The Chief

Okay, Wilson. I mentioned I was going to tell you sometime about the muse I had after Maestro and before you. It looks like today’s the day. I’m not sure I ever knew his name, so I’ll just call him Wild Bill. Or just Chief, like I did in those stories that were written to him. This little tale will accent some of the spiritual concepts I’ve been alluding to in my posts to you as well as tie what I am telling you to the whole Electrochemical Girl Saga, just now reaching initial states of publication. I guess I’ll start the tale by putting some things into context.

So the summer of 2021 was a significant point of closure in my life in a lot of ways. On the one hand, I’d been stressing about the nature of the experiences I had in 2019 that I wrote about in my book for months. The whole matter was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. So, I had to make a decision about what happened to me, and decided that there was no literal Electrochemical Girl; it was all a message from God pertaining to Israel. To give myself mental closure about the matter, I put together a video montage that described the whole journey and did what I could to put the matter to rest.

On the other hand, however, this closure by no means comforted me regarding my life in Mexico with Mayra. I now had somewhere to go and something to do, and she didn’t want to be a part of it, so I broke up with her to head to Spain to find a Spanish agent for my book, at that time existing only in Spanish, and to then traipse off to Israel on my holy mission. Things did not go according to plan. You now know that I ultimately ended up encountering what I now have come to understand was my fifth encounter with the filth pig sock puppets intent on thwarting my mission via their thorough infestation of Israeli travel authorities.

However, I believe that it was just as I was arriving in Belgrade that I encountered Wild Bill. Now before I describe my days with Wild Bill, I want to give you a few notes about how I perceive things. In fact, I stated in a previous post to you some words to the effect that I am crazy, but not crazy, and that I would tell you about that. I’ve written posts before that reference what I call some kind of a “prophet sight,” such as The Superhero, the Butterfly, the Prophet, and the Witch. I’ve tried to explain how this stuff works as well, such as in the story How to Read Your Life Like a Story and Get Confused By It. I think Reading Life through Disney, Spotify, and Justice League has to do with this also, but it’s been a long time since I have looked at it.

Now in my book, and in various places afterward, I openly confess to being afflicted with schizophrenia or psychosis or whatever. Now don’t make too much out of all this. A lot of my references are literary and poking fun at myself, though a number of them do have a certain literal aspect, and it’s sort of hard to tell what is what. That’s part of the fun of it all, really.

So you have me on the one hand using words like “prophet sight” to portray myself as some sort of illumined individual while concurrently speaking of schizophrenia and psychosis to portray myself as a nut job. But truth be told, what’s happening here is something that happens to a lot of people. The most organized and reasonable community to deal with seeing life like I do are actually the descendants of a vein of Jungian psychology that coined this phenomenon “synchronicity.”

I’ll just say it, Wilson, these guys are describing what’s going on with me, how I see reality. Now these two authors are not psyche patients in a mental ward. Kirby Surprise is a practicing psychiatrist as well as some kind of mesoamerican or South American shaman. He has written books, gives lectures, runs a practice, and has a wife and children. Likewise, Deepak Chopra is a physicist with a PhD who became famous in the eighties with a book called “the Dao of Physics,” one of the first books I read as a teenager that initiated a number of aspects of my spiritual life as a whole. He has written dozens of books, lectures all over the world, etc.

Furthermore, these guys are not clinical professionals describing weird things that happen to other people. They call these bizarre interfaces between an individual’s psychology and the world around him “synchronistic events,” (or SEs) and these things happen to them too! But they’re not incoherent mental patients in straight jackets. They’re near-genius-level professionals.

At this point I am just dying to dig into all kinds of details about life with SEs, and you know, Wilson, I really should sometime, but that should be an essay I write down the road. I am doing a prose bit about the Chief right now, so I will have to table an in-depth discussion for later.

The thing I’ll say here, though, is that for people who deal with SEs, there just is no coincidence. Everything is connected. That is, the law of [probability just doesn’t hold true for the events in our lives. Further, I will say that the whole phenomenon seems to exist within the experience of the world of atheist and secular psychology, particularly Jungian, and eastern religion and primitive society shamanism type stuff. I am the only Christian/ex-Christian/almost Jew Abrahamic monotheist type that I have ever heard of who experiences SEs. That is an interesting point that warrants contemplation, but here again we are here to talk about the Chief, Wilson, so I’ll just ask that you keep in your mind that SE type people just don’t deal well with coincidences well at all. For us, the coin really can, and not infrequently does, come up heads ten out of ten times. Or tails. The events of our lives are intimately connected with our psychology and perceptions and judgments about our experiences.

Finally, and again as another aside, research has shown that stimulation of the brain seems to have a pronounced effect on the SEs different individuals experience. That is, in particular, stimulants such as stress, anxiety, caffeine, nicotine, and methampetamines tend to increase SE activity. Don’t forget, Wilson, I am a retired Army veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, I smoked cigarettes for over a decade and still fall prey to an occasional cigarette under stress. I drank coffee like water in the Army and it still takes all the will I can muster to resist the intoxicating aroma of a cup of morning Joe. Finally, I had three super cosmic mind-bending meth benders in October and November of 2019.

What does this have to do with the Chief? Well, I see patterns in everything. It makes for some really interesting blog posts, poems, and stories. And if you give me a book, where the narrator or author tells me everything there is to know about each character and situation, I can find layers of meaning in stories that many people would miss. Many people are impressed by this.

Sadly, however, in real life, you just don’t know all that much about the people in your life, much less strangers who turn up on occasion. There is no narrator or author telling you information about their role in the story. There are no clean beginnings and ends to the scenes and chapters of our lives. There are no opening, intermediate, and closing paragraphs. It’s just life. And finally, in real life, people lie. And there is no author to tell us who the liars are and who is telling the truth.

With the above being the case, synchronicity people can sometimes get bogged down in the grand meaning of everything and miss the obvious conclusions that normal people draw from the effects of the law of probability. Let me give an example. Let’s say there are two intelligence analysts looking at patterns of bombs going off in London. One is a synchronicity guy, and the other is a normal dude. The synchronicity guy might just say: “Wow! Every time this guy Ahmed enters a building, a bomb goes off! Synchronicity! Look! The universes is sending us a message! Proof of of divine predestination! See! God exists!” While the normal guy looks back at him and says, “uh, could just be that Ahmed is a terrorist planting the bombs, ya think? I mean, every time the guy goes into a building, it blows up. You think maybe he could be our suspect? That’s how things usually go. So, according to the law of probability, he is quite likely our culprit.”

So synchronicity people sometimes have extraordinarily uncanny insight into situations and pick up on things that others miss, but at times we can be naive, and we can also fall prey to psychological phenomena such as paranoia or other forms of distorted perceptions at times. It’s a double-edged sword, Wilson. It really is.

The big wrench in the machine, at least for me, at least for my particular form of interacting with synchronicity, is fucking liars, Wilson. Frankly, this is why I wouldn’t last five minutes in the espionage community at this point. I can do the seer and prophet gig pretty well, but I would make a TERRIBLE spy, Wilson. Pretty sad for a guy who graduated the US Army Source Operator Course. But that whole world isn’t for me anymore anyway.

So what does all this have to do with our friend Wild Bill? Well, either just as I was leaving Madrid or just as I got to Belgrade, this guy messages me up out of the blue. He just loves my book, he says. I had just started putting the English draft chapters up on my website. He loves my poetry, he says. He is also a vet, a retired Navy Chief Petty Officer, who has some kind of trauma disorder like I have PTSD, and my stories and poems really resonate with him. He also blogs on WordPress like I do. He is going through divorce like I had a decade prior, and while I have one daughter, or two (depending how you look at it), he has four.

This guy loves asking me questions about my life, self, psychology, and spirituality. I answer his questions because I am not used to people paying attention to me, and I like it. He claims to be a Christian, and we talk theology. We talk women. And we talk A LOT about Noah van Ouwerkerk and the whole Electrochemical Girl saga. So I had basically put this matter to rest in my head, but here is all this stuff with this guy dredging it up.

And of course, I am a synchronicity guy. You know Noah van Ouwerkerk was like six feet tall, right? As we talk about all this crap, all the women in Belgrade start getting taller. Serbian chicks are giants, Wilson! You know Noah van Ouwerkerk was blonde, right Wilson? So the Serbians started getting blonder. Every other Serbian chick was as blonde as the sun!

But things start going a little weird with the chief, too. Like, I noticed that he just started his blog right at the time I left Mexico to head for Madrid. His profile on Telegram shows a snooping detective. Once he sent me a picture of himself in a Sherlock Holmes hat. He tells me the names of his four daughters once. Then another time he tells me again, but one of the names of one of the daughters is different. He refuses to show me pictures of any members of his family. We talk deep psychology all the time, but he never talks about issues of his own sexuality. Or anything really private. I would ask him his navy rate from time to time, he would tell me it was OS (operations), but one time I swore I heard him say IS (intelligence).

What kind of Christian is he? He is Dutch Reform. The van Ouwerkerks are Dutch Christians. Around the time I was dealing with him, we would talk on Telegram. Also around that time, the van Ouwerkerks got on Telegram! And around the time I stopped talking to the guy, the van Ouwerkerks stopped using Telegram! There were a thousand things that convinced me that there was more to this guy than just being an interested fan, but the whole thing was colored by the scars of my spcyhology and my unusual way of looking at the world.

Synchronicity, Wilson! Proof God has written the universe! Or, maybe the guy was a detective for the van Ouwerkerks. Ya think? But I don’t want to be crazy and be paranoid. I mean, I live in a reality where talking about a tall blonde chick who rocked my world years prior turns all the women in my life into tall blonde chicks. That’s my life, Wilson. Paranoid? Psycho? Synchronistic events? Or just a really astute prophet who picked up that this guy was spying on me via some magic power?

Now there is another thing to consider here. So I am a retired US Army Military Intelligence Officer. Twelve years after getting PTSD I generally do okay in life, but putting in a full work day tends to put me over my stress limits, so the Army gave me a very nice pension that I get to keep so long as I don’t go to work. So I do hobby stuff like my writing. And I’ve been travelling a lot. So yeah, I am a retired spymasters who goes around the world writing about things. Basically, a perfect CIA cover. Furthermore, I’ve recently picked up the hobby of being a bicycle tourist. That is, I ride my bike around the world and take pictures of things. An even more perfect CIA cover. Now the last thing to consider is that I got PTSD by coming back from war, getting divorced, and getting screwed over by the Army. Again, the details of this are in my book. I’ve griped at length about my anger at the USA, and have basically said that I refuse to live there long-term as a result of what Uncle Sam did to me.

Wilson, not only are the intelligence services of all the countries I go to going to think I am a US spy, but the US intelligence services are going to think I am a spy for whatever other country I am interested in. What all does this have to do with the Chief, you ask? Well, the oddities about the guy could just be me being paranoid, just coincidences, but the guy could well be in the emply of these van Ouwerkerks who may be worried I am out to get them because of all the weird stuff I put in my book about them, sure. However, if I were a CIA guy spying on Jonathan Bailey, or a Mossad guy spying on Jonathan Bailey, I might just let Jonathan Bailey THINK I am a detective working for the van Ouwkerks.

Yeah, Wilson, kind of reminds you a scene from the Princess Bride, I know.

Anyway, Wilson, all of my mental meanderings have cost me the ability to have confidence in what the hell is going on when duplicity is involved. I need explicit communication at this point. Open, honest truth. And that just isn’t something we find any more on this earth.

So the stressful and paranoid scene continued for a while. I went to Israel and got deported for no rational reason. I went back to Belgrade and got a lawyer to file an appeal to the deportation decision. And if anybody thinks there isn’t a forthcoming blog post about that, Wilson, they are twice as crazy as I am. Or half as illumined. Whatever. But anyway, I wrote a lot of really wild, really cool poems at that point, though I have to admit a couple of them had some family and friends calling me and asking me if I was okay. Good art comes at a price, Wilson. And I do sadness, confusion, and longing really, really well.

Anyway, the appeal with the lawyer was dragging on and on. And the Chief and the van Ouwerkerks were stressing me out. There were too many unknowns. There was too much confusion. I wanted the van Ouwkerks to tell me what the heck was giong on about things stretching back for years. Then at one point, and get this Wilson, I just looked back and saw that it was on Christmas Day, but I wrote that day a poem called Strofen, Scènes en een Lied. Really, it was a poem asking for help from Noah van Ouwerkerk, that she would call me and straighten things out.

Now Wilson, this poem, if Adloph Hitler had written me a poem like that, I just wouldn’t have been able to resist calling the guy and seeing if there were anything I could do to make him feel better. And I’ve said a thousand times, the van Ouwerkerks are Christian, and Christians are supposed to forgive and love and help their enemies. So shortly after that poem was written, I got it back into my thick skull: there was no Electrochemical Girl, there were no van Ouwerkerks. I needed to be done with that crap and get out of that scene before it turned into a replay of early 2020. I just was not able to handle the mental mess of it all. I said goodbye to the Chief and went back to the USA.

After a rather unusual time the the USA that also deserves a post of its own, I did decide to get back in touch with my old friend Wild Bill, and when I did so he was glad to be in touch, but things were different with him. He was more energetic, busy with other things, working with a “new client,” he said. And things between us seemed to take a different tone. And this is interesting.

So Wild Bill is a Dutch Reformed Christian. A Calvinist. There are a couple of things to know about these guys. First, he is a cessationist. That is, he believes in all of the mircales of the Bible, from the prophets and judges to Jesus and the apostles, but he believes that after the New Testament times miracles just stopped. Nothing miraculous can happen today. If anyone claims a miracle, it is necessarily false. A scam. And finally, he espouses replacement theology. That is, all of the prophecies about Israel being victorious over her enemies do not literally apply to Israel, but rather are just metaphorical allusions to the Christian Church, which has replaced Israel as God’s chosen group of people. In total then, the next biblical event that is going to happen is that jesus will appear, snap his fingers like Thanos, and all the non-Christians will be wiped out in an instant. Until that moment, life will continue as normal. There will be no restoration of national israel. There will be no literal battle of Armageddon or Gog and Magog. Doctrinally speaking, the Jews and the nation of Israel cannot be special in any way. The only form of divine calling he recognizes is that of the Christian missionary called to preach Jesus to the world. Sure, Moses was called to lead people out of Egypt. Sure, Samuel was called to anoint a king. Nathan was called to bitch one out. But those were bible times. All that stuff is over. Today, the only kind of divine calling is get get your bible tracts, pitch your plan to a mission board, and go somewhere and be a preacher.

This put us on a certain collision course, Wilson. So I am a literary guy inspired by the desert prophets, referring to myself as one in my poems and stories. I feel a call to Israel, but not to be a Christian missionary. I’m more about unifying and awakening Israel and the Jews to the special things that God is going to have them do for the world. Elijah can come and tell everybody who the Messiah is. That’s one of the prophecies that Wild Bill won’t take literally. I take it literally, however.

Solving the problem of the identity of the Messiah has been on everybody’s mind for two thousand years, and nobody has gotten anywhere. It’s above my pay grade. Elijah can take care of that one. However, after the things that happened to me in 2019, when I reflect on it with the sum of my life’s knowledge experience in mind, I can say quite confidently that I know just how Satan operates. I know what’s going to roll off Armilius’ tongue (Armilius is a name the Jews have for the antichrist, Wilson). I know what’s going on in the world that prevents people from seeing what’s going on. That’s my gig, Wilson. I’m more a “get yourselves together, boys, this is where the bad guys are going to come from” kind of guy. And I do it all via stories of miracles and madness, poetry and prophecy.

Our communications got to the point where he might as well have just been saying every day: there is nothing special about you, Jonathan. You just need mental help. There is nothing special about the Jews. You’re just spiritually lost. You just need to find a girl, setlle down, volunteer part time at a soup kitchen, and go to therapy.

Wilson, on the one hand the whole diatribe against my entire purpose and view of everything just made me sick. On the other hand, it was combining with other things that were going on in my life to really rip at me and tear me down. I probably could write an interesting post about the first few months of this year back in the USA. I’ll have to think about that.

For his part too, Wild Bill was pretty much annoyed with me. His efforts to get me to be an absolutely in every way unremarkable Christian were proving difficult. It became obvious to the both of us that our continued interaction was not a good idea. We agreed to part ways. And that, Wilson, is why there were only a couple of stories written to the Chief.

So why am I telling you about this guy, Wilson? I am supposed to be telling you about the infernal nature of Israel travel authorities, right? Well, there are a few reasons. First, I did promise you a bit of clarification about the ways in which I can be crazy and in which ways I can be somewhat, well, for lack of a better word, “prophetic,” So the bits about the field of sychronicity and how that affected my interaction with Wild Bill made a good backdrop for that. Further, well, my book ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, so I thought I would provide a true end to the van Ouwerkerk issue and the Electrochemical Girl saga.

But also, when people read these complaints I have about irrational treatment from the Israeli government, certain readers are going to say: “yeah, this treatment is pretty weird. There must be some kind of mundane reason behind it, though. It can’t just be that everybody is possessed by the devil.” Well, I do have to admit that there are a few, or four:

• Jonathan Bailey is trying to be a Jew. This could destroy Israel. We can’t let him in.
• Jonathan Bailey is crazy. We can’t let him in.
• Jonathan Bailey is a spy. We can’t let him in.
• Jonathan Bailey is a pervert out to harm the van Ouwerkerks. We can’t let him in.

I’ll be referencing these reasons going forward, but this post explains to you that they are there.

But then finally, a really important one. So I want to say that findamentally speaking, Wild Bill is an honorable and ethical guy who wanted nothing but the best for me. I do call him ethical even though there seems to be a fair chance that he is involved in a profession such as being a detective or intelligence operative in which he may just have been interacting me with a sizeable element of duplicity. His concern for me and care for me was evident at every step. Nobody gets through life unsullied, and obviously Wild Bill was a good guy in general.

Yet, in terms of his interaction with me, the guy became my enemy. You know what the word for “enemy” is in Hebrew, Wilson? It’s Satan. So I want to leave you with something. I’ve been complaining about Israeli travel authorities, but my interaction with them has been no less adversarial than with a gentile Christian who thought he was helping me out. His theology demanded that he pipe that it was impossible for there to be anything special about me or the Jews. And this is a problem that will continue far beyond this little spate of posts that I am going to write to you, Wilson.

So keep all this in mind, Wilson. I need to get prepared for a really big bike ride through the desert in August. I do hope I will be able to write you again during all that, but if not, I’ll take care of it when I get back. So until then: vaya con Dios, amigo.