The tiny farm towns we cross through are monuments to the past and decaying representations of the present.  What little remains of a Main Street is often fronted by a few beautiful old brick buildings long since abandoned.  It makes me wonder how they ever served as a commercial center but I suppose in the era of Amazon they ar

In life there are many things we do in seeming futility.  It might be trying to look younger, arguing with a Republican or explaining evolution to a creationist.  Perhaps also on the list should be gardening in Alaska.   There is some kind of genetic human trait likely explained by the evolution noted above that guides many human beings into the desire to grow.  This can manifest itself in many different ways.  It might be a simple flower or the eternal spring desire to plant things all around ones hous e that despite our best intentions, will largely be dead by the following year.  That said for a few months we will relish the feeling of our hands in the soil and the vivid colors of the natural world around us.  We will love the hunt for the perfect plant and how, like a freshly cut bouquet of flowers, it will make our world beautiful for a few fleeting moments.  At that point, the cycle will start all over again.  Maybe it is a response to darkness and the cold perception of ve

I have never been so worried for my country.  This is not hyperbole, it is seriously a feeling I have deep inside my gut.   At nearly 51 years of age I have lived over half a century.  While I find this thought an anathema to my feelings of youth inside, it is in fact a reality that I can now look at the world and time with a sense of perspective.   America is disintegrating before our very eyes.  Again, I don’t mean this statement to be dramatic in effect.  I simply state it as a realistic appraisal of who we are and where we are as a society.  Our value systems have become clouded and buried under a mountain of lies designed to divide and conquer.  Internationally we have never been weaker.  We as a nation are more vulnerable then we have ever been but like the Roman Empire before us we are literally rotting frown within.  We are sewing the seeds of our own destruction and no one should doubt that our enemies do not recognize this.   I have been a fighter and debater all

Las Vegas is forever evolving.  I imagine the place as a kind of organism that is alive and constantly metastasizing into different forms.   It is not just metastasizing it is in a constant state of metamorphosis.  I almost think a new word should be invented to describe the condition, perhaps "metastasorphosis."   It is precisely this change that intrigues me so much.  I have often said that if I could change my way in life I would have been an urban planner.  There is something about the re-invention of design and function that fascinates me.  Very few urban planners begin with a blank slate, a canvas with which to completely adorn with their own image of perfection.  While this might seem idyllic, in truth I think it is a recipe for disaster.  Cities created with such an open canvas tend to be Stalinistic monolithic nightmares or organized chaos.  Brasilia was carved out of the jungle as a model capital and is instead an urban horror of concrete steel and glass that is