I was there for a PR dinner, to taste their new menu items. I don't regret that Vista, Snoqualmie Casino's recently rebranded fine-dining establishment, is nonsmoking. I do, however, regret indoor smoking, even as someone who will occasionally join my friends for one outside the bar on a boozy Saturday night. It's at least a gesture of acknowledgement. It allows the tribes to have indoor smoking and keep all the tax revenue from their cannabis stores and fireworks stands and the other commerce they are allowed to engage in, even though it doesn't begin to make a dent in what the United States owes Native peoples.

I definitely do not regret tribal sovereignty. Though he insisted he'd seen us 'plenty of times before'-he hadn't-he asked us for ID.

A pleasant young man with a Secret Service–style earpiece greeted us. Then my dining companion and I stepped into the casino's main hall, a massive cavern of blinking lights and celebratory sound effects. The valet did not bat an eye at my beat-up old pickup, efficiently noting the smashed-in bumper and various other cosmetic travesties on the damage card. I do not regret complimentary valet, which always makes you feel like a boss, even when you don't have power steering. Why do you need so many lumens that you render the tiny, twisty, two-lane highway completely impossible for oncoming drivers to see even with your brights off? Eventually, my 1987 Jeep Comanche emerged into the casino's massive, brightly lit valet area. I regret driving in general, because of what fossil fuels are doing to the environment, but especially driving in the age of aggressively bright headlights. I regret navigating Highway 202 in the midst of an exceptionally eerie fog. Despite having lived in Washington my entire life, despite the ubiquitous casino ads featuring well-dressed, impossibly happy white people cavorting in an atmosphere of bedazzled luxury, casinos have always seemed like the pastime of the suburban working class, a population that us city slickers are apparently dangerously out of touch with. I regret that I'd never visited one of our state's Native American gambling establishments until a few weeks ago.

Director of marketing casino snoqualmie