Yearbook

It'd been a rough stretch there for a couple dozen years, so imagine my delight when, in January last, Ellen Degeneres came a-knockin' on my door for no particular reason. "Well, hello, Ellen Degeneres," I said, "what do you want?" Then I remembered my manners and thought about inviting her in, but the house was covered in layers of old magazines and dirty clothes, dirty magazines and old clothes, something like that, and so I just stepped outside on the front walk to speak with Ellen Degeneres. We talked briefly about her latest dance moves, and I showed her my new steps, and she hopped back on her scooter and zoomed away, but not before we agreed to overthrow the world through the healing power of dance.

It was that kind of year, 2004. Good fortune. The following month, I was picking up trash along the Strip and found a huge bag of cash. I knew it'd be wrong to just keep it, because it wasn't mine. So I tried to give it to this Midwestern couple and they wouldn't take it either, what with their Midwestern values, and so I was stuck with this bag of money and a bunch of guilt, which I tried to get rid of with a stiff drink at the Barbary Coast. Oh, that's a lie. I had quit drinking a while back, and somewhere along the line thereafter I learned that guilt serves no purpose, so what the hell, I got a bag o' money. It's not like I could get anyone else in Vegas to take it.

So it wasn't long after a visit from Ellen Degeneres and a bag of money that a national TV news program called 60 Minutes sent me a job offer via standard U.S. mail. They're lucky I even opened it, frankly, because I get so much mail and if it's not hand-written I often just tear it right up. But it smelled like Mike Wallace's aftershave—don't ask me how I know that, because it's really not something I'm proud of—so I opened it. Anyway, they offered me a ton of money to move to Washington, D.C., and co-anchor a new political show. I wrote back: Thanks but no thanks, because I have recently found a bag o' money on the curb, and I wouldn't want to live in D.C. anyway, because a lot of politicians live there.

In the interest of space and accuracy, I'll have to skip through the parts of 2004 that include the ghost of Hank Williams Sr. and the lifetime supply of Milk Duds—God's most unattractive but delicious yellow-boxed confectionary delight. Suffice to say that the months kept getting more grand, and I find myself here in December thanking the good Lord for my blessings and looking forward to a selfless and Purpose-Driven Life in 2005.

Stacy J. Willis is a Las Vegas Weekly associate editor.

My 2004 began with a white mushroom cloud over what my family calls Mt. Ploppy, the new site of the housing development on Highway 160 called "Mountain's Edge." (The billboard shows sleek young men and women in bicycle gear smiling in "the new Southwest.") My son, sitting next to me in the car on the way home from school, screamed: "It's a nuclear bomb!" and fell sobbing to the floor; knowing he was right, I said, "No, it's just a giant firecracker," which brought him back to the seat and into a debate about just how large a firecracker had to be to raise such a cloud.

My 2004 continued with a phone call to Harry Reid's office the next day, where a receptionist explained that what we saw was "a test" of a nonballistic missile sent from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, a "test" that wasn't an explosion, but an implosion, proving that the missile defense system in Utah was "keeping us safe."

In my 2004, safety was lost in the endless rhetoric of my, of "our," protection, and the color-coded danger warnings, which I ignored because the danger, I knew, was not elsewhere, not in "insurgents" or "terrorists," but in the empty place my America was becoming.

My 2004, oh my 2004: I exercised in the same gym, but the news had taken a worse turn, as pictures aired of the hooded prisoners at Abu Ghraib and "our troops," one Lynndie England, who had attached one young Arab to a dog's leash for her now eternal photo op. I listened to the news on the radio; I saw our president exposed for leading us into war under the false premise that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and I saw our president return to office. Out my window, I saw the armies of housing tracts nearing Red Rock Canyon, and I watched the covey of quail that live in my yard propagate and multiply. I noticed one day that my little boy, Benjamin Brecht Revell, was nearly 10 and five feet tall. I turned 45 and entered what a church's billboard in town called "the youth of my old age." On my birthday, it seemed the only news in my 2004 was that Kmart and Sears had merged. I looked for wisdom. I saw it in the return of the roses and verbena, in the perpetual bloom of the hollyhock in my front yard. I wondered how to start praying again and I did, Ben and I praying each night for peace in Iraq and elsewhere where people were dying; for the American people, who have lost their hearts to the shopping mall; for our president, who will never be mine. In my 2004, I prayed for my own innocence and its loss; and I tucked my boy into bed and reassured him each night that all would be well.

Claudia Keelan is an award-winning poet and member of the UNLV English department faculty.

This summer, I saw President Bush speak at a conference of minority journalists in Washington. I saw him hit his marks with the same gentle-eyed enthusiasm as a child grasping a point and looking for parental approval.

When one journalist dared him to think by throwing a tougher question at him, about university legacy admissions, I saw the president tentatively step toward an answer, his eyes lighting with trepidation and a touch of indignation. I saw the wheels behind those eyes turn mightily, as if to ask, Am I about to say something I shouldn't? The leader of the free world ...

So you see why I can't help but feel a bit of apogee in the air these days: post-election, hip deep in Iraq, et. al. Like, we've peaked, like the 21st century will belong to someone else's civilization. Still, don't worry. I'm over it. No hand-wringing. No country-divided talk. I promise. It's Christmas. It's cool. Anyway, I'm finally adjusting to the balmy hedonism of Las Vegas.

I spent most of the year living in New York City. "Definite culture shock," people say when I tell them. Yes and no. Certainly the differences between the two cities are clear. The Big Apple alone has more people than Arizona and Nevada combined. People are unavoidable. Contact is unavoidable, and sometimes unwelcome, and the competitive nature of the place can be a grind. But New York thrives on such serendipitous interaction, the way folks, more often than not, actively engage each other to get ahead.

Beyond the Strip and downtown, Vegas is ringed by suburBenjamin Spacek, which means everyone can afford their own modest piece of the desert and be left alone. The city is as much marked by its meticulous expansion into the dirt as by the Strip-strollers just off the plane from Frat U.

New York makes life difficult—the city is always testing your worthiness to participate in its great vitality. Vegas makes life easy for everyone, either as a salve for losing your money or for wilting away in a culture that could use some meat on its bones.

But both, of course, thrive on hype and ambition. Along with Los Angeles, they are the country's most potent dream factories. Vegas in particular is a town in which sophisticated engineering—water and plastic surgery, to name two—masquerades as showmanship. To its credit, Las Vegas defies easy description: I don't know whether it's the beginning of the future, or the beginning of the end. Or maybe neither, just an overheated blip on the map.

This year felt like our national attributes—freedom, faith in technology, plainspokenness and love of all things big—were trumped by growing inequality, boorishness and crappy taste in everything. Yet here it is all smashed together in the space of a few blocks, the tacky and the stupendous. It's all on proud, sometimes shameless display. Las Vegas reminds me that the country has always been too vast to reduce, categorize or, frankly, make much sense of.

T.R. Witcher is a Las Vegas Weekly staff writer.

Although his most abominable act of selfishness didn't occur until August 7, 2002, the day he killed his wife, news reports surfacing two years later suggested that Frank Marques had never known how to place his spouse's welfare above his own.

Yet, reporting on the confession Marques gave authorities the day after he put three mortal bullets into Candace Weckhorst, a middle-aged woman who had dreamed of an unpretentious life with a house and family and who had finally gathered the courage to flee from Marques and his implacable tyranny 11 days before her worst nightmare came true, one article quoted Marques as saying that he "was a good man who loved his wife."

I read the article to my good friend Adrian Lansford—a carnal blackjack dealer with incisive wits who has chosen to forever slice out of his thoughts all matters of conflict or complexity, which he believes lead to the same immutable conclusion: sufferance. He responded, with a soldier's dismay:

"Love ain't a reality today."

And he meant it. For Adrian is an avatar of his own social commentary: He—like many—has forgotten how to love.

Somewhere in the sound and fury of growing up in America, a multiplex society saturated with immoderate goods, and living in Las Vegas, a city flooded with insatiable lusts, Adrian lost that sense of authentic love—pure selflessness—which he had absorbed from his mother up until the time he learned to look out for himself; and, spoiled with the provisions secured for him through centuries of his forebears' sacrifices, Adrian has never been able to conceive that love, like anything worth having, is not free. Or that it's hard work.

And so, he—like many, who know only what they've been taught through the images, icons and illiteracy of modern culture; that is, the language of "me"—has cast love from his mind.

Thus, the dissipation of love has become a famine in our country, where irreconcilable and serpentine politics have turned brother against brother, mother against daughter, with rancor that hasn't been seen since the 1860s; and in our own city, where divorce rates dwarf the national average, foster homes exceed capacity and the work is endless for family therapists—one of whom, Mark Odell, gave a local paper the grave synopsis: "You have to work hard to find an environment that is child- and family-friendly here."

All of which, of course, is not unprecedented; history refutes every romanticized era. Yet, the landscape of love has now become, in this year of 2004, so barren that even a loveless man like Adrian Lansford mourns its disappearance.

Joshua Longobardy is features editor of the Rebel Yell, UNLV's student newspaper