Driving through Vegas at night I love looking at the lights. Not the green glow of the MGM Grand, or the over-compensating shaft that shoots out the top of the Luxor, but the scattered lights that shine from people's hotel rooms. Each one has the promise of a story. It might be something boring. It might be something exciting. It'll almost definitely be something that I won't get to hear about, but that doesn't matter. What matters is behind every one there's people being people. Whether that involves a mundane activity like watching infomercials, or something that requires the participants to wear rubber, it doesn't matter.

I've always been fascinated by lights. One of the best things about the university I went to was that it looked out over Portland, and the docks, and at night there were a thousand lights looking up at The Bluff, hinting at their stories. Provided the weather wasn't too bad and the clouds or rain didn't cover them. Hell, lights are the reason I am where I am right now. If I hadn't have taken a drunken stumble all those years ago, and seen a cruise ship in dry dock a hundred points of moving and working and preparing for sea, I don't know if I'd have had such a stupid idea as work on ships. If I hadn't worked on ships, then I probably wouldn't have ended up in Vegas.

But now I'm here, and I see each of those points of illumination as something more than they ever were before. Each one is someone, or some people, who have specifically made the decision to come to Vegas. Whether they've come for a wedding or funeral or divorce or other life-changing event, they're here. They're here for the hell of it. They're here for the heaven of it. They're here, doing whatever they're doing in those little pools of light, and if the potential behind each and every one of them doesn't make you curious, at least for a second, well then take a moment and think about it.

Enjoy the fact that none of us are in this alone unless we choose to be, no matter how bad we think things are, because behind each one of those lights is someone, and we're all just writing the stories of our lives as hard as we can.