Greetings again from Cyprus. From Limassol. I spent my first week in this country at an amazing hostel named Lima Sol before heading to Paphos and then Larnaca to see some of the island before settling into the hard business of what currently stands before me. The last couple of weeks have had no shortages of incredible and bizarre experiences. I’d say this last little bit of time on the Island has reminded me somewhat of the movie K-Pax, if you have seen that one. Ideals and reality trying to get along but not doing a terribly good job. But here I am now with nothing to do except decide how much longer I wait with my thumb up my tailpipe or get started with the next phase of my life, which quite likely isn’t going to look anything like I have envisioned it, and this because I haven’t spent terribly much time envisioning any kind of future for myself. I haven’t really envisioned much of a present for myself over the last six years either, seeing my entire life as a thing that would take place in some distant alternate reality in which I stand on Israeli soil, though again I stress I haven’t given terribly much thought to that distant alternate reality either. The only thing definite about me is that I’ve been on the road.
I’ve gone back and forth about about how much of the rest of this trip to write out, and how to describe it. I’m at something of a juncture where I’m not exactly sure having the Jewish Agency and the Israeli Ministry of the Interior look at this post would be the best of all ideas. It might just come off like trying to invade Russia in the middle of the deepest and darkest winter available to the human imagination. When you put some information out in pubic knowing that this or that authority is evaluating you and may well just take a look, descriptions of abject lunacy are probably best avoided. However, nothing about what happened in France even remotely resembles anything that could be described as sane. I told the Big Guy I wanted to do this thing, though, and the Big Guy has made certain things happen along the way. I can’t do anything but call it what it is. So I’ll throw prudence to the wind and just tell you about what riding a bicycle through France was like for me.
The later posts I’ve been writing have described a lowpoint for me in which I went home and found that home wasn’t entirely there, though the latest one, about the cruise back to Europe, seemed to include a certain uptick in the saga with the Almighty surrounding me with the laces and laughter of the loveliest ladies on the Queen Mary 2 and in the privilege of meeting Daniele Savarini, my very first riding buddy on a long tour. If I’m going to dive into this narrative, I’ll start with that guy and some of the cool things that happen on a bike in Europe, and we’ll just take things from there.
Unlike my arrival in Southampton on the Sky Princess, where upon leaving the ship I was slugged in the face by English wet and fog like a drunken grandfather trying to grope his niece in the worst way possible, we rode our bikes off the bow of the Queen Mary like kings riding into Elysian Fields on a rainbow bridge of sunlight and Brunhilde’s blonde hair.
The first thing to capture my attention was the Moses coffee shop on the brilliant summer day in August. We didn’t have a big UK ride on this leg, though. There were only a few miles to the ferry to Normandy not far away at all in Portsmouth this time. I’ll have to table the UK proper for another tour someday, before or after Armageddon, I don’t know.
Let me tell you a bit about Daniele. I’m all happy with myself as I try to wrap up this nine-month, six-thousand-mile bicycle tour twice across Europe and parts of the USA. No small feat. But Daniele was in the process of drawing to close a 25,000-mile two-year world tour that started in Switzerland, continued through eastern Europe, went through the Middle East, far eastern Asia (Kazakhstan, all that…), China, Korea, the entire 3,000-mile breadth of the USA from Los Angeles to New York City (no busses, no trains, no nothing…), at which point he joined me on the ship.
The guy hadn’t had a haircut since the archangel Gabriel told Mary Jesus was on the way, and he had stories of back pain that would make Atlas shrug…and then call the best chiropractor that Zeus had in his rolodex…plus some Thai girls to walk up and down on the glutes. I’ve been at the end of my rope at various times and places on this trip, but I tell you, this guy WAS AT THE END. Nevertheless, the things I am going to show you will let you see a glimpse of a spirit of adventure that just won’t quit.
Though we were going to be riding together, and the compatibility of our souls notwithstanding, we weren’t exactly a match made in heaven as far as bicycles are concerned. I do what we call bikepacking. That is, everything I own goes on the pack. The bike doesn’t have to carry anything but me. I was riding a fourth-generation Trek Domane SL5 at that time. I ended up swapping that out for a 4th gen Domane SLR7 with Shimano Ultrega Di2 electric shifters in Milan, but that’s another story. I’ll just say that these are fast bikes. They are made for comfort, but not to make you comfortable. The comfort is just so you can survive the long days in the saddle on rough terrain like that featured by the cobblestones of the Paris-Roubaix race in northern France. So while the Domane line might be a touch slower than a number of the aero race bikes made for flats and tracks or the road racers for open racing terrain like the Tour de France, these “endurance road” bikes like the Domane are made to race, and they are made to be fast. The advantage of this kind of bike is that I can cover long distances pretty quick, and when I get to a fun area, I can drop the pack in the hotel or hostel and tear up a local area at mach five if I have the mind. I’m limited on the types of terrain I can handle, though, and with only a couple of changes of clothes in my pack, I am pretty much limited to finding a hotel every once in a while, not being in a position to slog across the Gobi Desert, for example.
Daniele did not go that route, however. Most long-tourers are going to tour with a heavily loaded gravel bike with a long wheelbase for added stability and lots of mounting brackets for all kinds of bags and equipment. That’s what Daniele did. I didn’t get as many shots of his bike as I thought I did, but here is a full shot of us heading to the ferry to France.
That’s 85 lbs on those front and rear panier bags he is toting. And yeah. if you zoom in, you can see the guy’s helmet tucked comfortably on his handlebars instead of on his head, and down there on the downtube is a bottle of champagne with which he can whet his parched tongue on a day of hard riding. And don’t forget the Swiss flag on the back. Gotta have that. Let me tell you, the Swiss Italians are more Italian than the Italians and more Swiss than the Swiss. God didn’t leave anything out introducing me to this guy. I wish I could show you an audio file of him road raging at substandard drivers in full Italian with fingers puckered in that “up yours!” move that I’d previously only known from seeing Italians scripted to do stereotypical Italian things in the movies.
So for the first day we only had a short ride from the ship in Southampton to the ferry in Portsmouth, but already, Daniele was going to school me on some backroad adventure. On the way to the ferry, his rear derailleur fell to pieces. It was probably channeling the energy of his broken back and creaking knees, I don’t know. But whatever happened, we were on the way to the ferry, and he completely lost his ability to shift gears.
A quick Google search told us we were in luck, as the calamity befell us just as we were coming around the corner to a local bicycle store. There was a lot of that with Daniele. Miraclous calamity in the midst of miraculous fortuity which lead to some solution that wasn’t on anybody’s table at any point until we found a way through.
Anyway, we pulled up to the bicycle shop and asked if we could get some assistance, and the owner told us that we’d have to wait three or four days for some replacement parts to arrive, since Daniele had built himself a completely custom 12-sprocket cassette on his bike. Daniele was not going to sit in England for four days, however, so the guy pulled out a multitool and rebuilt his own derailleur right there in the parking lot of the bicycle store with the tech standing there looking at him.
Since most of you are not bicycle enthusiasts, I’ll just let you know right now…that thing…that grotesque monstrosity in that picture…with the metal blade all sticking out off to the left…it’s not supposed to look like that. At all. Total field rig. If I were the tech who told him to wait four days for parts I would have had to just take my had off, hold it over my heart, and apologize. Nicolai Tesla couldn’t have pulled off this feat. So Daniele wrangled for himself the ability to shift from the #2 sprocket to the #7 sprocket, five gears, and this is what this guy was going to finish his trip on.
After the ferry ride to France we camped on the beach. This would be the only time I would camp out on the whole trip through Europe. Daniele had saved money to do his trip. He was not a retiree or a digital nomad or independently wealthy or anything. He’d spent quite a bit of time living like a king in Asia where he could get hotels on $10 a day, and so through America, and now on his last European bit, he was about spending absolutely zero dinero at all..eating at grocery stores, camping, all that.
The arrival was overall magical for me. In fact, the locals were even having some kind of festival the night we arrived.
Stepping off that boat, and with a friend no less, seemed to inspire me with an attitude that was reflected in the world around me. The weather was spectacular the whole time we rode. There were early autumn storms in front of us. There were early autumn storms behind us. The whole time we were risking getting caught in some bad weather, but there was nothing but sun where we were the entire time we rode.
After that first night when we arrived in France after everybody was closed and we camped, I had incredible luck with accommodations. I’m both an Expedia Gold member and a Booking.com Genius Plus member, and God gave many gifts. We would pull into an area where accommodations averaged hundreds of Euros per evening during these last days of the French tourist season, and I would find on one of my apps that my memberships would combine with some special limited promotion available for just that day where there would be just one room left available at just one place, which would be some splendid atmospheric hotel that should have cost thousands, which I could grab for just forty Euros or something. Given that Daniele and I could split a room for twenty euros each, it wasn’t hard to convince him to drop a couple of ducats on some air conditioning with complementary breakfast. The sun, the friend, and the hotels alone were enough to give me the idea that the story I was living had past the phase of the worst chapter. At least this phase. Maybe that Singaporian newspaper salesman I met in Frankfurt was still with me somehow, maybe sitting invisibly on the back of Daniele’s rear rack…I dunno…
Other little benefits started to turn up as well. I did not lose a single sock the whole time. That may not say much to you, but for me, that was something. I literally tie my passport and keys to me because I can lose anything you can think up before the image of it even appears in your mind. On the first leg, the combination to the combination lock that I carry with me to secure my stuff in lockers at hostels and whatnot was literally “loser.” Ironically, I lost that lock in Texas and had to get a new one for this trip. I still have it. I’ve whined at God for years about the pain of losing everything I haven’t superglued to myself, but now, in addition to the weather and accommodations, I wasn’t losing anything.
In philosophy and spirituality there is the principle that you get what you give. If you put out happiness and kindness and joy, these things you will receive. Most people see this in terms of psychology, but in my case, even the clouds in the sky were playing ball. Ever the cynic, however, I can only point out that there is something of a sword of Damocles in this scenario. If I get into an argument with somebody or wake up in a bad mood, am I going to lose my credit cards, pay a thousand dollars for a night in a hotel, and get struck by lightning? More on that below.
For now, we were having fun. On the way to Paris, we stumbled on an enormous cannabis field. I Googled, and neither recreational nor medical marijuana are legal in France. How that field got there is a mystery that would require a lot of explanation to understand.
Not all of the fun was easy. We had been having confusion about the different routes generated by Garmin and Google at one point, so I buit a garmin route for one of our rides that Garmin just refused to make, so I literally had to draw out every inch of the ride to make the route look like the one that Google generated for us. That ended up being a mistake. Garmin likes to keep road bikes on roads. Google doesn’t care what bike you are riding and will send you anywhere any twelve-year-old on a dirtbike decided to go at some point. Thus, I ended up taking my bedraggled companion with his super loaded bike through some deep, dark forests in the middle of France. But even these kinds of calamities ended up being fun and adventuresome. Daniele was on the verge of killing me at a few points on these rides, but I got to force him to show you what Hercules does when he has to get from point A to point B. And yeah, for my part, I got to see what the Domane can do on dirt. Trek advertised the new fourth-generation frame as suitable to build an off-road rig with, and I do concur. The gearing could have been better, but with my 32 mm tubeless Continental tires, there wasn’t much I couldn’t take.
Look at this guy haul those bags through that grass…standing on the pedals…and of course…no helmet…wearing sandals.
And wow he could put on some speed on the thin trails.
Daniele was loaded with everything a person could possibly imagine taking around planet earth on a bicycle, and at one point he told me a secret that would give any dirt tourer a chubby: “I have a drone.”
After a few days on the road, we made it to Paris.
Now the Swiss Italians hail from the Milanese, and Milan is the capital of taste and fashion. Italians in general are known for an astute sense of taste and a proclivity to eschew “tourist traps” and common experiences, preferring to forego the beaten path in favor of the best, the most exotic, and the rarest of experiences. Daniele had just been around the world, and he was in pain and ready to get home. France in general was not exciting for him. However, he was impressed with Paris’ monuments, and my heart was touched when at one point he stopped and asked, “hey, can you get a shot of me on the Champs Elysees?” I obliged with glee.
Of course the experience wouldn’t have been complete if God hadn’t let the ghost of Carl Jung chime in with a synchronistic event. I’m collecting a sountrack for this trip, and I decided that with this I would need to add the old French classic “Les Champs Elysees” to the list in case I wanted to include it with some video at some point, so I pulled up Spotify and searched the song. There it was, without any further prompting on my part, translated into Italian.
I tell you, life only starts to make sense when you see the patterns behind the little coincidences.
For me, though, Paris would go off the chain. We ended up staying at the St. Christopher’s hostel near the north train station.
I grabbed a shot as we walked in.
I want to point something out to you. There are eight human beings in this photo, and every single one of them is a beautiful young woman. And yes, the hostel is basically a bar. Hostel life has its plus sides. However, there is a lesson from the past to heed here. Back at the dawn of civilization, Abraham chose the life of a pastoralist, living in the fields with his camels and sheep. He did rather well in life. His nephew Lot decided to hang out in the big metropolis of the day. That city was called Sodom. Things did not go so well for Lot.
Now I’ve almost died a few times on this trip, and most of that has come from going out at night. I swore it off. Further, I had so many incredible things happen to me that I myself don’t even believe can happen to a person. A number of these experiences have involved drugs, concussions, random psychotic breaks…maybe…if we exclude angels and demons, that is…and I’d just chucked a shrimp po-boy in the New Orleans Warehouse district with a pair of DEA agents who are the only people I have ever met who told me they thought my art was good, and that they might want to go somewhere with it if maybe I can figure out how to clock a half-day at work in an adult state of mind. They’re not going to hear “I’ll send you the script next week…sorry…been drunk.”
So I try to steer clear of the rabble rousing. However, that night in Paris at the hostel there were so many people everywhere, and they were having a “free mojito night” in the bar at the hostel. I told myself, “Daniele is upstairs…I’m not even leaving the hostel…what could go wrong?” The mojito is a thing for me. I’ve mentioned it in a number of poems and other things I’ve written. It represents for me chucking the greater world at large and spending the rest of my days in a deck chair aside some Latin American jungle looking at Pacific waves, not encumbered by the grander meaning and purposes of things. I usually contrast the idea of a mojito with an umbrella in it in a derisive way against doing something really meaningful and important in life.
And so there I was, my bunk bed just a few years upstairs, and I thought I would have to get in on this college booze fest with some mojitos and beautiful backpackers. In my recent posts I’ve been referencing strange behavior that people do that can can only be explained by being influenced by some sort of force or beings from beyond. I’ve been pointing my finger at others. First, I talked about how my daughter turned into another person completely and disowned me because I sent some mean text messages to her mother-in-law. The daughter I raised could never do such a thing. Not possible. Some spirit or force did that. Not my daughter. I also griped about my sister, herself possibly holding a White Russian at the time, saying some off the wall thing that hurt my feelings. Finally, just in my last posts I’ve expressed the fear that my immigration packet to Israel is just never going to get processed because some evil spirits are likely gumming up the bureaucracy at the Israeli Ministry of the Interior. About myself I have only mentioned that I gave a cousin a peck on the shoulder without even knowing what I was doing. Just a little “Jonathan Bailey would never do that” kind of harmless odd behavior. But, remember the doctrine of the Singaporean newspaper salesman I met while wandering comatose after an Easter Sunday mugging in Frankfurt: “This isn’t you…” he said. We do these things that “just aren’t who we really are” sometimes. It’s important to recognize that when it happens and correct it. But I am a slow learner sometimes.
So alright. There I was, drinking mojitos with the splendid sophomores of Paris when all the sudden I went out on the streets…in search of what, I still do not know. Daniele was supposed to be a companion whose very presence would ground me to normative, rational behavior. I thought that he was upstairs, but as I headed out, I saw him in front of the hostel on the phone with family. I shot past trying to avoid him. Why? I still can’t explain.
Walking around on the street, a middle eastern looking guy came up and started walking beside me. His name was Ali, he said. He asked the usual, where I was from, what I was doing, etc. I told him I had been in Frankfurt, and he looked at me and told me he was from there. I got the impression that some kind of Frankfurt experience was on the way. I haven’t written everything out about Frankfurt. The posts from there only captured a portion of the weird. I didn’t tell you about Julia Teresa Homilius, the mooch, who had been living at that hostel for free, having her rooms paid for night after night by whoever happened to come along, and who talked to me about the secret wisdom of Satan. Yes, there’s that name Julia again. She blocked me sometime later, so if you want to verify her existence, you’ll have to do it yourself.
Since she blocked me and I can’t communicate with her, I’ll have to assume she won’t mind being doxxed. But yes, there are many, many things I’m leaving out in these posts that all my friends tell me are too long, in order to make a coherent narrative of things. But being approached by a street guy from Frankfurt in Paris struck me a bit, as I had been mugged by a bunch of street guys there, was surrounded by demons there, and talked with an angel there. Frankfurt was no small thing for me.
We sat on a burm in a park not far from the hostel at which point a variety of other street people came up and took their seats. I was asked what I was looking for, but I don’t remember my answer. One of them put some cocaine (I assume – some white powder) on the back of his phone and presented it to me with a straw. He didn’t try to sell me anything. An impoverished street bum just giving me drugs. How often does that happen? I snorted it. Why? I don’t know. Jonathan Bailey wouldn’t do such a thing. Street bums don’t pass out free cocaine to drunk Americans in bicycle shorts.
They told me they were trying to help me. How could giving me drugs help me? I stood up and started walking, and a few of them started walking with me. I felt numb, and my body felt strange. Like, more than the euphoric effect that people laud cocaine for, and more than the speedy effect, what struck me most was a kind of psychedelic detachment from reality and my body not feeling like my body. The sort of things that users of psychedelics report. Now remember, way back when all the weird began, back in 2019 in Scottsdale, Arizona, I was all upset about my lot as a lone and unknown middle-aged male, a threat to everyone everywhere, a fact which the world incessantly drilled into my head at every opportunity year after year, and at one point in late 2019 I decided I was going to do whatever it took to transcend the facts of physics and material reality and be someone else. The results were nothing but calamity, as I describe in my book. I’ll just say at that time I took drugs with the intent of taking a trip that would make Jim Morrison look amateur…I wanted to alter reality with my mind, and I was going to blast my mind until I was able to believe that such a thing was possible. Again, read the book to see what all happened with that. But, I kind of got a feeling that something similar was happening here. Like, these street bumbs in Paris gave me drugs in order to put me in a state of mind where I could, perhaps under the influence of the same infernal beings that they were, actually change reality simply by changing my perception.
One of the guys there said, “we are trying to help you.” Why would he say that? I can’t think of any reason that isn’t connected to what I just said above. On a different note, though, another one of the guys there said, “we can take a video of this.” That got me paranoid. I’m a God guy doing the bicycle prophet thing. Videos of coke binges don’t exactly fit any posh-printed program of whatever image I may want to present to the world…much less any videos of whatever any other crap these guys may have had in store for me. I got up and started walking.
They accompanied me and asked me what I wanted to do. I didn’t answer. One suggested I go off with this other guy who was just sitting there. I looked at the guy suggesting this to me, and for some reason that I also cannot explain, I just walked off in the other direction. Like, my eyes were staring at two o’clock to the right, but my feet just started moving off to ten o’clock to the left and removed me from the area without making any personal decision to do so.
It was almost like a superhero movie in which Professor X was sitting around the corner in his wheelchair taking over my mind. Since most of you aren’t superhero fans, I’ll include a clip of Professor X taking control of a villain, Sabertooth, in order to strangle another villain, Magneto, who was using his powers to mess with a bunch of cops. It’s a bit of a tangent, so skip clicking it if you’re in a hurry, or if you’re already a superhero buff, but the absolutely stark changes in behavior that I was experiencing really can only be described by the intensity of involvement of actors with superpowers.
First, I roamed around intoxicated at night with streetfolk and drugs, and I was out there doing things I would never do, walking around at night drunk, hanging out with street guys exactly like the ones who mugged me in Frankfurt, snorting free cocaine (or whatever it was) off the back of their cell phones, seemingly possessed by some infernal force and interacting with others possessed by infernal forces trying to totally separate me from rational reality. And with the same lack of choice, with the same lack of understanding, and with the same lack of conscious decision-making, I got the hell up out of there and walked away. It’s like the spirit of the Almighty, or some guardian angel, possessed me just as powerfully as the spirit of the infernal had possessed me up to that moment, and I just got up and left. As I started to walk away, the first guy looked at me and said, “no?” at which point I just shook my head wide eyed as I was trying to figure out what my feet were doing. I walked by myself for a bit not knowing exactly what to do or where to go, and then all of the sudden I just stumbled and fell through a door on the street, that for some reason was unlocked, and collapsed to the floor in what turned out to be some kind of a storeroom.
I sat there for a while, and my brain began to run, trying to make some kind of sense of what was going on. That’s when I ultimately hit what is called a “limit of explanatory regress.”
This has only happened to me a couple of times in life. Some philosophers are familiar with the concept of the “limit of causal regress.” This is when you look at something and say “what caused that” and then you look at that cause and say “what caused that” and you continually look back from cause to cause all the way back to the first cause and come up with a “this doesn’t have a cause. It just is.” The argumentation comes from Aristotle and Thomas Acquinas and is generally applied to arguments about the existence of God. Ultimately you trace the universe back to its beginning and ask yourself “what caused it” and the only available answer is: God. And you try to ask, “what caused God?” and the answer is: “nothing. God just is.” That’s the beginning of the causal chain. It’s a feature of what theologians call “the cosmological argument” from the Middle Ages and gave us Aristotle’s term for God: “the Prime Mover.”
Well, originally, Aristotle and his contemporaries weren’t concerned with causal regress. They were talking about EXPLANATORY regress. When you say, “why is something this way” and give the explanation, and then say “why” about that explanation. And “why” about the explanation of the explanation. And you keep looking for explanations for the explanations in a kind of chain of explanation, until finally you get to the point of “there is no further explanation possible. This is just the way it is.”
So there I was, face up on my back in a concrete storeroom in the north of Paris with my brain on fire trying to explain what on earth was going on, and explain the explanations…and explain the explanations of the explanations…etc. Then I hit the wall. The fundament of reality. My paradigm, so to speak, is simply the reality of God, the Messiah, and angels and demons, and what was going on here was that I was under the influence of some spirit allowed into my mindset by a little booze, and then what may have been cocaine, to the effect of walking headlong into some kind of spirit world, and then some other spirit on some opposing team just waved his hand like Professor X and got me the hell out of there. I didn’t have any sense of personal agency at all. I was being traded between the opposing teams of heaven and hell.
You see, before the world began, before anybody ever had the idea to argue with anyone, one angel said to another, “screw off…I’m done living in your heaven. I’m going to create a reality all my own.” He didn’t leave the paradise that was for a new one like he thought he would, however. He wound up in an abyss of darkness and pain, and he and those he took with him have been trying to get out of there ever since. When our world was created, God gave it to us, but this fallen angel got into it, into our dreams and hearts, and has been trying to manipulate us into accomplishing his purposes. That’s what I think was happening here. My will was being commandeered, but the powers of heaven were showing me who was ultimately in control.
Upon reaching this realization, upon seeing for myself what I basically thought of things, how I was going to see things, who I was, what I was not going to be able to avoid understanding, I got up and walked back to the hostel. It was about 2:30 AM. Daniele was in his bed asleep. I did my best to sleep, but didn’t have much success. We woke up the next morning and got ready to ride.
We had made the decision to separate after Paris. Daniele had a deadline, and he couldn’t ride as far or as fast as I could, so he was going to take a straight shot home, but it was important for me to see Alsace and Verdun. We made a commitment to a hug and a fist pump via a rendezvous in Switzerland down the road. Daniele never had any idea about anything that went on. I gave a brief explanation that I drank and went for a walk and fell into a storage room before coming back, and that was all there was to it as far as I told him.
Inside, though, I was boiling raging mad at God. An old Depeche Mode song kept running through my head.
The “best friend” I was riding with was not Daniele, though a friend he was, but my best, and at most times my only friend, who is God. I’ve been entirely too high too many times in life, I’ve nearly died entirely too often, and I’ve lost my mind one more time than I can count. The Big Guy and I had already had the conversation. If he wanted yet another garbage stain on the tire of a Ford F150 smeared on the dusty desert of Route 66, he was more than welcome to do that to me. After all, he’s the Big Guy. But if he wanted to win, he was going to have to have my back. And this wasn’t it. I’d thought we had an understanding. I thought that’s what the beautiful girls and Christian princesses on the QE2 meant. I thought that’s what my sunlit adventures in the forests of France with Daniele meant. That’s what our sunny days surrounded by storms out front and storms behind meant. I thought we were getting somewhere. But this just wasn’t it. I’m signing up to write scripts with the mother loving Drug Enforcement Agency for crying out loud. So, what on the green earth is the Big Guy doing to do to me now?
I mean, you have to understand. I have a tendency to get into some crap. I stayed in a hostel in Frankfurt’s red-light district. Okay. But I got mugged and beaten by a swarm of crackheads at noon on Easter Sunday, for crying out loud. I almost died walking home from a club in Budapest. Prudent people don’t go clubbing, I could say, but I literally paid a staff of professional chaperones to take me safely on a pub crawl. What insanity between heaven and hell is working on me? Working within me? Demons. That’s just the only answer. There is no other explanation.
This next day, after Daniele had taken off, I spent some time in the hostel by myself in the front bar area. That’s when I met Louise, sitting at the table next to me. Young. Gorgeous. Nerdycute. Glasses. Ankle-lenth skirt with a twee pop vibe. Sandals with a toe ring. That kind of thing. I’m sure you’ve seen this kind of creature. If I’d taken a picture, you’d never be able to forget the wonderful beauty. I know I won’t. She had a journal of paper with words and sentences interspersed with crosshatched doodles and symbols everywhere. She got up from her seat, walked over to me, set a little origami bird she had made on the table beside me, and walked back to her seat at the table behind me. I looked at the bird and saw the words “good luck” written in the folds of the paper between the wings.
She was promptly joined by her boyfriend, a hipster kind of guy, American, with a long but neatly trimmed rust-colored beard and a plaid shirt. Turning around to engage the pair, I exclaimed my amazement at reception of the gift. He told me she often did that in order to meet people. I wondered if these two had some kind of hookup game going on, like maybe they came to this hostel/bar of succulent college girl backpackers and strapping young international traveler guys on the lookout for some kind of fabulous sensual threesome or something, at which point a bald dude in bicycle shorts piqued someone’s interest…his or hers I would never know, and so they gave me a “good luck” message as an invitation that I might just “get lucky. Who knows what would make her come up to me and give me that little origami bird with “good luck” written on it?
We talked a bit about Paris and France and the USA. I couldn’t get that bird out of my mind. I didn’t get an explanation about why she gave it to me, what she meant to say with it, and in all likelihood this girl couldn’t give me one if I had pressed her, which I didn’t. In the end, I told them I didn’t know what to make of it, but that I was on a long journey, and luck was something I had been thirsty for, so I would take the gift as well-wishing for success in my travels. However, a thought crept into my mind toward the dark.
In the Torah, birds represent invisible spiritual beings, angels and demons, usually demons. And this bird had written “good luck” on it. My thoughts turned to the movie Taken, with that scene where the protagonist is talking to the villain who has just stolen his daughter, at the end of which the villain tells him, “Good luck.”
While I don’t want to tarnish my memory of this cool French pair at the hostel bar in Paris who treated me completely magnificently, I have to say, the “good luck” could have been taken in two ways. I had just been lead down demon road toward a field of psychedelic strawberries in some kind of endeavor to alter reality altogether, but some heavenly influence got me out of there and home safely. Perhaps the “good luck” came from some kind of dark force reminding me of that movie. “Okay…you’re not going to let us ‘help you’ get out of the reality you live in (and help us get out of our hell in the process)…you’re going to eat your angel food cake and keep on with the God thing…and you’re still going to ‘burn us for a thousand years and then kill us’ as you say in your blog…good luck…”
I put that in my pocket. Back to bicycle riding. The day after I had roved the streets of Paris high and drunk and come back to the hostel to fail in every way to sleep, I rode 72 miles down to Soissons.
I had separated from my riding buddy. I was again alone. I’m a lonely boy.
I had also just been put through a spiritual ringer with yet another “this has to be a dream” utterly impossible encounter with the forces of darkness…and maybe angels too…in which I had violated every significant principle of adult behavior I had cultivated in recent years. I was mad at God for subjecting me to more than I could handle. I wasn’t in the best mood. Wouldn’t you know it, the sky turned grey. The sun was gone.
This was all pretty challenging for me. I remember going to Los Angeles in 2023 in a dismal state of mind after losing Chloe, and there was nothing but fog every day all day the whole summer until July 16, the day The Flash premiered. I ended up thinking the movie was not so great, but I was absolutely excited for that premiere, having been waiting for it for months, and if you check the Los Angeles weather forecasts, July 16th was the day the fog lifted. Forget not as well, when I got nervous from turbulence on a plane from Florida to North Carolina at the end of 2024, the landing gear malfunctioned. When I got nervous from turbulence on a plane from Guadalajara to Phoenix just a month later, the cabin lost electrical power. I got nervous about flying, thinking if I get nervous, the plane will crash. Then the news exploded with plane crashes. The airliner hit the helicopter in Washington DC. The Korean plane crashed killing 200 people. A plane flipped over while trying to land. All of that motivated me to ride my bike around Europe instead of just flying.
Then there was the Sky Princess ship voyage that was wonderful until some chick and her boyfriend reported me to the crew for harassment because I told them they were harassing me, and the ship hit a tropical storm. It’s like I am somehow synched with the universe in a way that I had never noticed before. Let me tell you, I find this unsettling. I don’t know how to interpret it. Others experience this sort of thing and come up with all sorts of explanations. That reality is a simulation. That reality is a dream. None of that fit my paradigm, other elements of reality that I was seeing like those utterly incomprehensible days with Chaz and Haley that I describe in my book, or like that incomprehensible night in Puerto Vallarta.
To our story, though, while the dark mood of those days seemed to be sync’d to grey skies, I was still having incredible luck avoiding calamities and getting amazing accommodations. Daniele did not have such luck after we separated.
There he is waiting out a storm under a bridge. I’ll tell you the end of Daniele’s story, or at least my story with him, in another chapter.
For my part, I continued on to Reims, Epernay, Verdun, and Nancy before hitting really bad weather in a little town called Taintrux, and I was blessed enough to spend shabbat there during the rain. On that stretch I had the pleasure of seeing John Rambo’s boat.
I tell you, I’ve lived every frame of the last two Rambo movies. That guy is an important character for me, and on this trip I’ve been shocked at every turn at what pops out at me from the depths of my unconscious mind when I am on the road alone. At any rate, the weather cleared up on Sunday when I got back out on the road.
I was doing a lot of thinking on these solitary long rides, particularly about Paris. Normally in spirituality, we understand that when we are “under the influence” of these destructive urges, we are enslaved. We are possessed. But when we are doing great things and pursuing the ideals that God has for us, ruled by the love and truth and justice in our hearts, we are “inspired.” We are free. But in this situation, I’ll be the first to tell you that this night in Paris I was “under the influence” of demons, but also, based on how my exit from the situation went down, I can only say that I was utterly controlled by some external force…from heaven. And with that, I want to declare before God and man, I am good with that. If I am on some wrong road, I WANT some angel or some force or some pattern of divine behavior to take control and move my little feet out of that situation like a marionette. I surrender. I give control to God. I’ll happily play the part of one of Elon Musk’s robots. And so when that happened, when my feet took me away, and when I randomly fell into some opened storeroom, well, I declare, God did what I wanted to happen. I don’t need any more freedom than that.
Alright. Just a few more words before I close this down.
Verdun was a powerful moment for me. I rode through the site of the bloodiest battle of recorded history.
You can see the blood on the trees, right? I kid. All throughout my stay in the city I was reminded of how much I love, and how much I miss, Chloe, my Full Metal Bitch. One of my nicknames for her. I can’t believe she is gone.
There is a movie called Edge of Tomorrow. It centers on a fictional, futuristic “Battle of Verdun”. It’s about a war with battles that you fight over and over until you get it right. Until the last battle. The ultimate battle. For that one, you only get one shot. That’s what this poster is from. There is no clearer picture to the meaning of human life. We fight and win, we fight and fail. We fight and fail, we fight and win. Until the last battle. The last day on earth. The last minute of life. The precipice of heaven and hell. In ultimate terms. As I sit here in Cyprus looking at Ashkelon over the sea, that’s the sense I’m getting. The last battle is upon me. Apart from all that, though, Verdun was just a cool city.
From there I shot down to Nancy. After decades as a Beatles fan, and after years of being something of a “superhero expert” if you will, it was in Nancy that I finally made the connection that the superhero Rocket Racoon from The Guardians of the Galaxy was based on a Beatles song. The city was utterly marvelous.
The name of the city got me thinking about that song, though, on account of the fact that the name when written looks like an English name for a woman. That name would feature in this song of no small repute.
I couldn’t help but note the connection in the post I made on Strava about the ride.
I couldn’t fit all the lyrics in the screenshot, but I’m sure those of you who know the song are aware that that it’s a 2/4/2/4 stanza breakdown of an AABCCB rhyme that ends in: “but everyone knew her as Nancy.” So while I was riding through France taking pictures of pretty buildings and boulevards in towns with beautiful French names, my thoughts were guided toward matters of spirit and soul, and of fate, and of passions deep, insoluble, and as every bit unforgettable as the image of petals of roses slipping through the bone white hands of a widower liche who had cast the wrong spell and was now trying to make sense of the vapor he held between his skeletal fingers.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this installment of the bicycle ride to the Holy Land. There was a bit more to France than I have written about here, but my blogs are too long and rambly, so I think I am going to work just a bit of my last couple of days in France into my next post about Switzerland. A lot happened here that becomes relevant down the road, but unfortunately, I can’t put it all in this post without muddying the narrative, so I’ll give you a break. Congratulations. You’ve made it to the end. More to come.
