Love Note

Como struck me like an axis around which a pair of polar opposite realities did a dance of love without ever touching. Since I’d set my bicycle boots on the sandy shores of Normandy, I had been riding with Daniele and Paul, and even a few hours with LouLou and Sie, with only a few days by myself in Alsace. Como would mark the beginning of a very long stretch of solitude. The environment itself was spectacular, though the sky was a grey as my mood.

Paul and his Chinese goddess friend had spent a few days at the bars partying, but I wasn’t about to do that, despite being in one of the standard atmospheric hostels surrounded by backpack boys and gorgeous girls.

I had to get moving. As always, I had to get to Israel. I’d grow old before I could list all of the things I didn’t do on this trip, that I didn’t enjoy, because I had to get to Israel. And at this particular time, I had to get down to Milan to fix my busted bike if I didn’t want to break bones on the bullion brick byways of the Italian alps.

The ride down to Milan.

The ride down to Milan was quick and painless enough. Well, perhaps not entirely painless, but if painful, then in a fun way. As usual, there was a bit of getting lost in unfamiliar territory that I would solve with a little gung ho.

For the thousandth time, my Domane endurance road bike does in fact handle a variety of terrain types rather well.

By the end of the day I was in Milan, the regional Trek bicycle center, to either fix my bike or get a new one. Getting a cracked carbon frame repaired is no small matter. There aren’t many people who can do it. If anyone could get it done, it would be in Milan. If I couldn’t get it repaired (the likely course of events), I would have to get a new bike. Contemplating the matter, I couldn’t help but snap a shot of this billboard as I entered the city.

I wasn’t exactly heartened by the exterior of what was supposedly the biggest Trek store in northern Italy.

However, once I got inside, miracles started happening. Fillipo, the salesman there, told me that there was in fact one Korean guy in Milan who could fix carbon frames, but he was not currently open for business, and his wait times were exorbitant. That said, I was looking at just chucking my Domane in the trash and finishing the tour with a little cheapie something that he had available on the floor. However, I was tempted with a gift. Just by chance, he had a store return Domane SLR7 with Shimano Di2 electric shifters that he had fitted for the previous customer with 32mm tubeless tires. While my mood was rather glum at the time on account of leaving Paul and Daniele, and the grey skies reflected this, I was still receiving miraculous gifts of good fortune from the Almighty, it would seem.

I think I’ve said in some previous posts, the bike I’ve been touring with was a Domane SL5. That is, the fourth generation standard carbon frame with the fifth best groupset (the grouping of shifters, gears, sprockets, etc.) that Trek puts on their bikes. It runs about $4,000 new when you include taxes and whatnot. This bike he was offering me was a racier frame (the SLR) made from a higher quality carbon, and while not an electric bicycle, the shifting was electric, making the bicycle vastly more stable. I had always avoided electric shifters previously because I wanted my bicycle to be nuclear war proof. I’d hate to be on tour and find that my bike had run out of electricity. However, they told me that one charge lasts five thousand kilometers. I would also find out that the bike can be charged from a standard power bank that you buy at Best Buy for $20 and keep in your backpack for emergencies. What sold me, though, is that the previous customer had the bike fitted with the exact same type of tires that I like on my bike. These were touring tires that handle offroad well, just like I had on my SL5, though they might make the bike a little slower for racing. The guy was willing to sell me the bike for 4,500 Euros out the door. These high-end bicycles are a bit like cars. If you drive one off the lot, the value of the car drops to half. A new SLR7 Di2 would run for about $10,000 in the US.

These were my only options. I could get a little cheap bike to finish the tour or get this perfectly fitted out pearl. It was time to call mom and ask for a loan. After talking with my stepfather, they decided to help with the money. My birthday was coming up, so things were left kind of open about how much I would pay them back and when. My beloved parents topped up my checking account to make sure I could get the bike right then. In less than 24 hours I would ride out of Milan with the bicycle of my dreams. I think God was cheering me up. I’ve mentioned in my account of these tales that starting with the trip on the Queen Mary 2, I’d been showered with incredibly conspicuous episodes of luck. I’m blessed to have the parents I do.

Despite the wonderful bike brought to me by miraculous good fortune, I was still quite sad about riding alone, and the weather in Milan reflected this. On the morning that I woke up to head to Peschiera del Garde, 90 miles away, I decided to head from my hostel on the east side of town to grab some photos of some monuments before leaving the city.

Milan truly is an incredibly beautiful city.

I remember at that time being in touch with Hawkman fairly regularly. Remember, I met the guy in Hollywood while trying to write about Zack Snyder, and at one point I was talking to him about my quixotic endeavors to do something for the Lady, Gal Gadot. Now I consider myself a guy who, in the absence of any other life constraints, lets himself be guided by personal ideals and dreams into what I hope manifest themselves in some general way in reality, either directly or indirectly. At the end of the conversation, wanting to allay any fears he may have of my behaving as some sort of crazed fan, I reminded him that I look for patterns and meaning in coincidences and bizarre occurrences, and the whole thing was a sort of a test of the reality of the concept of serendipity. That morning, heading out of town, I snapped a shot of a common store sign that I thought was cooler than any of the monuments I saw, however.

The ride out of town started off as something of a challenge, navigating through the traffic in the rain.

However, once out of the city, despite the gloomy skies, the route became quite picturesque.

Because I headed west into Milan, the 90-mile ride became a 118 mile ride that ended late at night with a lovely pit stop in the town of Brescia.

As mentioned, the extra miles of the ride caused the day to draw long.

I finally did make it to my destination, however.

I barely made it in, though, needing to stop just short of the hostel to charge my electronic devices. I’ll link the two videos below together for some future draft of this story if it ever becomes relevant. I accidentally shut the video off when I intended to flip the camera over. So you get two videos for the price of one at this time.

Thus ended my first ride with the new bicycle.

I would find out later that Lago del Garde was a rather famous vacation spot in Italy, perhaps less well known than other places, but a part of the general allure of the area around Verona. Since I’d stayed in Pesciera del Garde, I ended up just riding through Verona itself rather than spending a lot of time there. Remember, I was in a hurry to get to my new home of Israel, and I was completely off schedule due to the horrific interactions with Israeli bureaucracy, so I blew through tons of places that I should have stayed for weeks. Verona is in fact an incredible city.

I wish I could have soaked up the atmosphere of this place forever, but my route for the day was to a place rather dear to my heart. Vicenza. I knew nothing about the city other than that it was home to the 173rd Airborne Brigade. I’m proud of my military service and heritage, and had heard about the unit for years, but getting assigned to Italy for an Army Soldier was a dream not many people would have the privilege of seeing come to fruition.

Throughout all of my descriptions of this trip, I have noted that the weirder things happen when I am alone. I’ve said many a time that people don’t see UFOs looking out the window of the boardroom office during the Monday morning office call. They see UFOs late at night, alone in the woods, when they’re drunk. Well, I wasn’t drinking at this time. I hadn’t received any concussions at the hands of swarming homeless people like I did in Frankfurt. I wasn’t on any drugs, even the medical marijuana that I’d been accustomed to treating some PTSD symptoms with a few times per year. But I was lonely and sad despite the splendor of the Italian villas and countryside, and this is when a lot of coincidences started to happen. It was around this time that I’d told Hawkman that I had a bad feeling about September. I think it was precipitated by my mood. I was for the most point joyful on this part of the journey from the Queen Mary 2 onward, but they grey of the skies and the emptiness from saying goodbye to Daniele and Paul kept my spirits low, and well, there is no other way to say it, but things got weird.

To begin with, right about when I told Hawkman I thought things might go bad during September, a bunch of Christians in the USA started claiming that the Rapture was going to happen that month.

They were calling it RaptureTok because of the social media storm the whole thing generated. I do not believe in this Christian doctrine of the “pretribulational rapture” that claims Christians will flat disappear and go straight to heaven just before the awful events of the apocalypse. However, I thought it was interesting that I, a guy styling himself with a literary identity of “bicycle prophet of the apocalypse” with a mission to go help the nation of Israel get ready for its destiny during the last age of earth as we know it, would tell a friend that he had a bad feeling about the month of September, and lo and behold, Christians across the world start thinking the world is going to end right then and there.

That was just a funny beginning to a string of amazing coincidences that would turn up on this last stage of the Italian ride. The next one wasn’t so funny. It rather saddened me further, I must say. I mentioned previously that I had been talking to my friend Rodney, an Army buddy of mine in the 90s, ex-husband to my ex-wife, and father to my now ex-stepdaughter Veronica. I’d been motivating him as best I could to accomplish what he told me was his divine calling to become a Christian pastor.

Well, just as I was riding into Vicenza, a town known to me for its US Army heritage, Rodney decided to hate me and end our friendship of thirty years. He had gotten into a fight with his new wife and wasn’t doing too well on a day that I called him. I asked him what was going on, and he bellowed at me that I had always refused to help him with his problems and raged at me over the issue of my marrying his first wife, an issue that we had settled decades before when we resumed our friendship.

At the beginning of this trip, I lost my daughter. During this trip I met and had to say goodbye to two friends I was riding with, Daniele and Paul. And now my oldest friend on earth decided to get rid of me. I had been pressuring him to get about his Christian calling, and I was getting the sense that he wasn’t being honest with me about his accomplishments. He claimed that he had prepared and lead a bible study and told me he would video it and put it on the net, but afterward let me know that he couldn’t get the camera to work. I’d been getting frustrated that I could only hear his reports of what he said he was doing, and I think this was chafing at him. Finally, the guy just got rid of me. So much for three decades of friendship. I lost my old Army buddy just as I was riding into this Army town.

Then, as I was riding into Vicenza, I called Hawkman, who told me, “JB, I can’t talk right now, buddy, I’m hauling precious cargo at the moment! I’m on a road trip in Florida with my wife Christina! Talk to you later, brother!” That was the first time I had heard Hawkman’s wife’s name. I then pulled into town to my hotel.

That route on the bicycle ended up being a wild ride. It also happened to be 66.6 miles long. The number of the beast. The devil was gloating about taking Rodney, apparently.

I do have to say that Vicenza is a pretty nice place to be stationed, although the grey skies were still mirroring my grey mood.

Seeing the Army base was like a half-day of deja vue, however, and I couldn’t help but wax reflective about how many lives I’d lived.

I did nurse a glimmer of hope for a bit of fun, though, as the next ride was going to be to a rather famous destination: Venice. The city of love. Remember dear reader, not only am I a knight champion to the Lady, but I am also a knight of the Messiah, the king of love. Every knight has a lady to champion and a king to serve. I was just curious what was going to happen to me in that city. Remember how traumatized I am. I broke up with my last girlfriend, Mayra, in September of 2022, and although that was a great relationship, I’ve still nursed various issues around women ever since, particularly after the awful treatment from the girls of Haven Coliving in Venice Beach. That being the case, I thought I might plunge into rank depression going to Venice in my sad and lonely state, minus Rodney and my buddies, so I was just curious what I would find. The road to Venice was lovely, and with my excitement and curiosity about Venice, the sun came out to boost my spirits.

I checked in to yet another trendy hostel packed with strapping boys with backpacks and lovely college ladies.

Coincidental moments of wonder would continue. First, I saw the most beautiful woman who has ever entered a man’s dreams. At breakfast one morning, I started talking to this absolutely lovely Korean girl named Kaon. When you say this name in Korean, though, it sounds like Gaon. “Gaon” is the Hebrew term for “genius.” I was dismayed to learn that she and two friends had come to Venice to study, but they were having problems with their dorm room accommodations, and they didn’t have a place to stay. I got really upset about their dilemma and told her I would be praying for her. Looking back, if I were not going to Israel, I would have just stopped right there and gotten a four-bedroom apartment and offered them to live with me. They were two girls and a boy in their early twenties.

While Gaon was absolutely ravishing in her own right, her friend, whose name I never got, was the unearthly specimen of feminine majesty that I reference above. It simply is not possible for a human being to be so beautiful. She was pure porcelain draped in a cascade of glistening midnight, slender, and delicate as a baby’s breath gracing Christmas snow. I didn’t get her name because I couldn’t speak when I saw her. I am not being literary here. I am not exaggerating when I say that my heart beat without rhythm, and I literally couldn’t breathe. I had to hold myself up by putting my hand on the table and look away before I literally passed out or had a heart attack and remind myself that I was still on planet earth. We all use the term “take my breath away,” but we don’t mean it literally. However, I can now say that this has literally happened to me. I literally couldn’t breathe until I collected myself.

I never saw her again, though I saw Gaon a couple of times, and ended up leaving the city before finding out if the trio ever found a place to stay. The things I gave up in order to go to Israel shock me to this day. The privilege of beholding such supernatural beauty was not the love that I would find in Venice, however. That would be Liliana Suarez. From Columbia.

Adorable, isn’t she? Twenty-seven years old. I met her at breakfast. I asked her if she had been into the city, and she said that she hadn’t. She wanted to, but she was having difficulty getting tickets, as she was strapped for cash. Immediately I went into dude mode. I told her up front right there that I recognized our age difference, and that I was a religious person, sexually and romantically conservative, and carrying wounds from women from the past, specifically younger ones. I think I also mentioned that I had lost my daughter, getting into a fight before taking my bike trip that was yet to be resolved. I added to all this that I had made a commitment to not dating a woman until she had been my platonic friend for at least a year.

With the above said, I asked her if she would grant me the privilege of taking her to Venice as a date. I would pay everything as a man would his lover, take her out to a good time, and make her feel as though she were enjoying Venice with a beloved gentleman. Only that this would be for the pleasure of enjoying the city of love, and that really it would just be a date, and hopefully the beginning of a friendship.

She took me up on it, commenting that she had this mystic power that whenever she was in need of aid, someone would show up to alleviate her sorrows. I noted to myself that this was the opposite of me, for whenever I am in need of aid, I stare straight into the blood cold eyes of abandonment and solitude. Nevertheless, we went as a pair to the island of Gondolas.

I let her know I liked to take a ton of pictures, at which point she made a strange comment with a worried look on her face: “You’re going to make me famous?” If I remember correctly, she said this in reaction to myself explaining my love for picturetaking by saying I was doing a travel blog for my trip. Little did she know how few people look at any of my blogs. I assured her that her chances of becoming famous were slim to none, and that I would inform her if I put any pictures of her anywhere or referenced her in any way. Satisfied with that, off we went on our tour of the town.

The place, and my companion for the day, were of a magic that the grandest of all archwizards would never dream to command.

Even the water took on the tone of a mirage too incredible to be real.

God actually gave me a girl to enjoy Venice with. And an amazing one she was. A medical student. Highly intelligent. Philosophical, even. We talked a bit about Kabbalah and Carl Jung and God, but not too much, as I didn’t want to detract from the incredible ambience of the physical world we were swimming through.

Who could resist the enchantment of such an ensorceling creature?

I bought her wine, water, and ice cream.

We saw the monuments. After an eternity I wasn’t taking pictures of buildings with no people in them or only strangers. I was actually able to take a picture of beautiful place with a beautiful person who I actually knew in the same photo.

There was no shortage of conversation. We talked about my experiences with Spanish and Spanish language literature.

I felt a bit of reserve when she contributed her philosophical insights, however. She was reading “The Power of Now” from Eckhart Toll. According to this philosophy, the key to happiness is to forget the past, not think about the future, avoid contemplating that which is elsewhere, and live completely and solely in the present moment. The idea is that most of the time, most people are fine at any given moment, but they drag themselves into misery thinking about the bad times of the future, the past, and the world at large.

This philosophy is completely, utterly, and diametrically opposed to the perspective from the Bible.

For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Ecclesiastes 1:18

They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.

Luke 17:27

I began to have some reservation that she’d likely tug me in a different direction with her philosophies, and she might ultimately prove resistant to some of mine. But on a conscious level, this didn’t disturb me, as we were really just friends. Although I was even aware at the time that on an emotive level, this lonely and sad old man was enchanted beyond reasonable capacity to describe. Whenever I associate a song with a girl, I try to be careful to never attribute that song to another girl. It’s a gesture of respect that I try to remain faithful to. However, this time I think I can only capture my mood with one of Fire Girl’s songs.

After our day in the city we went to a concert at the hostel.

Yes, they were singing “Country Road, Take me Home,” a song that I attach to my trek to Israel. Between my hesitation about her attachment to Eckhart Toll, and my urge to go to Israel, it would seem that a bit of conflicting energy was developing. I continued to speak to her from a perspective of great closeness, however, as the power of her charm had bitten into my soul. But that energy, well, she started to comment that I was still treating her like a lover and not a friend. It was like the reservations that had been crawling around in basement of my conscious mind somehow mirrored some sort of reservations on her part. She was correct, however. I was indeed treating her as the lover I was playing with hours before. My response, though, was that my ex-wife was never my friend, so that if she would be my friend, I might just treat her better than any man had ever treated his lover.

I really was lost in the sauce. We parted ways with that bit of conflict and hesitation. I hung out at the hostel for a couple more days, and I ran into yet another girl. I kept to myself after Liliana left to go on further travels, being hesitant to get close to others given that I had completely lost my composure with Liliana. I had my day in Venice with a beautiful woman. It was exceptionally powerful for me. I needed to regain some emotional sobriety. I was truly drunk off the experience. But somehow one other lady attracted my attention. Her name, wait for it, was Christina.

We more or less just met, exchanged contact information, and went our separate ways. We’ve kept in contact since, though. She’s a cool chick in general, but I couldn’t avoid mentioning her here because she is the third Christina I ran into on this trip. Hawkman’s wife, Hotel Christina, and this girl. This looks like quite a coincidence because of the timing of it all, and really, I’ve hated to bring you down talking as I have about my deflated mood for a lot of this part of the trip, but Italy really was a pretty solitary time. It’s not like I was talking to ten thousand chicks and a couple of them were Christinas. Furthermore, I was heading off to Greece next, and this Christina has Greek extended family, goes there all the time, loves it there, etc.

I was thinking a lot at the time about where to go and what to do if Israel ended up not working out. Spain, Germany, and Greece were top options. I just don’t think this sort of thing can be random chance and tricks of perception. I really think this sort of thing makes it pretty obvious that our lives are organized and arranged by God, and these sorts of patterns and coincidences offer a demonstration of that.

I tried to keep in touch with Liliana as well. She continued to be a little hesitant because I had been so friendly and romantic toward her, and I had difficulty shutting that off. Then I completely blew it with her. She said at one point, “your behavior kind of scares me.” That triggered me. I really have difficulty being treated like a male threat after everything that happened to me in 2012 in the Army and in 2023 in California. Venice Beach, California, by the way. I blurted something disgusting and cruel at her. She was still cool to me about it, or as cool as she could be, but about a day later she went ahead and blocked me. I think I deserved it. Well, I hate being blocked. Especially by friends or family. However, she didn’t know me that well, so I after what I said that day, what else could I expect? I lost that friend, and I got a lesson in just how damaged I had been. Also, though, I thought, could this be some kind of a sign that we weren’t going to get along because she was an Eckart Toll girl, and I was a Bible guy? Are we just of fundamentally different spirits or types? Could it have been that if we had maintained our friendship, it would have been a bad thing because of our competing world views? Everywhere she goes, when she need help, someone arrives to take care of her. Everywhere I go, when I need help, everyone disappears. She says she has no problem being happy no matter what. I have a hard time being happy no matter how great things are. The universe seems to love her. I can’t say the same about myself. The universe seems to come after me whenever possible. In the end, who knows? I’m sure it will all make sense one day.

Venice was my last stop in Italy. I would take a ferry to Greece after a few days in that city. That said, this post should end here, and I should start a new chapter about the rest of the trip. However, I want to talk about my first stop in Greece because something happened there that fits with what I’ve been talking about here. So, yeah, I took a ferry from Venice to Patras in Greece.

It turns out there was another cyclist on the boat that I didn’t run into until we were about to exit. A German chick. She asked me to ride with her a bit because it was nighttime, and she wanted some escort to get to her hotel or hostel safely.

I didn’t get her name, actually. I should have. If it were Christina, I would of course have positive proof that the law of probability is just a bald-faced lie.

As it was, I bid her on her way and rode to my hotel. I was still having amazing luck finding cheap accommodations, and I was happy to have a little space and privacy in a hotel.

Here I once again had a conversation with Hawkman about my travels. Just as I was trying to get in touch with the guy, while I was thinking about all this, I looked in the bathroom and saw something that struck me.

So Italy and September were mostly a period of negative mood. Despite the incredible scenery and the lovely girls I ran into, I spent a lot of time in lonely solitude and ended up blowing it with this great girl I met in Venice. I was really excited about trying to get into film with Hawkman and Skip, however. Then I see this. Being somehwat down, I look at the sink, and the soap and tissue packets seemed to make a kind of a message.

In the Torah, stars represent heavenly powers. usually angels. The top star would be the king of the angels. It was like a message: “I am sending you a care package. I believe your choice. You’re mine. Sew up the wounds and drive on. This is the ideal standard.” Then I got a thought in my head. I remembered an old blog post I wrote where I was trying to describe some features of ancient Greek, and I used Zack Snyder’s name as the example of some points I was trying to make. I went through Hebrew, Greek, and Yiddish aspects of his name and determined a meaning: “God remembers the tailor.” And here I was, thinking about Hawkman and Skip and film, and I get this message about a choice…and a sewing kit. And while I was talking to Hawkman a lot at that time, I hadn’t really been thinking so much about Zack Snyder lately. So, I opened up Vero, the Social Media app that I follow Zack Snyder on, and wouldn’t you know it, he is filming a movie in Columbia. I’d just loved and lost a Columbian chick friend.

I quickly pulled up AI and asked about the movie, and the film he is shooting is called “The Last Photograph”. My working title for this bicycle story I’m doing is “The last Trip”.

There is the Spotify playlist where I am putting songs for a soundtrack. And, as Gemini mentions above, Zack’s movie “The Last Photograph” is about DEA agent looking for his missing niece and nephew. Hawkman and Skip are DEA agents. Finally, this DEA agent is looking for his missing niece and nephew. I lost Chloe in 2023, and I lost my daughter just before this trip.

At this point, a normal person might think that someone is stealing someone else’s creative content. However, if you remember, I went to Los Angeles to write about a bunch of actors that had relationship problems and got accused of sexual impropriety. I’ve written enough in the past about Ben Affleck’s divorce, Ezra Miller’s issues with his teenaged girlfriend, Henry Cavill’s problem dating a yung actress, and Joss Whedon’s career being ruined over improper relationships and adultery. While trying to write about all that stuff in LA, I got accused of sexual improprieties three times in three months and completely lost my mind, leading me to leave the city in a fit of insanity without finishing a single booklet.

This whole trip seems to be a very clear demonstration from God about what Carl Jung called “acausal relationships” – patterns of coincidence, which demonstrate that life isn’t just random chance, but rather must be organized by an overarching intelligence.

So what was going on here? How should I take this? Well, there certainly are a lot of common patterns and details with all this. Can this all be just chance? I hope things are clear enough for the reader to see the correspondences. To this day I am still wondering what to make of things. If you have any ideas, let me know. I’m going to end this here and continue the saga of the journey at a later time. These are my experiences with the city of love. So this will be a quick love.