Tag: king dude

There was a time when for me, going to Psycho Las Vegas meant budgeting only enough money to eat McDonalds for three days while I slept on a friend’s couch in some lawless Vegas neighborhood so far off the strip, Ubers wouldn’t dare travel to such unsavory corners. Now, in the post-pandemic world, I report on Psycho with new purpose. This year, I was staying in a Delano scenic suite high above the city and budgeted enough money to properly chase the American dream. Raoul Duke’s American dream in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a metaphor for the limits of human consciousness. With freedom as the central American covenant, what greater expression of patriotism is there than breaking free of reality’s chains by dosing yourself past every threshold? Now though, as I take that same trip as Duke in 2021, my search for the American Dream is a futile attempt to connect with a time long gone. You might assume I mean the world before the pandemic but I also mean that beautiful era in music history where rock and metal bands could draw crowds as far as the eye can see. How do we recover