Daniel, I awoke today in Babylon, on the nineteenth story of the Red Rocks Casino Hotel.

The serfs scurry like ants below me, cleaning the immense geometrical pools. They move among the cabanas and beach bars, folding towels, preparing for the pilgrims to arrive. They vacuum the leaves from the trees.

Daniel, the number of serfs it takes to maintain Babylon is tremendous. I have seen them, swinging among the rivets of the Paris Paris Eiffel Towerfake as fuck, trapped in the wedding-cake layers of the Excalibur Hotel. I have seen them businesslike in very short skirts amongst the candy cartoon video poker and I have seen them servicing these machines in the alley, wheeling them away.like sick relatives on stretchers The serfs of Babylon hand out glossy flyers for women with painfully large breasts; they walk shyly by, nearly naked, down the hallways of hotels with their johns.

Daniel, there are palm trees on the rooftops here.The palm trees have whored themselves out, I’ve decided, by continuing to be beautiful here.

I have seen the cracks in the concrete across the Bally’s Bridge. I have seen the ornate vomitorium in the baths beside the All-You-Can-Eat buffets. I have seen the eyes of the magicians, glittering in the cocktail lounges. They know something the pilgrims do not. Babylon is in its final, graceless flower. Babylon is falling down.

Daniel, the sky here is filled with clouds now and it is raining. They are descending rapidly, rendering buildings indistinct. The land beyond the golf-courses has been stripped bare; the mountains in the distance look stunned.

There is a rainbow over the Red Rocks Casino Hotel. It ends the length of a city block from where I sit, on the nineteenth floor, overlooking the fan-shaped pools. Before me streams a highway where Hummers and Beamers and battered Neons hurtle towards their ill-founded desires, bounded by billboards advertising homes in foreclosure. Still, the rainbow is a promise.

Daniel, the rainbow is gone.

Today, I heard the voice of God singing Luck Be A Lady as a thousand inverted cataracts shot higher than the mountainous palace where once they filmed Ocean’s Eleven. The women stood on the bridge with their lovers, teetering on cruel heels, impossibly beautiful. The young people were all in love. Still, it was not enough.

Cirque du Soleil came rolling past  on a shrink-wrapped bus, the gentle dreams of all humanity in tow. Still, this place was not redeemed.

I stood mesmerized as a woman on a giant electronic billboardin fishnets and garters caressed her own ass in a manner that should be inscribed forever in the annals of Love Goddess Hot Sex, and still it was not enough.

It will never be enough. This place (which is so many places) has betrayed the earth that bore it. Its appetite is insatiable. Soon, every inch of California farmland will bow in obeisance to the buffets of Babylon. Already, the breadbasket of Nebraska rots in its dumpsters. Already, the rivers run dry.

I am thinking of the Hoover Dam now, the way those stern stone Aryan angels seek to pierce heaven with their wings. I am thinking of how this place has grasped the beatinghydraulic heart of the Colorado River and thrust it to the electronic gods atop the pyramid of the Luxor Hotel. I am thinking now how all these empires aped so fake by Babylon are fallen.

Daniel, I’m telling you this because you are the one, it seems, to whom all my best thoughts are directed these days. I tell you these things because I cannot stop thinking of you, the same way I cannot stop thinking of Babylon.

Daniel, you are the vastness of stars and lights receding in the distance. You are the water that flows deep underground. You are the future of cities and sunlight. I dance around the axisthrowing ineffectual feathers, scheming on a dream to monkeywrench the Red Rocks Casino Hotel, while you stand at the crossroads of ethics and knowledge, undreaming Babylon.

You are the stone from which these intricate marble carpets were quarried. You are the blue Morpho butterfly, imported in pupa from Costa Rica, which awakened this morning in the greenhouse of the Bellagio Easter Garden. You are not the stone-faced angel, singing adamantine madrigals to the Hoover Dam. You are the water behind it. ancient and waiting You are the clear sky above.

I am worried that despite all our well-intentioned purchasing of one-hundred percent recycled toilet paper and locally grown produce,composting, gardening, cap and trading, grey-watering, public transportation, solar energy, wind-turbines, shopping local and remembering to bring our grocery bags  Babylon will eat us alive. I am afraid it will go on forever, sucking electricity from the hypothetical water that flows beneath the wind-blasted red rocks of Mars.

Daniel, this is a very real fear.In your Book, you saw the signs. Now those signs have come to pass.

I have seen the decaying financial centers of this empire, like husks of stucco upon the land. I have seen the master-planned communities, half-built and halted. And just today, that monstrous new City proposed for the Strip, stopped like a runaway train in its tracks.(The tracks, the imaginary money that kept the empire hurtling towards Mars.)

The cranes there, silhouetted like lonely centurions against the sky. The vertical acres of unfinished rooms stand vacant, horizontal acres of stone quarried from a black hole rendered in the guts of the earth—perched upon the steel arms of the shiny black high-rise like yet another sacrifice of yet another empire, waiting with geological patience to fall.

And Daniel, I am perfectly happy for this place to lay vacant until the end of times—until birds make their homes amidst the luxurious commodes of those overpriced, unsellable condos and the coatimunditheir long tails waving work the slots. Daniel, I am as gleeful as the UniBomber in consideration of this: tumbleweeds tumbling down the Boulevard, the Chinese elm and the tamarisk sucking water from the crumbling culverts beneath the Strip, the pyramid at the Luxor Hotel overtaken by shifting pink post-Apocalyptic sands.

I am ready for the suspension bridge at the Hoover Dam to wait forever for completion, its two ends half-lowered, forever unresolved.like the question of civilization itself Ready for the cars to line up to the horizon, and for the driversat last to abandon their cars. I am ready for the Aryan angels at the Hoover Dam to stand amazed beneath the immense, still shadow of the cranes.

I am ready for themone day, when no one is looking to fly back into the gaping stone heart of the earth, absolved.