My apologies or being offline for most of the past week. Roughly a month ago, our thirty-three-year-old niece, vacationing with her husband in Hawaii, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. She died shortly after Easter, and this past weekend was the memorial service for her in her hometown of Reno, Nevada. The service would have been held a week earlier, but being Reno, there was the problem of a Slots Championship soaking up every hotel room in town.

There's more than a little cognitive dissonance in the air with a memorial service that has friends and relatives in from all over the country bunking at a casino—The Nugget—AKA "The neu-zhay" to everyone affecting low-rent hipster-dom. But our niece was a sweet, fun-loving kid who would have laughed at the thought of it. (I'll always think of her as the twelve-year-old whom I took to see The New Kids on the Block on Harriet Island years ago.)

I hadn't been in Reno in a decade, and The Biggest Little City in the World is bigger and more tattered than I remember it. Downtown—where the World Bowling Congress was filling every lane of the seventy-eight-lane National Bowling Stadium (go ahead, make your Kingpin references, we did)—could serve as the set for a post-apocalyptic movie without a single extra buck of effects work to lay on movie grime, faded posters, derelict arcades, and dank lounges that were quarter-full with motionless, dessicated characters who probably wouldn't pass the pin prick test. Casino revenues in northern Nevada are off by nearly 25 percent from 2008, and like everywhere else, except maybe pharmaceuticals, no one sees a bottom anytime soon.

For all the talk of how much of the debt bubble middle class Americans used to buy $40k SUVs, hot tubs, time-share condos, pricey handbags, cosmetic surgery, and high-end restaurant meals, it'll be fascinating to find out how much of that temporary/imaginary "wealth" went into the gambling industry, which inflated simultaneously with the financialization of the American economy.

One night, seeking escape from the Neu-zhay, my wife and I dodged across the street to Paddy & Irene's Pub—Jell-O shots $2—which we could tell was Irish because of all the paper Guinness pennants fluttering out front in preparation for the big Cinco de Mayo street fair. With a clientele of us and a big, heavily tatted guy who looked like he could have been bounced out of American Chopper for abusing 'ludes, the bartender, a twenty-two-year-old with a swoopy, streaky hairdo, pouring drinks five nights a week while going to cosmetology school, launched into her deep fear of Swine Flu.

Naturally, she was getting all her science info from the TV and her friends who watched TV.

"I'm going to die because I have Epstein-Barr, and I have no defenses. So as soon as I get it, I'm going to die." She was talking louder over Seminole Wind by John Anderson that she punched up on the jukebox. "There is no vaccine, you know. And there are seven signs, seven symptoms, and right now I've got five of them. Including puking and diarrhea."

"Right now you've got 'em?," I asked, worried for my glass of Guinness.

She wouldn't hear about the other swine flu, back in Gerry Ford's day (despite what Michele Bachmann says), the other terrifying pandemic that was certain to kill us all but fell just a little short of parachutes failing to open while skydiving in terms of decimating the population. She had seen what she seen, as Dizzy Dean might say, and if nothing else, this thing was bringing drama where there otherwise wasn't a lot, except for the occasional pissed-off, drunken (suburban) cowboy slinging chairs against the front door after closing time.