Biography: guest blog by Sam Gurr

I was born in Boise, Idaho.

We lived in Meridian for a bit when I was a baby.

My dad worked for different mining companies, so we moved to Wyoming until I was about four...then we found our way to McGill, which is a small town a little ways away from Ely, NV.

(As kids, we thought Ely was the city).

My dad loved living in the middle of nowhere (and still lives in a very small town in UT), but my mother wasn't happy with that life.

They got divorced.

I was eleven when we moved to Las Vegas.

My mom, me, and my two brothers and sister.

Not only had I never been to a big city, but I had never been to a place that was so hot! (It was 100 degrees out and we drove to Vegas in an old Mustang with no A/C).

After a few years of living in Vegas I was getting into a lot of toruble. It seemed that the only kids who wanted to be my friends were all trouble makers--it seemed that their parents had never done much to raise them, or even cared where they were or what they were up to.

I spent eighth-grade living with my mom's parents in Idaho.

It was nice to be in a place where life seemed normal again...but I was worried about my family.

I was upset and filled with anxiety about coming back to Vegas, but my youngest brother and sister really needed me, and my mom was still struggling to just get by. We were basically stuck here in Vegas because being a dealer in a casino was all my mom knew how to do (and she was good at it).

When I got back, it was clear that the neighborhood had gotten much worse.

All the people in the apartments that I knew had moved away, and the general population was rapidly being replaced with people of questionable character.

Murders and apartment fires were becoming very common. Drug deals, drunkenness, robberies, people constantly fighting and gangs somehow became the new normal.

I was in my early 20's before we got out of there.

(Skipping a few years of having my own apartment by UNLV)

(Also skipping times where I'd live with my dad for short periods of time in UT)

My mother had finally got situated well enough to buy a house (in a neighborhood just west of Sam's Town).

Our quality of life had certainly improved, but Boulder has it's own kinda crazy going on as well.

LOL

I met a girl and years later we got married. She wanted to visit her grandma in Queens NY.

I thought Vegas was weird, but NY was unlike anything I'd ever seen!

24 hours a day there were hundreds of thousands of people just going every direction!

As soon as we got there, I was very nervous about walking around in this environment (not to mention I was the only white person there).

After a while I noticed how many people dealt with living in that kind of environment...I would try to say hi to strangers (out of habit), but they would just block themselves off from the rest of the world. The only people that you had to worry about were the ones trying to get your attention.

We had a decent time there, but I was glad to come home.

Over time, it turned out that I was a lot like my dad and my wife was a lot like my mom...eventually we also went our separate ways.

Now I have a house of my own a couple of miles north of Sam's Town, where I've been working for the last 15 1/2 years.

Still living the dream.

Sam Gurr is a resident of Las Vegas, NV. He works in a casino there, and writes poems and other things when he isn't working.