Transverse City: The 51st State?

(I'm not sure what happened last week but this entry was eaten by the Gawds of Google, which angered me immensely and then humbled me as I realized there was bugger all I could do about it. I'm very happy that all the glitches have been fixed; please let my family go.)

Since this is at the top it can't be a footnote: I hadn't really grasped it until Tuesday, but Mike Peters, who draws Mother Goose and Grimm, has been underscoring his unhappiness at how the Chinese government regards human rights with incredible, and funny, comics every day of the Olympics. Go look at 'em, they're super! Not a footnote over.

Here in Southeastern Connecticut we are rapidly becoming a state of mind unlike that of the rest of the Land of Steady Habits (perhaps we could secede from Hartford, and become our own state, from the Connecticut River to the border with Rhode Island? Windham, Tolland and New London Counties-we could call ourselves Slotsylvania (a combination of gambling and rural, clever, eh?) and on our license plates we could put 'The Winning is Only Beginning'), life just gets faster and more furious, even when we don't all have those tricked out little cars or Vin Diesel.

I wonder about Vin and the kit car drivers most especially early in the morning on my way to work while waiting at the intersection of the Mohegan-Pequot Bridge and Route 12 in Preston, CT, when the White Rabbits come barreling over the bridge and through red lights that have been red for at least six Mississippi's, hang the left turn and then hang the next right as they retreat, pell-mell, from the Mohegan Sun Casino and head towards what they hope is the luck changing Foxwoods Casino.

Ladies and Gentlemen: they never close--you need not fear. For every aspect of your addiction, there's a device designed to draw maximum profit from it, and good news!, a fresh shipment has just arrived so keep your eyes on the road and both hands on the wheel and feel free to let up on the gas pedal. Yes, at the moment, the price has 'dropped' below four dollars a gallon for regular (I filled up yesterday at 3.97 (and nine/tenths) and I felt almost giddy--like I was stealing the gasoline. Such is the level of our addiction. 'I love you baby, can I have some more?'), but that's just a temporary and probably cosmetic change because unless we redesign our lifestyles, individually and as a nation, we're just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

From overhead, in the dark, the effect is stunning--two large gleaming, illuminated hearts you can practically feel the pulsations with veins and arteries marked by headlights of all sizes and shapes, threading to and through the pleasure domes. Beyond them, in any direction as far as you can see, varying degrees of dark, of luckless, lunchless, loveless, little lives lived beyond the glow of the electric fire, households where those happy sounds the slots make when someone wins, like the Super Mario music on the handheld game, never echo. The sound is so obsequious you go from being overwhelmed by its volume when you first step on the gambling floor until not even realizing it's there, and everywhere, until an hour after you've left and are in the car on your way home when it suddenly stops.

And in the Gilded Palaces, all an auslander can do is gawk at what man hath wrought. We don't need the light of day--the casinos have no windows. Time has no meaning--their walls, no clocks. We are all exchangeable and interchangeable on either side of the equation. And despite the political correctness of 'smoke free' areas (like on long distance air flights, back in the day; remember that?) the air is stale while the atmosphere is electric with excitement. We breathe in what we exhale and I'm not sure where exactly what we eat comes from, but I am afraid to guess aloud.

"Pollyanna take my hand. Show us endless neon vistas. Castles made of laser lights. Take us to the shopping sector, In the vortex of the night. Past the shiny Mylar towers. Past the ravaged tenements. To a place we can't remember, For a time we won't forget."
-bill kenny