By Conrad Joseph Walsh
Vegas heat is oppressive. It makes shoe rubber melt into asphalt. The kind of heat that requires dog owners to put literal shoes on their canine’s paws in the summertime.
I drive to Smith’s Food King to buy some Monster Energy drinks. The white ones. I get the drinks and put them in my cart.
I slouch down a few more aisles with no real goal. The cereal aisle screams with loud colors and cartoonish fonts. I add a box of Trix to my cart. A man starts talking to me, and I wish I had my AirPods in.
“None of this stuff is good for us, but here we are, right?”
“Right.”
“Health is the most valuable thing there is. It’s not money. If we’re rich but sick, then what do we really have.”
“That’s a good point.”
“Have a good one, brother.”
“You too.”
I escape the aisle and head for checkout. Gotta get out before another impromptu conversation. Without AirPods, it’s too risky to be in here like this.
The Dalai Lama once said that the ultimate source of happiness is not money and power, but warm-heartedness. But the Dalai Lama is rich. His net worth is 150 mil––so much for that vow of poverty. And before you tell me about how it’s held in a foundation and that he doesn’t have access to it, et cetera, et cetera, what I know is this: his rent is always covered, he has book deals, and that pad in Dharamshala isn’t exactly a dump.
I feel myself atrophy in the parking lot. The palm trees look like candles on a birthday cake, waiting to be lit by the waves of heat radiating off parked cars and abandoned shopping carts on Tropicana.
Conrad Joseph Walsh writes fiction and essays exploring disillusionment, absurdity, and the quiet pressures of modern life. His work has appeared in Expat and elsewhere online. He lives in the American Southwest.