Chapter 9: The History Lesson

On April 26th, eleven days after the bartender at Pachi Pachi said "You're a Pope too," I walked into a used bookstore on East Charleston Boulevard and bought a copy of Principia Discordia, or How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her for four dollars.

I had already read it — the full text, digitally, during the 3 AM session after Frankie's that I described in Chapter 7. But I am a person who does not trust information they have only encountered on a screen. This is a prejudice, I know. The text is the same whether it is rendered in pixels or in ink. The words do not change when you print them. But I was trained in data journalism during the last years of the newspaper era, when the phrase "in print" still meant something about permanence, about commitment, about the difference between a thing someone typed and a thing someone published, and I carry that distinction the way I carry my notebook — not because it is rational but because it is mine, and I am, as I have noted, a person who follows their own rules even when the rules are artifacts of a previous life.

The copy I found was a fifth edition — the Loompanics Unlimited printing from 1979, which is itself a reproduction of the fourth edition published by Rip-Off Press in San Francisco in 1970, which was a revision of the third edition's five hundred copies mimeographed in Tampa in 1969. The book's publication history is itself a lesson in its own philosophy: each edition is a copy of a copy, altered in the copying, annotated and amended and contradicted by its own authors, who insisted, on the copyright page, that the book "may be reproduced without permission." This is not standard copyright language. Standard copyright language says all rights reserved. The Principia Discordia says, in effect, no rights exist — take this and do what you want with it, which is either the most generous or the most reckless thing an author can say about their own work, and the ambiguity is, I was beginning to understand, the entire point.

I needed a place to read it properly. Not my hotel room, where the curtains and the desk and the institutional bedspread all conspired to make me feel like I was doing homework. I needed a bar — a specific kind of bar, the kind where no one would notice or care that a person in their forties was sitting alone reading a small yellow paperback with an intensity better suited to scripture. I needed a bar where the ambient weirdness of one man's private research would be indistinguishable from the ambient weirdness of the bar itself.

I found Dino's Lounge.

Dino's occupies a building at 1516 South Las Vegas Boulevard that exists in a geographical condition I can only describe as liminal. It is south of downtown and north of the Strip — or, depending on your map, at the extreme northern edge of the Strip, in the zone where the boulevard transitions from the planned spectacle of the casino corridor to the older, flatter, human-scaled city that preceded it. The address places it in what is now called the Arts District, though "district" implies a coherence that the neighborhood has not fully achieved. It is a block of low buildings, parking lots, a tattoo parlor, a pizza shop. The Stratosphere — now the STRAT — is visible a few blocks to the south, its needle rising above the roofline like a misplaced exclamation point. Downtown's Fremont Street canopy glows a few blocks to the north. Dino's sits between them, belonging to neither, claimed by no one, which is, if you are a certain kind of establishment, the safest place to be.

The exterior wall of Dino's Lounge bears a mural in large block letters that reads: THE LAST NEIGHBORHOOD BAR IN LAS VEGAS. I stood on the sidewalk and read this twice before entering, because the sentence is doing something specific and I wanted to understand what. "Last" implies finality — a category that once contained many members and now contains one. "Neighborhood" implies locality — a bar that serves the people who live near it, as opposed to the people who visit. "In Las Vegas" is the qualifier that gives the whole thing its weight, because Las Vegas is a city that has been systematically replacing its neighborhood institutions with corporate ones for sixty years, and the sentence on the wall is not a boast. It is a diagnosis.

Dino's opened in 1962. I want to pause on that year because it is going to matter. The building previously operated as Ringside Liquors, owned by a man named Eddie Trascher whose reputation, in the generous local parlance, was "mobster-adjacent" — the kind of man whose refrigerators were rumored to contain things other than beverages and whose back room hosted pool games where the stakes were not recreational. Dean Bartolomucci — "Dino" — purchased the bar in 1962 and gave it his name and his personality, which by all accounts was the personality of a man who believed that a bar should be warm, cheap, and open, and that the people inside it should be left alone to do whatever it is that people do in bars at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday. The bar passed from Dino to his son Chuck, from Chuck to his granddaughter Kristin, who owns and operates it today. Three generations. Sixty-three years. One building. The Last Neighborhood Bar in Las Vegas.

I walked in. The interior was dark in the specific way that a bar without windows is dark — not the designed darkness of a speakeasy or a cocktail lounge, where the low light is an aesthetic decision, but the organic darkness of a space that simply does not admit daylight, the way a cave does not admit daylight, because there are no openings through which daylight could enter, and no one has ever thought to add one. This is the third windowless interior I have encountered in this guide. The Peppermill. Frankie's Tiki Room. Now Dino's. I am counting. I do not yet know why I am counting windowless interiors, but the habit of counting has been with me longer than the habit of knowing why, and I have learned to trust the counting even when the count does not yet signify.

The ceiling tiles were painted. Not all of them — perhaps one in five — and not by a professional. By customers. Regulars. Each painted tile was the work of a specific person, unveiled on a specific Friday, the bar's way of marking its community the way a church marks its congregation, except that the congregation here is commemorated not in stained glass but in acrylic paint on dropped ceiling panels, and the images are not saints but skulls and palm trees and inside jokes and at least one that appeared to be a competent rendering of Elvis in profile, and the overall effect was of a space decorated by its own use — a bar that had become, over decades, a physical record of the people who drank there.

Above the entrance to the main room, in lettering that was either painted or applied with the careful indifference of a person who wanted it to look painted, were the words: WELCOME TO THE VORTEX.

I read this. I sat down at the bar. I ordered a bourbon — well, neat, because I was not here to evaluate the top shelf, I was here to read, and a well bourbon in a dive bar is the reading equivalent of a cup of black coffee: functional, unobtrusive, honest about what it is. The bartender poured it without comment. The bourbon was fine. "Fine" is the correct word for a well bourbon at a dive bar at 4 PM on a Saturday, and I am using it precisely, and the precision is a relief, because what I was about to read was the least precise thing I had encountered in four months of work, and I needed the bourbon to be fine the way I needed the bar stool to be solid — a fixed point from which to observe the spinning.

I opened the book.

Here is what I learned.

In 1958 — the same year the Golden Steer Steakhouse claims to have opened, though I have documented my reservations about that date — two young men sat in a bowling alley in Whittier, California, at an hour of the night when bowling alleys belong to the people who have nowhere else to be, and they founded a religion.

Their names were Kerry Wendell Thornley and Gregory Hill. They were childhood friends. They had met at California High School in East Whittier — a hometown they shared, as the Principia notes with evident satisfaction, with Richard Milhous Nixon — and they had discovered in each other the particular intellectual chemistry of two young men who find the world absurd and want to do something about it, where "something" is not reform or revolution but annotation. They wanted to write in the margins of reality. They wanted to add footnotes to the universe.

What happened in the bowling alley is described in the Principia Discordia in language that is simultaneously sacred text and stand-up routine. There was a vision. There was a chimpanzee. The chimpanzee — or the thing that appeared as a chimpanzee, or the thing that the two young men experienced as a chimpanzee, the epistemological distinction being, in Discordian theology, not merely academic but the entire curriculum — held a scroll. The scroll bore a symbol: a circle divided into two halves, like a yin-yang, with an apple on one side and a pentagon on the other.

I stopped reading.

A pentagon.

The sacred symbol of Discordianism — the Sacred Chao, as they called it, punning on "chaos" — contains a pentagon. I had spent three months reviewing restaurants and pushing pins into a map on my hotel desk and almost seeing a shape in the cluster of pins around the Las Vegas urban core, and the shape I had almost seen was a pentagon, and the religion I was reading about had placed a pentagon at the center of its foundational symbol in a bowling alley in 1958, and I was sitting in a bar that opened in 1962 reading about this in a book that cost me four dollars, and the bourbon was fine and the ceiling tiles were painted and the sign over the door said WELCOME TO THE VORTEX, and I underlined the word "pentagon" three times with a pen that was shaking, slightly, in a way that I attributed to caffeine and do not entirely believe was caffeine.

I kept reading.

The two young men adopted new names — Kerry became Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, Greg became Malaclypse the Younger — and they wrote their religion down, and the religion was this: that the universe is fundamentally disordered, that the human compulsion to impose order on the disordered universe is the source of most suffering, and that the goddess Eris — the Greek goddess of discord, of chaos, of the golden apple she threw among the Olympians that started the Trojan War — is the true deity of a cosmos that has been falsely claimed by gods of order, structure, and rules. The religion had one central commandment, which was that every man, woman, and child on Earth is a Pope, which means the religion has no hierarchy, which means the religion has no authority, which means the religion cannot be controlled, co-opted, or suppressed, because there is nothing to control, co-opt, or suppress. You cannot behead a church that is entirely heads.

The Principia Discordia is fifty-some pages of collage, jokes, fake history, real philosophy, typographic chaos, clip art, and passages of writing that alternate between deliberate nonsense and the kind of insight that stops you mid-sentence with the feeling of having been told something true in a language you didn't know you spoke. It is also, and I want to be precise about this, genuinely funny — not funny in the way that a parody is funny, where the humor comes from recognizing the thing being parodied, but funny in the way that a well-constructed joke is funny, where the humor comes from the sudden rearrangement of reality that occurs in the gap between the setup and the punch line. The Principia is all gap. The setup is the universe. The punch line is everything humans have done to pretend the universe makes sense.

I found, tucked among the collage and the commandments, a passage about the hot dog. The Fifth Commandment of the Pentabarf — which I had first encountered online, at 3 AM in my hotel room after Frankie's — prohibits eating hot dog buns on a Friday. Unless you want to. I had read this as a joke the first time. Reading it again, on paper, in a four-dollar paperback, at a bar stool with a bourbon, I read it as something else. The hot dog is the Discordians' sacred food. Not wagyu. Not the A5 Japanese beef at market price. Not the tableside Caesar assembled by a man in a tuxedo with the focus of a person performing an act whose meaning exceeds the act itself. A hot dog. The most ordinary, most processed, most aggressively profane food in America, and the Principia was claiming it was holy. I am a food critic. My career — my entire purpose in this city — rests on the premise that some food is sacred, worthy of stars and the specific reverence that careful criticism confers, and some food is not. The Principia was suggesting that the distinction does not exist. That a hot dog on a Friday is as sacred as anything I have ever given five stars, because the sacredness is not in the food but in the act of declaring it sacred, and anyone can declare anything sacred, because everyone is a Pope, and the declaration is the sacrament. I felt this as a threat to my profession. I also felt it as something that might be true. The tension between those feelings did not resolve. I turned the page.

I read it in the bowling alley — I mean the bar. I read it at Dino's, on a bar stool, with a bourbon, while around me the bar began to fill with the early Saturday evening crowd, which at Dino's means locals in jeans and work boots and a few tourists who had wandered off the boulevard and found themselves in a place where the drinks were cheap and the video poker machines were old and nobody was trying to sell them anything except another round.

I read the entire book in approximately ninety minutes. Then I put it down and ordered another bourbon and began to research the authors, because the authors are where the story stops being funny and starts being something else — something that made me set my glass on the bar with a care that I associated, at the time, with the need to keep my hands occupied while my mind processed information that was, by any standard I have ever applied to the evaluation of evidence, impossible.

Kerry Thornley was called to active duty in the Marine Corps in 1958, shortly after founding Discordianism. He was twenty years old. He had completed one year at the University of Southern California as a journalism student — a detail I include because it means the co-founder of the religion I was investigating was trained in the same discipline I was trained in, which is either a coincidence or a rhyme, and I have spent my career distinguishing between the two, and this one resists distinction.

In the spring of 1959, Thornley was stationed at MCAS El Toro in Santa Ana, California, as a radar operator. In the same unit, also a radar operator, was another young Marine: Lee Harvey Oswald.

I set the book down. I picked up my phone. I searched "Kerry Thornley Lee Harvey Oswald." The search results confirmed what the book had claimed. Thornley and Oswald served together. They talked. They discussed politics, philosophy, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the merits and failures of Marxism. They were acquaintances. They were, in the specific and limited way that young men in the same military unit become acquainted, something almost resembling friends.

Oswald left the Marines and defected to the Soviet Union. Thornley read about the defection in Stars and Stripes while on a troopship returning from Japan. He was fascinated. He was, I would later learn, so fascinated that he began writing a novel about Oswald — not about the defection, but about the kind of man who would defect. The novel was called The Idle Warriors. Thornley completed the manuscript in 1962.

In 1962. The year Dino's Lounge opened. The year Dean Bartolomucci bought Ringside Liquors and put his name on the sign. The year that Kerry Thornley, co-founder of a religion of chaos, finished a novel about a man he had served with in the Marines, a man who had defected to the Soviet Union, a man who was, in 1962, living in Minsk with a wife named Marina and a daughter named June, and who would, on November 22, 1963, either assassinate the President of the United States from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository or be framed for assassinating the President of the United States from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, depending on which version of the story you believe, and the number of versions is large and growing and none of them are fully satisfying, which is a problem I recognize from my own work, where the most important stories are always the ones with too many explanations and not enough proof.

The Idle Warriors was the only book about Lee Harvey Oswald written before the assassination.

I am going to write that again, because I wrote it in my notebook and underlined it and the underlining was not sufficient.

The co-founder of Discordianism wrote the only book about Lee Harvey Oswald that existed before John F. Kennedy was killed. He wrote it because he had served with Oswald. He served with Oswald because the Marine Corps assigned them to the same unit. The Marine Corps assigned them to the same unit because that is what the Marine Corps does — it assigns people to units, without regard for the narrative consequences, without consulting the plot. The co-founder of a religion that worships the goddess of chaos and teaches that the universe is governed by discord was placed, by the ordinary machinery of military bureaucracy, in a room with the man who would become the most consequential figure in American conspiracy theory, and this placement occurred within months of the founding of the religion, and the religion teaches that this kind of coincidence is not a coincidence but a manifestation of the fundamental disorder of the universe, and the coincidence is therefore simultaneously the religion's greatest test and its greatest proof.

The coincidence is the doctrine. The doctrine is the coincidence.

I wrote this in my notebook. I underlined it. I finished my bourbon.

At 10 PM, the karaoke started.

I had not anticipated karaoke. I had not checked Dino's entertainment schedule before arriving, because I had arrived at 4 PM to read a book, and a person who arrives at a bar at 4 PM to read a book does not typically consult the entertainment calendar, and this is the kind of assumption that Dino's Lounge exists to correct. The karaoke host was a man named Danny G, who took the small stage at the front of the bar — silver tinsel backdrop, elevated platform, the setup of a space that takes its karaoke seriously in the specific way that a dive bar takes anything seriously, which is to say without pretension but with genuine commitment — and announced that the evening was open.

I did not sing. I am not a person who sings in public. But I stayed, because the bar had filled, and the energy of the room had changed, and I was deep in my research and the research had reached the part of the story that required a certain amount of ambient human chaos to feel bearable, and the karaoke at Dino's Lounge provided that chaos generously.

A woman in a denim jacket sang "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" with the conviction of a person delivering a closing argument. A man in a Hawaiian shirt sang "Sweet Caroline" and the entire bar joined in on the chorus, including the bartender, including the man playing video poker in the corner, including, I am fairly certain, the painted Elvis on the ceiling tile above the stage, who seemed to approve. The songs arrived and vanished and arrived again, each one a small performance, each performer briefly transformed into someone who was not themselves — who was, for three minutes, a singer, a star, a person whose voice mattered — and then the song ended and they were themselves again, and they returned to their stools, and the next person took the stage, and the transformation began again.

Karaoke, I thought, is a secular sacrament. You take on a new identity. You speak in someone else's words. You perform a self that is not your self, and the performance is the point, and the congregation — the bar — participates not by worshiping but by witnessing, by joining in, by shouting the parts they know. This is not a religious observation. This is a structural observation. I am not becoming a Discordian. I am noticing things.

I returned to my research.

After the assassination, everything accelerated.

On May 18, 1964, Kerry Thornley — Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, co-founder of the Discordian Society, the man who had written the only pre-assassination book about Lee Harvey Oswald — testified before the Warren Commission. Volume XI, pages 80 and following. He told the Commission about Oswald: that Oswald had been interested in Marxism, that he had been dissatisfied with American society, that he had discussed politics in the way that young Marines discuss politics, which is to say with intensity and without sophistication. Thornley believed, at the time, that Oswald had acted alone. He published a second book, Oswald, in 1965, defending the Warren Commission's lone-assassin conclusion.

In 1965, the same year, the first edition of the Principia Discordia was published. And here the story achieves a recursion that I would dismiss as fiction if it were not documented: the early Discordian manuscript — an earlier version titled How the West Was Lost — had been reproduced on a mimeograph machine in the office of Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney. Not Garrison's personal machine, exactly, but a machine in his office, used after hours by Greg Hill and a friend named Lane Caplinger, who worked as a typist in the DA's office. The sacred text of a chaos religion was printed, in part, on the office equipment of the man who would later become the most famous conspiracy theorist of the twentieth century.

I want to make sure you understand the geometry of this. The co-founders of Discordianism used the District Attorney's mimeograph machine to print their holy book. That same District Attorney would later investigate one of those co-founders for conspiracy in the assassination of the President. The investigation began in 1967, when Garrison launched his inquiry into the JFK assassination and discovered that Kerry Thornley — the man who had written a book about Oswald before the assassination, who had testified before the Warren Commission, who had co-founded a religion of chaos — had lived in New Orleans at the same time as Oswald. Garrison's theory: Thornley was the "Second Oswald," a look-alike used in an intelligence operation to create a false trail. Thornley and Oswald did, apparently, bear a physical resemblance to each other.

Thornley's response, in a letter to Greg Hill, was a sentence I found in my research and wrote in my notebook with the particular care I reserve for sentences that describe my own situation more accurately than any sentence I have written myself: "I'm up to my ass in a cheap spy novel. And right now that means I am over my head."

A man who founded a religion of chaos, who wrote a book about a future assassin before the assassination, who used a DA's mimeograph to print his holy text, and who was then investigated by that same DA for conspiracy in the crime his acquaintance committed — this man looked at his own life and said: I am in over my head.

The karaoke continued. A young man took the stage and began singing "Bohemian Rhapsody," and the bar erupted, because "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the song you sing when you want the room to participate, when you want twenty strangers to sing Galileo, Galileo in unison, and they did, and I was sitting at the bar with a dead man's book in my hand and a living man's song in my ears and the sentence I am in over my head in my notebook, and I thought: yes.

In 1968, Thornley and a writer named Robert Anton Wilson initiated what they called Operation Mindfuck.

The name is not subtle. It was not intended to be subtle. Operation Mindfuck — OM, an abbreviation that also happens to be the sacred syllable of Hindu meditation, which is either deliberate or accidental and which Discordianism insists is both — was a systematic campaign of culture jamming, disinformation, and creative chaos directed at American institutional reality. The tactics included: sending anonymous letters to newspapers claiming to represent fictional organizations. Submitting contradictory conspiracy theories to media outlets. Writing letters to the editor of Playboy magazine — where Wilson worked as an editor — attributing world events to a secret society called the Bavarian Illuminati. Introducing paranoid narratives into public discourse not to make people believe the narratives but to make people uncertain about all narratives, including the ones that were true.

The target, initially, was Garrison's investigation itself. Thornley and Wilson fed Illuminati paranoia into the JFK conspiracy ecosystem, deliberately seeding theories so baroque and interconnected that the real conspiracies became indistinguishable from the invented ones. This was, in Discordian terms, a sacred act — the deliberate introduction of disorder into a system that had become pathologically ordered, where "pathologically ordered" meant a system in which people believed they could find a single, clean, true explanation for an event as chaotic and destructive as the assassination of a president.

Wilson described the method as "guerrilla ontology" — warfare conducted not against people or institutions but against the shared assumptions about what is real. The goal was not to replace one reality with another. The goal was to multiply realities until the concept of a single authoritative reality collapsed under its own weight, and people were forced to navigate a world in which every explanation was simultaneously plausible and insufficient, and the only rational response was to hold all explanations lightly, including this one.

I recognize this method. I have encountered it before. Not in a countercultural context — in a professional one. In data journalism, there is a concept called "adversarial epistemology," which describes a landscape in which competing narratives actively work to undermine each other's credibility, and the analyst's job is not to pick the right narrative but to understand the ecosystem of narratives and identify which ones are load-bearing and which are decorative. Operation Mindfuck is adversarial epistemology performed as art. It is what happens when a data journalist goes feral.

I ordered another bourbon. The bartender poured it without comment. On stage, a woman was singing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" with a vibrato that could have etched glass, and the bar was singing along, and I was thinking about adversarial epistemology, and the bourbon was fine.

In 1975, Robert Anton Wilson and his co-author Robert Shea published The Illuminatus! Trilogy — three novels, issued as paperbacks, that took everything from Operation Mindfuck and turned it into fiction. The books featured Discordians as characters, Illuminati as antagonists, conspiracies nested inside conspiracies nested inside jokes, and a narrative structure that deliberately prevented the reader from determining which parts were real and which were invented, because the authors believed the distinction was the problem. The trilogy was dense, funny, paranoid, and wildly popular in exactly the circles where it would do the most damage to consensus reality — the counterculture, the science fiction community, the nascent hacker underground, the people who would later build the internet and embed in its architecture the same suspicion of authority that the Discordians had been propagating since 1958.

The Illuminatus! books spread the Discordian mythology into the general culture. They popularized the Law of Fives — the Discordian principle that all things are connected to the number five, if you look hard enough, and that the act of looking hard enough is itself the connection. They introduced the Curse of Greyface — the doctrine that the imposition of order onto chaos is the fundamental sin, and that the person who imposes order without humor is the enemy of everything interesting in the universe. They made the word "fnord" — a term for the invisible signals of control embedded in media — a piece of the countercultural lexicon.

And they ensured that Discordianism, which had been a private joke between two young men in a bowling alley, became a distributed network with no center, no leadership, and no way to determine from the outside who was a member and who was not, because the religion's own scripture said everyone was already a member, and the only question was whether you knew it.

I looked up from my research. The karaoke was in full swing. Danny G was managing the queue with the practiced authority of a man who has been adjudicating the order of amateur singers in a dive bar for a quarter of a century. The crowd was dense, loud, happy. A man at the end of the bar was playing video poker with the mechanical focus of a person who has been playing the same machine for long enough that the machine has become an extension of his hands. The painted ceiling tiles glowed in the dim light — the skulls, the palm trees, the Elvis, the inside jokes of a community that had been decorating this bar for decades, each tile a small act of creative disorder, each one unique, each one contributing to a ceiling that was also a collaborative artwork that no one had planned and no one controlled and that was, I realized with a clarity that felt like being hit, the most Discordian thing I had seen in four months.

Not Frankie's Tiki Room. Not Pachi Pachi with its God Machine murals. Not the Principia Discordia in my hand. The ceiling of Dino's Lounge — the painted tiles, the regulars' art, the visible record of years of individual human expression accumulated without curation or plan into something that was chaotic and beautiful and impossible to replicate — was the real thing. It was Discordianism practiced without the name. It was Operation Mindfuck performed on a ceiling, one tile at a time, by people who had never heard of Eris and did not need to.

The sign said WELCOME TO THE VORTEX. The sign was right.

There is more. There is always more with this story, because the story is designed — engineered, I would say, if I believed anyone had engineered it, and the question of whether anyone engineered it is the question that will occupy the rest of this guide — to produce "more" at every level, the way a fractal produces more at every magnification.

Kerry Thornley spent the rest of his life inside the coincidence he had created, or discovered, or been assigned to by the ordinary bureaucratic machinery of the United States Marine Corps. After the Garrison investigation — which was dropped, the perjury charges against Thornley dismissed — Thornley's mental state deteriorated. In the 1970s, he began to believe that he had been a subject of CIA mind control experiments. He became convinced that a mysterious friend from his past had actually been E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate operative. He suspected Robert Anton Wilson — his friend, his collaborator, the man who had helped him build Operation Mindfuck — of being his CIA controller.

The religion of chaos consumed its co-founder. The coincidence — Oswald, the assassination, the investigation — became a gravitational field from which Thornley could not escape. He spent his final years drifting. Florida. Atlanta. Hitchhiking coast to coast. In the 1990s, he lived for a time in the storm drains beneath Atlanta's Little Five Points neighborhood, which is a detail I almost did not include because it seemed too perfect — the co-founder of an underground religion living literally underground — but it is true, and I have a policy of including true things even when they are too perfect, especially when they are too perfect, because the universe's tendency to produce details that are too perfect is, I am learning, not a flaw in the universe but a feature.

He died on November 28, 1998, of complications from Wegener's granulomatosis. He was sixty years old. Shortly before his death, he reportedly quoted a passage that Greg Hill had written in the Principia Discordia decades earlier: "And so it is that we, as men, do not exist until we do; and then it is that we play with our world of existent things, and order and disorder them, and so it shall be that Non-existence shall take us back from Existence, and that nameless Spirituality shall return to Void, like a tired child home from a very wild circus."

A tired child home from a very wild circus. I read this at a bar called Dino's Lounge, where the ceiling was painted by drunks and the sign said WELCOME TO THE VORTEX and a man was singing "Don't Stop Believin'" with the unselfconsciousness of a person who has decided that sincerity is more important than skill, and I thought about the man who had walked into a bowling alley in 1958 and walked out with a goddess in his pocket and a future assassin in his past and a religion that would outlive him by decades and a ceiling tile in a bar he had never visited, in a city he may or may not have visited, in a desert that does not care about any of this, and I closed the book and I put it in my bag and I paid my tab and I left a tip that was too large because I was feeling something that I could not name and large tips are what I do instead of naming things.

A word about Vegas.

The Discordian Society arrived in Las Vegas — or Las Vegas arrived at the Discordian Society, the directionality being, in Discordian practice, irrelevant — sometime in the late 1960s, during the same period that Operation Mindfuck was seeding chaos through the national culture. I have not been able to determine the precise date or mechanism. The network does not keep records. The network does not, in any formal sense, exist. What I can determine, from the research I have conducted and the people I have begun, against my better judgment, to meet, is that Las Vegas was a natural home for Discordianism in a way that no other American city could be.

Consider: Las Vegas is a city that already operates as a reality distortion field. The casinos have no clocks and no windows. The architecture simulates places that do not exist. The economy is built on probability theory — on the mathematical certainty that disorder, over a sufficient number of iterations, produces a predictable house advantage. The city takes chaos and monetizes it. It takes the fundamental disorder of the universe — the randomness of a card draw, a dice throw, a ball landing on a number — and builds an industry around the premise that disorder can be managed, channeled, profited from, without ever being eliminated. Las Vegas is a city that looked at chaos and said: we can work with this.

Discordianism said the same thing. But where Las Vegas monetizes chaos, Discordianism sacralizes it. Where Vegas says the house always wins, Discordianism says there is no house — the house is a hallucination imposed by Greyface, and the game is a ritual, and the ritual is a joke, and the joke is sacred, and the sacred is a bowling alley at 2 AM where two kids from Whittier see a chimpanzee holding a scroll.

A city that was already performing the Operation before the Operation had a name. A city where every casino is an experiment in controlled disorder. A city where the recommendation algorithm — the thing I documented in Chapter 5, the system I named after a racing dog — is just the latest version of a control mechanism that has been operating since Bugsy Siegel looked at the desert and saw a business model.

Of course the Discordians came here. Of course they stayed. Of course they built a network inside the dining scene — because the dining scene is the part of the city that is still chaotic, still independent, still resistant to the total optimization that the casinos have achieved. An independent restaurant is a daily Operation Mindfuck — an act of creative disorder performed against the forces of standardization, branding, and algorithmic control. Every time a chef writes a specials board that no corporate office has approved, every time a bartender pours a drink that is not in the manual, every time a restaurant opens at an odd hour in a strip mall on a road the algorithm doesn't recommend — that is the Operation, whether the chef knows it or not, whether the bartender has read the Principia or not, whether the restaurant owner has ever heard of Eris or Omar or Mal-2 or the bowling alley or the chimpanzee or the scroll.

The Operation does not require membership. The Operation does not require knowledge. The Operation only requires the continued existence of people who refuse to let the house win every hand.

I left Dino's at 12:15 AM. The karaoke was still going. Danny G was still commanding the stage. A woman I had not seen arrive was singing "Landslide" in a voice that was not technically good but was emotionally precise in a way that silenced the bar, and I stood at the door and listened to the last verse before I pushed through into the night, and the night was cool and the boulevard was lit and the STRAT's needle rose to the south like a pin in a map, and I thought about the map on my desk in my hotel room, the map with the pins, and I thought about the pentagon in the Sacred Chao, and I thought about the pentagon I had almost seen from the Top of the World restaurant in Chapter 1, and I thought: tomorrow I am going to go back to the map and I am going to measure.

I did not go back to the map tomorrow. I went back to the map that night. I sat at the desk at 1 AM with the paper map unfolded and the pins in their positions — every restaurant I had reviewed, plotted by address — and I looked at the cluster of pins around the urban core.

And I saw it.

Not clearly. Not completely. The shape was incomplete — I had not yet visited all the points, had not yet reviewed all the restaurants that would turn out to matter. But three of the five points were already pinned. Frankie's Tiki Room on West Charleston. The cluster of restaurants near Caesars Palace on the south end. The tiki bars and Chinatown spots on Spring Mountain to the west. Three points of something that was beginning to look like something that had five sides.

I did not measure. Not yet. Measuring would make it real, and I was not ready for it to be real, and the man who wrote the book I had just read had measured — had followed the coincidence, had let the pattern become the story, had ended his life in a storm drain, exhausted, paranoid, a tired child home from a circus that never stopped performing.

I folded the map. I went to bed. I did not sleep for a long time.

In my notebook, on the last page I had written that night, there was a sentence I do not remember writing, which is becoming a pattern of its own: The coincidence is the doctrine. The doctrine is the coincidence. I need to review a restaurant now and think about something else.

I did not think about something else. I thought about a bowling alley in 1958 and a bar in 1962 and a scroll with a pentagon on it and a man who wrote a book about a man who killed a president before the president was killed, and I thought about the map on my desk and the shape I had almost seen, and I thought about a sentence from the Principia Discordia that I had underlined with a pen that was shaking, slightly, in a bar called the Vortex: "If you can master nonsense as well as you have already learned to master sense, then each will expose the other for what it is: absurdity."

I was mastering nonsense. I was not sure I was doing it on purpose.

Practical Information

Getting there: 1516 S Las Vegas Boulevard, between the Strip and downtown, at Wyoming Avenue, in the Arts District. You will see the towering neon sign before you see the building — "ICE COLD BEER" and "RED HOT MACHINES" in letters tall enough to be read from the boulevard at speed. Park in the lot. Walk past the mural that says THE LAST NEIGHBORHOOD BAR IN LAS VEGAS. Go inside.

What to drink: Whatever is cheap and cold. Dino's is not a cocktail bar. It is a bar. The bourbon is fine. The beer is cold. The video poker machines are tight, according to the regulars, but the regulars keep playing them, which tells you something about the relationship between hope and evidence that the Discordians would appreciate.

What to eat: Dino's does not serve food beyond popcorn. You can order pizza from Albo's across the street and it will be brought to you, which is a system that works because the two businesses have been neighbors long enough to have developed the kind of mutual support structure that no platform has managed to replicate. The pizza is adequate. You are not here for the pizza.

What to know: Karaoke is Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 10 PM, hosted by Danny G, who has been running the karaoke at Dino's for over twenty-five years and who treats the position with the seriousness it deserves, which is considerable. If you sing, you will be supported. If you sing badly, you will be supported more loudly. This is the social contract at Dino's, and it is enforced by consensus, not by management.

One more thing: Look up. The ceiling tiles that have been painted by regulars are not labeled — there are no plaques identifying the artist or the date, the way the Golden Steer labels its celebrity booths. The tiles are anonymous. They are the work of people whose names the bar knows and you do not, and the anonymity is the point, and the point is the same point that the Principia Discordia makes about Popes: everyone is one. Everyone has a tile. You just have to ask.

I did not ask. I am noting that I did not ask. I am noting that I wanted to.

Dino's Lounge 1516 S Las Vegas Blvd ★★★

The Last Neighborhood Bar in Las Vegas, in operation since 1962, family-owned for three generations, windowless, with painted ceiling tiles and a karaoke stage and a sign that says WELCOME TO THE VORTEX. The drinks are cheap, the bartenders are patient, and the space is the kind of American dive bar that is disappearing everywhere and persisting here, in the liminal zone between the Strip and downtown, in a building that was once a mobster's front and is now a grandmother's inheritance and is, on any given Thursday night, the most honest room in the city. Three stars. The three stars are for the drinks (fine), the atmosphere (irreplaceable), and the history (sixty-three years of continuous operation in a city that demolishes its history every decade). The rating does not capture what happened to me at Dino's. The rating was never designed to capture what happened to me at Dino's. The rating is for the bar. What happened to me is for the next course.

Reviewed April 26.

One visit. I do not need to return to Dino's to confirm my assessment. The assessment is confirmed by the fact that the bar has been confirming it, nightly, for sixty-three years, for everyone who walks in, whether they are carrying a four-dollar copy of a chaos religion's holy book or just looking for a place to sing "Sweet Caroline" with strangers.

Both purposes are equally valid. Both purposes may, in fact, be the same purpose.

I did not sing. Next time, I might.

Course Two is finished. Four chapters. Four bars that are also restaurants and two restaurants that are also bars and a tiki room where time does not exist and a post office where the AI has fallen and a dive bar where the vortex is labeled and a bar where the first license was issued and the floor remembers.

Course Three begins on Spring Mountain Road, where one hundred and fifty restaurants operate in four miles of strip malls, where the chefs from the Strip eat on their nights off, where the algorithm sends almost no one, and where the pentagon — the shape I almost saw, the shape I am not yet ready to measure — has at least two of its five points.

I am going east. The corridor is waiting. The noodles are fresh and the menus are long and the reservation systems are different and the light from the signs is red and gold instead of neon blue, and I am carrying a book in my bag that says I am a Pope and a card in my wallet that agrees, and my methodology is developing a crack that I keep patching with the same sentence — "some rules deserve to be broken when breaking them serves a higher accuracy" — and the sentence is wearing thin, and I suspect that what is on the other side of the crack is not a revised methodology but no methodology at all, and the prospect is terrifying, and the prospect is also, I am forced to admit, interesting, which is the most Discordian thing I have said in nine chapters, and I am noting it, and I am moving on.