Adventure #24 - Day Three -- Las Vegas, NV

DAY THREE - Las Vegas, NV - Systema Seminar Day One

Description: Wherein Marty and Heather attend Day One of the Systema Seminar!


Ok, first day in Las Vegas.  The workshop with Mikhail started at 10a, so I went out early to the local Sprouts health food store to get supplies (apparently Sprouts is a chain, which I'd never heard of).  I rousted Heather and we fixed up lunch, then several of the crew came back from IHOP, and we used the how-did-we-ever-live-without-it? GPS to get us to the YMCA, up in the northwest of the town, a clean and fancy facility.  We cued up and were shunted off by the translator, Val, to a prickly Asian woman who told us that they hadn't processed my card, and we would have to pay there, but when I offered my card, she said they were only taking cash (c'mon, really, nowadays you can't do digital cash and just charge me the fee?).  I said we would take care of it on Sunday, and that we weren't going to miss the beginning of the workshop because they had screwed up on their end.  She folded and let us in (at the break, when we said we'd go to the bank to take care of it, she said they had gotten confused and their note was simply what Heather's name was, and she apologized).

Mikhail was there looking all Jedi-masterish.  He looked a bit rougher and more conventional human in old recordings of his work, but everything recent has him looking like a Finished Dude, simple but Big.

We worked on relaxation and breath initially, then on knife work, some of which was familiar, but more on the offense than we've studied before.  It was a mellow group in general, with only a few wingnuts or dickheads.  The larger conferences like this will draw members of the bellcurve ends, which are pretty steep for Systema (the top of the curve, representing ethical and caring people, is big and flat), but still there.  I got some dessicated old fucker who thought, in doing slow work, it would be good to strike me in the back of the neck.  I called it out as too rough, and he seemed concern, which was fine, but he wasn't a guy I wanted to return to.

Still, it's all useful;  old emotions get stirred up and you have to negotiate with them just like physical pain, keeping your emotional posture just like your literal posture.  It's not as enjoyable, though, as working with people you trust and like, which is what we have at our Sunday group with Ed.

I got some individual attention from Mikhail, when we were practicing hiding knife strikes, and he showed me how to hold the knife blade pointing up the arm, which worked a lot better for attacks.

Such a funny life, so unpredicted from 20 years ago.  I'd never imagined being invested in a combat practice like this, studying from one of the great masters in a place like Vegas, with a wife and a community of beautiful lethal people.  I'm not sure what I thought would happen, but this wasn't on the radar, and yet here it is.  Makes me wonder about the next 20 years.

After lunch, more knife work, and then we ended around 5p, and since Dante and Alex were going to the banquet at some casino, Nathan and Jenny and Heather and I decided to drive down to the Strip to check out the Vegas Experience.

And:  Wow.  Like a neon Marquis de Sade.  Admirably reverential about it's own debauchery and Bacchanalia carnival, as was de Sade about his perversions.  We drove down from the apartment through an oddly immaculate town, through the outer dustings of casinos (one wonders about the hierarchy of status among the gambling parlors), into the denser and busier nucleus of the town, The Strip.  It was like driving through the spiral arms and towards the galaxy center, with denser and denser stars, and a hidden black hole at the center, sucking at everything.

Jenny is, apparently, a master at situations that were stressing the rest of us out, because she figured out (using the Internets!) how to park, and we ended up in the massive, and free, parking garage at Aria, which seemed to be a new gaming resort complex, huge and upscale.  We went into the gaming floor, with its acres of slot machines, but more fascinating to me was the poker floor.  It was somewhat secluded from the slot machines, with maybe three dozen tables, all filled with poker players (we saw later there was even a waiting list to get on a table).  I was astounded, more than any of the other crazy sites of the town:  just like in the movies, but this was actually happening.  The actors in film were simply mimicking the frozen grimness and companionable anti-social guardedness of the players, each inches away from the other, but strategizing how to fuck each other over and get the prize.  Like some kind of open-room group sex, it was amazing to see nothing covered or hidden, no apology or pretense for what was going on, and no assertion that there was anything loving going on.

So with that intro to Vegas, we skipped by the buffet ($40/head, we thanked-but-no-thanks) and headed out onto the Strip to find a cheapie Mexican place a couple stories up in a mall, where we had absurdly huge burritos and food items, while Nathan talked about chemtrails and Heather bantered with him in what we identified as a brother-sister dynamic.  I pointed out that the commercial airlines have no incentive to allow the military to use their planes to dust the sky with weather manipulating chemicals, because if and when they are found out, the political fallout would be a disaster.  Nathan countered that they have to because all the airports are military facilities.  Or somesuch.  He gets so goofy sometimes, having one lemon in hand but claiming it's a whole tree.  Jenny was politic and lawyer-like.  They've been together maybe a month and seemed, as far as we could tell, doing well with each other.  She's not bat-shit crazy like his prior women.

Then we sauntered (which Heather tells me comes from a French word that was used for pilgrims walking to holy sites, so that fits for Vegas in a way) the Strip, and stopped at the Coke haus, a two story building literally all dedicated to Cocacola.  Everything.  We got ice cream floats, with Coke (natch), and sat at the burnished metal tables, under the interrogation room lighting (maybe a little exaggerated, but it wasn't intimate), and Nathan got a Coke bag, which he apparently had wanted.  Then we left, with me tugging.  I can only take a little time in such places before starting to feel my protective tinfoil hat is failing.  Metaphorically.

First ring (gold), and recommittment (death head)

We had half a thought to see a Cirque du Soleil show, of which there's something like eight on the Strip, but it was getting too late, and we couldn't find the cheap tickets booth.  (And, looking back, we couldn't have anyway since we needed to give Nathan and Jenny a ride.)  We did go in New York, New York, which hosted the erotic Cirque show that we were looking at, and this casino turned out to be the dingy cousin to Aria, like the place where the coal miners went after work, while the mine owners headed over to the glass-and-plush Aria.  It got pretty overwhelming.  Nathan initially agreed to go on the roller coaster that sits on top of the building, but it was expensive, and everyone was draining out.  So we played skee ball, and got trinkets with the winnings, including a plastic shiny death head ring for Heather, with purple eyes.  (Given this is our 10 year anniversary, I later proposed to her at the apartment, with Anthony as our amused witness.)

Home to our beloved AirBnB, where we watched Ze Frank nature videos with the crew (hmm, maybe that was tomorrow night that we watched those?  You know, using our ability to remember both sequences of events, as well as the abstracted events themselves, we can engage in something akin to time travel.  And also, we reflect here about the inherent unreliability of autobiographical narratives, but then doubly reflect on how all narrative, and memory as narrative, are fictional, even if their source material is tagged by our brains as "has happened," or belongs to a consensually agreed upon narrative sequence.  Thus, come to think of it, fuck you, we watched Ze Frank tonight.  You're not the boss of me, you narrative fascist.  Jesus, loosen your sphincter for Christ's sake.)

I continued reading Vernon Vinge's novel, "A Fire Upon the Deep," which won the Hugo Award (the Oscars for science fiction) in 1993.  It's continuing my long, deep plunge into contemporary space opera, which began in my recent adult life with Ian Banks' novel, "The Player of Games," and has continued these last five-ish years with some William Gibson (though I've given up on him, and technically, he's cyberpunk), Paolo Bacigalupi (also more cyberpunk), Charles Stross ("Accelerando" is one of the most brilliant, idea-dense books I've read), David Brin ("Existence"), every Culture novel by Banks, Peter Hamilton ("Night's Dawn" trilogy, 3500 amazing pages expressing both the deepest horror we hold about existence--basically, that hell is a property of the physics of the universe, without controller or originator, i.e., no one to bargain with--and the deepest insight/claim to human development as the only way to, like a swamp, dry up hell, i.e., he's my kind of anti-romantic), Robert Charles Wilson ("Spin"), and China Miéville ("Perdido Street Station").  Well, so not all of that is space opera, but it's all literature that is both the most Integral (in the Wilberian sense, i.e., the philosopher Ken Wilber) and the most interested in both discussing, investigating, and proposing different models of consciousness that other literature takes for granted.  All of it is asking, "What is consciousness, what do we assume it is, and what could it possibly become?"  I love it love it love it, because it is challenging, expansive, and by pointing to the limits of human consciousness now, points the how it can change, and also to expanding my love of humanity as it is.  The post-rabbi Marc Gafni says that love is a perception, not a feeling, that it is what you experience when you know something intimately.  This literature helps me know my species much more intimately, and therefore love it much more deeply.

So I read more of Vinge and then went to sleep.