for my first return to the U.S. since starting school in Canada, i chose Las Vegas. oh, to return to terra americana papered over with concrete, to be greeted by glowing airport slot machines, technicolor billboards shilling ads for Waymo and enterprise AI and Ru Paul’s Drag Race Live.

had i not lugged two backpacks of fits and books, and had it been less mid-night, i would’ve walked the 1.2 miles from Harry Reid International Airport to my hotel. instead i opted for seven minutes in the Uber Share, whirring on the buttery, slick-smooth pavement of overbuilt freeways.

my reason for being (here, anywhere): Charli xcx. to avenge my failed attempt at proximity at Outside Lands, i arrive three hours early to line up for the pit. i make friends with two 19-year-old boys, one of whom is Greek; he squeals that he wants to name his first child Αγάπη (my name). buzzing, we scuttle up to the front row and land next to a group of six BYU girlies, whose miniskirts and dedicated xcx fandom muddy my understanding of Mormonism.

i touch the barricade. we wait. soon, there she is: once a set of pixels on my 13-inch laptop screen, Charli xcx sings and writhes 13 feet from my eyeline. she sways, bangs her head, licks a guitar, drags her finger up her body and into her mouth.

her entire persona is stage makeup: applied so thick it looks garish up close, for it must reach all the way to the back row. i can see the whites of her smirking eyes—they wink—and the soles of her tattered heels. i watch her stumble in the dark when she gets up from the floor during “Track 10.” her voice splits in two: one a backing track, perfected; the other her human vocal cords stretching and crackling. it’s her, and it’s not, and it is. fantasy and reality become one.

i may die happy now

i don’t have the skills / equipment to shoot this (see above) but i could’ve from my position—shout out / thank you to Kentucky’s Jennifer Denham

ẍ Ⓧ 🄧 𝒙 🆇 🅧 ⓧ 𝕩 𝕏 𝔛

in sociology and literary writing both, we must make the familiar strange. the granddaddy of sociology, C. Wright Mills, birthed the idea that to study the social world—those issues we think are our own but are actually shared, patterned, and political—we have to see them differently. we must X-ray-vision our way into our interconnectedness. similarly, when we write, we draw the reader’s attention by defamiliarizing what we know: describing it in fresh ways only our inimitable human brain could come up with.

Las Vegas does the work for you. from the plane, i see a sphere covered in a white woman’s eyelid. it blinks over a green-gray iris, then flashes into a Gatorade ad, then a swirling lapis lazuli marble with the Oracle logo tacked on. on the ground, the only way to top the chaos that is The Strip is to go for a run on The Strip. at 9 a.m., i toss gentle elbows around flip-flopped Midwestern tourists on South Las Vegas Boulevard. along these nine-lane roads, Times Square meets Epcot.

nothing says U.S.A. more than the collection (as in curation, as in plucking and displaying) of other countries’ landmarks: shrunken replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the canals of Venice, the artificial beaches of Mandalay (a city with no beaches), and the exotic pastiche of Treasure Island, with “design” inspiration drawn from Nepal, India, and Europe. only these interventions can fill the void where our own national culture should sit.

or, perhaps, this is our culture: a ceaseless taking to fill a spiritual hole ripped open again and again. first, by the European monarchs who sent their foot soldiers to steal the land and clear out the people upon it. then, by the descendants of those foot soldiers, some of whom arrived consensually and others as indentured servants. they gave up—or were stripped of—their own identities to bloat the numbers and power of whiteness. they were English, they were Irish, they were pagans. later, they were Italians, they were Greeks. and then they were white.

also our culture: an oversized Coke bottle, an oversized guitar, an oversized, buttercup McDonald’s arch above the escalators that take you into the casino. capitalism alongside appropriation; appropriation for transformation into capital.

the sun sets and light pollution dizzies the birds gliding in from Red Rocks: the stars! my path! the Bellagio.

𝕔 𝖈 𝒸 𝒞 𝕮 𝙲 Ⓒ ĉ 🅒 🄲 🅲

the uncanny is having a moment right now, due to Backrooms, which i am too afraid to watch. if you search “uncanny” on Are.na, you’ll find prosthetic deer, virtual models, alternate universes in which Japan won the war.

per Wikipedia—that bastion of humanity in the now-un-human internet—the uncanny refers to “the psychological experience of an event or thing that is unsettling in a way that feels oddly familiar, rather than simply mysterious.” while other sources define the uncanny as merely eerie or broadly frightening, “oddly familiar” holds the key.

inside the uncanny valley, certain non-living objects feel too human for us to like them. in other words, corpses, zombies, and automatons disgust us because they are both too much like us and too much unlike us.

the uncanny is Madame Tussauds and why my only doll had rainbow hair. the uncanny is the “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror, where the aged and the dead enter a virtual world in their younger bodies, timelines undisturbed. heck, it’s the entire moral uncanny of Black Mirror.

sometimes, i might wager, it’s not the things themselves that are creepy, but the similarities between them.

ẍ Ⓧ 🄧 𝒙 🆇 🅧 ⓧ 𝕩 𝕏 𝔛

sometimes Vancouver feels like a twin of Portland, or an older sister. the trees are taller; the green is impossibly more green, the rain wetter. the mountains are nearer, like the West Hills but zoomed in, and sharper, like sharks’ teeth jutting northward. the skyscrapers get much closer to scraping the sky. every house is actually three houses. the buses all have accordions and ride full up.

everything’s beautiful but more, and some things are the same but a bit off. the library catalog runs on the same bones, not even the font different. as on Hawthorne, the brunch line for a restaurant named Jam winds down 4th Ave on a Sunday. red-brick apartments in the West End look like Portland’s Northwest scaled up. edible Vancouver published its radicchio article right after Lola’s Portland Monthly feature.

these near-coincidences run on a spectrum. on one end, the superficial, even delightful: the squirrels here scurry by black as their own shadow. the same cuboid hunk of chocolate ganache cake that runs you $11 at New Seasons goes for $4 at the 24-hour bakery—a pleasure, sure, but also evidence of some bulwarking against inflation.

somewhere in the middle, the wave of AI-generated cafe signage has hit Vancouver in a way it hasn’t in Portland. here, there’s less AI-shaming that the ethos of Portland promotes (🙋‍♀️ apologies…). as a result, the soft serve has 15 swirls, the latte foam sits like an igloo, a convex meniscus drizzled in equidistant trails of syrup.

at the other end of the spectrum, the duplications ring grave. in my UBC inbox i receive an explainer for Canada’s “Access Without Fear” policies, which guarantee public services to people with precarious immigration status. in the U.S., people are stolen away as they take their child to the hospital for a broken leg, as they drive on roads paid for by their tax dollars. these Canadian policies act as a twisted funhouse mirror, reflecting the depravity of the American approach back to us.

𝕔 𝖈 𝒸 𝒞 𝕮 𝙲 Ⓒ ĉ 🅒 🄲 🅲

every university has, i think, a Harry Potter Room. at UVA it was the McGregor Room, maroon sofas and brass chandeliers enclosed by mahogany bookshelves. at UBC, it’s on the third floor of IKB. inside a castle, warm light streams through stained glass across rows of long tables.

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