The Jerash Girl

Greetings from Seoul, Wilson. I hope you’re doing well there on the beach. Sorry to hear your girlfriend broke up with you. If I were you, I would wait a while before dating. It can be a lot to deal with. I can’t say what I’ve been doing here is what you’d call dating, but there have been a few women along the way. Not here in Korea, mind you, beyond the short encounter I just described in my last post, but there were some interesting encounters with the ladies in Amman that were considerably more substantial. I’m going to tell you about one of them.

On the one hand, I’m trying to convince you to take your time before going out to look for another woman. It’s not easy for volley balls in this modern world to find the right partner. On the other, though, I want to finish the series of stories that I was hoping to tell you about when I started the one about Kennedy the stripper. I said that one was going to lead to an arc that would tie in to what I have going on now.

I’ll say I am skipping a post that I had intended to write. It was about a chick in Athens. Athens may have been the most otherworldly part of the whole trip around the world, and I am not sure I will ever write about it. But there was a chick there. An Asian chick. Yeah, X-23 is Asian. More coincidence. I know. Something happened with this Asian chick inِ Athens that just blew me away. But I think it would belabor the story to write about it, so it will be one of the many things that happened in Athens that I will just keep to myself.

So in Jordan there were four or five chicks that I interacted with that affected me. Most quite cursory, but impactful nonetheless. There was Katrina, the neuropsychology student I blogged about, I think here. She also shared a name with the Danish Katrine Winding from Athens. Again, let’s not talk about Athens, Wilson. What happens in Athens stays in Athens. Then there are the Italian UK chicks. Julia, the ketamine girl who talked to me about teleportation and told me she would marry me if it would help me get to where I was going, but who I couldn’t share a dinner with because she said I said pathetic things and told her she was hot. I’m really glad I got her number, though. I just heard from her now that she is back in the UK. That warmed my heart.

Then there was Luna, the other Italian chick living the UK. Oddly enough, she didn’t study neuropsychology. Marketing was her thing. She is apparently looking for orcas to swim with. Not dolphins, Wilson. Orcas. She’s a scorpio, if that explains anything to you.

So yeah, that’s three neuropsychologists, the Dutch chick in Rome, Katrina the Canadian, and Mark the professor, plus the Chinese Canadian girl going to med school for psychiatry I met here in Korea. Only 35% of the people I talked to on this trip are advanced mental health professionals, apparently.

While my interaction with Julia was definitely more strange than the more casual ones, I think the strangest person I ran into among this cavalcade of comedic characters was Eva. She was the only chick from those I met in Amman who was my age. She was wealthy and hurting from divorce. The thing that struck me about her was her absolute inconsistency of behavior. She would often berate me with such relentlessness that I couldn’t help but laugh. I didn’t know if she was being serious or not. It was like a joke in a dream. Then she would turn around and be super kind. She would change her views on a dime. I remember using OG’s Jesus test on her, and she initially responded that she had no belief in him whatsoever. She only believed in herself. A few days later, she was telling me Jesus was her buddy. I think she would say anything. I think she didn’t care about the truth. At times when I was with her it would be like my prophet sight was kicked on all day. Not just for short moments like usual. I thought I might be talking to a demon at times. At other times I thought I must be dreaming. That’s how strange she was.

So there are the two Italians in the UK, plus another UK expatriate, this time an Indian. That’s the girl I want to tell you about with this post.

Yeah, unfortunately, this UK chick wasn’t Italian. But she wasn’t exactly brit. As stated, her family was from India. After everything with her was said and done, I told her I would be writing a blog post about her, but insodoing I promised her that I would not use her name or any picture of her to invade her privacy or get revenge. The assurance that I would not take revenge on her was because the encounter ended badly.  I don’t want you think she wasn’t real, though, so for the image for this post, I did the same thing I did with Liat. I hope you like the picture, Wilson. It’s one of us together in the Jordanian town of Jerash. If you want to know, she looked like Amia Miley, but with more meat on her bones. Gorgeously thick, black hair.

I first saw her from the other end of a hall. At the Battuta Hostel. She had just come out of her room rather early in the morning, and I had just come downstairs from having breakfast on the terrace. She was looking to see if anyone was going to Jerash that day. That was one of the only places in the country I hadn’t been. There was apparently some big Roman ruin there that people often went to see. It was one of the Jordanian tourist sites. On the hostel’s WhatsApp group you’d see almost every day people looking for groups to go to Petra, Wadi Rum, Aqaba, etc. She was apparently running a little late, and everyone going to Jerash that day had already taken off. I offered to go with her.

She said that she wanted to go see the Roman theater in the city and check out Rainbow street and the market district, and maybe Jerash if we had time. We did all those things. Of course we got to know each other. She was an actuary. I told her my story about the bicycle trip and trying to get into Israel and explained that I lived on a pension. From there, the conversation turned toward how expensive life in London was. This gave me a certain impression.

Frequently I run into a lot of younger female travelers who are living dime by dime, working here and there to save some money to travel to the next town, or who saved all kinds of money to be able to take a trip to one of the places I happened to be in, and when I say I don’t work and do this sort of thing more or less permanently, they tend to warm up to me quite a bit. Nevermind that all I want to do is freaking get to where the hell I am trying to go and settle and start a purposeful life. Everybody else is just trying to get out of wherever they are and go be “free,” whatever in the world that means.

So I was starting to pick up that she was signaling some kind of interest. However, I’ve often chastized both myself and others for reducing male/female connection to romantic prospects. It flatters me quite frequently to think girls I meet who are positive toward me are into me romantically, but also disappoints me because I am just not into picking up this or that chick while on travels. That is, if any chick is going to tag along with me, she is going to have to accept the mad prophet mission and all that, so I fear I am going to be discarded when I am found to be unsuitable. Then there is the fact that I think to myself that I am just reading into things, and I wish I could just accept a chick telling me she was short on cash without interpreting it as a sign that she wanted me to sugardaddy her around the planet.

At one point the subject of religion did come up, and I told her what I could about the whole converting to Judaism thing, and ancillary topics of religion came up with that. Nothing too deep, but a little philosophizing. Not long after she did say under her breath, seemingly with a little frustration, that we were just too different, at which I admonished her not to judge too quickly. I wasn’t like most religious people. After all, she had not read in my book about the meth benders in Scottsdale, Arizona, or the hookers in Mexico. Her comment that we were just too different did give me the idea that she was in fact checking me out for romance, though.

While telling me about her life in London, not only did we talk about money and her job and a bit about her social life, but she said a couple of other interesting things. While talking about her job, she mentioned that her boss got upset with her for being too drunk at work. My response was muted.

Not many breaths later, she mentioned that at a party she decided to take off her clothes and swim naked in the pool with everyone around, and that seemed to motivate others at the party to take off their clothes and something of an orgy started. She spoke of it like, “oops, not sure how comfortable I was about the orgy.” As if she were the holy one in the group, after skinny dipping in front of a party full of people, of course.

Finally, she told me a story about how a wealthy guy she knew had her and a friend over, and the lot of them got naked in a hottub at his place with the guy’s 18 year old son DJing inside the apartment. The guy’s Brazilian wife showed up, and in typical fiery latina fashion, proceded to tear into her husband, beating him with a broom or something and bringing the entire party to a crashing halt.

From my perspective, from the perspective of the poor old rich guy, it was a familiar tale of a sexy night with a couple of vixens thwarted. To her, the most interesting part of the evening was the calamitous end with the angry wife. “That’s what made it funny!” she said to me. I had no comment.

All in all, I added it to the complaints about money as an appeal to her attractiveness. That is, “I may not have money, but if you take me along, you’ll have a sexy little sable at your side to get into adventures with.” In other words, a temptation to dissuade me from my interminable mission to get to Israel. However, I liked the chick. I am always in the mood for the companionship of a lovely woman such as her, and I am never at a loss for thinking with my dick. So I kept that romantic chemistry kind of energy with me for the remainder of the day. At least until the end. But we will get to that, Wilson.

So off we went to Jerash. The taxi driver told us the city was the city of love in Jordan. When we got there, after looking at the streets through the window of the taxi, we joked that it wasn’t quite Venice. Rather than walk the streets looking for an amenable restaurant as I think we both wanted to do, the cabby sent us straight to the restaurant in front of the site of the ruins. It also was hardly romantic. Plastic red and white checker table cloths and a cold buffet with no selection. I was disappointed not to be able to treat my ladyfriend to some atmospheric Middle Eastern cuisine.

The ruins were indeed rather spectacular, though, Wilson. As cool as anything I saw in Greece, actually. We did get some great pictures. Upon entering, a million tour guides swarmed us offering to sell us their services. She said she didn’t know anything about any of this stuff and never remembered anything she heard on those tours. I told her for my part that I already knew everything that I would remember about the place, and that I was practicing to be a Jew, and the only part of that I was any good at was not wanting to spend money needlessly. She didn’t get the joke, so I had to explain that being a person who had a lot of money but didn’t want to spend it was a negative stereotype for Jews, and I supposed that since I was going to be one, I could make negative jokes about my own race. Sort of like how black people get to say “nigger,” but nobody else does. That perk is kind of cool, Wilson. It’s a strong motivator to go through with the conversion, even if nothing else does.

Now at some point in the day, I had vowed to take her to a proper drink after the disappinting lunch. So back in Amman after out tour of the ruins I took her to Dali, a hangout that I had particularly come to enjoy. It had a western and European feel. The Arab world has a truly exotic feel to it, Wilson, but I was really coming to miss the beauty of Europe and America. It’s in my blood. The fact that you find places like this in the midst of streets walked by bedouins wearing head dresses and man dresses as if they’ve just tied their camels to posts at the curb gives Amman a particular charm, however.

My companion was rather frugal with the drinks when we got there, however. I am guessing she was guarded against getting tanked up and taken to bed. I just naturally assumed this, however, given that she had presented herself as reather bed-ready with her talk of sexy skinny dipping swimming parties and hot tub brawls with angry Brazilian wives and getting drunk at work and whatnot.

I, however, spared nothing. I threw back more than a few glasses of red wine. Of course it wasn’t long before I started talking about sex. After all, she had advertized herself as a harbinger of orgies. We had established earlier that I was religious, but she was not. So if there was going to be something interesting about the day, it might as well involve a lack of holiness. I began to think of how I used to meet people back when I was young. Back when I was alive. Back when everything hadn’t cauterized itself into false and superficial interactions wrapped around cacophonic condemnation of whatever the hell the news media tells us to be offended about.

I asked her up front to tell me a secret sexual desire of hers. Again, back in high school, this would have had the girls piqued. Only in the 21st century New Matriarchy is this sort of thing over the line. However, she did bite. Her answer was tepid.

That is, she confessed to an utterly tame perversion. I won’t tell you what it was out of respect for her privacy. I took in the information and offered as my retort a desire of my own, in exactly the same category as hers, but specifically one order of magnitude more perverse. Yes, Wilson, porn is a strange mistress. When I want to dip into that hat, I can pull out just about whatever I want.

She wasn’t impressed. Now she was going to play the skinnydipping Brazilian wife rousing nun. Her response was, “I’m not going to let you turn me out.” For those who don’t know the lingo, that meant that she wasn’t going to let me turn her into a prostitute. So all of the sudden, we were back in holy roller land. The secular chick who was getting in trouble for getting drunk at work was on the defensive from the tztiztit-wearing meth monk on a mission to save Israel from the antichrist because he was just too perverse.

Yet I say, Wilson, her concern was both common and real. Remember me asking Kennedy how she got into stripping? The crazy ex-boyfriend. To be frank, one of the reasons that I haven’t traveled further down more of the dark roads of crazy sex was because I didn’t want to take anyone else into darkness with me. So while I’m a bit condemnatory of her switching gears, I totally get it. She gave me a tame kink, and when I gave her a significantly less tame one, she got addled. I respect that, Wilson. So while I may see myself the victim of her skinny dipping temptation, I understand that my portrait of perversion was something I should respect her rejection of. I’m glad she did that.

She turned the conversation to another subject. She had heard me tell of my attempt to enter the holy land, so she asked about it. Definintely having traveled more than far down the road of warm drunkenness at that point, I felt no inclination to be coy about anything whatsoever, so I told her in no uncertain terms at all that I was going to Israel to save that country from the wiles of the Devil in human form. This definitely raised her eye a bit. Of course the whole story sounded absolutely megalomaniacal. And I was glad it did.

Her response was emphatic, but not unanticipated. With eyes wide as she slapped her hands on her knees, she exclaimed, “How can you have such an idea! You’re NOTHING!” I am not unused to the universe telling me that I am nothing, Wilson. That’s all she ever has to say. I refuse to believe her. I don’t work for her. I work for someone higher.

I told her, “SOMEBODY has to do it. And from the looks of things, if I don’t,nobody will.

She asked me, “and what happens if you don’t get in?” I told her that would mean that I failed. In the moment she asked me that, I thought of an interview that a news reporter had with Donald Trump. It was during his election campaign against Hillary Clinton. He was all blustering and bloviating like he always does about winning and doing great and everything, even though he was over ten points down in the polls, and the reporter asked him, “and what if you don’t win?” He said in response, “then the whole thing will have been a waste of time.”

I’m writing this to you from Korea, Wilson. I’ve already figured out that I am not getting into Israel. At least today. Maybe never. But there is something beautiful in that statement from Trump. He won that election in 2016, even though he shouldn’t have. It was only by a freaking miracle that Comey opened that investigation into Hillary right before election day. That’s the only reason he won. And four years later, he lost to a bunch of COVID nonsense that wasn’t even real. So he won when he should have lost, and he lost when he should have won. But that wasn’t important. He was going for it with everything he had. And if he didn’t get it, and when he didn’t get it, he admitted, “I lost.” That takes balls. He wasn’t going to lie to himself or anybody else. That’s what I was going to tell this chick.

She then asked me: “so what are you going to do if you don’t get in?”

I responded, “Well, if I don’t get in to Israel, I think I’m going to shoot porn.”

She burst out into laughter. I do have to admit, it was an interesting contrast. Either go as a holy prophet to the holy land and protect the holy nation against unholy enemies…or go shoot porn.

Now that really wasn’t the main reason I would go to Los Angeles after my trip to Israel that didn’t happen. I’ve been blogging to you, Wilson, that I would go back there and see what my beit din had to say about everything and that I was going back to explore the whole idea that the Hollywood film director Zack Snyder accidentally wrote the central message of the bible in superhero form, and to see if I had any sort of connection with this guy from the perspective of Jungian synchronicity that was not entirely unlike the connection that I felt with Miss Noah van Ouwerkerk that I was never able to verify.

I’ve thought at length why I made that statement to her about shooting porn. In the moment, I can only say that I made that statement after guzzling a half-dozen glasses of wine. But usually in situations like that there is something deeper at work. I can only analyze in restrospect what moved me to say it. Some interesting things come to mind.

The main one is just throwing my hands up to God. That is, I have denied myself to a degree that I have not seen in many others concerning service to God. My parents bought a penthouse apartment in Guadalajara to live in just as I had made the commitment to go to Israel. I broke up with the best girlfriend I had in decades, perhaps in my life, in order to go to Israel. I haven’t found another. I have lived out of a backpack for half a year. Seriously, Wilson, I have had one freaking pair of pants for nearly a year. Everything I own fits in a bag the size of a woman’s purse. I have been tramping from hostel to hostel, going insane in lonely hotel rooms, foregoing the affection of numerous lovely ladies who would adore being taken across the planet by me, in order to accomplish this mission to Israel. As of today, God doesn’t really look like he gives terribly much of a damn about that. And if he doesn’t care a whit, why should I?

There is also another concept to be aware of here, though. There is the issue of truth vs. kindness. On the one hand, the message of the bible is that you should be following the King of the angels, the Messiah, because his story is the one that is being written with actual history. He is coming. Things are going to happen. You should get with that program. On the other hand, though, the central message is that love is what it’s all about. The goal is to be kind to your neighbor.

Well, if it’s just a matter of being nice, why can’t you do that on a porn set? Nobody is perfect anyway. Nobody can be. So we should just be nice to each other within whatever context we find ourselves to be in? And again, if that’s just the goal, to be nice, then let’s go to the pornstars and be nice.

There is just one final thing to consider in this, though. There is the issue of Kennedy the stripper. And the girl in Athens that I can’t tell you about. Those people with demons in their souls could see in their hearts that there was something different about me. I don’t know if you have, Wilson. But I know my own mother hasn’t. The daughter who is my seed hasn’t. But Kennedy saw it. That’s why she broke into tears in my arms.

So there is this question I have. Am I a holy man or not? I’ve just had my face dropkicked out of the Middle East by everyone I called in Israel. And even by a freaking dating app. I’ve lost my mind trying to do this sacred mission thing. I am wondering why that has happened. I’d like God to give me an answer. So, if I land in Los Angeles and hit up all the porn studios asking to hold the lights while they do a shoot, will they welcome me with open arms? Or will they all run to the nearest windows to plunge themselves to bloody deaths on the streets below because they have come into contact with a man of God?

Now when I am in Los Angeles, as of the moment of this writing I tell you that my intent is to go visit the rabbis of my beit din and ask them about a way ahead and to see what the hell I can make of this magical mystery connection I have been feeling with Visionary Film Director Zack Snyder and the innate biblical messages of the three films of his superhero film trilogy. But, you know Wilson, I have to confess that there is just this small chance I might visit a porn studio and see how they react to this fallen monk who failed in his divine mission to the holy land.

But all of this was just too much to get into with her, I suppose. I didn’t really have too much of a grasp of it myself in the moment, I confess. So I just told her that the world was coming to an end, and I was going to herald this coming end. That sobered her up. She looked at me in a sudden childlike ernest. She told me, “but the world can’t end.” Now in restroespect, Wilson, I wish I had told her that what we think of as the end of the world is just a momentary hiccup, a few battles, before a glorious time. I’ve written about that. People take this term “armageddon” as a horrific end, but it is actually just the start of the messianic kingdom. The days where the lamb lays with the lion. But I didn’t do that. I just said, “the world certainly can end, and it most certainly will. Soon.”

Oops. That negative characterization sobered her up considerably. She looked down and to the side, as if possessed by an incrutable energy. Right then and there she told me that she said she was going to go. I looked in astonishment. I wasn’t about to stop her. I was flabbergasted at her resolution, looking at her with amazement. My only words to her were, “I hope you have a nice trip home.”

She stood and walked out, Wilson. And I finished the last couple of swallows of my wine before I did the same. We went back to the same hostel separately. I didn’t see her again in the flesh. She was of one spirit. I was of another. Or so it seemed at the moment.

I did get her Instagram earlier in the day, and after she left I sent some messages. She responded to me that I was “creepy.” That’s the common fallback the ladies have, and my having recounted a tale of torrid kinkiness left me vulnerable to it. There she will be to come out of the woodwork sometime and call me a hypocrite, a pervy religious guy or something. That’s usually how it works.

Sex seems to always be part of the downfall. Best just to just put it on the back burner.