I was in Reno last week, tagging along on one of my wife’s business trips. She had a meeting one afternoon in a conference room at the Peppermill casino. Now, we’d been hanging around in casinos for a couple days, so smoke and flashing lights and lack of windows wasn’t surprising. But the Peppermill went way beyond typical casinos; it was filled with lots of blue and red neon, it was dark, it was noisy, and filled with at least thirty years of smoke and nicotine. It was a maze. Heck, it might have been a gate to the underworld, but I doubt I would have been able to find that famous gateway in that disorder, and I sure wouldn’t have been able to read “Abandon faith, all ye who enter here” over it until someone managed to hit a jackpot
Have fun, dear. I’m getting out of here while I can.
So I go driving down Virginia Street trying to find some place to get away from the casino insanity. Driving down Virginia, I saw it all—casinos, worn out malls, strip clubs. Eventually, I found it, some place I could relax and forget where I was.
Yep, I found a Starbucks.
And even though I’m not a big fan of chains, and not a particular fan of Starbucks, I was so happy to be somewhere without bells ringing and slot machines rolling and zombiefied oldsters staring slack-jawed at the one armed bandits. I was ecstatic, I was somewhere safe.
I didn’t do any writing, but I did read an author’s self-published mystery, and got some nice chances to think about how good fiction feels.
And I was safe.
