Greetings from Turkey! I’m just about to finish my bicycle trip, and as I turn my attention to focus on matters of the future both immediate and long-term, it seems that it has fallen into my lap at this moment to resume the mantle of writing out this story. As I have been intimating in previous posts, I’ve wavered concerning the idea of even continuing writing these things out. Lately I have felt particularly invisible concerning my previous life. I’ve lost some friends, it’s been a while since I have been in one place, and I’d found that nobody I knew really read my story anyway. Not even family members or people close to me. And despite the fact that things have been happening to me that are absolutely beyond the scope of normal, being absolutely insane if not frankly otherworldly. If I can’t get my own friends and family to pay attention to adventures as crazy as these, I must be under some sort of curse of utter obscurity. So perhaps under the influence of some discouragement, I haven’t been writing, an easy road to take since I have so many other things going on with riding my bike around Europe and the US over and over and all.
However, it has come to my attention that nothing is happening with my immigration to Israel. Once the final document of my packet was viewed by the Los Angeles office of the Jewish Agency and the original was sent back to me in Texas, my interview and documents were sent to the Jewish Agency office in Jerusalem on the fifth of June of 2025. That was four months ago. My advisor with Nefesh B’Nefesh, the agency who helped me get everything set up initially, had told me that Aliyah processing normally took a couple of months. (“Aliyah” is the process by which a Jew immigrates to Israel under the Israeli Right of Return.) He stressed that it quite often took about three months in the case of converts, however. He also told me that this summer there had been a large number of Aliyah applicants, so things would be a little slow, and not to expect too much progress before the end of the summer. The summer is long gone, however. It’s been four months.
Additionally, when I got back to contacting the Jewish Agency for updates, I was first informed that Deborah, my case manager with the Jewish Agency, was on leave, and I would have to be helped by others. Weeks later I was informed that Deborah was no longer my case manager. I do not know why she is no longer my case manager. I do not know who my case manager is at this time, actually. I need to call them and find that out. In addition to my packet taking too long, I’m rather distressed that Deborah is no longer by my side. She was there to witness the supernatural difficulty of my inability to get help from the German office of the Jewish Agency that ultimately resulted in my just sending everything back to Los Angeles to get the bureaucracy moving. She witnessed people not responding to e-mails. She was also a part of the miraculously fortuitous event in Marseille by which I got my passport viewed and that bureaucratic step completed. She was there when the Israeli consulates in Barcelona and Madrid refused to help me notarize a document for my packet despite my being told by the Jewish Agency that they could do this and despite their own websites saying they could do this.
Now I am back to talking to whoever happens to be answering the phone at the Jewish Agency, with everyone saying that everything is fine, just wait and wait and wait. However, a few weeks ago the Jewish Agency submitted a request for an update from the Israeli Ministry of the Interior regarding my Aliyah packet, and there has been no response. But now that Deborah is gone, everyone is just saying all is well, they will get back to me when they get back to me.
I, however, have the feeling that dark forces are trying to ensure that I get lost in the cracks. Dark forces do not want me to go to Israel. They so much as told me so at the outset of this entire misadventure. I have had bizarre experiences of difficulty at many points along the way. Bucharest, Mexico City, and the Israeli border with Jordan, are some more direct examples involving difficulties with the Israeli government itself. Then there is the fact that I have nearly died a few times on this trek such as in Frankfurt and Budapest. Yes, I have observed at many points that my difficulties seem to have been related to lack of faith, and that this lack of faith has been linked in certain cases to certain moral or personal failings on my part. That is, it would seem that my desire to go has been tested, and with that my readiness to go, characterologically and personally, has been tested as well.
However, the fact remains that there are just too many difficulties involving the Israeli bureaucracy to go unnoticed. So then while tests of my desire, character, and readiness are certainly involved, these tests do usually involve the presence of dark forces, individuals, and patterns of activity. In the old religious terminology, the best way to describe it would be: when God is going to test you, when God is going to get you ready, he is going to unleash the devil at you. And the devil is going to work from within you, using your own weaknesses, uncertainties, and failings, but he is also going to come at you from dark powers out in the world. Those dark forces are usually going to be on one hand the rich, the powerful, the connected, and the political. So, it’s no wonder to me that the Israeli government is dragging its feet. On the other hand, those dark forces are going to be those you love the most – those who you would never dream would hurt you. Even your only child, for example.
Deborah was starting to get a hint of the bizarre nature of my travails, and now, for some strange reason, she has been removed from my case. And now, for some strange reason, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior is not responding to the Jewish Agency.
I’d told my Aliyah adviser with Nefesh B’Nefesh at one point that this story was going to end in one of three ways. The first one would be like the book “The Alchemist” by Paul Coelho. In that book, a young boy takes up an incredible odyssey from Spain to Egypt in search of a treasure, and after many incredible and unbelievable experiences, lessons, and trials, he finds it. That’s how I would like this to end. The second way this could end would be like the movie The Straight Story by David Lynch. In that movie, an old man rides a lawnmower from Iowa to Wisconsin to collect a winning lottery ticket, and in the end, he does not get the end he anticipated. I certainly hope that does not end up being the case with me. Finally, the last option is that this story ends up being like the book “The Trial” by Franz Kafka. In that book, the protagonist, named Joseph K, is put under house arrest until he is to appear at a trial. He is never told what he is on trial for, his trial date is constantly pushed back forever and ever, and no resolution is ever achieved.
Now in my last post I made a Bladerunner reference regarding getting help communicating with my daughter in which I portray myself as Nexus Seven, Rick Deckerd in the films, trying to get help from Nexus Nine. In the second Bladerunner movie, the Nexus Nine who ends up helping Deckerd get in touch with his daughter is named Officer K, a clear reference to Kafka. Folks, I am afraid I am living a Kafka novel right now. The Israeli Ministry of the Interior is just going to lose my packet over and over. They are going to push my application date back over and over, and I am going to ride my bicycle around the earth forever and ever and never hear a word about my Aliyah application.
Those guys in that office are going to work long hours day after day, they are going to come in for weekends, in order to think up all the ways that Jonathan Bailey making Aliyah is going to destroy the Land of Israel and the planet earth along with it. The sky will turn black, all the little girls will get kidnapped walking home from school, everyone will die of plague, if Jonathan Bailey goes to Israel. God will stop answering prayers. Nobody will get presents for Chanuka. The Iron Dome will always miss. These horrible things will happen if Jonathan Bailey goes to Israel. I kid you not. That’s how bad the devil doesn’t want me in that country. It’s just par for the course.
So, once this bicycle trip ends here in a couple of weeks, I am going to start taking actions, and some of those actions involve this entire story being written out for all to read. So, with that, I am going to continue writing this thing. When we left off, I was down with my mother and stepfather on the Texas Gulf coast after having spent the Fourth of July with my aunt and cousins in southeast Texas.
Because I wanted to spend as much time as possible with mom, but I had to get to the Bailey family reunion in the hill country on the 13th of July, I took mom up on her offer to drive me up to New Braunfels where the reunion was. I only did a short 10-mile ride to the condo that my dad had rented in the nearby town of Gruene.
That was where I met my dad and his party, which included my stepmother and my niece, my stepsister’s daughter Sabrina. This was the second time I had met Sabrina, with the first time just being a very cursory introduction at my sister’s wedding reception a year prior. And while I was excited to see everyone, this would be one of the first disappointments of the reunion this year. Originally, my sister Destin was supposed to come with her new husband, and my stepsister Paige was supposed to come with her boyfriend, but neither of them did. My other stepsister didn’t come as well. I kind of got the impression that a number of people didn’t really care. Or, if the truth must be told, I kind of got the impression that more people would have come if my dad had paid for them to do so. But that’s another story.
To boot, I found out that my Uncle Terry, the oldest of the Bailey brothers and one of the war heroes we were hoping to celebrate, had health issues and couldn’t come. It was very important to him to be able to come, but he just wasn’t able. Then Fire Girl didn’t show up, nor did her son. Fire Girl is one of the most important people in my life. She is a character in my book and a poem or two that I have written. I’ve only been able to have a conversation or two with her per year for the last several years, and for the last couple of years I haven’t been able to get a word in with her at all. She doesn’t answer my texts. I’d texted her son to see if he was going to make it, and he didn’t respond to my text either.
Remember, I am cursed by some supernatural force, perhaps the technodemons, such that my texts are simply not responded to. I’m way, way past the law of probability on this one. The only people who are going to respond to my texts are those who absolutely have to. Like, I see them regularly, so if they don’t answer my texts, I’ll be able to look them in the eye and ask them why they didn’t answer. Or I know their friends, so I can ask around to find out what the heck is up. Otherwise, if I can’t somehow force you to answer me, and I choose to reach out to you via text message, you just won’t respond. The chance of this pattern being the case increases drastically if I don’t know you very well, and it absolutely skyrockets if you are female. That’s just my life.
I have a little story about that, even. So in my post where I introduce you to my problem with the technodemons, I showcase that I had sent text messages to a niece of mine who did not respond to me. I did in fact ask my dad to find out why she didn’t respond and to have her respond to me. The answer was that she was probably busy. I also asked my sister Paige, her mom, the same thing. The answer was again that she was probably busy. Well, the niece in question was Sabrina!
So I did in fact see her face to face when we were at the reunion, and I did at one point ask her why she didn’t respond to my texts! She merely looked to the side in silence without giving an answer! I still to this day do not know why she did not answer me! How is that for bizarre? I tell you, technodemons are real, and they don’t only live in computers. That is, it’s not simply because of technological glitches that certain people don’t answer my texts, or that my e-mails don’t get read, or that important files come up missing. Satan will use every avenue he can, so if you’ve got evil spirits, when I send you an e-mail, your eyes will glaze over, or you will forget that you received it, or you’ll accidentally delete it, or you’ll randomly get angry about something I said in it and not respond, or something like that.
If you’re a young woman who I don’t know well, like a lot of these chicks I meet at hostels, I’ll have a great conversation with you, we will exchange Instagram accounts, but then later when I send you a message on Instagram, you’ll assume I’m a dirty old man sex predator and run away shrieking or something like that. Something completely inconsistent with giving me your Instagram account in the first place. This is not to say that the technodemons ONLY use their traditional human-centric methods of influencing hapless humans who are not aware of their existence and do not guard against them. They will happily take the form of hackers or bots or random glitches from inconceivably poorly put together software. That is a favorite method of Microsoft technodemons. Most Microsoft executives should be jailed for the high crime of being principal agents of Satan. They are obviously guilty of this crime. It’s the only way their software could possibly be so bad.
But while their methods are diverse, the picture painted by their presence is remarkably obvious and evinces a very clear theme. The result is that I can make very direct statements about their presence, such as “young women never respond to my texts,” or “any e-mail sent that pertains to my going to Israel is going to get lost in the junk file,” or things like that.
But back to our story. Several of the people important to me did not show up, with my daughter being the most important one of those. Her absence was quite conspicuous to me every day and hour I was there. I was thrilled, though, that my cousin Kevin could make it, and we did manage to have a good time. Baileys always manage to have a good time. And there were tons of us.
We spent a day at a major water park, the Schlitterbahn, which actually had rooms that could be rented out.
I was totally thrilled to get to see Arabella, the little girl I met the last time I was in Texas. I wrote about her in my post, Texas Bicycle Tour. She looked like she hadn’t aged a day.
We spent a day at the San Antonio Riverwalk and saw the Alamo.
We went to a blues bar.
It was the day after this blues bar party that my niece Sabrina left to go back to Atlanta for work. She couldn’t stay until the end of the reunion.
One of the days were spent at one of the properties that my uncle Tim rented, and we had basically a back yard barbecue.
It was very Texan. We even fed the deer out back.
Something unusual did happen at this yard party. I’d had a number of beers, and as I got up to leave and was saying goodbyes, I grabbed one of my cousins, Jennifer, the one who actually put the whole show together, and have her a huge hug, lifting her off of her feet. Then I turned to the wife of another of my cousins, Marita, who looked at me like, “Oh no! Don’t do that to me!” and did the same thing to her! I think I was acting out a bit, wanting to convince myself that I was safe around family, that I was not going to be the subject of some police report for being a predatory male for hugging on family members.
But then something upped the game beyond that. As I was walking out, as I was walking past the wife of still another cousin of mine, Robert’s wife Angie, I gave her a peck on the shoulder! It happened so fast, I did it completely without thinking, and I had to ask myself what the heck I had just done. She stopped in her tracks confused, and I just kept on walking. It was like some force within me had me do that without even consciously thinking about it. Yes, I too have my demons. I’ll call this demonic activity because it’s like some force was trying to get me in trouble with my own family for being a sex predator or something.
The next day we met up at a local German beer hall. There is a lot of German culture in the area.
And then finally, there was one last cookout at a local park.
Another interesting thing happened here. One of my cousins had a daughter, early twenties, very beautiful. She had a number of tattoos, one of which was a “666” tattoo. I have seen these tattoos lately. The hostess at the hotel I stayed at in Stuttgart had “444” tattooed on her arm. I asked her what it meant, and she said they were her “angel numbers.” I guessed it was some sort of occult fad, but didn’t really look into the trend or fad. I forget where I was when a waitress in a restaurant had a “666” tattoo, and at that time, with my curiosity piqued, I asked her why she had a 666 tattoo. She said it was three nines. I just said, “okay” and went about eating, but internally I felt that I had been played. As if she just didn’t want to answer the question. She had to know about 666, right? Had she seen The Omen? Had she read the Bible?
Well, when this daughter of this cousin of mine turned up at the water park with that angel number tattoo, the 666, I didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t want to get off into some conversation about demons and evil with family. However, this same girl showed up at that park barbecue with a boyfriend in his fifties! He had a beard and white hair and everything! It turns out he was an Australian living in the US for decades, and that he was a local nightclub owner.
When my stepmother got a look at the pair, she was shocked. Nobody else at the party seemed to notice anything unusual, however. For my part, I just got a sense of a message from the dark forces, “Jonathan, just quit with all this God and Israel stuff, and you can get yourself a 20-year-old girlfriend. Keep on with the God and Israel program, and you’ll just get accused of being a sex predator everywhere you go. We’ll have you kissing your cousins’ wives on the shoulder until you get sued for a billion dollars for being an incestuous letch. We are everywhere. We are inside you, we are inside them, and we are coming after you. So, stop with Israel, and we will give you a teenaged stripper or something.”
It only gets worse from here. At the end of the reunion, on the last day, while my dad, stepmother and I were packing and getting ready to part ways, my stepsister Paige called her mother and started commenting that one of my cousins, or that I, it wasn’t quite clear from what she was saying, was sending inappropriate text messages to Sabrina. This absolutely triggered me, so I screenshotted my entire text history with Sabrina and sent everything to my stepmother. There was nothing out of the ordinary at all. People were saying that my stepsister was drunk. I suppose my sister has her demons as well. But for my part, no, I have absolutely no interest at all in maintaining any kind of relationship whatsoever that involves my sending screenshots of text messages to their grandmother to verify that I am not a sex predator.
I was devastated by the incident, as I will describe below, but I want to tell you something in my sister’s defense. It took me a long time to get to it, to talk to her, but when I did, I really laid into her. I am not saying that I told her cruel things to hurt her, nor did I yell at her or threaten her. When I say that I laid into her, I meant that I just didn’t hold anything back, that I told her that being treated like a threat by women was a huge trigger for me, and that there was absolutely no iota of a reason to think that I could be in any way a threat in this situation. There had to be some complete fantasy at play. She did something incredible. She cried and told me she was sorry.
In ten years of marriage, my wife apologized to me twice. She didn’t only make two mistakes. Her habit was to just pretend everything was fine, that nothing was wrong, which made me feel ever less and less cared about, which caused me to withdraw into my private worlds of work, of my computer life online, and with friends outside the family, whenever I could find some. On the other hand, feeling always the more castrated, I would get more and more frustratable, more and more fervently intent on showing her the errors of her ways, being at times temperamental. To which she would just tell herself and everyone around that I was a hypercritical, angry jerk. I didn’t notice this pattern myself until things were basically over between the two of us. I can only say at this point that nothing impresses me more than an apology. Even a deflective apology. “I’m sorry for what I did, but you did this that contributed to the problem” is fine. A complete deflection is not. My mother and my wife are both masters of this one.
OG: You did this wrong thing!
Mom/Ex-Wife: You did THAT wrong thing!”
The above is a complete deflection. A partial deflective apology is something like this:
OG: You did this wrong thing!
Mom/Ex-Wife: I’m sorry that I did this wrong thing. I might not have done it had you not done THAT wrong thing.”
That is, an apology acknowledges my perspective. A partially deflective apology acknowledges my perspective while also showing me how my own sins have contributed to the problem. In the case of relationship with my wife, I came to understand that any sort of recognition of anything about me or my perspective had absolutely nothing to do with anything in my household. I simply existed to work long days to provide paychecks and to give myself hernias providing orgasms, but otherwise nothing about me mattered at all. This became an intolerable problem for me in my marriage when my marriage became nothing but an obstacle to the presence of God in my life and in the life of my family. I could work in the Army and dodge bullets to bring home the bacon walking over the pieces of the bodies of my friends and innocent Iraqi farmers. But taking my kids to church on Sunday was going to be impossible because my wife couldn’t figure out how to put on makeup in less than three hours in the bathroom on Sunday morning. I could put my wife through nursing school as an Army officer, but she couldn’t work as a nurse while I went to seminary to become a pastor. And, of course, she couldn’t ever be bothered to listen to or understand anything that was going on in my heart. She never wanted any of that to begin with. Her mother told her to get a man to take care of her to get her out of working at that faucet factory in Colorado Springs, and I happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. A black knight with no family crest on his shield looking for a lady’s scarf to wear in his gauntlet. That’s all I was. That’s still all I am. But at least now I have an image of a Wonder Woman up my sleeve.
Sorry. I’m ranting about my ex. Men have a tendency to do that. I just wanted to tell you that when my sister did that, when she accused me and my cousin of dishonor, I was broken…in the worst way possible. But when I told her about things, with no hostility, only brutal, bloody truth delivered on the spikes of a morningstar to her ear, her tearful apology broke open the love of my heart.
As of today, my stepsister Paige, my niece Sabrina’s mother, might just be my only family member who gets me. She is certainly one of the only ones who reads my words. Airing grievances, confessing sins, repenting, forgiving…these things are powerful.
But, this said, let me again return to our story.
It’s this pattern I am trying to show you. Satan knows that young women can be scary for me. Now I had just had all of these fantastic experiences with all kinds of women at the various hostels I had been staying with in Europe on the first leg of the trip. As if God were sending various girls and groups of girls my way in order to give me positive experiences, to heal me. But Satan knows I have this trigger. This weakness. This thing that drives me crazy. It’s like there was this demonic plan to undo the healing that God was working in order to keep me stressed and uncomfortable. And he was using the lack of judgment that comes with booze in order to get into people’s heads, like in the case of my sister Paige, and also including my own case, for example in kissing Angie’s shoulder, in order to tear open the wound and stop me from getting to where I want to go.
There is no explanation for how this crap can happen to me just by chance. In my youth, this sort of thing never happened to me or to hardly anyone I knew. My expectation had always been that a man may have issues with being treated like a predator maybe a couple of times in his life or something. One could say that the #MeToo culture that California media exported throughout the world just ruined gender relations or something. But I don’t see this sort of thing happening to all my friends. There is a definite “this is the life of Jonathan Bailey” flavor to it all. One thing is for sure, no scientific accounting of human interaction can explain this. If this is what the statistics would actually show, humanity would go extinct because nobody could get together. Nobody would get married or have kids if all guys got treated like Jonathan Bailey gets treated. Am I wrong?
I left the reunion in a devastated state.
The ride back toward mom’s on the coast was hot and long. I was listless and without energy, and heading out of a little town called Beeville after riding for three days, I just called my mom and asked her to come pick me up.
This should tell you how beaten down I was. My mom is always trying to get me off the bike, and it’s only a rare exception, such as with the timing issue, that I give in and let her drive me. Normally, she is constantly reminding me, “you know, you can take a train!” and I am always doing the teenager “Aww, come on mom! You know I’m on a bike tour! Trains defeat the whole point!” But this time I just didn’t even want to be on the road. I pulled my phone out of my fannypack and called up mom and said, “come get me.”
I got back to my mother’s house in a state of depression. Again, I didn’t call Brad or anyone. I didn’t write the story treatment that I had told Skip and Hawkman that I would send them. I just hung out and waited for the cruise back to Europe to get back to Israel. I thought a lot about my daughter. I knew I wasn’t going to see her anymore. The circumstances surrounding her disowning me are just too ridiculous to be believed. I’d been gotten rid of my daughter for an utterly trivial reason, and after months and months, she has apparently gotten nothing but more hostile. I’d heard nothing from her. I had heard nothing about her except when my father told me she had her wedding date. Recently my mother sent her a message to which she replied that my mother was a narcissist and that she would only talk to my mother if my mother said nothing in my defense. Alia is sitting there surrounded by people who hate me, including demons whispering in her ear all the time.
I remember being down in Mexico when I first realized my daughter’s hatred, that she wouldn’t even hear my voice or see my face, that she would only spit vile over text, acknowledging nothing that was typed to her, and spend her days chatting with and hugging those who hate me and love to lie about me because they never knew me in the first place. She was going to hate me, and no words would really be exchanged, nor even a glancing look out of the corner of an eye to betray an honest thought. Just some e-mail crap with no acknowledgement from anyone about anything. That was the end of my relationship with my daughter. It was too surreal to be believed. “This is not really happening.” There is nothing that will shake your sense of reality more than looking into the bloody eye of the impossible. When your soul sister turns out to be a cornflake girl. It’s the kind of thing that will make B-Rabbit grab his keys, if you want a Mathers-Amos reference combo.
On this point I also got a message from the King in heaven: “Yeah…little guy…the things they do and say about you in Arizona while you are far away in your Mediterranean paradise…well, I am far away up here in my actual and ultimate paradise, and the demons have done nothing but trash talk me to my children since the beginning of time. Once again, now you know how I feel.”
Anyway, after all the bad that has happened to me in life, after everyone and everything I’d lost, well, my daughter was my only exception.
So I sat there on the Texas coast with the understanding that the last one was gone, and that there are no exceptions.
Concerning my family obligations, I’ll say that my aunts and uncles and cousins are all still there for me. Very, very few of them have any idea at all who I am. None of them would miss me if they never saw me again. I’m all too happy to see them when I am in their areas, and we always get along when we get together, and we share many common bonds, but we are separated over many cities and states, and we do fine without each other.
Concerning my daughter, I think the fact that God has let this happen, that this utterly improbable course of events has resulted in what it has, convinces me that I am supposed to be somewhere else. The only person who could anker me anywhere on earth wants nothing to do with me, and no one and nothing has turned up to change that in the intervening year. So if there is anything I can say to the nation of Israel about all this, it’s that it would really be a shame if I cannot make a new home in the Holy Land, as I have lost my daughter because of this.
I won’t ever see or talk to her again because Satan does not want me in Israel, and he got to the point where he called in the cavalry. He called in the artillery. He called in the fast movers with their JDAMs. And now everything and everyone else is gone. He did everything he could. But I’m still here, and there is nothing behind me. If I were to tuck tail and return to Arizona, and my daughter ran out to hug me, I could only feel like the devil was telling me, “yeah, now that you’re back in North America, we will let you pretend like you have a daughter who loves you. Just don’t think about going to Israel again. In 2018 you went to Israel, and she bolted. When you came back in 2019, we let you have her again. We let you think she cared. But now in 2025 you tried to go back again, so we took her again. If you give up and go away, you can talk to her again. But if after all that, if you go back to Israel again, we will just take her again because she is ours.”
I suppose I can be a bit superstitious. That being the case, however, if she would just call me up without requiring that I go back to Arizona, I’d feel like that curse was broken. I just don’t have confidence that she will.
Because of the above, if the Ministry of the Interior never picks up the phone, I’ll just do what I have to do from Cyprus. And that being the case, it would be a real shame if I had to lose my daughter because I was going to Israel, and Israel never opened the door. I can’t imagine that God would be too happy about that.
I’ll explain my post-reunion plans and activities in my next post. For now, I’ll just highlight that from the pictures above, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior and the Jewish Agency should be able to determine that I do not come from a long line of criminals out to destroy the very fabric of Israeli society and make life unsafe for little girls everywhere. We are soldiers. Sailors. Tugboat captains. Cowboys. And hopefully people will pick up from some of the strange things that happened, and seem to still be happening, that something spiritual is going on behind the scenes, trying to get in the way of my going to Israel.
Yes, maybe a bit of booze was involved here and there. But things happen according to specific patterns in violation of the law of probability. Now one has to ask themselves, what part do they play in these patterns? What spirits are influencing them? I’ll just leave this post on that point.
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