Killing Mr. Vegas

Stumbling around the check in and registration area of the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada I reach into my pocket and feel the thin, crumpled plastic baggie that contains the homegrown magic mushrooms a friend of mine at work recently gave me.

It's going to be a good night.

Not even twenty minutes ago I was so tired I thought for sure we'd be checking in and I'd be curling up in bed, but clearly I have forgotten the pulse of Vegas. The city itself is the anti-sleep; a mecca of artificial environment designed specifically to combat the human mind's insistence – after so much time spent awake and engaged – to shut down and recharge itself. With such a cluster of Will and agenda all shared by so many powerful ideas out in the middle of nowhere (read: no ideas) the City of light that floats in the middle of the Mojave Desert is itself something of an entity; a sentient being that beckons people in and then consumes of them what it can. Some it gets worse than others, just as some drugs or people can become parasitic to people, and bit by bit, year by year the vast and hungry egregore* that is Las Vegas, Nevada grows more and more powerful and is able to feed itself better, much like a person starting a job at entry level and slowly working up the ladder of position and pay rate, until it's no longer required they 'dine within their budget'.

Think about i: Las Vegas is such a powerful entity that the laws we know in the United States of America breakdown and do not completely apply within the city limits. What other person or place can sidestep such tried and true societal guidelines such as 'No prostitution' or 'no public imbibing of alcohol' (We're talking in the U.S.)?

So we checked into the Luxor and before we'd even made it up to the 6th floor of the West Tower I'd consumed most of my bag of party favors. Sleep still skirted around the peripheral of my consciousness but now it spoke to me in a manner that promised to return when called upon.

After the night's adventure had run its course.

Adventure here may be a bit of a misleading word. There was no wham bam excitement. No after hours parties, high speed chases or fist fights. The adventure I had in Las Vegas boiled down to a conversation. A conversation I had with an ancient, mystical being whose conscious body on Earth is a tiny fungus known by, among other names, Amanita Muscaria.

There are plenty of cultures, all quite older than our own, that consider the psilocibin an old and wise citizen of the Universe, one who beckons interaction with us. You see, Muscaria is a teacher, and it is always looking for new students to hear its stories. Why wouldn't we want to?

Why wouldn't we want to learn? To challenge the, frankly, pedestrian view of the Universe we as human beings on Earth in the twenty-first century have? Because it challenges the status quo? Let me remind you again that Mr. Vegas gets to challenge the status quo, and he wins.

Every time.

He wins.

So that's it; the jumping off point. Mr. Vegas might seem an affectionate, embellished moniker from a fiction writer, but he's real (or she – I'm lazy, not sexist), and I challenge anyone to try to kill him. You can't. Thing is though, it might be really interesting to study him as a hit man studies his kill. Day in, day out. Then who knows what might happen one day?

...................

* Which for simplicity's sake I will quote Wikipedia's definition here: an occult concept representing a "thoughtform" or "collective group mind", an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people. ...

In the trenches...

... It's been a pretty strange year, eh?

Actually, no scratch that. It is not that it's been a strange year - that is a cop out, a product of human language to say something that is pseudo-important not in the interest of being observant but in the inability we have of keeping ourselves in check when it comes to opening our mouths just to open our mouths.

So let me start again.

It has been strange, evolving through this bizarre matrix of intervals that we long ago fashioned restraints for using out language, to find myself utterly convinced that we live in what I would have recognized as science fiction when I was in fourth grade or below.

There.

Perhaps it is a product of being a child of what we refer to, here in western civilization, as the middle class. The middle class is not a shield, but it is a fence of sorts - a partition. We may not have had a lot of money growing up but we were, because of the institutions and social mores of this country, not in need of much. I had a roof, three square meals and a continuous loop of education for the pre-advised intervals, so maybe it was a fence, or blinder rather, to what the world really is.

Science fiction.

Seriously, I have detailed in my Bartender Chronicles blog the moment that I realized that there was no such thing as an 'Adult' - a mythical being of maturity and responsibility that children are taught they will turn into if they do good in school, get a good job and marry for the sake of propagating the species. But this goes beyond that.

Life is surreal not because clocks drip from trees or Jesus appears as a conquistador, but because we are taught through words and through repetitious reinforcement that certain key guidelines are always in place, governing us and the world we live in. Good triumphs over evil, Love can beat all, good people are rewarded, bad people are punished, etc. And sure, we can probably all name examples where these statements are true and more where they are not, but the very fact that we are raised to believe that these ideals are plentiful, or some kind of Universal Absolute is the basis for the real illusion - an illusion that some people never get to see behind. And when you do see behind it, when you're standing in a grocery store at 10 PM on a Thursday and realize just how alien a concept it is for droves of people to walk up and down brightly lit isles choosing from literally millions of products that have been researched to glisten and call to us with expensive, environment-defeating packaging while not too far away someone is taking part in a conference call that is going to cost thousands of people their jobs, or someone else is paying for a donut with a piece of currency that has passed through the hands of hundreds of people who died for it's possession, all while invisible, human-appointed 1's and 0's make and break the building of new cities, traveling devices and entertainments that suck us dry of our zest for actual, physical experience, well, that's when you have to either recognize that the world we live in is stranger than the science fiction we used to think was so strange and 'fictional' or maybe check yourself into an ECT treatment center.

Mostly I think those people who do not see things for what they are choose to adhere to the guidelines they've been ingrained with, because if in this day and age, the beginning of man-made interval 2009, you cannot see the absolute pure, swirling chaos all around us EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY then you probably are in need of something stronger than I can give you here.

so what the hell good does all my jibber-jawin' here do, anyway?

Sadly, not much. But as my high school guidance counselor once told me, just being insightful enough to be aware of what is really going on is at least a step in the right direction. Only I don't believe that as much anymore, but I too am so ingrained in my own personal minutia-intensive Universe to get up and go out and DO SOMETHING. Also, I am largely non-violent and maybe it's a cop-out but it seems more and more to me like the only change that is ever going to really come is going to have to be on the back of drastic, world altering conflict.

Who knows.