This trip has made me think about excess. Can excess be a good thing? If excess means more than the usual or necessary amount, then it depends, doesn’t it? There is no doubt in my mind that the Hoover Dam exists because of an excess: an excess of ambition, of money, of everything it took to dam up the Colorado and pour so much concrete that they had to invent a way of cooling it, without which the concrete poured in 1935 would still be giving off heat. 
But it’s not the engineering that I find most fascinating, it’s the people who decided that it was not just okay to intervene in nature but that it was necessary. The money people and the political people and the 16,000 people who actually built it. What gave them such nerve?
Most people like seem to like the result, whatever the cause. That’s certainly not universally true of the excess of the Las Vegas Stip; many seem to find it depressing. During the day, I couldnt agree more, and I suspect that this one-week visit will be enough for me. But at night there’s something irresistable about all that light, all tht motion, all that energy, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to eperience it. 
Last night’s trip was especially strange. When we got on the resort-provided shuttle, the driver explained that he couldn’t drop us at the usual point, Caesar’s Palace, because they had “a jumper.” Lots of bad jokes followed, from the driver and a fellow passenger, and I had an unsettling sense of how they and hundreds of thousands of others felt no connection to “the other,” whether it be a depressed guy who lost all his money, got drunk, and inconvenienced our evening or a refugee or immigrant whose religious beliefs are not our own. But Love Trumps Hate, right? I hope so, excessively perhaps.
Before we Ubered back to our condo (the jumper was in custory, but we wanted a quick ride home), we stood for a while to watch the “dancing fountains” of the Bellagio. While it certainly doesn’t deliver electricity and water to millions, this water show, excessive that it is, is my favorite thing on the Las Vegas Strip, and I can’t imagine it happening anywhere else. It takes a minute to load, but enjoy with me: IMG_3804