Alright, sports fans, I know all twenty million of you have been anxiously awaiting the next installment of this blog. Smoke has been wafting up out of the back of this computer on account of its inability to process the sheer volume of e-mails begging me to tell you what happens next. I’m in Bellinzona, Switzerland at the moment, and I need to get to bed early because I promised a guy I met on the ship from New York and rode through Normandy with that I would meet him in Lugano at 10 AM so I can film his triumphant entry into his hometown of Mendrisio after a two-year bicycle tour that he took through Eastern Europe, the Middle East, China and Southeast Asia, the United States, and, with me, through Western Europe and back home.
Lugano is on the other side of a mountain pass through the Swiss Alps, and I have no idea what I am going to have to go through to get to him. I also have no idea what we are going to go through together to get to his hometown. I have been on this journey home in one form or another for six years now, pretty much all by my lonesome, so I know how it feels to be almost there, tired, broke, and just wanting to step onto the sacred earth of one’s own land, so when I saw what this guy was doing, I made a commitment to make sure he gets there.
Yet also, I made a commitment to write out the steps of my own trip, and I am pretty far behind. So let’s see what I can get done before I have to ruck up and get marching. I’d thought I would be blogging about my family reunion in Texas today, opening with a short paragraph about a lunch I had just east of the warhehouse district in New Orleans after my cruise back to the US from Barcelona in June. Looking back at that lunch, though, two months after the fact, a number of details stuck out at me that made me think this encounter warranted a little more description, so I have decided just to tell you about with its very own blog post. Does that mean this post will be a short, enjoyable read? Well, it would have, but for any of it to make sense, I am going to have to give you a little background. That’ll probably screw everything up for you. Sorry.
So let me take you back to 2023 in Los Angeles. If you’ll remember, after my failure to enter Israel at the end of a Homeric odyssey of a bicycle trip from Lisbon to Amman at the beginning of that year, I decided to make my way to Los Angeles in order to write about the Zack Snyder and the DC superhero implosion that took place after that director made a trilogy of superhero movies that basically portrayed Superman as a messianic figure who died redeeming a wayward Batman, and who was resurrected to save the world from invaders from another dimension. Yes, Zack Snyder basically retold the New Testament Gospel in comic book form, and the Hollywood media establishment did everything it could to destroy those movies, and the director and actors who were involved as well.
Zack lost his daughter to suicide, and while he was grieving, he was fired and replaced. His replacement, Joss Whedon, also ended up being destroyed by the media establishment, accused of being a sexual predator. Ben Affleck, our very own Batman, fell off the wagon and lost his marriage to Jennifer Garner. Ezra Miller, the actor who played the Flash in those films, went off the rails with an eighteen-year-old Native American girl whose parents labeled him as a child sex predator. Ray Fisher got into a very public dispute with Geoff Johns (the comic book mastermind behind a number of the stories used in those films) and Walter Hamada, then the CEO of DC Studios. Henry Cavill, the actor who played Superman, was also portrayed in the media as a threat to women for dating a younger woman named Tara King. Nobody seemed to care that Leonardo DiCaprio looks at any girl with a high school diploma like his grandmother, but in those days of the #MeToo movement, Henry Cavill was public enemy number one for a day or two for going out with her, and his image suffered for stating in an interview the chivalric view that a man should have to chase and woo a woman a bit before winning her affection. A capital crime, I know.
Now for a long time there were urban legends that in order to make it to the top of the world media industry, secret cabals would demand prospective insiders be filmed in compromising positions in order to ensure loyalty to some dark inner core of people who ran all things media related. Look into Justin Bieber’s claim that he was asked to have sex with a child in order to make the team that ran the music industry. Things like that. I thought that the attacks against those filmmakers was so concerted that anything from demons to some sort of sinister syndicate of illuminati wizards to some general “dark side of the force” had to be behind it. Whatever it was, it hated God. That was for sure. And whatever it was, it also seemed to hate me.
I was not able to write that book, as I myself was accused of being a sex predator three times in as many months by the strippers and porn stars who were my roommates at the cooperative living apartment complex that I was staying at in Venice Beach. With my PTSD triggers surrounding women that I accrued after getting a divorce following my second Iraq deployment, I more or less went insane during that ordeal, and those writing projects remain unfinished to this day. All of this seemed to be predicted by a bizarre conversation I had with a backpacker in a hostel in Valencia back in 2022 who, through what I can only understand to be some sort of off-hand misinterpretation of what he was implying, gave me the impression that I would one day be discounted as an insane maniac by the forces of darkness myself.
I had gone to Los Angeles to try to tell story of the infernal powers that run Hollywood wrecking everything and everyone associated with that director telling what many would call the greatest Jewish story ever told in the superhero medium, and I did so after that utterly surreal bicycle tour around the planet earth that ended in a failure to enter the country of Israel, the modern-day Holy Land. I had not worked a regular job in a decade. I had no agent. I had no ability to make contact with the Hollywood film establishment via normally accepted channels. I tried to get an agent, but even agents only took clients by referral. Hollywood is a closed environment for most people. I was most people.
I did, however, have a bicycle, and I rode around knocking on doors trying to see if I could get anyone to talk to me. Over a year prior I had come to Hollywood in a kind of a romantic venture to drop off copies of the first book I had written with some of the personalities who had influenced me to pursue art and writing to begin with. At that time, I stopped by Believe Media, a small production company that made commercials which was associated with Zack Snyder. There, at that first time, I had a nice conversation with the company’s accountant as an adoring fan who wanted to tip my hat to Zack. With that conversation from a year prior in my memory, I went back to the same company on my bicycle and knocked again, this time with the intention of stating my desire to write about everything that went on with the making of the Justice League trilogy.
Things were different this time, however. Apparently, the devil knew I was coming. There was no friendly tolerance of an eccentric fan. I was sent away promptly, and not long afterward I received a call from an investigative agent associated with the company who wanted to have a little contact with me in order to get a handle on whether or not I was some crazed maniac who could be a potential threat to Zack Snyder and his family. I am going to call this guy Hawkman. Consider it a kind of a radio callsign or a code name or something like that.
Hawkman concluded that I was nuts but not dangerous, and I went on my merry way to finish out the year going crazy as a result of the machinations of my college girl roommates and otherwise going nowhere with my writing project. I kept Hawkman’s number, however.
He himself had done security work in Hollywood and had also done some creative projects of his own including a successful podcast about true crime stories of murders of Native American women, about taking down a New Orleans drug kingpin Richard “The Cuban” Pena, and other tales. So this was a security and investigation professional who had ties to Hollywood personalities as well as creative media projects.
At one point I contacted him out of the blue to see if he could help with Chaz Christianson, a meth addict who I had met a long time before who was a character in my own book. I forget all the contacts I had with him. There weren’t many. A couple of conversations. But I think I made a bit of an impression on him, and I got the idea that he was looking after me a bit and maybe keeping some tabs on me just to be thorough in his protection of Zack Snyder. I’m thinking he was making sure I didn’t show up on the director’s lawn with a can of lighter fluid and a belt of hand grenades or something. It was under these circumstances of minimal, occasional contact, that I let the guy know I was indeed leaving Los Angeles with my books incomplete to take up the task of riding my bicycle to the Holy Land yet again.
I think at this point the guy’s curiosity might have been piqued in some way. He followed my bicycle journey, which did nothing but get weirder and weirder and weirder, such that when I came back to the USA, this guy wanted to meet with me.
Now the only cruise I could get to take me back to the US just happened to be from Barcelona to New Orleans. It also just so happened that Hawkman was born in New Orleans and had completed an impressive career with the New Orleans DEA. “Just by chance,” I was going to sail through this guy’s hometown.
You’ll know from my last blog posts that I’m sure you read intently and remember every word of, that strange coincidences had been befalling me on this bicycle trip. I met a guy in Budapest who just happened to be basing out of Barcelona on his own European getaway, a young man from Santa Barbara who kept my bicycle for me while I was skylarking around that city. Then on the ship to New Orleans that was taking me to my family reunion where we would celebrate my war hero Green Beret uncle Skip, I met a fellow passenger who actually knew my uncle Skip. That was mind-blowing for me.
Keep in mind also, I myself was born just across the river from New Orleans in a small city of colonial French heritage, Beaumont, Texas. I spoke in my last post about my grandmother’s coonass gumbo recipe. There seemed to be a kind of a program of connection forming based on details and patterns of events. But then further, Hawkman wanted to introduce me to a friend and colleague of his, and that colleague’s name was also Skip, just like my uncle who my cousins and aunts and uncles and I all celebrate as a kind of family hero. But there was even a little more spice to flavor this small coincidence. My uncle Skip’s name was not his birth name. It was his nickname. He was really Dennis “Skip” Bailey. Hawkman’s friend was named James “Skip” Sewell. His Skip was nicknamed such just as my Skip was nicknamed such.
I think that over the course of my few contacts with Hawkman I had given him the quite accurate impression that I was a bit lost in the sauce in life while also convincing him that I had some wilds stories and could write well. To this day I would indeed love to write and do other things with this guy. On this bicycle trip I communicated with him a bit more than previously, and I think we reached a point of wanting to meet in person, and also, it looks like he got to the point where he wanted to introduce me to one if his friends, also a writer. And also a DEA agent.
Now on the day of the meeting I was coming to the conclusion of over a month of being rather psychologically on my back as a result of the machinations of Israeli bureaucracy as well as the multiple muggings and scams that I had fallen prey to along the way. Also, on this bicycle trip, months long at this point, I had no clothes to wear except bicycle clothes and a few weird civilian items such as leggings and undershirts that had specific roles to play on my bicycle tour. The end result of my bicycle touring bikepacker wardrobe choices is what when I am not on the bike, I cannot look any way other than bizarre.
At the beginning of my trip I had a lot of fun walking around looking weird, but in addition to being mentally exhausted, I had really been in the mood to experience the divine pleasure of jeans and a baseball cap for a fairly good while now. However, the bicycle riding was not over, so I ended up heading to lunch after a day of boozing in the French Quarter with some fellow crewmembers I had hoped would be my friends pretty much looking like Michelle Pfeiffer in a Batman movie plus a fanny pack…complete with my passport and keys being literally tied to me. This was a trick I learned in the Army, when we tied our soldiers’ rifles to them with what we called “dummy cords” so they couldn’t lose their weapons. In the words of the wise Sergeant First Class Florez (who I went to OCS with): “What Joe cannot break, he will lose.”
So no, boys and girls, I was not quite in the mindset to present myself as the next most valuable member of a team of DEA agents armed to save the world with Word processors and Audible accounts. However, I wasn’t going to miss this meeting.
Like on the ship, my commitment to Jewish life was still being eroded by distraction in other directions, so I ended up having a shrimp po-boy, and in we started with conversation. As the conversation went on, and in my reflections afterward, I began to be blown away yet again by more details of unusual correspondence. Skip had self-published one novel on Amazon. I had self-published one novel on Amazon. Skip’s novel was autobiographical. It was about his involvement with a corrupt DEA taskforce. I don’t want to give details. I hope you read the book. I’ll just say that he wrote his first novel from the position of expertise of his own personal experience. I too wrote my first novel about my own personal experience.
Now furthermore, I would learn that Skip had trouble at the end of his DEA career for being involved at all with that New Orleans DEA Taskforce mentioned on the book cover. Lo and behold, in my book I describe problems I suffered at the end of my military career due to being involved with Y chromosomes. While the nature of our difficulties were far from the same, we had both written precisely one self-published book on Amazon about autobiographical stories drawn from personal experience that included career difficulties at the end of our vocations.
A vedantist would say that I was just dreaming the universe around me, seeing myself in everything, with the universe basically being another expression of myself. The next time I get a chance to talk to Skip I’ll have to ask him how much he likes being a figment of my imagination. Seriously speaking, though, I always look for the divine message behind coincidences of this sort.
There were some important differences, though. First, Skip had actually taken some time to market his Freshman effort. As such he has enjoyed sales in the thousands of copies, where as I have merely sold dozens. Now in addition to my book, I have this blog of mine with tens of thousands of words of poorly edited blog posts of varying quality including a nearly-finished book about the Man of Steel movie as well as at least a sequel, or maybe a trilogy, about this interminable quest to enter the Holy Land on a bicycle that I’ve been trying to chronicle. For his part, Skip had a half-dozen completed movie scripts.
I spent a year in Los Angeles being unable to get Ray Fisher’s autograph much less have a sit-down with anybody connected to the Justice League movies whether they were famous or important or not. Skip has pitched ideas to Guy Ritchie and a few other very notable Hollywood filmmakers.
This is how I know I am not merely dreaming up Skip Sewell. That is, the differences also form a pattern. The meeting constituted an interface with a guy on the same path as I was…but who had done more…worked harder…kept at it. That meant a lot. Like God telling me, “look at this guy…a guy just like you…who has gotten further…because he has kept at it…you can sell a few thousand copies, kiddo.”
Again we see that the theistic model of explaining reality is better than the psychological or occult models. All of these models acknowledge that the law of probability only goes so far and that life contains incredible runs of good luck or back luck or unlikely patterns of occurrence. However, the theistic model says that this is only part of the picture. Further, all of these strange coincidences aren’t just our minds seeing ourselves in the outside world. There is a meaning to it all. A message from it all.
So at this point in the story, the meaning is: “dust yourself off, little guy. Get working. Get moving.” This theme is carried through on a scale that is even grander than anything I could ever conceive of imaging on my own. I only realized some important details months later. Let me explain.
So you know that a whole heck of a lot (but not all) of this weird that I live started with a 2019 PTSD-fueled meth bender that I decribe in my book. Throughout the story drugs have played this or that part in my whole spiritual and psychological odyssey, whether it was the 2019 meth, or effects related to medical marijuana, and a few other points of connection. Now, who in the heck am I talking to in this story? Freaking DEA agents!
Like, come on guys, you’ve just got to see it. God is saying, “Hey. My guy. Stop being so out of it. Get some mojo. Get to work. And for fuck’s sake lay off the booze and don’t do any drugs for crying out loud.” I mean the whole thing, looking back on it now, it’s like poetry. Poetry I couldn’t write if I spent my entire life trying to figure out how.
But now let me continue with the course of our lunch. As the conversation about getting ideas moved through Hollywood got underway, there were standard complaints about being forced to change story content to meet the requirements of various individuals and studios and all, a typical screenwriter headache. But then, as the conversation took on the tone of frustration, it came to fore that Skip had suffered the annoyance of pitching a number of stories to various individuals, but he had yet to get a bite on anything major.
I held my tongue through this bit of the conversation. Every word sunk into me like a dagger, however. I thought to myself, “these guys are not going to want me around.” One thing that I have been encountering consistently over the course of my adventures as a writer these last years is that the universe seems to be allergic to me. I spoke above about how I could in no way break into Hollywood. That’s not unusual, of course, but that’s not all. On my first bicycle trip, I tried to enlist the aid of anybody and everybody I possibly could to help me enter the country, and absolutely nobody gave me any sort of acknowledgment or aid at all. I have blog posts about everyone I asked.
I asked for help from the Israeli Knesset (The Knesset)
I asked for help from an Israeli friend of mine (Are You For Me?)
I asked for help from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
I asked for help from a Christian church that I was attending (The Christians)
I asked for help from the Times of Israel (The Sign of the Times)
You’d have to read the blog posts to have an idea why I made the choice to ask for help from those different sources, but in every case, I was stonewalled. I also wrote a blog post that described my sense of being suppressed by dark forces running the universe that opposed me (Suppression). Everything seemed to be coming true in accordance with a pattern that was described to me at the outset of this whole adventure by a fortune teller that I saw with my two girls that I also describe in a blog post (The Superhero, the Butterfly, the Prophet, and the Witch), that as I journeyed toward Israel, things would get more and more difficult.
What I have found is that as I move toward Israel, I get more and more invisible. In California I learned of the social phenomenon of reaching out to people electronically on social media and through text messages to receive no response and then find myself blocked and gossiped about behind my back. Even recently I have problems with electronic communications. I decided to make a group on my cycling app, Strava, for the fellow riders I met on this trip and before, but after inviting fifteen people to join, not a single one did.
The one member of the group I created is in fact me. Zero out of fifteen applicants accepted the invitation. After a few days I deleted the group in shame.
I’ve also had the experience that basically everyone who has read anything I have written, with the exception of my mother, has hated me for one reason or another because of what they have read. Perhaps God is somehow shielding me from that by making sure nobody reads anything I write. And of those who do occasionally read something here and there, only my mother, and ironically an Israeli girl named Neta I met in Salzburg earlier in the year, and, wait for it, Hawkman, have ever said I was a good writer.
From the above you can see what’s behind the comments in the last few of my posts that I am basically sick of this and am not going to be putting too much energy into writing for too much longer. If I am actually going to try to write a script and get it sold in Hollywood or any other media community, or if I am going to try to get any books published, I am going to need this thing called mojo. As of New Orleans, I had none.
I’m going to have to get to a point where every molecule in the universe isn’t trying as hard as it can to make like I don’t exist. With the kind of divine support I’d been having, if I were to go to Guy Ritchie with a script, even one that would make Shakespeare’s Othello look like the label on the back of a cereal box, Mr. Richie would certainly spit acid in my face and donkey punch me out of the fifth-floor office window simply because I exist.
This being the case, toward the end of the lunch, Hawkman looked at the two of us and broached the idea of putting some projects together. Skip and I stared in silence for a second, and then I piped up to say that I needed to get myself established on solid ground before I could look at anything like that, but that I would be interested in the future.
We shook hands and committed to stay in touch, and that was my New Orleans lunch.
With that, I went on with my trek, which I guess I am going to describe in yet another blog post to be read by whatever ghosts may be standing over my shoulder as I write this one.
1 Comment