learning from las vegas

All day, most of every night, she walked and she drove. Two or three times a day she walked in and out of all the hotels in the Strip and several downtown. She began to crave the physical flash of walking in and out of places, the temperature shock, the hot wind blowing outside, the heavy frigid air inside. She tought about nothing. Her mind was a blank tape [...]. When she finally lay down nights in the purple room she would play back the day's tape, a girl singing into a microphone and a fat man dropping a glass, cards fanned on a table and a dealer's rake in closeup and a woman in slacks crying and the opaque blue eyes of the guard at some baccarat table. A child in the harsh light of a crosswalk on the Strip.

in 'Play it as it Lays', (1970), de Joan Didion, pag. 170.