Complex Numbers

Atlantic City

I love depressing music.

To paraphrase the Doctor Who episode "Blink," "What's wrong with sad? It's happy for deep people."

I'm probably not all that deep, though. The things I like, they're mostly all right there on the surface: good food, good drink, money, movies, music, and video games. I'm no philosopher; I don't even have a liberal arts education, having opted instead for a very practical engineering degree.

And yet, when I hear a sad song, it makes me happy. I don't know why. I did notice on my first cross-country trip, years ago now, that my playlist is probably 75% songs about travel, the road, or cars. This has been true even before I spent days gripping a steering wheel, blinking into the setting sun, alone with my music and my thoughts.

But a good 90% of my favorite songs are what some people call "depressing" and I call "awesome." But hey, you already knew I was a Springsteen fan.



So like I said last time, I had to take an emergency trip to Atlantic City to hang out with an old friend who's going through a divorce. He needed it. I'd just as soon never go there again. See, I've been to all the classic gambling hotspots in the US: Las Vegas, Reno, and Atlantic City. Vegas is all about overdoing everything; it's exuberant and bright and it's like that rich friend you have, or would like to have, who laughs at everything, drives a Ferrari, and flashes a Rolex. Reno is... depressing. And not in a good way, not like the Tom Waits or Johnny Cash songs about the place. One time, driving through Reno, I spotted a billboard advertising a Morrissey concert. That's right; Reno is so depressing that they had to bring in Morrissey to cheer it up.

Atlantic City makes Reno look like Disney World.

Used to be, AC was the only place on the East Coast to gamble, so people went there from all over. Lately, though, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Connecticut and even bloody New York have legalized gambling to some degree or another, which leaves Atlantic City with very little reason to exist beyond sheer inertia and classic Jersey stubbornness.

But they still have bars, and blackjack, and usually you can avoid the scam artists wandering in off the streets for long enough to let casino security kick them out. And, unlike Vegas or Reno, if you look out the window you can sometimes see the ocean, and forget for a moment that those waves will one day drown the city in a flood of sharks and used needles.

Sometimes the only purpose of a place is to remind you of how good you actually have it. Or - maybe - substitute "song" for "place" and now I might begin to understand my taste in music.

Everything dies, baby, that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.