Five Hours in Vegas

December 28

What a week.

Where politics are urgently concerned: I hope all of you are following the unfolding story behind the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. In addition to being scary and tragic, this event is likely to have an enormous impact on the politics of the entire region. With his usual swiftness, Ali Eteraz has compiled information from several sources and written a personal analysis as well. Click over and read.

Our flight from Seattle to Denver last week was delayed (along with hundreds of others), the result of which was that Omar and I spent about five hours held against our will in Las Vegas. We arrived at midnight to find that the rumors are true: there are slot machines at the gates in the airport. Too tired and dirty to hang out in any more terminals, we got a room at a nearby hotel for a few hours so we could shower and pray and get a little sleep. If you’re ever in the mood to permanently alter your perspective, take a cab along the Strip in the middle of the night when you haven’t slept in 24 hours. I think you could probably see those eight blocks from space--they were lit up as bright as the death of some star; metallic and blue and totally without shadow. It was beautiful in the way that anything pushed to an extreme is beautiful--I go back and forth about whether such overreaching is cheap or brilliant. Our hotel was a trumped up version of the one we always stay at in Luxor (the real Luxor), which we simply call “And Horse” because of a strangely aphoristic advertising slogan the management once used to lure people to its New Years Eve party. By which I mean it was beyond tacky...the thing actually contained a tiki lounge. I’d always assumed tiki lounges were a myth invented by Quentin Terantino. I was wrong.

In Boulder, I met up with some old high school friends who are magicians. No, I’m serious. Two are in PhD programs; the third is a deep-sea diver. The most accomplished of these studies ancient religions at Yale and speaks Coptic, Greek, Latin and Aramaic, has full-sleeve tattoos and plays in a metal band. I hadn’t sat down with these three together in eight or nine years. All of us used to look at the world in a very similar way: filtered through a diligently researched, Ecco-esque blend of many forms of paganism. I was always the ascetic and wanted something more stripped-down and abstract; for me monotheism was inevitable. It was interesting, now that we’re all adults, to see how their ideas, which followed the Left Hand much more closely than my own, have developed. I asked at one point--this is the question I ask all polytheists--how they navigate a truth that assimilates the facets of the world separately rather than as a system. In other words, how does one reconcile the existence of (for instance) a sea god and a moon god who are independent of each other, when the moon has been proven to affect the tides? “The alternative is too massive,” said the deep-sea diver. “I’m conscious of the great white light [tongue in cheek], but it’s too big for me to approach directly.”

Food for thought.

Hope everyone has had a merry Christmas, a happy Hannukah, a blessed Eid and a joyful Yule.