Of A Certain Vintage

Saturday night, I drove my rented Sentra from Dante's Peak in Death Valley to the small town of Pahrump, Nevada, where I stopped for a coffee and some cell service.

Then I headed back to Vegas. After stopping by my hotel for a quick shower, I went to something called Meow Wolf, which I don't even know what that was. Not sure I'd recommend it, but the highlight was a type of installation that was basically off-brand Wacky Packages merchandise for sale in a fake 7-11. Like if you took stuff from Archie McPhee, Think Geek, and Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company and put it into a convenience store and called it an art installation.

The highlight of the evening was a guided nighttime tour of the Neon Museum. My first trip to Las Vegas was in 1990, I think. Maybe '89. Maybe '91, with fellow assistants at Marvel and one who'd moved to LA ahead of the rest of us. Our Dollar rental car three-cylinder Geo Metro gasped its way over the mountains from LA to the desert. I was working on a Conan letters page from the passenger seat on someone's borrowed laptop. Maybe Marc Siry's. (This was the same trip where he bought a green Karmann Ghia from a lot on LaBrea and drove it back East with David G. Wohl. They hit a vulture partway and the VW was never the same after that. I think Marc's boss Ralph loaned him the three grand to buy the car.)

I remember stopping by Vegas a few years later with Marie alice, and then it's a blur of short visits over decades, with the pirate and volcano installations being clues of changes to come. I'm vintage, apparently. (Last week involved a colleague telling me "There's no way you're 56, you seem so much younger" followed by a park ranger asking if I wanted a senior discount, so who the fuck knows anymore. More importantly, who cares. Every day is a good day, except the shitty ones. Those aren't good days.)

The Neon Museum features a bunch of classic signs, some working, mostly not, and a bit of Vegas history. I was uncomfortable passing so many signs I'd seen in action on my first trips to this living city monument to graft and consumerism. It's wild to think of how quickly the city evolved from when I'd first seen these signs on the Strip to now, when they are ancient history in a heap. Vegas is a good place to fly into in order to leave it, to go out into the desert or to national parks, but its overall aesthetic is a baffling combination of "that's awesome" and "bring on the comet already."

I loved the Neon Museum and recommend it--just go at night so you can see the signs in action.