I clawed at the unforgiving cushions of the back seat of our rental Camry, sweat pouring from my brow and running down the sides of my neck to pool unpleasantly around my shirt collar, my back arched as my muscles clenched and spasmed. I don’t know how long the drive was, only that the minutes screamed endlessly, like a man getting sucked into a wind tunnel in a better class of action movie. Traffic lights shone bright – so bright! – scorching my retinas, flaring like an ammunition dump explosion in a lower class of romantic comedy.

Goddamn Vegas, man.

Nothing – nothing – is real in that place. The Venetian Hotel has an interior roof painted to look like the twilight sky, and gondolas weave down canals filled with water of the kind of deep and rich blue that you see in children’s storybooks (See Spot Run Into Trouble At The Beach, Courtesy Of BP). The air is gusted with perfume to disguise the stench of cigarette smoke and when my body started craving salad (little did the poor chump know that a roadside Arby’s was soon to prove its nemesis), the closest I could get was a sole lettuce leaf alongside a turkey wrap that was not a colour I will ever believe could be found in nature. Unless it was the colour of Mother Nature puking after a night on absinthe and green chartreuse. That, I could believe.

But it’s not as if we went to Vegas for the authenticity.

No.

We came for the prostitutes.

What day is it? Is it Blurnsday today? It feels like a Blurnsday out there.

Time has ceased to have any real and true meaning – the days have become a blur of highway, movie scenes come to life, and the varied ranks of TNB. I’m keeping track of the weeks by marking off the vague offers of visa-superceding marriage I’m accruing from people I haven’t met and the one from someone I have (please note, ma’am, not only am I totally serious, but I’ll tell all of my friends that I think you’re really cool).

That being said, here’s what happened at the start of the week.

Yes, I agree, I deserved to be sat next to a big fat person for thinking Jesus, I hope I don’t have to sit next to a big fat person on this flight.

Yes, I agree, I deserved to be sat next to the biggest, fattest person on the flight after watching this person in particular walk down the aisle and thinking Jesus. Like that one right there.

The rule is this and always this: while walking though an airport on my way to boarding a plane, I must listen to the Dandy Warhols. The song doesn’t matter, the album is immaterial, and this isn’t something I do for luck, or to seal a bargain with fate that in return for my remembrance and recognition of this ritual the wings of the plane will stay sealed to the fuselage and not suddenly fall off over the darkness of the Pacific at mid-flight, midnight… it’s just the way it goes.

There’s a certain sound that the Warhols have perfected, a textured richness that rides the line between drone and groove. Played loud, it overrides everything else, washes through the world and puts you in a singular, solo universe – your own personal movie soundtrack. I like this; I like feeling like there’s a greater narrative of motion that is centred around me for an average of three minutes and thirty seconds.