by tashmcgill | Nov 18, 2014 | Culture & Ideas, Travel
You can learn a few things in Las Vegas. More than blackjack or how to play the house advantage. You can learn a lot about being tough, surviving and rebirthing yourself. After all, Las Vegas is a city in the desert, without a water source close-by. Lake Mead is some 45min away. None of the greenery here looks real, its irrigated golf courses and landscaped gardens a far cry from the stark desert ash everywhere else you look.
Amidst the lights and neon signs, the truth of Vegas is a testament to the best and worst of human experience. Here, each rebirth of Las Vegas can be seen etched into the landscape of architecture, signage, history museums and photographs. While new hotels and resort complexes rise up on the dust and ashes of previous monuments, others sit abandoned on the Strip, rusting slowly in the parching desert sun.
This is human. We live out of our history and everything we are becoming is from the context of who we’ve been. My mistakes and my triumphs exist side by side, the evidence of both scattered through stories, opportunities and lessons learned along the way.
The best of us learn how to drill down and find water in the desert. We learn to build our future stories out of and beside the rubble of our histories. We let our darkness live as shadow of the lights.
Sometimes we refurbish. We take the old structures and ways of being, strip them out to bare bones and begin again. New furniture and fixtures make a difference. We can change our habits through careful new architecture and design. Human beings are like houses – we build and design our lives carefully and those that dwell in them should be carefully thought through.
Sometimes we leave the rusting, decaying pieces just within view. Sometimes they are the challenge yet to come, a restoration so complex or unprecendented that we haven’t figured out just how to approach it yet.
Either way; this is a testament to human survival. When we triumph and when we fail – we go on. We begin again, we build more, we stretch more. If we fail but do not persevere, if we do not find another incarnation of ourselves, we do not survive.
Vegas knows this. Her rugged history of men and women escaping taxes and the law is written in the dust of this desert. No matter how many shows, new hotels and great restuarants pop up here – this is a place with a slightly dark underbelly, where people are often looking to lose themselves for a night or a weekend.
But that’s not all that Vegas wants to be – and why wouldn’t she want more? We, as people, are rarely satisfied with the status quo for long. So now, she reinvents herself as a city for the arts, a city for performers, for families, for luxurious and clean escapes.
In this city, rebirth and survival is found through reinvention. But it’s never reinvention from scratch. It’s actually evolution. Core ideas reshaped into new expressions. Take the circus. Once upon a time, circus trains travelled the deserts of the mid-West, slowly fading one by one from railway tracks and then from caravans until people began to say – the travelling circus is dead.
Not here in Vegas. Here, for more than 30 years, Cirque de Soleil has rebirthed traditional circus into a haven for the performing arts community. Gymnasts, dancers, contortionists, divers, fire-breathers – all have found a home in the new Circus that people travel all over the world too. That’s what Las Vegas has become for many – the home of Cirque.
Evolution through history. Future, present and past standing next to one another in a single view. Rebirth and survival.
Perhaps it’s best expressed like this: once, I knew how to live until it no longer made sense. The world around me changed enough I knew I must change too, in order to survive. So I reshaped how I lived in this new world, and found myself building new habits and ways of being. I am still present, still full of what has been but I am newer too. I am a survivor.
by tashmcgill | Jun 20, 2012 | Monologue, Short Stories
She looks frazzled and tired, he looks frustrated but calm; trying to maintain patience. They’ve walked off a 21 hour flight to Australia to begin the adventure honeymoon of a lifetime. Their rings are glistening under fluorescent light and both are still fidgeting, getting used to the weight of warm metal against skin; twisting and admiring the statement it makes on each of their hands. Then the too-warm air of the airport arrivals terminal clouds in, the groaning luggage carousel clanks along and other passengers swarm in.
She pushes then pulls their luggage cart to a stop beside a queue of people pushing themselves towards the customs line. He tries to steal a kiss but she pushes him to one side and gestures to the carousel. He struggles his way through the crowd and back, one suitcase at a time. Now he’s made three trips and is torn between anxiously looking for the next bag and glancing back at his wife, tapping her foot and waiting for her iPhone to find signal. By the time he returns with the fourth bag, those over-packed full size suitcases perilously stacked on the cart, she’s done with the phone and marching through the lines towards fresh air.
Now it’s his turn to sigh and hustle, creeping closer to people slightly ahead of them in the queue.
Maybe he’s anxious to shower and change or just to get his wife into more comfortable surrounds but now it’s his frustration that claws at the atmosphere. Here’s where I learn their story – he’s from Oklahoma, she’s from Los Angeles. They’ll be here for two weeks. I look at the luggage, I look back to them. She explains one bag is shoes, and I laugh – embarrassed but amused at the easy cliche. Their itinerary is jam-packed, they’ll cover New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, not to mention a flying visit to Uluru and she has a pair of shoes for every occasion. She pulls him close, looks up into his face with a moment of calm. I feel relieved; they were making me anxious but I run out of time to tell them why. I hit the security fast-track lane and leave with my hopes for them heavy in my head.
“Dear American Honeymooners,
Please slow down. You’re running the risk of missing each other in your rush not to miss a thing. Don’t fall into the trap of writing a to-do list that doesn’t leave you anytime to make memories of what it was like to be together in that place. Don’t set a pace for your life you can’t maintain. You’ll leave one another behind.
Please pack less. I’m not sure what you were planning on doing, but life just doesn’t need that much baggage. Love is only helped with great hair and nails, it isn’t made. Buy more lingerie and fewer pairs of jeans. Be light on your feet. We carry each other – learn not to be too heavy when you are expecting someone else to carry your bags.
I hope you have a wonderful time, see all sorts of things you’ve never imagined before and have your childlike wonder engaged with creativity, nature and breathing the air of the one you love. Love each other well – you deserve it. You came a long way to get here.
Oh – one last thought. I’m a big believer in shoes. They’re glamorous, enigmatic, practical, empowering and often necessary. But they’re also the difference between staying home and going out. A great shoe isn’t a personality that you put on, but it expresses something of your persona. Learn to wear your lover like one great pair of shoes. The ones that become an extension of who you are. The ones you can’t live without. The ones that make you feel strong enough to climb mountains and fast enough to run for cover. Warm like slippers and a fireplace, easy like Chucks you wear everywhere. And keep walking in them. Live in your love the way you live in your shoes. You’ll need less of them, you’ll take better care of them, you’ll nurture and protect them, you’ll take a lot of pride in them when they’re the only pair you’ve got.
Wishing you all the best,
T.”
