I’m in Korea, Wilson. I’m staying here a week. I am thinking that’s going to be too long. The 34-hour trip wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I started off being crammed between a group of Germans at the back of the plane. Yeah, Wilson, it’s always Germans. They’re everywhere. Or girls named Ellie. I ran into an Austrian named Ellie with her husband at the Battuta Hostel in Amman, and then another one named Ellie at a Bible study with the Christians there. Or Italian girls living in the UK. I ran into two of those in Amman. One went to Jerash with me, and the other told me about Ketamine treatments for PTSD.
I was specifically situated between two beautiful German girls. Shortly after takeoff, the Germans all dispersed to the front of the plane, where there magically turned out to be a bunch of empty seats, so they could jovially play cards and enjoy themselves. Initially deflated that I was left to myself without the company of two lovely ladies, I quickly took the opportunity to sprawl out in my now empty row of seats and slept through the majority of the flight. God quite often doesn’t give you what you what you want, but rather what you need.
Upon landing, I took a taxi to the hostel I had reserved while waiting to change planes in Saudi Arabia. “The Dream Guest House.” That name has not been lost on me, Wilson.
I arrived late at night, and the next day, I decided to just do nothing but enjoy the food in my local neighborhood and walk around in order to ajust to the new temperature and the six-hour time difference. It was a very relaxing day full of surreal thoughts. On the one hand, just getting out of Amman made me feel like I was returning to the land of adulthood and sanity. Again I was by myself and in a rather calm mood. I ate a hot Korean breakfast, something I delight in. Korean food is one of my favorites. My head was still running in circles, still lost in thought, but I was much calmer than I had been bouncing off the walls of the rented apartment in Amman the Interzone. I went and got a Korean massage in the afternoon and noticed that my body was all sorts of out of whack. The masseuse was well-versed in the Chinese meridians and hit a variety of acupuncture points, and both of us could tell that I was completely out of balance. Too much yang up top, too much yin down below. Too much heat on the right, too much cold on the left. When she got to my feet, things got really bizarre. All sorts of pain and tickles from the points of my Kidney, Liver, and Stomach meridians. After the massage, though, I felt like a completely new man, and I vowed to get myself to a true Korean acupuncture and herbalist for some balancing therapy before I left the country. Then on the way out I passed an interesting sight. A detox center with the Hebrew word חיים (chaim) on the front of the building. Chaim means “life” in Hebrew. Yeah, detox, spiritual and physical, was going to be the theme of this place.
So okay, I was coming back to earth, but the little coincidences were still there. No big deal, though. At least until I got back to the hostel in the evening. Of course, being the genius I am, after getting the message from God about detoxing after the heavenly massage where I found myself to be utterly out of balance, I decided to stop off for some beer on the way back. Koreans have this thing about fried food and beer. It’s amazing. There are tons of little joints around the area. I drank nearly a pitcher and then woozed back to the Dream House. It was there that I was bowled over by another “coincidence.”
There were two girls in the waiting room. Disgusted by my solidude and emboldened by the beer, I struck up a conversation. One of the girls was a Canadian of Chinese descent in the area exploring Asia while on break from school. She had just completed her masters in biochemistry and was planning to start medical school for psychiatry. We had a good time talking about that, as I am an expert in psychiatry, though not as a doctor, but rather as a patient. I asked her if she knew about Carl Jung. She said she had heard of him but knew next to nothing about him. I’ll also note that she told me her name twice, but I still don’t remember it. Maybe on account of the beer. Or maybe from the depression that I had been experiencing in the Interzone. My memory has been spotty lately. I can remember events from my childhood with spectacular clarity, but what happened yesterday is often a mystery to me at this point.
The other girl was, you guessed it Wilson, Dutch. With golden blonde hair. She was just taking a tour of Korea from her home in the Netherlands and would be going back there in a few weeks. She would be taking a train to Busan in a couple of days. That also was funny, as there is a popular Korean zombie movie called Train to Busan. Zack Snyder came into my mind, as he basically started the whole zombie apocalypse craze with his remake of Dawn of the Dead at the beginning of his career, and wowed the critics with his Netflix film Army of the Dead after his crucifixion by Warner Brothers for rewriting the Bible in superhero form with his Justice League trilogy.
I did end up telling the girls just a wee bit about my Zack Snyder obsession when they asked me about my travels. I told them I was on my way to Los Angeles to attend a Snydercon on 28 April. I did not tell them that it was sold out and I did not have a ticket, however. That would have just been too stupid, Wilson. Don’t ever tell anyone that. Please. No one in their right mind would travel literally half way around the world from Amman, Jordan to Los Angeles, California, to meet a filmmaker they had been having fan ideations about at a fan convention that they aren’t going to be able to get into. To do such a thing would be the most self-destructive plea for failure that anyone could ever conceive of, right?
So the Dutch girl’s name I do remember: Leah. Princess Leia from Star Wars. Okay. I’m good with that. There is of course more I could say about the conversation, but I won’t bore you with the trivialities. I’ll just say that I told the Chinese girl that I would love to hang out with a psychiatrist, not out of any need for therapy, but because I would love to hang out with some people while in Korea after the bizarre solitude of the Interzone in Amman. I asked her to take my number and shoot me a WhatsApp. She thought that was cool. It was at that point, at the end of the conversation, that she told me she was actually checking out the next day. I playfully expressed dismay, adding that the WhatsApp wouldn’t be needed, I guessed. She promised me that she would text me, however, and off we all went to bed at about 11 PM.
Then in bed everything hit me. I was talking to an Asian girl. My X-23 is Asian. I was also talking to a Dutch girl. You know I have a long and tragic history with one of those, Wilson. I wrote a book about one of those. The Electrochemical Girl. What the hell is happening here at the Dream House?
Not only do these two girls parallel two girls important in my life, but it isn’t the first time on this journey that I have run into this. Rememeber my post about synchronicity in Rome? There I ran into a Dutch girl and her Asian friend. That Dutch girl had just completed her Bachelor’s in psychology and was preparing to start studying neuropsychology. This time it was the Asian girl who was going to be a psychiatrist. I mentioned to you that I was running into a ton of psychology people on my travels. Remember in my post on Tinder, I mentioned running into Mark, the professor of neuropsychology I met in one of the hostels. We also exchanged WhatsApp numbers, and that guy actually wrote me back, though basically to tell me that he had looked at my blog and determined that I was bipolar. Gotta love that, right, Wilson?
Anyway, back in Rome I gave the Dutch girl a link to my blog and told her that if she was interested in any of it, to shoot me a WhatsApp. She never did. Apparently guys do actually get back with you, but girls don’t. With this in mind, I was sure that the Asian girl I had given my number to would never send me the text that she said she would.
I was not willing for that to happen. These coincidences, Wilson, are getting so stark and obvious that they just can’t mean nothing. Either I am walking around in my own dream, a Dream House even, or God is showing me things that normal people just don’t get the chance to experience. Things with meaning.
So I vowed to get up early and just sit at the reception desk waiting for that chick to check out so I could demand, in a friendly way of course, that she shoot me a message, so I could show her some interesting things about psychology…or spirituality…
However, I woke up at 9. Late. I rushed down to the reception in yesterdays clothes, no shower or shave or anything, and have been sitting here writing, waiting to see her. It’s 1:30 PM now. I am thinking she left early. I am debating whether I should wait all day or accept that I missed her and pray that she actually does send me a text. At the very least I want to be able to demonstrate that this is really happening.
Carlos Castaneda was an author like me who wrote books about himself. I don’t want to make a practice of doing that, but he actually gained considerable notoriety doing so. He was an Anthropology professor in California who wrote a series of adventure novels about going down to do peyote with Yaqui shamen in the Mexican Sonoran desert. He claims his books are true stories, but they contain wild tales about shapeshifters and magic, and nobody thinks they are actually true. I don’t think they are actually true. He has some followers who actually believe him, though.
I’m getting to the point where the coincidences that I am describing on this trip, a trip that I am taking absolutely by myself, with no witnesses, are starting to get rather out of hand, and I can’t really have them corroborated. Where much of it is experienced through the internet, which hates me. In fact, I noticed a strange sign in attempt to my Microsoft account that I didn’t make. Remember Kennedy Phillips from the Stripper story? I did actually have her number, so if anyone wanted to call her to verify that strange story, I could prove she was real. Well, I found her to be deleted from my contacts. Now I did actually send her a text, and I had the text conversation, so I could re-add her number to contacts.
But that Duch girl with her Asian friend in Rome is gone. And this Asian girl with the Dutch girl here in Seoul is gone. Should I sit here all day in the hope that she just went out to do some things and then will come back to check out in the evening? She did say something about doing some shopping today. I suppose I will. I am basically positive that she won’t send me a text. If I miss her today, I will just have to pray she does.
Let me know if you think these coincidences are such that nobody would believe me if I told them, Wilson. Or if you think they are just coincidences, and that my making so much out of them will make people think I am just crazy. Remember, I am also trying to catalog the strange coincidences involved with my thoughts about the film director Zack Snyder. Basically, everything I see, everything I concentrate on, seems to be involving these coincidences, whether it’s Dutch girls and Asian girls, whether it’s girls named Ellie, Whether it’s tons of Italians living in the UK, whether it’s neuropsychologists and psychiatrists everywhere, whether it’s strange observations about my favorite film director, and the list just goes on, Wilson.
Am I dreaming in the Dream House? I personally think that God is proving to me the teleological nature of the universe. I’ve been preaching that opposed to the idea that we just make up the universe, I think that our selves and our world and our lives are a story written by God from the foundation of the world. And my life is turning out to be a story of my psychology. The Noah the Dutch Girl was a period of profound psychological trauma for me. Chloe the Asian girl is for me a replacement for important young women who I have lost – My step-daughter Veronica and Noah the Electrochemical Girl. And lately she has barely been talking to me, which calls me to go back home so I don’t lose her permanently.
I hope I’ll be able to figure out what it all means later, Wilson. Or you could give me your opinion. You always have all the answers. Yeah, it looks like I am just seeing my psychology in the world. But it’s just hard to explain that the visionary film director Zack Snyder called a Snydercon just after I had been bitching that we need one on social media. In general, it looks like Jung was right. I’m just seeing my psychology in the external world. But even if that is true, am I to make nothing of the fact that I am having conversations with Dutch and Asian girls that pop up in Rome and in Seoul? Am I just to make nothing of sharing a common plan for a Snydercon with Zack Snyder?
I’ll leave you with that for today, Wilson. I eagerly await your response.