The madness ends in Broomfield, Colorado, a suburb of Denver or Boulder, depending on how you look at it. Five miles from the complex. On a little green Adirondack bench.

Yes. On today's episode of One Hivelife to Live, we find Lisa Pea amidst a mountain of discarded falderal, paralyzed by fear and inanity. On the brink of madness. On the brink of suburbia. Don't move a muscle, baby. Don't even flinch. You can miss me by a mile or just inch by inch.

Don't look at the arc welder. Don't stare directly into the viscera of day to day life that the Arc Welder pulls from the cavities of her cabinets and crawlspaces. So as the Arc Welder runs across the hall from the shower to the bedroom, avert your eyes. She was too tired and too forgetful to cover her banality. If you insist on staring, you'll only see empty spice jars wrapped in newspaper and scraps of fabric that will always be just that: scraps of fabric.

Lisa Pea, weakened and defenseless after a gut-clenching Las Vegas injection, finds herself sucked out of the small and tenuous righteousness of the city and into the morass of the barbecue cults and wood-paneled dens of suburbia.

The jumble of Gallagher with his head in his hands in a diner on the last day of Comdex, as though he'd awakened to the realization: I am Gallagher, of the taunting zenmaster laughing "Are you having a TRAUMA or something?", of the buzzing of Las Vegas coming like the killer bees. "Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the Las Vegas cell. Las Vegas: Do not buy! It means 'Does not go!'" There is no tenacity, no resistance on that downtown street with the ill-defined pixellated wars that play every to a crowd of bitter castoffs who drain out of the doorways with the puke-stained carpets and the dingy-dingy bells. And the gentrification. The gentrification after the cab ride with the little Italian man who says about the zenmaster, "He's not such a bad guy. Just tell him to stop making so much money." They've sucked out the sky to create a city of subterranean pathologies that lick at your heels like so many beautiful young fetishists smelling of sweat and lemon zest.

So, three nights in a row, forgetting my glasses, I squint at the same fuzzy, fleshy lounge singer humping his mike stand to Cole Porter and Kurt Weill, and I wear the sweatshirt that says "I Am Not A Prostitute" and think: This is not the Motor City. This is not the Motor City.

You can grind me under your heel like an inattentive Gian now because: Las Vegas. It is coming like a freight train. It is coming like Easter lilies. It is coming like plate tectonics. It is coming, then it is rolling over, leaving me alone and cold and tiny in this vacuum, and the only place left to go is the den with the bar and the fireplace in Broomfield, Colorado.

I'd walk a million miles for one of your smiles, my little Mammy.