A Family Affair, Part One

Alright. As of the last blog post I had just made landfall in New Orleans. With this one I am going to cover my travels through Texas with my family. As I have intimated in my last post, I am pretty much to the point where I think I am going to have more luck causing droughts and plagues and breathing fire on my enemies than getting anyone to read this, at least at current.

I as far as the Israelis are concerned, however, I have found them to be preoccupied with my family obligations, so this post will be for them. That is, there were multiple times where the Jewish Agency was looking at my file and could not find my information about my family obligations, only to have to dig deep into the database to find it. And then finally, the very, very, very last document that I had to complete and turn in for viewing was the second copy of my Affidavit of Personal Status, which is itself a document about family obligations. In fact, as of the end of the last blog post, I had come back to the USA to have this document notarized and sealed with Apostille and sent off to Los Angeles to be viewed. That’s actually where I’ll start.

After complaining in my last post about an incredible lack of luck, I would like to point out here that this lack of luck (well, more appropriately, lack of divine aid) seems to apply only to efforts that I take to actually become known and heard and understood, and to my efforts to go to Israel. As I said in my Carnival post, I get all kinds of luck and power from on high to do pretty much everything else. However, in this case, I did get a lucky break pertaining to my trek to Israel in that Baton Rouge, the capital of Louisiana, was more or less on my way to my family in Texas. The ride only took two days.

I was able to get a notary at any given place in the city. All it took was dropping by a law office where the secretary was a notary. I still can’t figure out why the Israeli mission in Barcelona and the Israeli consulate in Madrid couldn’t pull that off. Must have been because I was watching porn. That’s really the most logical explanation I can think of.

I was also able to get an apostille on the document at the Secretary of State for Louisiana, and then I had the package shipped off to Los Angeles to be viewed and verified by the Jewish Agency there along with a forwarding envelope to my mother and step-father, who had just gone to their house in Rockport, Texas, where I would eventually make my way.

I will say that the summer riding was HOT. I’ve actually ridden Route 66 in the summer. I’d dig up the old blog post about that ride, but you won’t click on the link. Well, okay, just this once. Anyway, I am no stranger to riding in hot environments, but this summer I really felt the heat more than I had before. I’ll also say that Louisiana is not the best place in the universe to ride a bicycle. First off, you’re not going to find many bike stands. Or even places where it’s at all possible to lock a bicycle.

I had made the rule some time before that if a gas station had absolutely no place within 500 feet to lock a bike, I’d just lock it to a pump. I had to do that a few times.

My destination was my aunt’s place in Southeast Texas, which I had hoped to get to before the 4th of July, the United States’ Independence Day holiday.

The first day was a potent slog to the town of Opelousas.

The next day would be still another of the same kind of ride to Dequincy, Louisiana. And yes, the title of the Strava post is a reference to the book and movie Misery, which would be a big win for James Kahn and a breakout role for Cathy Bates. It would also perfectly describe the depths of my heart as I pedaled my little way to my aunt’s house. Finally, after that day, I would be able to take a shorter ride to her son’s place, a cousin of mine in Deweyville.

Notice that picture of the very first street sign I saw after crossing the border from Louisiana. Check the words “Delta 8.” That’s a reference to Delta 8 THC. I’d heard from Chloe way back that Delta 8 THC was actually an incredibly potent form of the stuff. Seeing it for sale at the very first gas station in Texas not five hundred yards from the Louisiana border just blew me away. Texas is not a legal marijuana state. Not medical marijuana, and certainly not recreational marijuana. Remember, Florida is a medical marijuana state with dispensaries where you can buy the stuff if you are in a treatment program with a qualifying medical condition. Yet I was able to pick up some “kosher” gummies with these THC substitutes and alternatives without even presenting ID. It’s literally harder to buy cigarettes in Texas than these marijuana substitutes. Again, curious about what was being sold here, I bought a vape pen, took a few puffs, and found that also in this deep red state of the Bible Belt, you can indeed get stoned at any given gas station. I threw the pen in my pack for some day when inflammation would come a calling.

I have a lot I’m going to want to try to say in this post, and I expect it will be long, perhaps not terribly readable, but there seems to be a bit of a drug theme that is working its way into all of the weird that has been happening to me on this trip. I’ve suffered concussion, talked to an angel, met a guy on a boat who knew my uncle in Vietnam, took some puffs on an HHC vape pen in Austria that resulted in a bizarre conversation with a chick in the hostel, ran into an Israeli in Salzburg whose name in Hebrew has the same meaning as Chloe’s and who actually lives in the city where I did when I was in Israel in 2018, and there have been more oddities that I didn’t find occasion to put into writing. Now I am encountering this bizarre situation where drugs are entirely too available. Like, can it really be than none of the lawmakers in Texas have any idea that potent psychoactive drugs are being sold in their state where dispensaries are illegal?

I’ll just leave that subject for now. There have been some other unusual drug and marijuana encounters that have come up later on in the trip, so I did want to take the opportunity to mention this here. But let’s move on.

I had made it to southeast Texas where my aunt Esther and her kids live along with another cousin of mine Jill just in time for the Fourth of July weekend. We had a grand time. Everyone looked great.

We had an Independence Day celebration Texas style.

While there, I found myself in many ways very at home, but at the same time, I felt like I was in the heart of Christianville, no Jewish influences to be found. I did go back to keeping kosher, and my family was helpful to take me for some Texas barbecue where I could eat pork free, but I did feel like I was being carried away from the mission to Israel a bit.

I also started to think a lot about my daughter Alia. I still haven’t spoken to her. She still has me blocked on all social media. When she initally blocked me, I made some reasonable attempts at apology and explanation via e-mails that I do not have any evidence that she read, but mostly I sent her a bunch of verses from the New Testament about forgiveness, hoping that at some point they would sink in. She told me she was a Christian, and that’s how I had raised her, so I thought that over time some sort of spirit of forgiveness would eventually take hold of her and move her to have a conversation with me. I am still shocked to this day that all of this happened without a word of conversation or a look into an eye. There were some e-mails exchanged in which she didn’t acknowledge anything that was said to her and through which she merely ranted and ranted to no healing effect. At one point I dropped by her apartment before embarking on my voyage. No one was home, and an e-mail was sent to me forbidding me to appear in person under threat of police involvement.

Coming home to Texas didn’t involve many moments where I wasn’t thinking of Alia and the fact that as of four months after the fact, she still hadn’t been possessed of that spirit of forgiveness or healing. The whole issue was difficult to process for me. Let me explain. I’ll have to start the explanation with some information about my ex-wife.

I knew within 72 hours of marrying my ex-wife Karina in February of 2000 that I had made a mistake. I would have divorced her, but I had made a promise to her three-year-old daughter Veronica that I would be her daddy, and that I wouldn’t leave her. See, Karina was a user. She was having serious marital problems with her husband Rodney, who would later be a friend of mine for many years. She told me he abandoned her, appealing to my sense of chivalry as a rescuer. She then pretended that she liked me and got on fantastically with me with the mindset that she would change me once we got married. I know this because she told me so. Up to a year after our divorce was finalized in 2010, we stayed in contact and talked about getting back together. At one point in 2011, though, she told me that she only married me to change me, a bit of information that enraged me and moved me not to talk to her anymore. That was the last conversation we had until in 2014 her new husband contacted me to try to get money out of me. Years later, her first husband Rodney, Veronica’s biological father, and a friend to me, would tell me that she told him the same thing. That she didn’t love me but needed a man to take care of her.

Things stayed the same until Alia wanted to come live with me for her junior year in high school. My ex fought her wishes in court and manipulated my former stepdaughter Veronica to testify against me. I had to argue against Veronica in court, and Veronica felt bad about what she did. I know this because she whispered “I’m sorry” to me just before she took the witness stand to talk about how horrible of a person I was to the judge. After the court action, Veronica turned against me, and has hated me ever since.

So I stayed married with that woman to be a father to Veronica, and now Veronica hated me.

After we divorced in 2010 and I got out of the Army in 2013  I moved to Arizona to be close to Alia and pretty much played the divorced dad thing until Alia graduated high school. During that time I psychologically adopted her childhood friend Chloe, my X23, as a kind of replacement for Veronica. Now fast forward to 2023. I had just come back from my first bike tour to Israel. I had written a book and had developed a desire to be heard and to impart whatever wisdom I had gotten from God to the world. I had in mind to go to the most powerful mouthpiece on the planet earth, Hollywood, and talk about Superman as Jesus in a superhero costume via the Zack Snyder movie trilogy.

Satan wasn’t going to have that, and just as I was heading out the door to make noise about God Almighty, Alia and Chloe got into a horrible argument where everyone was saying everything about everyone behind everyone’s back, including me, and the two ended their friendship, and with that, I lost my relationship to Chloe. The whole thing only made sense to me if understood to be the Prince of Darkness trying to take me down by hitting me where I would be hurt the most.

Then fast forward to December 2024. I was in Guadalajara trying to help my mother as best I could with her apartment while really trying to avoid getting sucked into a life taking care of things in Mexico, a life that I didn’t want or ask for, in order to again take up the mission of going to Israel. I had already been suffering quite a bit of stress with that, trying to manage things even though I could barely operate a smartphone because of my technodemon problem or whatever you want to call it. It was under those conditions that I left my phone in an Uber car, and it was stolen before I could get it back.

The only person who could get my mobile account running was Alia. Her phone was on my account so I authorized her to make changes. But she wouldn’t answer me because she had blocked me. I had gone to her boyfriend’s mother to tell her that I was interested in talking with her son about joining the local Air National Guard unit in Phoenix so that he could get the GI bill for college, a benefit that he could pass to Alia or their children if they got married and started a family. His mother went behind my back and riled up her son and my daughter against me for daring to try to have any positive influence on her son, my daughter’s future husband. Alia then called me and told me she would never talk to me if I ever tried to talk to her boyfriend or his mother. The thought of my daughter not talking to me triggered me, and I ranted at his mother in text messages, basically sealing my doom. My daughter did in fact block me, and I went down to Mexico with that on my heart.

So when my phone was stolen and I needed help from Alia in the US to fix my phone account, I made the move to turn her phone off in order to get her to contact me so I could explain my desperation, my misery, my helplessness. Jesus also repeated the Torah commandment to love one’s enemy, as well as the Torah commandment to honor one’s father and mother, so I had hoped that if she contacted me, even if to rage at me, we would at least be able to communicate enough to get me a working phone down there in Mexico with my 75 year old mother, who isn’t much better with technology than I am. Alia only hated me all the more. She never learned why I turned her phone off. She just assumed I was being cruel to her and committed further to having nothing to do with me.

In the intervening months Alia has been in regular contact with her mother, who has only ever taken every effort she possibly can to prevent me from having any interaction with Alia, and her boyfriend’s psychotic mother, and her boyfriend who is in a codependent relationship with his psychotic mother, with all of these parties absolutely intent on ensuring that I never have any influence on Alia again.

See, when I had gone back to Arizona to get ready to go on my trip, I had been influencing Alia to have respect for the scriptures and to start going to Christian church. Alia’s boyfriend never had any interest in helping Alia to develop her relationship with God. His mother certainly wasn’t doing the same. Neither of them knew the first thing about Christian spirituality. When Alia would get comfortable in a church, her boyfriend’s mother would insist on another one. I found myself on opposing path to these guys, and Satan was going to use his presence in their lives and their hearts to keep her away from me, as I was trying to get her close to God. And he was also going to use this fight to take away my last daughter, destorying what sanity I had remaining, and derail me from going to Israel. The whole thing was an absolutely perfect attack of such comprehensive precision that it could only be orchestrated by God. No disembodied spirit or army thereof, no matter their powers over the human psyche, could have orchestrated such a devastating attack against my psyche. You have to have control over the butterfly effect in order to harm me in such a potent and perfect way. It’s reminiscent of the book of Job, where Satan actually has to go to God and work out a deal to wreck Job utterly and absolutely. I had just received a bitter kiss from the prince of evil, and it had to have divine sanction.

When this was happening, I asked God about this. He told me three things. First, he said, “okay. He took three of your kids. Do you want to know how many of mine he took, little guy? Billions. Welcome to my world. You’re on my team now. Like you never were before.”

That was the first thing. The second thing was a little more involved. When we ask about the perfection of the evil that befalls us, how God can allow it, or ordain it, we are basically talking about the “problem of evil.” That’s a philosophical term of art that you can look up if you want. In order to solve that problem, we have to understand how God can actually ordain this misery. We can’t say he couldn’t stop it. We can’t say he doesn’t care about it. We have to know why God actually does this. The answer is that we need to become familiar with the limits of possibility if we are going to live forever in perfect afterward. If we are going to live forever without ever making a mistake, we need to know what mistakes are and not want to make them. So everything that can possibly go wrong has to go wrong now, in this life, in this world, so that it never happens again. Basically, we are learning about the limits of contrast. The limits of possibility. And it all needs to be contained in this one little life on this one little planet.

The concept of contrast is best represented symbolically by the intersection of two perpendicular lines. There are two symbols in world religion the consist of the intersection of two perpendicular lines. One is Jewish.

The other is indic.

One of those symbols intersects straight lines. It is a symbol of self-sacrifice for others. The other intersects broken lines. It is a symbol of luck and prosperity.

The third thing God said to me when this happened is this: “Your three kids. My billions. We are going to get them back. Just be patient. This thing that’s going on…this life…this universe…this story…it’s big. I only have one chance to tell it, and everything must be told. We’ve been telling this story for six thousand years, and there is still a thousand years to go. But that last thousand years, it’s going to have more glory, power, and beauty than has ever entered the mind of man. Okay, little guy? You’re going to win. We’re all going to win. Now you just need to get to the rendezvous point and link up with the army.

Yup. That’s what he said. Now let’s return to our tale.

At the time of my return to Texas to go to my family reunion, I was basically of the staunch conviction that I will never communicate with my daughter again unless some third party basically forces her to have a conversation with me. Before and during the reunion I talked to three relatives about some kind of mediation, but nobody felt like they were in a position to do anything. For my part, my reaction is probably nicely characterized by a Bladerunner reference:

• Nexus 9, this is Nexus 7, are you there, over?
• Nexus 9, this is Nexus 7, do you copy, over?
• Nexus 9, this is Nexus 7, negative contact, Nexus 7 out.

My daughter wouldn’t be coming back any time soon. The devil took her, and I am on a mission to undo what he has done and make sure he doesn’t ever do anything like that to anyone ever again.

The evil one took my girls, so I am going to burn him for a thousand years. Then I’m going to kill him.

So after Independence Day with my mother’s sister and my cousins, I got back on my bike and headed to the Texas coast, where I would meet my mother and stepfather at their beach house. First, I would stop by my hometown of Beaumont and grab a shot of the hospital where I was born.

I was born at St. Elizabeth’s hospital. Maybe that’s why she loves that name.

Mom really hates the bike and worries that I will die every time I get on it, so I agreed to meet her near Houston and went with her by car to her place in Rockport.

I had just been energized by my conversations with two DEA agents about getting all my writing in gear and getting professional about this story that I am trying to live out and do writing for a variety of projects in a variety of contexts. I had also promised Brad and people from the synagogue and a list of other people I knew that I would call them and catch them up. I was on the way to the family reunion on my dad’s side up in the hill country and needed to get involved with everybody about all that was going to happen with that. So, of course, what did I do? I pulled out that Delta 8 THC and puffed on it the whole week and didn’t do a thing but lunge around and relax! I accomplished basically nothing!

I did have fun with my mother and stepdad that week, but that experience kind of served as a turning point for my impression of my personal use of medical marijuana, whether for anxiety or for inflammation. So if you read this, don’t let Hawkman or Skip know I sat stoned instead of writing that story treatment I told them I was going to write them. They’d throw me in the tank.

The coast was a good time, for what it’s worth.

You can drive your car onto the beach in Texas. Love that.

Familiarity and loved ones were picking me up, and I was ready to go see the Baileys.