Sometimes, a Little Crazy Keeps You Sane

Take three sugar cubes and a couple croutons wrapped in tinfoil. The sweet and the salty. First these, then those, and enjoy. Eight hits packed in five little squares. I watched a friend drop them by hand with what looked like an eye droplet on a set of sugar cubes just months earlier. Little pellets of a water-like substance inflate at the tip until the weight of its combined mass gets too heavy for the droplet to hold on. Quickly into the sugar cube before you can even blink, the liquid shoots down and disperses itself through the tiny particles of the white sandbox. A bucket of water down the side of a sandcastle, then ocean washed away. In the hotel suite, they ate it, and escaped to the hallway. No rabbit hole, just a billboard of comedian Carrot Top grinning in the lobby.

Vegas Morning

Daylight crept through the covers of my sheets and pulled me back into the quiet, still air of the late afternoon, my Vegas morning. I followed the line of light that had split through the hotel curtains and looked outside. A barren expanse of dust and construction littered the ground below. Almost nothing was alive from this side of the pyramid, except for the crane machine shifting dirt from one pile to another; just toys in the sandbox. It was time to leave.