Okay. The Wilson Saga is over. It ended with Take Shelter. I’m actually renaming the whole thing Adventures in the Bardo Thodol.
If we compare my writings about my own personal journey to the original Star Wars trilogy, my book Electrochemical Girl is like Episode IV. Everything is introduced, and the story gets set in motion.
Electrochemical Girl is a pretty potent story in its own right, if you ask me, but Adventures in the Bardo is like Episode V Empire Strikes Back. It’s where things get heavy and dark. It doesn’t have a happy end. It just points to a future story. Will there be a Return of the Jedi For me? Will there be a triumphant victory? We will see what the future holds. One thing is for sure, though, if there is, it certainly isn’t going to be written real time on a blog. The explanation for that decision will be found below.
I’d actually committed to not really writing much in 2024. I am kind of copying a productivity cycle I’ve observed in music groups. When a band is new, they put out albums constantly to build their song repertoire while touring what they’ve written. But over time they will take a year to make a record, then they will take the following year to tour it. Still later in their careers, they will make an album, then they will tour the album, then they will take a year off to go live life and gain experiences for when they go back to the studio for the next record. Now my life’s circumstances have prevented me from promoting what I’ve done (touring my album, so to speak), but I’m still taking this year to live life and get ready for the next record.
I’m getting signals from on high, though, that have me thinking I need to do some writing. I’ll tell you how those rolled out. There’s Zack. There’s smiley faces. There’s Gal. There’s peacocks. And then there’s some stuff from my personal life. I’ll try to go through these below, starting with Zack.
So you know I have this problem with electronics. Currently things with that aren’t like I’ve been writing about in the past, but they’re still weird. For example, in my life, in my reality, if I send an e-mail, nobody sees it. It goes straight to junk or something. If I send a text, people rarely respond. Females almost never do. I could go on and on about how electronic stuff just doesn’t work for me. I’m planning my next bike trip to go to another city in order to take care of something that anyone else would just take care of online. I’ve tried several times over the course of a month and a half, and it just isn’t happening. I am going to have to go there and take care of my business.
However, at the beginning of April I got an invitation by e-mail to attend an event that I did not request. The guy who can never get an e-mail to go through got an e-mail invitation that he did not seek. This is the opposite of my general e-mail experience. Kinda spooky. The event was a limited screening of a Zack Snyder movie.
In LA there are a lot of advanced screenings of movies. Critic screenings, audience screenings, etc. Now for a movie to be eligible to be shown at certain festivals, and for it to be eligible to win awards such as Oscars and Saturns and all, they have to have been shown in a theatrical release on a big screen. This has been an issue for streaming services like Max and Netflix, which are known to throw hundreds of millions of dollars into their productions just like the theater studios do, so a new type of screening has been popping up over the last few years where a streaming studio will show its movies at some theaters in LA and New York and such in order to obtain that eligibility. Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon movies are a 180 million dollar studio production in just such a predicament.
Out of the blue I got an e-mail saying that I had been invited to a local screening of the second of the Rebel Moon movies, the Scargiver. I accepted the invitation and went. I didn’t even know that this type of screening was going on, and I didn’t know this particular screening was going to happen. I just got a mail saying I was invited. Spooky, I know.
So I went.
There’s the Boss (that’s what us fanbois call him). Right there with his wife Deborah. דבורה. Dvorah. The bee. The honey bearer. She can cause you unbelievable pain, but it kills her to do it. Works well with others. Cool name.
I’ll say that God made two things to demonstrate to the creation the summa of conceivable perfection and bliss. The first is of course heaven, the supernal realm where the angels abide. The second is chicks in boots. I hope that guy knows how blessed he is. I think he does.
Now if you remember from Adventures in the Bardo Thodol, I discontinued my trip to Israel to go to a Snydercon for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention on April 28th, 2023. I landed in Los Angeles on April 21st. 4/21. That was the first of a series of Jungian synchronistic events that would dominate my 2023. Zack has this thing about the number 214. I have no idea where he picked up an interest in it or what it means to him, but he loves 214, and I went to go see him on 4/21. I missed him at that Snydercon. However, I randomly get invited to this screening. It’s on April 11th. 4/11. And this isn’t just a screening, but there is a panel with Q&A and everything. Almost like a kind of Snydercon. So 355 days after I miss a Snydercon, I get invited by who knows what to go to a Snydercon. Heaven smiled on me. I had a blast.
The release of those movies hit me in a lot of places. The first one was titled Child of Fire. Yup, that’s me. The second was called the Scargiver. That’s what I need to be. Yeah, I saw a lot in those movies, just like in the Justice League movies. I don’t know if I’ll find occasion to totally dig into them, but I’ll comment here and there. Needless to say, the whole episode was quite impactful, and I was dead set on writing about things pertaining to them, but I just couldn’t get to a place to do it. I was still pretty wrecked, and I had been since I left LA in December.
Basically, if I am going to borrow some Hollywood imagery, I got to a point where I threw the clapper at the star, told the director to fuck himself, walked through the exit door while flipping the bird at the Almighty God, farted, and slammed the door behind me as I walked off set. There is a headline from the Babylon Bee that describes my sentiment exactly.
I’d learned in my time in the Army that the most precious of skills mastered by the best of military commanders is the proper resourcing, preparation, and enabling of subordinate echelons. I just didn’t see that happening at that time, and I was mad at my creator. I’d decided that I just wasn’t going to do anything until I was ready. Until I was properly resourced and enabled. So while the movies and the screenings were a big deal for me, I ultimately didn’t get to writing.
More synchronistic events kept happening, though. Everywhere I went I saw smiley faces. Smiley faces are a thing for me. They have been ever since my days in the Interzone. That’s what I call Amman, Jordan. It’s a reference to William Burroughs writing The Naked Lunch.
There’s this verse in the Bible, I think it’s in Ezekiel. I need to find it at some point. But it’s basically something like God saying, “I am the verdant tree growing in the dry desert.” Like, “I am that thing that’s out of place. The thing that shouldn’t be there.”
Well, I was in Jordan, unable to cross the border into Israel. All the things I was trying to do weren’t working out, and I was succumbing to depression, basically unable to do a damned thing at all. That’s when I saw something weird on the street that I was able to get a picture of.
Not a whole lot of western clothing was to be found in this section of the eastern old city. But this chick in the photo had a shirt that said, “Just do it for yourself.” Like, if you’re not going to do it for God, if you’re not going to get out of bed for the mission, if you’re not going to keep going for your fellow man, well, just do it for your fucking self. And right there on her shirt next to the slogan was a smiley face. The only one I ever saw in that country.
That’s when I became a Watchman. You can take a look at an old post of mine called The Faith of a Centurion to see why. The blood splashed smiley face is from a graphic novel that became a Zack Snyder movie. It’s been one of my symbols for a while. My Facebook page:
Okay, so just keep in mind, the smiley face, particularly with the blood spatter, is an important symbol for me. Now after the Scargiver screening, when I was having trouble motivating myself to write, as I had committed to laying down the pen for a long, long time, I started seeing smiley faces everywhere. I mean EVERYWHERE. I was only able to get pictures of a few of them. Have a gander.
I forgot the name of the above cafe in Palos Verdes where I go riding every week. And that smiley face was right next to another item on that counter that struck me.
These “Orthodox Chews” were sitting right there next to that smiley face from the picture just above. This was a Jewish cafe that put a smiley face right next to their Jewish candy. Basically, I was getting hit with the Watchman urge.
Now I know seeing smiley faces everywhere isn’t really all that much. I have this condition called apophenia. It’s actually one of the signs of onset schizophrenia. No worries, though, I have never advanced to that stage, and I still function fine. Back in 2020 and 2021 the condition was quite fascinating and actually rather useful, such that I dubbed it my “prophet sight” in those earlier posts. I saw a lot of really fascinating connections that proved to have interesting relevance to my life.
But seeing a certain symbol everywhere is one of the less glorious manifestations of the condition. You can look at my older posts to see some really bizarre and interesting expressions of it. But we all know those guys who smoke too much weed and get paranoid and every single car with an antenna is some kind of CIA surveillance vehicle or something. That is, apohenia can turn up in a variety of forms in very interesting ways. The series The Queen’s Gambit actually makes reference to it, like it’s a kind of gift or something. But when a particular theme takes over your attention span, that’s one of the expressions of apophenia that is pretty easy to explain with a psychological descriptive model. It’s your unconscious mind jumping out at you. Still, though, why was my unconscious screaming this at me? Am I just crazy? Or had God laid something on my heart that was bubbling up in the form of smiley faces?
I’ll take a second to add that apophenia is more than people think. Just a couple of weeks ago I was at a study at my synagogue. We were studying a kabbalistic work called Tiferet Shlomo. In the book that guy was doing all kinds of gematria, number and letter pemutations, finding the letters of one word embedded within the letters of another word and building a thought process out of the connection between those two words, connecting verses and ideas that utilized those two words that were not connected by logic or narrative, but rather only that one word contained the letters of the other. That kind of thing is the bedrock of a whole realm of kabbalistic thinking. It’s also pure apophenia. So if I’m just a schizo, so are pretty much all the great minds of Jewish esoterica.
All said, though, even this droning incessant call to the destiny of a Watchman in the form of smiley faces at the bottom of every drinking glass in Los Angeles was not enough to get me to do anything. I’d walked off set. I wasn’t going to budge until I was properly resourced and enabled by my commander.
Now let’s talk peacocks. Almost every week I try to ride my bike down in Palos Verdes with some guys from my riding club. It’s a pretty area with some good hills to climb and some great sweeping high speed descents with spectacular views of incredible houses and, of course, the Pacific Ocean. These guys know all the cool areas to take people to for some great pictures and views. There’s El Cero. There’s what they call “lover’s lane.” There’s also this place that the ride leader calls “peacock.”
Apparently, the laws of Palos Verdes don’t let the locals harm or interfere with the environment of exotic birds in the area, and that includes peacocks. At some point a bunch of peacocks migrated into the neighborhood, and the residents aren’t allowed to do anything about it, so you have this picturesque residential area that is just teeming with peacocks, and we get a chance to see some when we ride through there every other ride or two. Below is a video of us showing them to a chick who signed on for a ride back in April.
Okay, so on the same day as a ride where I saw a bunch of peacocks, I went home to see another movie that has become an important one for me. Heart of Stone starring The Lady, Gal Gadot. That’s my nickname for her. Zack is the Boss. All the hardcore fans call him that. Gal is the Lady. That’s unique to me.
It comes from an occasion where I was arguing gender issues with some misandrist Bolsheviks on the Reddit. I quipped at one point that Gal Gadot could own me as a gladiator servant warrior protector if she so chose. I was making the point that a man can take a position of subordination to a woman without his masculinity being in any way impugned or without his fundamental equality to her as a human being threatened, but for some reason thinking a woman could do something similar is considered a mortal sin in certain circles.
I can see an interesting conversation coming from the whole episode:
Gal: It looks like I got this gladiator knight guy out in East Hollywood by Glendale.
Patty: No kidding? Awesome!
Gal: Well, I dunno. This one kinda sucks.
Kristen: Oh no! What's wrong with him?
Gal: Well, he's scared of little girls.
Patty: Oh no! Can you take him back? Exchange him for another one?
Gal: This one is definitely out of warranty.
Kristen: Well, wasn't Yaron looking for a valet? You have to be at least sixteen to drive.
Patty: Parents take their kids to events with valets, Kristen.
Kristen: Oh yeah.
Gal: I mean, all he does is sit in his apartment trying to reclaim a lost sense of rationality and adulthood.
Patty: Well, I mean, if he's not hurting anybody, you don't have to tell anyone about him. He can just keep on with all that.
Gal: Thank God.
But I digress. We are talking peacocks. So just after seeing a flock of peacocks earlier in the day in Palos Verdes, I’m watching this movie about a superspy, and at one point when she is getting a tour of the new spy base, a freaking peacock walks across the set. Gal says, “hi.” The guide says, “came with the house.” And that’s it. Nothing else came of it. I have yet to figure out how that peacock had anything to do with the movie.
I can just see the director coaching actors and crew: “guys. I need your focus on this scene. The movie. The theme. The deeper meaning. All the plot threads and arcs, they all depend on this peacock. It’s crucial!” I mean, was this scene something he added? Or was it in the script?
I can see the screenwriter despondent during the writing process. It’s just not flowing. He calls his mom. “Mom, nobody is going to buy this script. This spy movie. It’s missing something. I can’t pin it down.” To which mom responds, “Greg. I know what it needs. Put a peacock in it. Every number one spy movie has a peacock in it somewhere. They can’t not make this into a movie if you include a peacock.”
So yeah. Seeing a billion smiley faces everywhere, that’s a pretty common misdirection of attention that paranoids and ADHD people see here and there. Not really anything too intense. But what in the flying flip of a freak was that peacock doing in that movie? And why did I see it just after seeing a bunch of peacocks earlier in the day? That’s the green tree in the dry ground. The thing that isn’t supposed to be there.
When the laws of probability go out the window, God is talking. But I was mad at God. And, well, okay. Getting invited to a Zack function that I didn’t go looking for. Smiley faces everywhere. Watchmen. Zack Snyder movie. Gal Gadot. My link between the Justice League and Israel. Peacocks. Something was being said with all this. But what? I went around knocking on those movie stars’ doors in 2023. They circled the wagons against the psychofan.
Not to fault them. I knew what I was getting into. After the Electrochemical Girl saga I learned that trying to solve the mysteries of the universe with the cooperation of a teenager whose dad hates you is going to be an uphill climb. Trying to solve the mysteries of the universe with the cooperation of movie stars is going to be climbing up a cliff. But I had left the whole thing with the sentiment that it was a closed chapter unless at some point my connection with Israel and interest in stories and writing and porting my activities to film moved me to try to make contact with Pilot Wave at some point. That’s Gal and Yaron’s production company. Or if I already had a bag of art at my disposal, I could again look to Stone Quarry. I actually wanted to write a prequel short story about Tarak from Rebel Moon. I love that character. Probably my favorite. I started outlining it. But I don’t know enough about the world. Tolkein had a basement lined with file cabinets full of fantastical languages and races and tribes and histories that he turned into the Lord of the Rings. I imagine those guys have something similar for Rebel Moon.
But no. For now, I’m quit. I’m healing. Mad at God. This was still not enough to get me doing anything. But something happened in my personal life recently. To explain it, I’ll have to demonstrate just how stupid I can be. To understand, just know, nobody who randomly clicks on my site ever reads anything but the latest few blog posts of mine. All this stuff is a part of a long series, but if somebody were to click on my site, the only thing they are likely to click on is maybe The Religion Angle or LA Story because those are my most recent blog posts. Keep that in mind.
Okay, so there is this app that I use to find a kind of event that I like to go to. I am being vague here because I don’t need anybody else pissed off at me for writing about them. So this app, it has some social media features, and you can run across people, but it doesn’t include any kind of direct messaging, so you can’t actually reach out to the people you are finding. So years ago on my profile I linked my website with a note, “my contact info can be found on my website here” so anyone could get in touch with me if they wanted. That was years ago.
Now remember, the blog has never had any kind of search optimization and doesn’t do much tagging or anything. It’s designed to show family and friends drafts of my stuff and just naturally collect material that I could sift through for actual writing projects. Random poetry, some academic and philosophical essays, not much else. When I started the bike trip around the world, I had intended to get into travel blogging, actually, and started posting about my travels like a travel blogger, but this being a trip to the Holy Land and all, and with the Electrochemical Girl saga behind me and a heavy case of apophenia and post-traumatic stress disorder in the mix, I wrote my travel blogs like a prophet on a holy mission, and God being the kind of guy he is, well, the whole thing turned into a Carlos Castaneda novel on cocaine, drenched in all kinds of gender issues and other facets of my inner child.
Now as a student of human nature, I have always been fascinated by the intellectual disconnect that people experience between events that are clearly related. A common one that we all know of is the alcoholic that drinks a half dozen bottles of wine a night and says, “I’m not an alcoholic.” But there is also the dude who thinks he is a great, devoted husband but is cheating on his wife. There are countless examples of this totally irrational type of behavior. I mean, as a guy with apophenia, I’ve often been astounded at the connections that normal folks FAIL TO MAKE. Well, I did the same damned thing.
See, I’ve gotten this idea, and I still don’t think I’m wrong, where I reached a point in terms of knowledge, study, and personal experience that when it comes to making certain points and maintaining certain arguments about various issues of history and spirituality, nobody can contradict me. I’ve said a number of times, if anybody ever lets me debate Bart Ehrman, I’ll make that dude look like a freaking monkey. Israel Finkelstein? Same thing. Frank Moore Cross? Complete moron. Don’t put him in a room with me. I’ll embarrass him. Baruch Halpern? Idiot. And it has seemed that Satan has figured this out and sent the missive to Screwtape and Asmodeus to make sure that nobody ever hears me. If I join a Reddit group, I’m banned pretty much before I’ve had a chance to open my mouth. If the Lord of Ignorance is going to keep people stupid, he has to take me out of the equation. If you look at any of my social media, I get no followers. I’ve posted about this here and here. Once upon a time, people used to try to debate me. Now they just close their eyes and put their hands over their ears and scream LALALALALALALA until everything is over.
Depite all that, though, if you’ve read any of my stuff, you know there is no limit to just how stupid I can be. With this in mind, that my blog is basically just for personal use, and that there is some sort of supernatural power that prevents people from reading my stuff, well, I left that damned link to my website on that app for years with the deranged idea that I could show that site to whoever I wanted, and nobody would ever read any of it. I just wanted people to have access to my contact information.
Okay, so recently I went to one of these events I go to from that app, and these chicks that were there start acting all creepy. It was bizarre and hard to explain. I’ll just leave it at that. Did I tell you that creepy chicks disturb me more than they do most people? There was one point where I was talking to this Jewish guy I’d just met there, and I asked him what kind of stuff he liked to do. He said, “I like to go to events like these.” I thought to myself, “Oh…nice knowing you…this is going to be my last event of this type.”
Thinking about it, it wasn’t hard to piece together that somebody had read my blog. And of course, instead of talking to me about it, they’re going to talk to each other about it day in and out until everyone is worked up into a frenzy. And of course, nobody is going to read the whole story. Only the last few posts. Like LA Story, about how my Hollywood experience was a boulevard of broken dreams. Or The Religion Angle, which ended with an ode to supreme loneliness.
Oh crap. What did I get myself into? How could I not think that they’d all be reading that? Now I’m sure that pretty much everybody I know in LA has read those things, and it’s generally not a problem. I’m certifiable. Ask my mom, my dad, my daughter. It’s not a problem because I’m a fully functional normal dude to anybody’s face, so I suppose most everybody just said, “the guy is weird, makes weird art, but sitting here in the cafe with him I can’t tell the difference between him any other typical adult, so whatever.” I’m an open person. Not a problem. But when little girls start getting all creepy in my neighborhood, that doesn’t sit well with me at all.
So Marshall Mathers put out the Slim Shady LP. It has a song on it about putting Kim in the trunk of a car and driving off a bridge. Now Marshall has to go to Hailey J’s parent-teacher conference. Oh well. I know how Mister Mathers feels.
I’m here to put in an immigration packet to Israel. It’s a nine-month process. I’m almost halfway through it. I only hope there is an Israel to go to by the time I get there. I mean, of course there will be. That’s the point of this whole thing. To show that history is determined by God. But things get wonky at the end, and I don’t want to miss out.
Anyway, the last time I came to LA, I spent six months accomplishing nothing except going stark, raving mad due to the machinations of evil little girls. This has happened to me a few times in life, and I can tell you, the brain can only handle so much of it. You lose a little bit of yourself every time. Satan knows this. That’s his game plan. Remember the conversation in Valencia.
Thus being the case, I tell you, I will happily spend the next six months caulked into a shoebox under my roommate’s bed if that means I avoid the maddening bullshit. Lonely? Yeah, I moved by myself back to the city where I had the second worst and most psychedelic year of my life. I then promptly joined a synagogue, signed on with an ulpan in Israel, met some Israeli friends to talk Hebrew with through an app called HelloTalk, and I ride my bike around with a few buddies. It’s not the most exciting of lives, but I’ve lived ten exciting lifetimes already, and I can do with that for a year. 2025 is going to be off the chain, and I need to conserve my strength and keep my head together.
I am absolutely not down to play sex predator for any more hysterical Jezebellian priestesses of Ashera because I’m not feminist enough. My roommate is a male model who goes to raves every week and shows me pictures of whatever hot chick he is banging for the moment. He has invited me out. I don’t take him up on it. I don’t need my last dollars flying up anybody’s nose, much less my own, and I don’t need alcohol-fueled sexual harassment complaints from chicks twerking in the clubs in their lingerie. Satan knows my kryptonite and is not afraid to use it. I smile, they call the police. It’s always the same story.
Do I hate women? Certainly not the Lady. And I think I paid a cool compliment to Debbie Snyder above, if maybe a slight bit racy. What can I say? Those were some incredible boots. But that’s a badass wife and producer for a supercool famous dude I follow. My daughter is my life. Period. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have Juaisca, my Venezuelan parathlete friend. I just had a great time reconnecting with my high school friend Felicia. Esther from Hasharon in Israel who I met on Hellotalk goes gaga for all things Korean, and ever since I showed her a bunch of pictures of where I live in Korea Town, well, I’m getting an idea that the chick wants to marry me. We are getting along quite well.
Do I want a girlfriend? Not if you’re not Jewish. Jews have a commandment to follow.
Deuteronomy 7:3 – You shall not intermarry with them: do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons.
But the fact that I wouldn’t touch any woman until I know she is kosher won’t stop the Jezebellians from calling me a threat to whatever chick I may smile at, while out of the other side of their mouth they call me a misogynist for not smiling at them enough, then they call me a racist for keeping to my own people. It’s not women who are the problem. It’s the demons who have free reign over those who don’t believe demons exist, which happens to be the case for most California gen Z chicks. But no, I’ve got a lot of great women in my life, and there will be many more, and I’ve got lady public figures that I admire and follow such as the two I mention above. Historical figures too. Everybody from Mother Mary to Joan of Arc to Abelard’s Heloise.
Now let me tie this last bit into the rest of the story, which has been about God’s efforts to get me going that I have been resisting. Remember what I said when I started this thing. People only read the last few blog posts. This is what is finally going to get me to write. What I seem to have to do now is write a bunch of posts so that Adventures in the Bardo Thodol and the recent posts summarizing my 2023 pain do not show up on the front page. Then I will be safe from those who will treat me like a freak because I accidently let them stumble on things they’re just not going to understand unless they take a lot more effort than they are going to take.
So that’s what I am going to do. I am going to write some blog posts. They are not going to include my personal life or reference the lives of anyone I know. I’m not saying I am going to start immediately, but this is what is getting me going.
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