I rode back to Limassol on the last day of October.
Coming back into town, I would learn that Kevin Spacey, an actor who had been removed from Hollywood via accusations of sexual impropriety, was living hand to mouth in Cyprus!
I thought this was fascinating, as I had just relived a reenactment of my trauma with the van Ouwerkerk family via the Greek Ebionite, all of which surrounded the issue of being accused of being some kind of sex predator. No one had heard much from Spacey since his ordeal of hitting on underaged boys. When something like this happens, when a super luminary famous person suddenly falls from grace, I ask myself if they had made a deal with the devil to get where they were and then somehow decided to renegotiate the contract of blood, just as Bob Dylan did. I myself never got very far in life, but what falling from the not sole lofty heights of my life I had endured quite often involved being labeled as a horrifying male. I am quite convinced that Sean “Diddy” Combs played rather a lot with dark forces, decided to get away from that life, and suddenly was confronted with the sins of his days in darkness.
I don’t have anything to say about Kevin Spacey’s guilt or innocence pertaining to the allegations surrounding him, or about his personality or character. I have never met him. The actor has always been important to me because of his film catalog, however. The movie American Beauty has always been close to my heart, as I have lived every frame of it. That movie was about a man, well two people, really, as I connect quite closely to Lester Burnham and Ricky Fittz, who shed the clouded views of life in the rat race to reach a kind of freedom from the world. In the case of Lester’s character, through this evolution, despite whatever natural desires he may have possessed, he treated a young woman with honor during a period of difficulty with his daughter. It would seem again that my unconscious mind was being written around me on the billboards of Cyprus.
And of course, every cat in the city looked like Rascal, the favorite cat of my youth.
I arrived back at the Bee Hostel without much ado.
The design of the hostel continued the trend of the variety that I had come to be accustomed to through my travels across Europe. It had its unique character and seemed to cater to the young, fun, and clever adventures of backpackers traveling the world. For example, I found this in the bathroom.
However, something suddenly changed in the universe concerning the patrons. There were absolutely no gorgeous young girls, as there had always been everywhere I went. This hostel was filled mostly with old men and a few younger ones who had come to Cyprus to look for work. In this sense I was reminded of Los Angeles, where many hostels required guests to present foreign passports or proof of travel via a plane ticket or something in order to avoid being overrun by homeless angelinos looking for a place to stay that was actually cheaper than an apartment in that city. I spent time trying to make progress on my immigration packet to Israel, wanting to push things along with the “squeaky wheel gets the grease” method.
Otherwise, I spent time outside of the hostel walking around by myself, of course seeing nothing but cats that looked like Rascal. At one point I saw graffiti of Charles Burkowski, a writer and thinker I learned about from the Maestro in Mexico, only to turn the corner and find someone selling elotes like the ones I used to eat in Mexico.
How does a person not come to the conclusion that he is dreaming when confronted with such chains of coincidence?
Also at that time the Israeli actions in Gaza were on the forefront of everyone’s mind.
I saw Watchman references all over the place.
Things got particularly interesting, though, when an unusual character came into the hostel. It would seem that once again I would meet a mirror of myself who would become a kind of a dark reflection.
The character in question was Max Tijerino. I could not believe the number of points of intersection I would have in common with this guy. He was going through a messy divorce. My divorce, and the destruction of all things pertaining to myself in the aftermath of it, including the horrific ending of my military career at the hands of female Army officers who treated me like an evil male predator in the aftermath of my divorce from my wife, and then subsequently losing my stepdaughter to my ex-wife’s machinations, was of course a significant event that left deep scars on my nature and character.
Second, Max had been an actor in Hollywood. I had just left living in Hollywood for over a year where I not only had my first experiences with local area athletic cycling, and not only spent time with the Jews of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Koreatown, but most importantly I tried to write a book about the symbolic meaning of the Zack Snyder Justice League trilogy and had been frustrated in attempts to meet that director and other actors and filmmakers who were involved in the whole Warner Brothers’ implosion surrounding those films.
Finally, though, and this perhaps struck me the most, Max was a United States Marine. A combat engineer. That really meant a lot to me. I started my military career as a junior enlisted mechanized infantryman. Not a Special Forces Operator. Not an Army Ranger. Not a paratrooper. Just a regular old grunt. A rifleman that jumped out of the back of an infantry fighting vehicle or armored personnel carrier.
There is a certain competition between the Army and the Marines about who is the best. It is generally understood that Marines are tougher than the Army. This is an oversimplification. The Army is the United States’ force for ground warfare. Human beings are land dwelling creatures, so this makes the Army our basic military force. All of the others support the Army in some way. It is our largest branch of service. Therefore, it contains most of our most elite soldiers. The Rangers, the Special Forces, Delta Force, these are all Army organizations. However, not every soldier can be like those guys. So a supply clerk in a line infantry unit just isn’t going to have the same kind of gusto as a Special Forces Operator.
The Marines basically allow the Navy to accomplish things on land. They are a smaller force. They do have certain unique missions that the Army doesn’t do such as bursting out of the back of giant landing ships on hovercraft, boats, and amphibious vehicles. However, for the most part, they form a corps of coastal and river fighters who function as a second land army to bolster the nation’s fighting strength, often fighting with leftover Army equipment. Their small size allows them to make up for their equipment shortcomings with a particular attention to esprit de corps and ethos and devotion to high standards of training that spans the entirety of the force. So then, while a supply clerk in a line unit in the Army is a far cry from a US Army Ranger, the Marines operate like every typist is also an infantry warrior. Everyone is a Marine. For life. Even if you only serve a couple of years. Even if you get convicted of a crime, your rank is taken away, and you serve time in a military prison, you are a Marine. No matter what your job was. No matter what your rank was. And finally, as a person who serves God, and who is devoted to the concept in faith in the higher and beyond, I have always been impressed by the Marines’ fundamental motto: semper fidelis. Always faithful.
As I said above, what Marines lack in numbers and equipment, they make up for with heart and their commitment to core values. Keep in mind when you click the video below, that Max Tijerino, he told me to call him TJ, was Hispanic.
I said above that there is a competition between the Army and Marines about who is better. I am not like that. When I see a Marine, I think, “they say you are better than me…I’m glad you’re here.” I told TJ that I had been riding a bicycle by myself for a year, that I was writing a book about it, that I was tired, and that I was having trouble getting to my final destination of Jerusalem. TJ learned shortly after meeting me that I retired at the rank of Captain. When I told him of my travails, he said, “I can help you out, Cap.” That was his nickname for me. “Cap.” I was floored that he chose that name. That is a very special name for me.
For a guy who has spent years analyzing superheroes, he nicknamed me after my favorite superhero from Marvel Comics. If I remember correctly, TJ finished his service with the rank of Sergeant. While lowest rank of a non-commissioned officer in the Marine Corps is a Corporal, the Army doesn’t use Corporals much anymore. We go straight from being Privates to “Specialists” to Sergeants, with the Sergeant being the lowest rank of non-commissioned officer. Thus, we call them “buck sergeants.” Captain America had a sidekick, James Buchanan Barnes, shortened to “Bucky Barnes,” or just to “Buck.” I couldn’t believe all the coincidences. The ghost of Carl Jung and Chaim Vital had to have gotten together to confect such a conspiracy of coincidence. There we were, Cap and Buck together.
TJ introduced me to Veterans in Movies and Entertainment after I told him I hadn’t been able to make any headway contacting anyone in Hollywood about previous work and that I hadn’t started promoting anything I was working on currently. He also offered to use his experience with AI to help me make some promotional videos. I was skeptical that he would be able to do so, as my trials with technodemons made AI lie to me more often than not and made most of my attempts to use it to any effect result in labor intensive projects that never returned what I wanted. I did want to see what he could pull off, however.
This initial encounter with another veteran such as myself with a background in the entertainment community and problems with divorce would not end with the two of us being twins, of course. It would seem that this initial impression of having met another version of myself would ultimately result in my partnering with someone who was in many ways my exact opposite. The differences started small and then grew large.
We talked a bit about superheroes, and I would learn that instead of the common understanding of Batman as a hero, TJ saw Batman as a misguided servant of the forces he was hoping to fight against. I initially sluffed off his descriptions of Batman as what I would call an unenlightened interpretation of a hero that had been written in many different ways and interpreted in even more.
I then noticed that he smoked a lot of marijuana. I myself had just done so in Larnaca, and I am in general open to people who do this. For me, though, that drug makes me vulnerable to a variety of negative spiritual moods and states of mind. I can never be around people when I am under its influence, and I have to use it very sparingly. In fact, at the time of this writing I am committed to not using it anymore. TJ was a regular user, and one day on the patio of the Bee Hostel, when I was telling him about my idea for a movie in which the threat of an alien invasion would be used to turn the world against the arrival of the Messiah, he brought aliens into the conversation in a completely different context, linking them to advocacy of antisemitism.
He showed me a video of a conspiracy theory surrounding an Antarctic expedition of an Admiral Byrd in 1946 in which the admiral found a secret “land of the lost” under the south pole to which he was escorted by flying saucers with swastikas on them. In a secret city under the ice, he allegedly met beautiful aliens who had been trying to save humanity from nuclear destruction. These aliens had apparently motivated the Nazis. I can’t find the exact video he showed me, but I will include a similar one here. I apologize that it is long. I’ve explained the essence of it, so feel free to skip it.
After viewing the video he showed me, I said, “so in World War II…”, he cut me off, looking at me with a joint in his hand, his soul seething with the energy from the dark side, “…we were on the wrong side,” he said.
The words cut me deep. Buck was a Nazi. His mind was not his own.
Still, I thought that perhaps at some point he could come to his senses and pull me up onto the beach. We continued to hang out. I’d met a couple of Christians in the area, one of whom spoke Spanish, and I introduced TJ to him in order to see if a little God would help him out of his difficulties with his divorce, and maybe his love for marijuana as well. He said he was raised Christian, but had gotten away from it as he got older. When the subject of Israel came up, he began to passionately advance the idea that spiritual Israel, Christianity in his eyes, was all that mattered. National Israel had nothing to do with anything anymore.
After spending some time with him and the old and broke men of the Bee Hostel, I decided to head up north to get my teeth cleaned by Omer, the Turkish dentist I had met in Basel who was now working at an Israeli clinic in Kyrenia. Yes, I think anyone who found themselves on a difficult journey to Israel would find bumping into a Turkish dentist in Switzerland only to again find the same dentist working for Israelis in Cyprus rather conspicuous. Don’t you?
On that ride I got a much cooler look at Nicosia as I rode through the city than I did on the way down.
The ride ended up being long and late, but I got a great nighttime highway descent going into Kyrenia.
Finally, entering the city I was reminded of an old movie that some people may remember. Schindler’s List.
While waiting for my appointment with the dentist, I got to see a good bit more of Kyrenia.
The hostel was nearly empty except for a few travelers who spoke only Turkish.
On the day that I woke up to go to the dental appointment, I decided to walk instead of ride my bike, and this made me run late, a point which frustrated me quite a lot. I started to frantically look for a taxi to take me, and couldn’t find one. This frustrated me even more. It was in this state of frantic frustration that my watch seemed to jump andhour into the future. I gave up trying to make it to the appointment. The whole thing was so distressing that I went into a massive stress reaction that I could only quelch by guzzling alcohol. I was swearing at God in my head on my way to the marina to sate myself with booze, at which point God calmed me just a bit with a sign from heaven.
He was telling me I was his virgin bride and to calm down. So calm down I did at one of the bars on the marina.
The next day, somewhat back to my senses, Omer took me for a little ride around town.
We wondered what sorts of ships were surrounding us.
I then went to his clinic and got my teeth cleaned and talked with some Israelis and the employees from the clinic who charged me next to nothing and treated me like a king. Back at the hostel, however, I tried to catch up with writing and had so many problems with technodemons that I thought I would lose my mind. I was just unable to make progress on the blog post I was writing. Hawkman had been waiting for me to catch up with my story for months. I felt like I was alone there on the top of this Island by myself with nobody at all understanding my plight, and there I was unable to write anything out, talk to anyone, etc. I was like a caveman on the wrong side of the world with nothing but a loincloth and knife made of stone.
Between the incident with the watch and the inability to use my computer to write, I grew absolutely despondent again. It was while I was suffering this stress that rain began to form, and there was an earthquake on the island.
I could not help but think that somehow I was related to this natural disaster. Oddly, I felt comforted a bit by it. I was in fact able to sleep fairly securely afterward. I understood the event that God was displeased with my despondency.
After another night on the marina, it was time to head home.
Coming back though Nicosia, I got a flat. The tire had an advanced “run flat” kind of foam inside that necessitated changing the tire by an Turkish tech in the city.
Again, Nicosia looked like a fun place.
Even in Nicosia, all cats looked like Rascal.
The delay with the tire meant that I would once again finish the ride late at night.
The ride finished with a reference to the herald of the apocalypse, however.
And of angels.
I had to stop to grab one of the more bizarre images that I have found in Limassol.
Exhausted, I would make my way through the streets of the vibrant old city.
Finally, I would make it back to the house of the bee. Deborah’s house. The Bee Hostel.
I’ll tell you how the story with the Marine ended later. That story will better fit with the theme of some other events that happened at this time and shortly afterward. For now, with this story, I can only point out that as with the Greek Ebionite, I met in the Marine an image of myself who turned out to be the exact opposite of who I am. I don’t know why this happens or how. And with the story of the dentist and technodemon watch time warp and computer malfunction with subsequent earthquake, I can only say that if I get upset enough, strange things seem to happen. This is not unlike my experience with planes nearly crashing every time I get nervous while flying.