SALT LAKE CITY (2024) "Brigham Young University"

Why are the Mormons so happy?

Mormon missionaries. Yes, this is how old they are.

In Las Vegas, I stayed in a giant casino/hotel complex that was going bankrupt.  That’s why my room was $44.  It was a decent room, on the fifth floor.  I could see The Strip in the distance including THE SPHERE, which is the big new thing.  It looked like a giant marble stuck in among the other toys. 

It was April so there were rain storms and thunder storms passing through that evening which was the night’s entertainment.  It was fun looking down on Las Vegas from the Fifth Floor.  It gave you a good sense of how insubstantial the whole project was.  The soul-sucking casino business….    

I woke up the next morning and had a good two hour writing session, in bed, with the desert in the distance and the tiny gambling people walking around in the parking lot below. 

I checked out and drove north toward Salt Lake City.  The highway cut through a corner of Arizona, which felt cleaner and more upstanding than Nevada. I then entered Southern Utah which was beautiful and unpopulated but which has trashed, prison-style rest stops.  I don’t know what that’s about.

The spring storms continued all day with pounding rain and then sun breaks and then huge black clouds swarming in again—that great smell of electricity in the air—and then more downpours that were so intense some drivers just pulled over and waited for it to be over.