Remember when I said that I missed the kids from the Lima Sol hostel even before I left the place? I forgot to mention in the previous chapters why I came back to the Bee Hostel on my way to Larnaca from Paphos instead of coming back to the Lima Sol hostel to see everyone. When I tried to book a bunk in the Lima Sol hostel to say hi to everyone again, I found that there were no rooms available. Lima Sol no longer appeared on the app I used to find hostels, in fact. I thought to myself that the Technodemons had struck again, and by some bizarre coincidence of black magic or hostile AI hacking or something, the infernal lords of all things electronic had just made the place disappear from computer reality. However, shortly after arriving in Limassol from Larnaca, I looked up the number from the call log in my phone and texted the owners, who told me that they had shut the hostel down while they were having a baby.
On the one hand, I was glad to have a naturalistic explanation for what happened to me rather than having to chalk the sudden disappearance of the Lima Sol hostel from the app up to some supernatural or paranoid theory. Travelling through Europe and America for nearly a year, constantly moving from place to place, I never got the chance to actually verify anything that was going on in the flesh. I was constantly having bizarre computer and internet failures without any ability to double check anything in person to find out what was going on. This will drive a man insane over time. It really does become possible to think that malicious little elves are behind everything, working within the machinery like gremlins. Further, given all of the bizarre and seemingly supernatural things that happened to me, such as an apparent meeting with an angel in Frankfurt, or yet another dance with demons in Paris, or rank violations of the law of probability like meeting a Vietnam-era Green Beret who knew my uncle, also a Vietnam-era Green Beret, on a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic, a person can begin to doubt their sense of reality.
Let’s not talk about the fact that all of these strange occurrences, particularly with regard to the Technodemons, seemed to have a sort of thematic meaning. If I really wanted to get in touch with someone, and worried that it might not happen, there seemed to be a much greater chance that the Technodemons would get involved, and it wouldn’t happen. The most important thing in the world to me is to be able to have a conversation with my daughter on the phone. I worry it won’t happen. It’s not happening. Likewise, attempts to contact Israel just wouldn’t happen. Calls would get dropped. They wouldn’t go through. E-mails would never get answered unless I courtesy-copied them to a dozen people to make sure everyone I knew saw that I sent an e-mail. My case manager with the Jewish Agency, Deborah, the bee, was mysteriously transferred once she started to get a sense of what I had going on. My case manager for Nephesh B’Nephesh, Casriel, had a family emergency and was reassigned. The devil was thwarting my trip to Israel. It would seem that he was using my expectation of frustration. My lack of faith.
Coming into Cyprus, the weird kept going. Sevens everywhere. My cat Rascal everywhere. Then Lima Sol hostel where I met the van Ouwerkerks again via the Greek Ebionite, a dark mirror of myself. Obviously, God was showing me patterns. Then I met the Marine. Another dark mirror. I would meet still another. I’ll start this story with how that happened and close the chapter with the Marine.
While I was frustrated to have to wait in Cyprus on word from the Israeli Ministry of the Interior about my immigration packet, I did take the opportunity to finally do some settling. I started going to the local Chabad. It was a strange experience. It was difficult to go. That is, difficult to make myself get up and go. When I got there, services were overwhelming. There was so much Hebrew spoken at lightning speed. I was nervous about all the new people. I was half crazy. No, I was totally crazy. How could I explain all the stuff I had going on to anybody? I’ve written everything down. Nobody should have any problem knowing what was going on with me if they just read the story. But at this point, I have tens of thousands of words written. If you include the previous volumes of the story, The Electrochemical Girl, the Wilson Saga, Adventures in the Bardo Thodol, and now the Last Trip, anyone who REALLY wanted to know what was going on would have to read hundreds of thousands of words.
It can take a while to warm up to Jews. Everybody is trying to kill them. If you have trouble being Mister Social, they can discount you pretty quick. I did get the e-mail of one of the workers at the synagogue, but his e-mail mysteriously vanished from my contacts not long after. I tried to get people’s attention. I remember one time there was a guy from Georgia there who seemed pretty involved with the synagogue. The secretary told me to get with him about whatever I needed. I remember standing and waiting around looking at him for fifteen minutes watching him pace around on a phone call, messing with his phone, seemly doing anything but paying attention to me. This happened a few times with a few people. It seemed like everything was out of sync. When I would walk in, people would walk the other way. Like a black magic spell had been cast on me to prevent me from talking to people. Of course, if I were to talk to anyone, I would have no idea what to say. Sevens everywhere? Cats like Rascal? Carl Jung? Kabbalah? Synchronistic events? Angels in Frankfurt? Demons in Paris? Succubi in Munich? Green Berets in the Atlantic? Soulmate daughters who hated me? Yacht girls, Melting Blue Deliciouses, Scorpion Queens, and Girls of Copper and Milk? Jesus? Technodemons? Faustian bargains gone awry? Banned from Israel? Electrochemical Girls? Hawkman? Dear reader, how do you suggest I should have brokered an introduction?
Likewise, when I got into town, I started going to a local evangelical Christian church. I pretty much always do that when I roll into somewhere. When I got to Los Angeles, after false starts with the Shul on the Beach and then Chabad Marina del Rey, I finally registered and became a member of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Koreatown and took a conversion course to Reform Judaism with Rabbi Marc Rubenstein online. Likewise, however, I went a few times to Zoe Church until I found that place was just looking for money to build a new building, and then after that I went a few times to Pac City Church in Santa Monica. That’s where I ended up taking my friend Pat Patel to see about getting his spirituality going.
For the last years I have always considered myself a Jew or on the way to being one and have associated myself with online communities like Spirx or the Ark Program while I was on the move, or Temple Chai in person Phoenix Arizona. However, most of the people I meet are gentiles, and I don’t suggest people try to become Jews unless they have a specific reason such as an interest in the traditions of the rabbis, the Law of Moses, Jewish friends, Jewish spouses, interest in Hebrew, connection to the land of Israel, something like that. None of these things are needed to find and know God. However, I do believe that the origin and center of divine special revelation has come through the Jews, and Jesus and the apostles were Jews, and apparently their message was powerful enough for God to take it all over the world. It was serviceable enough to rule emperors all over the world and to put copies of the Torah all over the world, along with the New Testament’s interpretation of it written in Greek, the first international language that has infused its vocabulary into the philosophies and religions of all the world, and whose early translations such as the Geneva Bible, the Bishops Bible, and the King James Bible, along with William Shakespeare and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer created English, the last international language of the world.
So, when I meet a gentile who is looking for God, I take them to a Christian church. I mean, what am I going to do, recommend that a gentile become a Hindu because Jews have a problem with Jesus and the apostles, Jews who were teaching their understanding of Torah? I left the Christian Church due to problems with Christian doctrines and problems with Christian behavior. But a church looks like the best option out there to send gentiles to in the current environment. So while I was doing everything I could to ally with synagogues and Jewish communities on my own personal journey, I always make sure I have some kind of church at hand for those whose journeys do not resemble my own.
Also, when I got into town, with everything that was going on, the Greek Ebionite, the Free Will Girl, all that, everything from the trip, I just felt like I was losing my mind. I’ve never called up a Jew and asked them to pray for me. I don’t know what one would do if I tried that. I’ve always been an outsider with one foot in the door. But I know from experience, if you call up a church and ask for prayer, they’ll send someone over. So I did. That’s how I met those two Christians, one of whom ended up trying to talk to the Marine to help him out.
While I was having all those issues connecting with the Chabad, the Evangelical Christian environment was familiar. I would show up on a bicycle in bicycle shorts, but I didn’t much care. This was Christian church number one thousand and one in my life. I knew the routine. Since I had been having difficulties at the Chabad in Limassol, I ended up going pretty much every Sunday to this church. Once again, the universe seemed to be pulling me away from Jews, but in this case I felt like it was pulling me to this church.
Pretty early on, that’s when I met my next dark mirror, Barbara Holliway. I’ll use her first and last name here because I am thinking she is probably dead as of today. She seemed to seek me straight out and stick to me like glue. I don’t specifically know why. I assume it had something to do with how I first made contact with that church.
When I called the church up asking for help with some prayer, the guy there wanted to know absolutely everything I believed. About everything. Well, I don’t believe in much of anything the standard groups believe in. While Judaism is really focused on how you practice and who your parents are, Christians just need to know everything about what you believe about everything, so they know what category to shove you into: Christian brother, lost heretic, or son of hell. I’m generally in that second category. I did my best to explain my beliefs. I called myself the Ramjackup and explained why. That pretty much put me in the heretic category, which made them assume I needed to be evangelized, which is probably why they sent the two Christians to pray for me from their evangelism team. Well, explaining to them that I was the Ramjackup assuredly convinced them that I was jacked up, but likely also that I was bigtime into a lot of Hebrew and Jewish stuff, and maybe that got around, and maybe that came to Barbara Holliway. I really don’t know.
The first thing to know about Barbara is that she is one of these Hebrew Roots style Christians who are into all things Jewish. Like the Greek Ebionite, she also tries to follow the Torah commandments like a Jew. She also feels like she is a kind of missionary to Israelis and Jews. When considering why these Hebrew Roots Christians try to follow the Jewish commandments, some of them just do it in order to ingratiate themselves to the Jews. The Apostle Paul said that to the gentiles, he became like a gentile, and to the Jews, he became like a Jew. Paul himself was a Jew, and the issue of whether he himself followed the commandments of Moses is a huge area of debate among these types. Did Paul eat pork? That’s an involved topic of discussion in this whole area. I do know that Barbara interpreted scripture to mean that every follower of Jesus, she called him Yeshua in English, is obligated to go to Jerusalem for the Shalosh Regalim. Those are the three holidays where Jews go to Jerusalem. Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (Pentecost), and Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles). I couldn’t disagree with this more. Can you imagine if all two billion Christians went to Jerusalem three times per year? Think about the hotel prices! I don’t think this is what God intended at all. So, I put her from the start into this group of Hebrew Roots Christians and Messianic Jews who have bizarre interpretations leaning toward Judaism that they don’t quite understand. The mirror was a cracked one, but I had met another version of myself who was all off into Jewish stuff.
Another difference between her and me, as far as I could tell in the short time that I knew her, was in her understanding that Jews need Jesus and that meant that she should be witnessing to them about Jesus or how. She pointed this out to me without my asking her anything about Jews and Jesus and evangelizing Jews.
Apparently there is a Christian guy, John Hagee, who runs a foundation supporting Jews, and this guy espouses, I think, what is called “the two covenant theory,” which means, as I understand it, that gentiles need Jesus but Jews don’t. So John Hagee’s group doesn’t evangelize to Jews in Israel. I guess he supports them out of the Protestant dispensationalist understanding that Israel and Jews will become relevant to God’s plan during the end of days. Now I do not follow this two covenant theory that John Hagee does, or so I’ve been told, but I am also a bit loose on the whole needing Jesus thing. I mean, I think I know what the New Testament is getting at, but I’ll just say that King David never heard about this Jesus Christ Galilean carpenter guy. So, if David needed Jesus, he got him some other way. Also, the eskimo at the north pole in 1,000 BCE had no chance of hearing about Jesus. So, if he needed Jesus, he got Jesus some other way. This whole question is a huge one in Christian theology, since Jesus did a few times say words to the effect of, “you get me or you go to hell.” What all that means and how it plays out in history has been the subject of enormous debate and entire theological frameworks such as Dispensationalism, Covenant Theology, etc.
As this applied to Barbara, however, she was drawn to Israel because she thought by her understanding of obeying commandments that she had to go there three times per year for the feasts. However, while there, she was very active in evangelizing Jews according to the Christian formula. For my part, I am drawn to Israel for a few reasons. First, the universe has been telling me for six years that I can’t go there. The universe and I do not get along. Specifically the prince of this universe or the god of this universe. That guy took Veronica Shulz from me. That guy took Autumn Snyder from all of us. That guy took Noah van Ouwerkerk from me. That guy took Chloe Powell from me. And that guy took Alia Bailey from me. So, I am going to burn that guy for a thousand years. Then I’m going to kill him.
So pray for me. Apparently I’m going to need some luck. I think one of the best ways to get that luck is to get a good position in God’s army, and to do that, well, there is always getting with his captain.
Once, when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing before him, drawn sword in hand. Joshua went up to him and asked him, “Are you one of us or of our enemies?” He replied, “No, I am captain of God’s army. Now I have come!” Joshua threw himself face down to the ground and worshipped him. He said to him, “What does my lord command his servant?” The captain of God’s army answered Joshua, “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy.” And Joshua did so.
Joshua 5:13-15
I try to understand how past experiences can lead me forward, and so looking back on all these years of writing, superheroes, the entertainment industry, and traveling and taking pictures of videos of things, my goal is to go to Israel and get involved in the Israeli film industry, preferably for the Lady if possible, somebody who I asked for help from a long time ago and who I have wanted to meet for years.
Barbara, though, wanted to go over there to go to her feasts and convert Jews to following Jesus. While our motivations for going over there are quite different, her motivation does lead me to a point that we had in common, however. Both Barbara and I have been banned from entering Israel. Barbara told me that she was debating with rabbis and that she got into trouble with them and is on some kind of a ban list. I didn’t know what to make of that.
No rabbi has ever given me any problem about Jesus. Rabbi Shmuel Koppel, Rabbi Pinchas Taylor, Rabbi Bonnie Koppel, Rabbi David Rue, Rabbi David Rousseau, Rabbi Susan Nanus, and Rabbi Marc Rubenstein never gave me any grief about Jesus. Now, I’ll say that hardly any of these guys have asked me about Jesus. They just see a website with a bunch of quotes from the New Testament on it in addition to quotes from the Midrash and the Bhagavad Gita from time to time, if they bother to look at it. I’m aware that some of them have likely tried to put me in a box, and some of them have may have had serious problems with me behind my back. But nobody ever said, “go away, I saw Jesus on your website.”
I have always taken the Jordan Peterson approach. He doesn’t tell you what box to put him in. Just when you’re thinking that guy is a Christian, he will say things that no Christian would ever say. Just recently I wrote a post with the primary theme that you can’t tell a Jew what to believe. The backdrop of that post was Bob Dylan and the Faustian bargain. I have sat in on a couple of those bargains. The Faustian bargain idea comes from Jewish, and later, Christian demonology, went through Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to voodoo (which is a mixture of Roman Catholicism and Yoruba paganism), to New Orleans and the Mississippi River delta, to John Roberts and the crossroads of Highway 61 and Highway 49. Bob Dylan started off as a secular Jew, then, I think, made a dark deal, then became a Messianic Jew (a Jewish Christian, some would say), and now he sings the Hava Nagila for Chabad. You can’t talk about Faustian bargains without talking about the blues. And you can’t talk about the blues without talking about Jesus.
It was the disgusting notion that as a Jew there are things that I am not allowed to think about or talk about that drove me to write that post. It wasn’t any evangelistic urge. So, I’m going to Israel to make movies, as best as I understand it as of today. But Barbara went there to debate with rabbis, apparently. I do not know why I have been banned from Israel other than the entertainment of the notion that the devil doesn’t want me there. But Barbara thought her troubles came from rabbis. I don’t know what to say about that. I only know that the two of us were Hebrew lovers who have been banned from entering the Holy Land.
After Barbara got banned, she decided to concentrate on staying in Cyprus to prepare for Armageddon. I didn’t give up on going to Israel until later. The first thing Barbara did was show me a group of college girls that she was becoming the group leader of from a Christian bible training school in the area. I remember when I met them at a local supermarket for lunch. I still remember some of their names. There was Deborah, of course. The bee. Then there was Rebecca, the captivator, my mother’s name. And there was Lynne, the brunette with eyes of icy liquid steel. I remember her the most because of the conversation we had. I asked her what she wanted to get out of her bible school. Her response floored me: “How can we be witnesses of what we are unless we know what we are talking about?” This reminded me of the Hellenized Jew named Phillip and a conversation he had with an Ethiopian eunuch.
Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Rise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” This is a desert place. And he rose and went. And there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning, seated in his chariot, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah. And the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.” So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.
Acts 8:26-31
From there we talked about Israel and Hebrew, and I explained to her the about uvular and pharyngial phonemes and the differences between Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Yemeni, and modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation. She was like a purring kitten eating tuna from the palm of my hand. At the end of it, she said, “you should really think about going to the school to see what you can do there.” I put that in my pocket, and we finished our lunch.
Of course the Israeli Ministry of the Interior still hadn’t given me word about my immigration packet, and I was looking for places to stay outside of the Bee Hostel. Things with the Marine were going haywire, and I was looking for some longer-term lodging. As if she somehow intuited this, Barbara offered that I could stay at a Caravan camper that she had out on her property east of town. I thought it would be a bit far out in the woods, but that I could get into fantastic shape riding my bike into Limassol on a regular basis. I hadn’t been on the bike hardly at all, and in my experience, getting off the bike usually amounted to getting into some kind of trouble. That indeed was happening. I was also looking to save money, as I had been eating and drinking my entire paycheck, and the universe was trying to get me to spend every dime I had partying or what have you. She said that I could work ten hours a week getting the place ready to host these girls she was taking care of for whatever retreats, hikes, and all that. I thought it was odd that she seemed to entice me with the statement, “those bible school people aren’t going to let you around those girls without my being here.”
I didn’t answer. First, I thought to myself, “yeah, that’s pretty much how churches operate.” I personally think churches go a little too far with the statement from the Apostle Paul about avoiding the appearance of impropriety. I mean, you should wait until someone shows evidence of being a danger before treating them like they are a danger, if you ask me. There is that statement that came through Moses about not vexing the stranger because you once were strangers in the land of Egypt. But that’s just the Old Testament, they would say, and churches tend not to pay too much attention to that. They weren’t, after all, strangers in the land of Egypt.
But also, I had to ask myself what the heck would make her say that in the first place. Did she know about the hole in my heart that I have for the young ladies since Corporal Moron the Dork of Darkness took my girls from me? Maybe it was the spirit that was inspiring her that knew.
First, I went out there to spend some time with her. We talked a bit, she showed me the area, and I helped her fix a tire on one of her vehicles she had.
I started early with breakfast at the Ousia Cafe in the Old City and then headed out of town. It was a Tuesday, but on this trip I was thinking that if I lived out there, I would be stuck there on Shabbat since I don’t travel between cities, so I would have to figure some way of getting to the synagogue. I had no friends to stay the weekend with in town, but I would try to work on something.
After breakfast, I hit the road.
I was happy to know there was road shoulder out this way.
In Chirokitia I thought I would grab a little more food and some rest before heading into the mountains. Instead of the snack I expected, they brought me a banquet.
I stuffed it down and rode into the mountains.
Views were spectacular. When I linked up with Barbara, I got a look at the place.
After a few hours with Barbara, I rode back into the city. Having spent some time there, I would not make it back until late.
I was glad to make it to the lights of the Old City on the way back to the Bee Hostel.
The next day would be my birthday, and God would give me a gift.
The Marine was there in the red shirt, along with Adriene, a traveler from France. But the gift was Juliana Lilkova in the red skirt. There was now a young lady from Slovakia among the dudes of the Bee Hostel. Another Drop of Jupiter. Now it’s time to think like a Kabbalist. Her name. Juliana. The name is a mixture of Julia and Ana. After I wrote the Drops of Jupiter chapter about the Carolines and Julies, I showed it to my mother who told me that Julie was her nickname as a child. Her name at birth was Rebecca Jewel Vance, and her mother always shortened her middle name Jewel to Jewelly, spoken with the Oklahoma accent like Julie. So, Julie is my mother’s name. I saw in a superhero movie that a mother’s name can create healing. It can throw the Spear of Longinus into the rocks.
It always amazed me that for a century of kids growing up with those characters, I never realized, nor was I ever told, that Superman and Batman had mothers with the same name, Martha Wayne and Martha Kent. I had to be shown that fact in a movie made nearly eighty years after they were created. That I had been running into Julies and Julias everywhere for years only to find out that they were named after my mother constitutes a pretty potent synchronistic event for me.
Something else popped up just recently that I thought was interesting. The second Caroline that I wrote about in the Drops of Jupiter chapter, Carolina la Tapatia, got in contact with me recently to gripe at me about a poem that I wrote about her and put on my website. When she found me on Telegram, that threw her complete name into my view again for the first time in years.
While the conversation was hilarious, the big event with this one was that her name was actually Ana Carolina. I really found this interesting because there are two Anas and a Julia in my life right now.
If this isn’t enough Jungian Kabbalah for you, I’ll say that this young Slovakian girl named Juliana was an exchange student to…wait for it…the Netherlands. I forgot to ask her if her university was from the town of Ouwerkerk! Maybe I will someday. She does have that Ouwerkerkian hair of honey. At that time, I was too entranced to think. Juliana was a singer of Slovakian traditional music who had gone to the Netherlands to study hospitality. There she is in her Slovakian folk singer dress doing what kids do in the 21st century: looking at her phone.
One of the Anas in my current life is a waitress in the Georgian restaurant next to my apartment and just graduated her study of hospitality.
I bonded instantly with this young lady. The Marine did also, in his own kind of way. He hooked up with her. I’m 53 years old. The Marine is 37. Juliana was 20. They had a number of personal conversations, and he told me that she had suffered a tragedy that she was trying to get over. I had also suffered this same tragedy. The Marine and I got into a sort of love triangle with her, from my end she was a daughter, and from his she was a lover. They fought back and forth. I didn’t fight with anyone. She would tell me about her problems with him. I got the idea that they wouldn’t last. Along with a girl named Jess, we all formed a sort of a crew for about a week or so.
There were so many amazing things that Juliana said, but it’s all just too much to get into. She was so brilliant in so many ways, and just a kid in so many others. Then it came time for her to leave and go back to the Netherlands. I couldn’t look at her to say goodbye. I could only give her a hug with my eyes staring off into space in order not to cry.
Both the Marine and I continued to talk with her after she went back via text and phone. The Marine saw me as a romantic threat. I did honestly have the opinion that Juliana wouldn’t be talking to him for long, and I wanted her to come back down to Cyprus. My love for her did get intense, and I broached the idea that she could be my girlfriend and I could bring her back down. She was, after all, open to older guys, apparently. She hadn’t really seen me that way, or so she said, as I also hadn’t seen her that way previously. But my passion for her conflated with my hatred of losing everyone I had been meeting on the trip, and pretty much losing everyone I have loved in my entire life.
The strangeness of all of that is not what sealed my end with Juliana, however. At one point, when confessing matters of the heart, I told her that I had developed a certain insecurity from being hated by or losing and not being able to talk to those I loved that caused me at times to ask myself if it was possible for anyone to love me. She responded with words that trigger me: “you’re scaring me.” Liliana Suarez did that after our day in Venice, and just like with Liliana, I broke into a rant. Juliana blocked me, and I have not heard from her since.
Remember, if you block me, I cannot ask if you want your picture or name used in my writing, so I am more willing to just dox you. At this point, though, I am getting more lax about whether people want their information used. People everywhere have been coming out of nowhere trying to tell me to take them out of this book. Note Ana Carolina above. Again, the god of this world doesn’t want this thing written. I’m getting tired of writing it, in fact. Satan works from without and from within. But I have my reasons to continue, and I just want to get the story told at this point. So I hope you like your introduction to Juliana Lilkova.
It was then time to go live with Barabara. Barbara had this fear of electric fields, a fact which I equated to my problems with Technodemons. We were mirrors of each other in a number of ways. However, despite this, she would download podcasts of a conspiracy theorist she found somewhere and listen to him for hours at a time. I listened to one of the episodes and could barely pay attention to him. I was that bored. For my part, I asked her to read the chapter of my book about Frankfurt, when I got mugged and hit over the head and had a conversation with a Singaporean newspaper salesman on Easter Sunday that had me thinking I may have conversed with an angel.
When she read it, she told me she was very concerned, and that I should never show it or anything like it to anyone from church. I was in shock. Yes, the story was crazy and showed that I was a crazy, if you looked at it that way. Yes, it was very raw, talking about walking around the red light district in Frankfurt and everything. But that was a very powerful experience for me. And it’s what happened. I have found that supernatural things occur under circumstances that people don’t want to tell anyone about because they are ashamed, so I have learned to eat my shame and tell people what actually happened, no matter what the circumstances.
She complained that the chapter was terrible because it was about me. This told me that some spirit within her was just moving her to hate the chapter for whatever reason. Imagine if Anthony Bourdain went to television producers and said that he was having all of these great experiences travelling the world and he thought they would make a great show, and the producers looked back at him and told him to go away, that the show would be terrible, their grounds being that the experiences were his. Autobiographies are automatically bad, apparently. They are about the experiences of the people who wrote them. This was like arguing with your wife in divorce court. You’re just bad, for any reason. You’re just bad.
I saw her as being under the influence of the dark force, and it was giving me the message, “do not tell anyone this story. They will hate you. You are to remain alone, a complete unknown, a rolling stone, with no direction home.”
The second day I was there, I started work on getting one of her storage containers ready to be painted over. While doing, that, I lost a lock. I looked all over for it ranting at heaven for letting this happen to me. Finally, I had to tell Barbara that it was just gone. I honestly do not know how the thing could have been lost. I specifically remembered exactly what I did with it, and I myself got a little paranoid that it was taken by some supernatural means. Barbara got even more paranoid, however. She also went into a rant, and ultimately told me that she wasn’t comfortable with me there. I reserved another week at the Bee Hostel, and I left her property within hours. There was absolutely no spiritual brotherhood here. As similar as we were, Barbara and I simply were not alike. While getting ready to leave, I looked up at the sky in a fit of desperation and hissed at the Big Guy, “How could you do this to me?” So much for the Christians. I was able to contain my anger at God, however, as I knew where all of this was coming from and channeled my anger in that direction. There was a sign that expressed this anger perfectly as I came back into town.
Back at the Bee Hostel, things continued to get adversarial between me and the Marine. At one point, we went to the beach with some other guys from the hostel, and I bought everybody beers.
I am not rich. In fact, I spend way too much money eating and drinking. And one of the things I spend too much money on is enjoying everyone else eating and drinking. That’s what I was doing that day when I sprung for rounds. The Marine looked at me and said that while things had been bad, this was a good day. I was buying everybody beer, just like I was supposed to. Again I could see the demon behind his eyes driving me broke like they always do via my bad habits and bad luck with money.
During the first couple of days in December, I started looking for an apartment. I really had no idea what was going on with the Israeli Ministry of the Interior. I was thinking I would have to start some kind of long battle with them to get them to approve my packet. Things were getting supernatural. They were surely trying to lose my packet under whatever desk they could. I had been calling more frequently, requesting status updates, and pushing the Jewish Agency to make inquiries. Satan really does not want me in Israel. It was at that time, on December 4th, that I got a letter rejecting my immigration application. The grounds for the rejection were that I never had any interactions with Jews, that I had only been with Wilshire Boulevard Temple for a few months with no other connections to the Jewish community, that my conversion certificate with Marc Rubenstein was invalid, and that the fact that I stated that Jesus could be a valid candidate to be the Messiah meant that my conversion was not sincere.
I was of course floored. My dark mirror Barbara insisted that no one ever know who I am, and my dark mirror TJ was just using me. Demons, demons, everywhere. Then the Israeli Ministry of the Interior got to the point where they could no longer pretend my packet did not exist and sent me a ridiculous rejection. This was the only time any Jew had ever said Jesus was any kind of problem, out in the open to my face, and this statement was surrounded by absolute ignorance about my interactions with Jews and my path to Judaism and to Israel. Demons, demons everywhere.
Back in Limassol I continued to go to the church.
Barbara showed up one morning and confronted me. She talked about how angry she was at me about losing the lock. She said that I was trying to present myself as some sort of church leader, but that I was not, and that I was deceiving the church. I had absolutely no concept of ever presenting myself as a leader of anything at that church. I thought she was speaking out of emotional anger. I guessed that she was very excited to have me there to help her with her plan of making some kind of a camp for those girls. At the beginning, she said she would present me to them as Dodi Jonathan. That’s Hebrew for uncle Jonathan. That’s actually a role I would have relished. But after everything that happened, I just had the impression that it wasn’t going to work. I think her disappointment drove her to anger. I really couldn’t deal with conflict with her with everything else that had been going on. In the New Testament, if a conflict with someone is unavoidable, you first bring in others to arbitrate, and if that doesn’t work, you bring the conflict to the whole church. I needed help with this, so I recommended that she go to the elders about the issue. She agreed.
At the same time, I showed the rejection letter from the Israeli Ministry of the Interior to one of the leaders. The same one who sent over the two evangelists. He agreed with the letter that my conversion was probably insincere. I guess he assumed that I was a Christian who got a fake conversion to go over and evangelize the Jews after the manner that Barbara wanted to do. I guess he didn’t know anything about my wanting to make movies.
I was getting mad about getting rejected, and thinking maybe I wanted to turn my story into a tale about everything the devil was doing to me as I tried to get to Israel, and I asked if there was anyone who made videos at the church. In fact, there was. When I talked to him about my story, however, he said that they were cautioned about making any sort of videos that were critical of Israel.
The next lovely thing to befall me was that I inquired with that same church leader about what was going on with Barbara, saying that I wasn’t able to help her with her plans, but that she was out there by herself on this property that she couldn’t take care of, and perhaps the church could check on her. He said that they already had, that she was fine, and that I was trying to stir up trouble and get attention for myself. Again, there was this common theme. I can’t get any attention for myself. That is a crime. I must remain alone, a rolling stone, a complete unknown, with no direction home. No one ever got Barbara and I together to talk anything out. That’s a Torah commandment. When there is conflict, you get with one side, then you get with the other side, you make diligent inquiries, then you make decisions, all of that. But that’s just the Old Testament. Christians don’t pay a lot of attention to that in a lot of cases.
Finally, on the 23rd of December, the day after the last day of Chanukah, two days before Christmas, I moved into my apartment. Everyone I knew had left town to be with loved ones for the holidays. As I was leaving the Bee Hostel for the last time, I saw the Marine for the last time. He was out on the balcony, his eyes were closed, and he had a blanket over his head. He looked either sick or stoned, I couldn’t tell which. Next to him on the table was a copy of the Christian Bible, and on top of the Christian Bible was a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now. I’m not kidding. The exact same book that Liliana Suarez was reading in Venice. I saw a hint that this guy was being torn between service to God and all mankind on the one hand, and service to himself for any given moment on the other.
I told him I was moving out, and I made comments about staying in touch. He simply muttered with eyes closed, “I can’t talk to you…I can’t talk to you…I can’t talk to you…” It was like some demon had control of him, moving his thoughts to keep him away from me, just like I felt that something was getting in between me and the Jews of Chabad. I stood there in silence for a minute. That demon was telling me, “you will be all alone, a complete unknown, a rolling stone, with no direction home.” I felt absolutely powerless. I no longer had my rank. I no longer had my nine-millimeter. I could not pull it from the holster, put it to his forehead, cock it, and say, “Marine, you are being given a direct order from a commissioned officer in the United States Army. You will talk to me. You will understand. And you will comply.” I just did not have what I needed in order to get through to him. I looked again at that Bible and that book from Eckhart Tolle, and I walked out of the hostel, leaving that soldier to fend for himself on the field. He blocked me not long after. Remember, if you block me, you might just get doxxed.
I went over to my apartment, laid on the bed, and waited for the New Year.