From The S.F. Chronicle
By Mark Morford

It is, of course, all a matter of scale. Perspective. Of allowing yourself and your sensibilities to be hammered to a bloody pulp by the hard fist of gluttonous reality, just for fun, and see if you can walk away with a shrug and a smile and without feeling like running off to the woods with a case of absinthe and a copy of “Sailing to Byzantium,” never to return.

You might think you’re helping, doing what you can, assisting the healing of the world in tiny but essential ways. You cut down on your garbage and buy compact fluorescent lightbulbs and respond appropriately to the giant polluting scam that is bottled water. You recycle and buy local and eat organic and maybe even compost, watch your mileage, choose carefully, tread lightly, vote accordingly, use a nice little reusable canvas shopping bag at Trader Joe’s. Sweet.

Reality flips you off

And then, well, it all just explodes. Reality – or rather, a certain nasty aspect of it – spits on your shoes and flips you off and lumbers away like a fat bully after stomping all over your cool sand castle at the beach. I love it when that happens. I hate it when that happens. Ain’t it just the way?

I hit the fabulous Vegas Strip recently, and it was a sharp and wonderful lesson, a reminder, a slap in the heart of all you think might be changing, shifting, improving.

I’ve been to Vegas plenty of times, but it’s always an astounding thing, the scale, the overkill, the energy usage, the sheer impudence of the place, excessive waste like a mantra, fresh water sucked into the void of the scalding desert, air conditioning blasting and gargantuan everything as a million European and Asian tourists flock to the place to indulge in distinctly American fantasies of greed and consumption, all thanks to our pathetically weak dollar and wicked extant ethos of more, more, more.

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