Crossroads

Okay Wilson. After that last post, since we have insanity on the brain, and before we go on to some other kinds of stories, there is this one that I have to tell you about that continues our theme of madness, but perhaps leads it to somewhere else. You be the judge. It’s not about something that happened to me recently, like a lot of these posts have been. It’s actually about this guy. We’ll call him OG. It’s the story of something that happened to him. In Puerto Vallarta. In the Spring of 2021. Around April or something like that.

His parents had invited him down to stay for a week in a luxurious Airbnb on the south end of town. The beginning of the week had been quite relaxing. The weather was wonderful, if only slightly warm. The brutal summer of the Mexican coastal rainforest had not yet begun. The sunsets were the stuff of legend, as was the glimmering gold sheen that crested the flickering waves of the sea later in the day. Sadly, his folks were hardly ambulatory anymore, so getting out to walk along Puerto Vallarta’s spectacular boardwalk was something he would have to do by himself. There he would enjoy the shops, cafés, spectacular restaurants, and bars.

Around mid-week he decided to take one such walk, right around mid day. He’d told his folks he would be back before sunset. First he would get himself a massage, for pennies on the dollar, and then head around to a bar with a nice view of the waves and the girls from the patio outside. The corona’s were delightful, accompanied as they were by the music and the sounds of Spring on the coast of the Pacific. It wasn’t long, however, before OG began to feel a bit drowsy, an odd occurrence given that he’s only had a couple of beers, and that it was nowhere near time for the sun to tuck itself behind the golden blue horizon of the sea. Since he wasn’t on anyone else’s schedule, and nowhere near in the mood to go back to the Airbnb, OG thought a walk along the malecón would get his blood flowing and put a little zing in his step, so he paid his bill and took off for a stroll.

In fact, Wilson, as he explained it to me, OG continued to feel a bit hazy, and with that, maybe a bit crazy, slipping into some bizarre thoughts that he hadn’t had for quite some time. Lost in his head a bit, the guy began to think about his body, what he liked and didn’t like about it, ways he wished he could improve it, in order to both look and feel better. Remember my book, Wilson? During the utterly bizarre episodes I describe there, the concept of body image was attached quite closely to concepts of identity that I was struggling with at the time, which lead to otherworldly encounters that could not be definitively attributed as such because of the involvement of drugs. Therefore this description OG gave about feeling hazy and then suddenly becoming drawn into a thought chain revolving around dissatisfaction with his body piques my interest. But for now I’ll just continue the story as it was told to me.

So while on the one hand feeling drowsy to the point of wanting to take a walk, yet somewhat contradictorily feeling drawn into a kind of obsessive train of thought revolving around dissatisfaction with his lack of head hair and ubiquity of arm hair, or that his stomach could stand to flatten out, OG began to feel an attitude of a completely different spectrum. While walking past the various people out on that sunny day, OG felt a particularly strong connection to the people around him. The women playing with their kids in the shallows of the beach would conspicuously take note of him and smile at him as he did to them. The family of mother and father and their two young children sitting on the bench as he walked by stared at him intently with smiles and looks of comfort as he walked by, and he returned the sentiment with kind-eyed smiles of his own.

Certainly OG was in a very strange mood or state of mind, as he was feeling drowsiness alongside a kind of anxious obsessiveness alongside a calm and friendly connectedness to all around him. OG noticed this about himself, that he was in some kind of a strange mood or mindset, and thought he might like to take a rest to collect himself a bit. He noted that he’d only had a couple of beers, and was wanting of an explanation for this state of mind he was having. So right there, he stepped off of the paved boardwalk and laid himself down on the sand right next to a small tree that had been planted to beautify the malecón. No beach towel. No sunscreen or sunglasses. No swim trunks. Just a 48-year-old man in a collared short-sleeved shirt, walking shorts, and tennis shoes just planting himself horizontally on the sand and covering his eyes with his boonie hat.

I hope I am conveying that something bizarre was happening to the guy, Wilson. We’re still not sure what it was. And it gets even more strange. A lot more strange. So I will continue relating the narrative.

There on the ground, OG all of the sudden felt absolutely and utterly physically at peace. Gone were all traces of his perception of his age. He experienced no joint pain. No stress in any part of his body. No aches or any such thing associated with decrepitude. It was almost as if he were returned to the body of a child or young adult in perfect health, with the perfect amount of tension and relaxation, and with no trace of any discomfort whatsoever. He could even hear the sounds of the waves and the birds above with the perfect amount of detail. The perfect amount of noise in comparison with the perfect amount of silence. Something unusual was happening here.

Energized and at a loss for what was happening, OG decided to get up and walk a bit more. As he walked, he paid close attention to the many people around. He seemed to have the sense that everyone else on the beach was aware of him, and knew of his condition. As if he had nothing to hide from anyone. That everyone knew everything about him. He felt a certain connection with everyone around, that their mood somehow mirrored his, although this didn’t prevent him from the usual level of reservation that he maintained around strangers in public. That is, despite feeling connected to and open toward everyone, he didn’t just run up to everyone and treat them like friends he had known forever. His attitude seemed to work against itself, a bit. That is, he felt connected to everyone, but that fact in itself was so strange that something very unusual and unknown had to be happening, and so he had better keep his distance and treat the world as he always had.

At least that’s how he felt at first. It wasn’t long before he was curious enough about this way of relating to the world that he decided to go up to someone and just talk. OG’s reservation around strangers was one of the complaints that friends would level against him from time to time. Occasionally someone would compare him to a robotic style German who just goes about their business without being open to the world in general. Well in his current state of mind, this was anything but the case.

He also noted that there happened to be an unusual number of folks on the beach. All dudes. And all by themselves. All in regular clothes as opposed to bathing suits, and all doing nothing. Just standing there or sitting there. So, in deference to his unusually connected and open mindset, he went up to somebody. A guy in his early or mid-twenties or something like that. Fairly handsome. OG introduced himself, and the young man was surprisingly open to being approached by a random strange dude on the beach. Now OG was an American and speaking Spanish with an American accent, and Mexicans did tend to treat him fairly well on that account. But life for OG in Mexico certainly wasn’t that of a god among men, and quite a number of people weren’t that impressed in his experience, and once in a while he would get some grief from someone who didn’t like Americans, etc. This guy did not seem particularly impressed with anything or curious about being approached, but yet was casually open about being talked to by some American guy with a grey beard walking up to him on the beach.

The pair exchanged names, though OG didn’t tell me the other guy’s name, Wilson. Sorry I can’t recount that detail to you. I think he said something about getting the guy’s number even, though I can’t remember. But they engaged in some perfunctory introductions, what are you doing out on the beach, etc. The guy didn’t really ask any questions. OG only asked a few before getting to the point that was on his mind: if the guy wanted to go do something. He said, “sure,” and asked OG what he was up for, to which OG responded that going out and getting laid would be cool.

Yeah, Wilson, our dear OG is a kind of a weirdo. But, you know, carousing with a dude and hitting a bar or something and going to talk to and hang out with chicks was a kind of a “go-to” suggestion of his, particularly when talking to a younger and fitter male about possibly doing something out on the town. So sure, his suggestion was maybe a bit forward, but I don’t think all-too-uncommon. And remember, he was in a pretty weird state of mind, rather Zen, and somewhat inexplicable since he’d heretofore been having a rather typical afternoon out in Puerto Vallarta, only having downed a couple of beers at a bar when all this bizarreness began.

The guy’s answer was quite bizarre, though. He said something to the effect that he might be interested if OG wanted to make a recording. Like make a porno. I’m not kidding. We were both shocked at this answer. For his part, despite all the strangeness of this inexplicable mood he was in that included both pleasant physical sensations and a Buddhist style sense of connection to all living beings, OG was not interested in gallivanting off with some guy he met on a beach five minutes prior to star in a porno film. I’m glad he didn’t. Aren’t you, Wilson?

He apparently said something to that effect to the dude he met, but they did arrange to go out to a bar or something. The guy made some kind of excuse about wanting to go home and get ready and come back, though, asking OG to wait for him. OG did wait for a while, but quickly came to the conclusion that the guy wasn’t coming back, a fact not entirely disagreeable to OG, so our hero goes ahead and ambles further down the beach to see who else might be there to talk to.

Again, there were various people on the beach just sitting or standing, generally not moving or doing anything. This time OG goes up to another dude. There were zero chicks on the beach. Yeah, just various lone guys sitting or standing relatively motionlessly doing what looked to be basically nothing. So this guy OG goes up to is older than the last one, and looks considerably less like a twink in a gay porno. He seemed to be in his thirties and was a bit hefty.

OG introduced himself to the guy and pretty much straight away asked if he wanted to go do something, to which the guy responded that he wouldn’t mind at all. He asked OG if he wanted to stop by his place for a bit, presumably to kill time until some bar or club started to get hopping later in the evening. OG really didn’t ask. If you haven’t figured it out yet, Wilson, there’s something a bit wrong with OG. We don’t know exactly what. I don’t think we ever will know. But something is obviously not right with the guy at this point. So he just walks with this guy to a bus to head to his place.

On the way, OG notes to himself that he doesn’t know the guy’s name. That’s a trait of OG’s. He gets to know a person’s soul pretty quick. Their look, their mannerisms, etc. He will pick up facts about them as they come, such as their age and details about their lives, and their name will be included among those facts at some point. He often forgets to note people’s names right when he first meets them. So he asks, “Hey, you know, sorry, I think I’m a little out of it for some reason, but I never did get your name.”

The guy responds, “Samael.”

This sends OG into a panic. “Samael! Samael!” he says in a in a rush of anxiety. “Are you serious!?”

To this the guy responds putting his hand reassuringly on OG’s shoulder and giving him a smiling look of friendship, “No, compa, cálmate, relax. Samuel. My name’s Samuel.”

“Oh,” breathed OG in a sigh of relief. “I’m OG.”

You see, Wilson, Samael is one of the names Jews give to the king of the demons. Satan. OG was well aware that there was something strange going on, given the feeling of confusion, the feeling of relaxedness, the dudes standing around doing nothing, the offer to make a porno, and the trip to the house of the guy whose name he didn’t know without really knowing what they’d be doing there. OG didn’t hear really well apparently, and he misheard the guy’s name and thought there for a second that he was actually talking to Samael, the king of the demons. Satan. The quick reassurance brought him back to his wits, but we’ll add this to the list of oddities going on with OG during this adventure. So for right now, OG is just hanging out with some guy he met named Samuel. Samuel isn’t the most common of names in Mexico, though, Wilson. Just keep that in mind.

On the bus Sam commented that it was strange that OG freaked out so much about his name. OG apologized and told him that he misheard his name and thought that he was named after an obscure demon. Sam asked OG if he was religious. OG said that he spirituality was very important to him, but that he didn’t belong to any definite religious culture, but that he followed the Bible. OG then asked Sam if he were religious. Sam said he was Catholic. That was quite common in Mexico. Of course it didn’t really say much about Sam’s spirituality. There are a great many Catholics who say they care Catholic because they were baptized Catholic.

At Sam’s place the pair just sat and talked. Sam offered water. That’s all he had. Sam wasn’t rich. The floor was concrete. The chairs were of the metal folding type. The apartment was one large room with the sleeping area separated by a divider. It was that kind of place. OG asked Sam what he did for a living, and he responded that he worked for some people in Mexico City, and he found people in Puerto Vallarta that wanted to go work in Mexico City.

Ever since meeting this guy, the current of confusion and relaxation that had been defining OG’s condition began to be more and more suffused with a tinge of anxiety, maybe from a lack of trust. Maybe OG didn’t quite unconsciously let go of the fact that he heard Sam saying his name was Samael. He tended to wonder if maybe Sam were talking in metaphors, and maybe Mexico City wasn’t Mexico City. If it was, well, it seemed that the job was a little bit weird. Mexico was a center of human trafficking. Maybe the guy was looking for young women to go be prostitutes in Mexico City. But, yeah Wilson, maybe Mexico City was a metaphor for another world. Maybe Sam was Samael, and his job was to get people on the earth and take them to hell. Wilson, with OG, everything tends to boil down to God, Satan, heaven, and hell. That’s what’s at the bottom of his soul. That’s his essence. That’s where he tends to go when he gets tired, nervous, etc. That’s how he tends to see things.

So he out and asks the guy, “are you an angel?”

Now if the guy were in fact some dude from Mexico City who recruits people to work there, whether that be for purposes mundane or nefarious, the question would have been beyond bizarre. His answer was equally bizarre. He said, “yes.”

I do suppose a typical person would have been confronted with a choice of freaking out on OG and asking him what the hell he was talking about or playing along in some way or just trying to translate that question into his own experience. Whatever the case, he didn’t ask OG what the hell was wrong with him for asking that kind of a question. He just said yes. So I do suppose a normal guy from Mexico City could have given that answer. But OG was intrigued. And although intrigued, OG still found a way to be confused and not get the answer he needed. You see, demons are also Angels. Fallen angels. And a demon wouldn’t want to say that he was fallen, but present himself in the glory of the angels, both to satisfy his own ego as well as to be able to deceive. So OG got another idea.

Sam had said that he was Catholic. Catholics believed in Jesus. If Sam were a dude on assignment from Mexico City, this would be a chance to see what he knew about his Catholic religion. If Sam were an angel from heaven, this would be a chance to figure out what about Catholicism, and indeed all religion, was right or wrong. And if he were a fallen angel from the outer darkness, well, this would be an opportunity to find that out as well. There are a couple of verses from the New Testament to consider, Wilson. They are from the Apostle Paul in his letters to the Corinthians. Did I tell you I was at Corinth recently, Wilson. I think I did. I know I blogged about it. If I didn’t address that particular post to you, I’m sure you read it anyway. But let me show you these verses from the New testament, here they are:

And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.

2 Corinthians 11:14

Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says “Jesus is accursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit.

1 Corinthians 12:3

I’m sure some of my Jewish friends are rolling their eyes. But there is a certain logic behind this. Jesus said something to his fellow Jews along these same lines:

If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

John 10:37-38

That is, if a dude is running around healing the sick and raising the dead and giving sight to the blind, it should be kind of obvious that the guy is on God’s team. If a guy healing the sick and raising the dead and giving sight to the blind is a problem for you, then you have problems. So OG wanted to know what this angel/demon/human trafficker/guy on assignment from Mexico City was going to say about the whole Jesus question. At the very least he would know what team Sam was on.

Sam’s response was a bit shocking. First, he just looked shocked. Confused. As if he couldn’t understand why OG would ask such a thing. Remember, OG had just asked Sam if he were and angel, and Sam didn’t have a problem with it at all, answering matter of factly, “yes.” But apparently asking Sam his opinion on Jesus was just too confusing for him. So OG stood his ground and insisted he answer. “You heard me,” he said.

With great difficulty, as if he wasn’t sure what he was saying, he said quizzically, “…a prophet…?…maybe…?”

At that point OG knew he was not talking to someone from above. At the very least, he wasn’t talking to a good Catholic who knew all about Catholicism and who could give the Catholic lines that OG knew very well from talking to those guys for years. And to be frank, Wilson, even a Catholic who doesn’t know anything about anything would say “Son of God” or something. OG was talking to someone who simply could not say anything about Jesus. Even Balaam was a prophet. Muhammad was a prophet. False prophets. Weak prophets. Mere prophets. Hell, OG, you know in my own more colorful writings I call myself a prophet. In the context in which he said it, he might have well been calling Jesus a bus driver. A rabbinic Jew would call Moses a great and mighty prophet. A Mormon would call Joseph Smith a great and mighty prophet. But this guy was like, “a…prophet…maybe…” Some Catholic, eh, Wilson? A Catholic who had no problem saying that he was an angel a few minutes before.

I am not here to tell anyone that Jesus is the Son of God or God or God in the flesh or anything. I am just telling you what OG said happened to him. OG has a lot of ideas about Jesus himself, but having pondered those words from Paul about exactly what kinds of people say what kinds of things about Jesus, he decided on that litmus test, to see what kind of an answer he would get, and the answer came from someone who couldn’t say anything good about Jesus at all. Again, this isn’t about Jesus being the Son of God or the Messiah or God or any of that. He could have said Jesus was a great miracle worker. The Muslims do that. He could have said Jesus spoke beautiful words about the poor. Atheists do that. He could have said Jesus spoke about peace and love. Hindus do that. And if Sam were in fact an angel from above, if there are problems with what the Jews think about Jesus, he could have corrected them. If there are problems with what the Muslims think about Jesus, he could have corrected those. If there are problems with what the Christians think about Jesus, he could have corrected those. I have to take my hat off, Wilson, for a guy obviously going through some kind of screwed up mental breakdown or whatever it was, he came up with a pretty good test.

If this guy was an angel, he was the fallen kind. That’s what OG was starting to get convinced of. And that’s when something strange happened. As he was sitting there, Sam suddenly fell a bit sideways, like something hit him from the side. But nothing hit him from the side. To clarify, it looked like somone was standing beside him while he was sitting in his chair and hit him in the shoulder with a board, only no one was standing beside him, and no one hit him with a board. He then got this look of momentary surprise followed by a look of satisfaction, and looked down at his hands in a kind of smiling amazement while wriggling his fingers as if checking with satisfaction that everything worked okay.

I’m not going to tell you what this means, Wilson. I think I know what it means. OG thinks he knows what it means. You’re just going to have to figure it out for yourself. But from then on OG had very little doubt about who he was talking to.

So he asked Sam what he was doing here. Sam said that he was just helping OG get to where he was going. This also struck OG as obscure. Samuel the dude from Mexico City could very well be looking after a wayward nut job. But if that were the case, wouldn’t he have just taken OG back to his Airbnb or something? But now Samael the demon king, what would that guy mean by helping by helping OG get to where he was going? And of course Samael the demon king would play the angel as long as he could. And I will tell you this, Wilson, if there is anything I know about OG, the guy will stay confused for as long as he possibly can. So he asked Sam, “where am I going?”

Sam replied, “what do you want?”

OG didn’t take long to respond: “I want to alter material reality. Alter my body into something different and perfect.” Remember my book, Wilson? Remember all those hours spent trying to alter my body? I guess some people are a lot alike. And some things don’t change.

“Why do you want to do that? A lot of people want that. It doesn’t happen.”

“I want that because that will finally show everybody the nature of things. I will be able to show people things and convince them of things,” OG offered in retort. Our OG is turning out to be quite the little philosopher for a guy in some sort of mind warp after having a couple of beers in a bar on a beach in Puerto Vallarta.

“So many people want that. Transsexuals, anorexics, old people, deformed people, so many people want that. What makes you think you’re different from them?” replied the fallen angel from Mexico City.

“Because I am pleading to God. Those people you mentioned, they don’t really beg to God to do it in order to honor God with it.”

That’s when the Sam said something that chilled OG to his bones: “Oh, but they do…”

OG thought about all of those centuries of people pleading with God to alter their bodies. Men who want to be women and vice versa, old who want to be young, people without arms and legs. They want that because Satan gives them those urges for things they can’t have, and they beg and plead and cry and stay awake at night shedding tears for all the years of their lives. And yes, a number of them beg and plead to God, and it doesn’t happen. And Satan is there with them, pushing them on and pushing them on instead of helping them to accept what they cannot change. And there was OG talking to the guy. Or someone he thought was the guy.

“Sorry, it can’t be done. We gave you your pension. That’s enough,” was Sam’s cap on the end of that request. The statement provoked OG in a number of ways. First, he hadn’t mentioned the horrible but grand and miraculous way he got his retirement pension, or even that he had a retirement pension. Sam knew things that Samuel couldn’t know, but only Samael could know. Second, he wasn’t quite sure if Sam was saying they were unwilling to alter reality for OG, or if demons were simply unable. Wilson, I think OG may have discovered a hard limit to Samael’s power. There is no limit to his ability to deceive. He can even alter perception. Cause hallucinations even. Maybe mass hallucinations even. But he just can’t alter material reality.

“You’re not going to want me to put you in some other body without a dick, anyway, added Sam.” Was he trying to make some kind of gay sex reference?

OG answered back, “I wouldn’t have a problem with that. They don’t have dicks in Mexico City.” He was speaking metaphorically, as if Sam were a demon, and Mexico City were the netherworld from which he came. Demons, while we address them with the male pronoun and consider them males, have neither penises nor Y chromosomes. No one should have understood this reference that OG made. It was a cryptic response he made as an answer to Sam’s strange comment about giving him a body without a penis.

“Well, yeah, they don’t,” responded Sam. As if he understood perfectly that not having dicks in Mexico City was a reference to spirits not having genitals.

Then Sam said, “God made the world.”

OG responded, when God made the world, it was perfect. Our world is fallen. Satan made the world fall.”

Sam didn’t respond to that. Now think, Wilson. There is a lot of meaning in these words. Satan thinks God is another guy, like him. And he is having an argument with that guy. God told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They told him that God told them not to do that, and that they would die when they did. He told them God was wrong. I think he actually believed that God was wrong. And they ate, and they did not die physically. They did not cease to exist. Then God comes along and curses them, their world, and the Snake that Satan was using to talk to them. So to Satan, it looks like God told them they would die, and God was wrong, and God cursed everyone as a form of vengeance because he was wrong, and therefore God is responsible for creating this messed up world. And not only that, but for Satan to be in a position to be forced to talk to Eve in a dream through a snake, God would have had to have been cursing him for a long time already, and in a lot of ways. He had already been cast from heaven, apparently. And he would have already been stuck in the outer darkness for a while. So Satan really blames God for all of everyone’s difficulties. He didn’t think that maybe God meant something else when he said that they would die. Death is a process. Maybe that was the say they would begin to die. Maybe the day was a little longer than 24 hours. Maybe he was referring to a different kind of death. Maybe it was the death of someone’s unity with God. There were a variety of ways to think that God would not have been wrong. But that’s not how Satan saw things.

“Can I ask you why you’re doing this?” asked Sam.

“I already said, nothing else is going to change anything.”

“You’re loving,” said Sam.

Now Wilson, I don’t know too many people who would call OG loving. He can be quite brutal with people, and has been so absorbed in his own issues for so long that he doesn’t relate to much anybody anymore. He is rather self-absorbed. These aren’t the traits that we usually associate with loving people. This is why this statement from. Samael is so shocking. Samael couldn’t seem to wrap his head around why OG would be here at this crossroad bartering for the ability to alter reality because he could see that OG was loving, and loving people didn’t do the kind of things that OG did, and they didn’t have the kinds of goals that OG had. As a, rule, apparently.

OG replied, “I’m not very loving.”

“Oh, yes you are,” Sam replied. Then he said, “OG, let’s go for a walk. I am going to help you be someone else. It won’t be immediate. It will be a process. It will be a long walk. But we will get you there.”

So they went out for a walk. While they were walking, they didn’t do much talking. OG could feel various feelings in his body, as if things were changing, but he would look at himself, and everything was the same. They walked and walked, and then they finally got to a place where the Mexicans went to get ID cards. They call them the INE cards. For Instituto Nacional Electoral. The main form of ID people use in Mexico is their voter registration cards. Sam said to OG, “I have a friend here. She is trying to get one of these.”

OG was confused at this point. Samuel had a friend here, a woman, who needed an INE. And Samael, the demon king, was telling OG he could make him into someone else. He looked down at his body, and everything was the same. But he felt these urges still, nerves twitching in his body. This was not good. Then Sam said, “you can take his power.”

OG knew Samael was telling him that he could take God’s power, and this made him angry. He yelled at Sam and said, “why would any one want to do that!?! He is good! He didn’t do anything wrong! He doesn’t deserve to have anything taken away!” There were people around, and everyone was looking at them.

Sam tried to calm OG, bidding him to be quiet with a shush, and then in frustration began to insist, talking over OG forcefully, “Samael is God! Samael is God! Samael is God!”

But nothing was going to change OG’s perspective, and the whole thing was becoming an unmanageably bizarre spectacle, so Sam just said, “If you don’t want anything from me, and you hate me, then I think I am just going to leave,” said Sam.

OG replied, “I think that’s a good idea. But let me get your phone number.”

“Why would you want my phone number?” replied Sam.

“Because right now I am talking to spirits. But sometime I may want to talk to Samuel the guy from Mexico City.”

“Okay, then,” replied Sam, and he gave his phone number, and OG entered it into his phone.

Sam then walked away, and while he was walking, he said:

“Relax. Everything’s going to be okay!”
“You better be careful, don’t do the wrong thing!”
“Relax. Everything’s going to be okay!”
“You better be careful, don’t do the wrong thing!”
“Relax. Everything’s going to be okay!”
“You better be careful, don’t do the wrong thing!”
“Relax. Everything’s going to be okay!”
“You better be careful, don’t do the wrong thing!”
“Relax. Everything’s going to be okay!”
“You better be careful, don’t do the wrong thing!”

He kept saying this as he walked away, the sound of the chant getting softer as he distanced himself, until OG quit paying attention. He grabbed his phone and called an Über back to his folks’ place. He sat in the Über in a mindless state, just ready to get back to what passed for “home.” While sitting, he heard the sounds of electronics frying, and he looked down at his phone. It was completely dead. He couldn’t believe his bad luck. He wouldn’t be talking to Samuel after all. There would never be any connection between him and anything that happened that night.

It was eight in the morning when he got back to his folks’. I forgot to tell you as I was writing this out, but the whole event apparently took the entire night. The walk to the INE office was in the early morning. They were very calm and didn’t ask any questions about anything. He volunteered that he went out for a couple of beers, and he thought he might have gotten drugged. He hung out with a guy he met, and came home when he woke up. That was the story he told. But he had no memory of going to sleep or of waking up. Only the bizarre events that he described to me that I am telling you now. You are the first person to hear anything about this. Until now, the only people who have known anything about it are me and OG. Now you know, Wilson. Be careful who you tell. This is some crazy stuff.

I was writing you a while back about rock stars and movie stars who go out to a crossroads at night and talk with Papa Legba about making their dreams come true. I think everybody goes to these crossroads in their lives, though the crossroads look very different to different people in their different countries, with their different languages and different philosophies and cultures. I think this was a very unusual form of going to those crossroads. Neither I nor OG have any explanation for what happened. Was he drugged? Was he having a lucid dream? He had no memory of falling asleep or of waking up. Was it a schizophrenic episode? I’m sure many, many people would love to call it that. But even if that is a suitable explanation, the meaning of it isn’t just random craziness. OG was making some choices with his actions and interactions. Could it be that something did happen that defies our common understanding of what can happen in time and in space?

You’re going to have to decide for yourself about the mental details, the metaphysical details, and the overall framework of how you would like to describe this event. However, I think that it’s hard to deny that the underlying theme of this event is that a man went to the crossroads. Beyond that, Wilson, I only have a question for you. After going through an event like that, how can someone not see Satan as a personal being, a rebel angel at war with God? OG doesn’t really have much choice but to go with what he knows from this point forward, right? Anyone who is going to try to tell him otherwise is just going to be wrong, according to him. He has personal experience now. He has talked to the guy.

I may add or make a change here and there to this story as I edit it and maybe think of an event or two. I am giving you this event to the best of my memory as OG gave it to me to the best of his ability. But it has taken me so long to write this thing, and I have to cross the Red Sea tomorrow. Literally. From Nuweiba to Aqaba I go on a nine o’clock ferry. In Shah Allah. God willing.