After the series of anxiety attacks in January, I made the decision that I just needed to devote myself to the bike. I had grown accustomed to staying on the bicycle as a means of keeping my sense of self-discipline that I had obtained from my military service from flying out the window in the face of the infinite variety of temptations and strange experiences that I was encountering in Cyprus. On the one hand, I had lost my daughters, and I had been by myself on the tour for a very, very long time. Some bureaucrat Ilai Wagshal at the Aliyah Absorption Unit of the Israeli Ministry of the Interior had denied my immigration packet under the pretenses that I was not enough of a Jew, had not associated with enough Jews, and that I could not have been a sincere Jew because I made the statement that Jesus could be a valid candidate for being the Messiah.
Ilai Wagshal apparently knows nothing of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. Specifically, he knows nothing about the Book of the Kings of the Mishneh Torah, in which Maimonides sets the bar for determining who the Messiah is so high that no one can make a definitive statement about who the Messiah is until the Messiah has actually finished the entirety of his work. That is, according to Maimonides, no one can be definitively called the Messiah until the temple is rebuilt, the enemies of Israel have been definitively, permanently, and totally defeated, and the world is being ruled in peace from Jerusalem by the Messiah. By this standard, neither the Lubavitcher Rebbe nor Jesus nor anybody else can be called the Messiah.
However, after all of this, Maimonides said that anyone who teaches Torah, isn’t dead, and who comes from Bethlehem can be called a potential or personal candidate for being the Messiah. This is why I said that Jesus was a valid candidate for being the Messiah. According to the New Testament accounts of Jesus which billions of people believe in, he is not dead, but resurrected. According to the accounts of Jesus in the Quran that billions of people believe in, Jesus was not crucified or killed but taken up to heaven, his crucifixion being some sort of deception. He seems to be as valid of a candidate for being the Messiah as any other candidate I have heard of if he is defined by the accounts of him that have been handed down from history. Ilai Wagsal has no concept of Jewish requirements for Messianic candidacy according to the standard benchmark of Judaism concerning who can and can’t be the Messiah.
Ilai Wagshal did not seem to recognize that not once at Wilshire Boulevard Temple was I told that there was any sort of problem with my conversion certificate from Rabbi Marc Rubenstein. He also had no recognition of the fact with much pain of heart I said goodbye to my Jewish friend Brad Ellison in Los Angeles in order to take a six-thousand-mile bicycle trip to Israel with the understanding that I had met all requirements for immigration to Israel. I left my Jewish friend Merle Wiener in Arizona thinking that I had met all requirements for immigration to Israel.
Satan had won once again, and I was once again in some far country, a rolling stone, a complete unknown, with no direction home. Ilai Wagsal at the Israeli Ministry of the Interior did me just like the entry authorities at Ben Gurion airport, just as the visa authorities at the Israeli embassy in Mexico City who denied my student visa to Israel in 2022, just like the entry authority on the Israeli border of Jordan who refused to let me into the country after the 2,700-mile bicycle trip from Lisbon to Israel in 2023 despite being shown an opinion from an Israeli judge that I could apply with the border authority in order to enter. The same scenario was happening all over again. There was nothing else I could do. I was having panic attacks. I did not know who to be, where to go, or what to do next. Nobody that I showed the rejection letter to had anything for me to do. I was beaten. I was numb.
The only thing there was to do was get on the bike and ride. I’d learned from the stories of the Rangers and Delta Force at Mogadishu, the Black Hawk Down incident, as well as other stories of captives of war, that you’re not going to be able to keep yourself together if you aren’t in shape. So I quit going to Sunday services at the Church I had been going to and threw myself into my bicycle club. It was the only way I could think of to keep myself out of the hospital. Or the morgue.
I got to know the coach at the club, a Cyprus time trial champion I would nickname “the Raptor” because of his impeccable riding form.
I went to various social rides with the club, some of which were truly spectacular.
The club was run by a retired road cyclist named Viacheslav Kuznetzov who was surrounded by a large number of Russian road cyclists who had profound respect for him.
I was a bit blown away by this new world of race cycling that I knew nothing about from my few years on a bicycle as a travel tourer, most of which was consumed with my Homeresque trips across Europe toward the Holy Land that seemed to have a tendency to end in spectacular failures saturated with supernatural scents of insanity.
Lost in the sauce in the world as usual, I conjured what I could of my inner military officer, an archetype of my personality that I connected to the athlete mentality of the cyclist. In addition to trying to improve my speed and form on the bike, I wanted to contribute what I knew about running all over on a bicycle taking pictures and videos of my experiences into making the club and the cycling community as cool as possible.
There was just one problem with all of this. I am the weirdest person in the world. I have died more times than I can count: Addison, Texas in 1992, Richardson, Texas in 1995, and Tempe Arizona in 1995, and then who knows what in the world happened to me in Frankfurt, Munich, and Budapest in 2025 on the current trip. Ever since the episode in 2019 that I describe in my book, I have seen underlying patterns in human behavior and life in general as well as literary stories that man has created, not the least of which are the various scriptures of the world, among them the Bible of Christianity and Judaism. The law of probability does not apply to me. I enthusiastically reached out to members of the club offering to contribute videos and suggest ideas for promoting the club, but things did not go well. You see, if I were not told to take my videos and disappear, someone might eventually know who I am.
It seems I had entered a rather closed, exclusive community of racers with their various groups and pecking orders. Perhaps some people here and there were even threatened by the things I was saying. That is, making suggestions about how things could be better might make people wonder why someone else hadn’t already made them better.
I have very little filter at this point in life, not really being like anyone else I know, consumed with seeing underlying patterns in scriptures and everyday life events that pertain to messages from the divine and all. You know, the kinds of things I have been writing about in my accounts of this trip.
Reactions were negative, and this didn’t surprise me. In my world, the universe is intent on my remaining alone, unknown, and with no direction home. Struggling inwardly to somehow merge this life I was starting up as a local area bicycle rider with all that had come before with God and angels and more than a few barrels of demons, I started to develop an identity for myself that I didn’t tell anyone about: The Bicycle Prophet. I thought it might help me merge the bizarre and utterly surreal that had come before with my day-to-day activities. There are those in Hollywood such as Pauly Shore or Carrot Top who have turned their personal weirdness into their public image. I never went public with anything, however. This is the first time I have mentioned anything about it to anyone except Hawkman, actually.
The winter in Limassol seemed to stretch on forever, being cold and rather wet on several days all the way up until May, actually. The weather seemed to have absolute control over my mood. If it was grey, I was sad. If it was sunny, I was happy. The correspondence seemed to get so intense that I actually thought at times that my mood controlled the weather. That is, science has confirmed that our moods are indeed affected by the weather, so if you wake up and it’s grey, and you feel bad, so you get into an argument with a friend, no one is surprised by this. Some people are affected by the weather more than others. But in my case, I would wake up, get into an argument with a friend, then the clouds would come out, and it would start to rain.
All of this contributed to my feeling like I had to be dreaming, or that I had died and was in some sort of dreamlike purgatory. Or perhaps a Bardo Thodol like the one described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Perhaps I was still in a coma in Budapest, and the reality I was perceiving was just the result of a permanent overflow of dimethyltryptamine. Or perhaps I was in some AI-generated reality like Neo’s Matrix or some sequel to the TRON series. This sort of surreality doesn’t bode well for making friends, whether being one of the boys or finding a girlfriend. If you’re the type of person who says whatever he thinks
Speaking of the girls, I became absolutely enchanted with Anna the waitress at the Georgian restaurant around the corner from my apartment.
She reminded me in so many ways of everything that I loved about my daughter. Beautiful, kind, wRm-hearted, and honest. And yes, she was my daughter’s age. I would flirt with her here and there. She had a boyfriend, of course, and I am older than her dad, and I don’t think she or anyone at that restaurant had any idea how to take me other than as an older man who was looking for a young girlfriend. There was no way I could pull something like that off, however, given my traumas around women, especially Russian ones (Anna was indeed from Russia), and eventually that whole scene turned into a kind of awkward discomfort that has tempted me to stop going there more than once, a fate that has thus far only been avoided by the fact that I just absolutely love the food at the place. Again, it seems that I am just too weird to get along anywhere. They say poets have a very high suicide rate, and that this is because they are romantic idealists given to weird expressions of speech and behavior that the world just doesn’t understand. I write a lot of poetry. Or I used to. And I can tell you that life as a poet is nowhere near as difficult as life as a bicycle prophet.
While I was keeping my mornings devoted to the bicycle, I ended up spending most the rest of my day either not doing much of anything, or trying to hang around with the Christians I had been associating with, particularly one of the guys from that evangelism team whose spirituality impressed me and who had looked after me rather well during all of the surreal misery that was January.
There he is showing me his true Cypriot nature by eating the eyeball right out of the head of a goat at a traditional Cypriot restaurant. Still, neither he nor anybody else really had much of an idea what was going on with me or who I was. Since Israel hadn’t panned out, I was just supposed to shrug my shoulders and spend my days eating goat brains and walking the beach for the rest of my life. I had a pension and didn’t need to work, so this of course is what anyone else in my situation would do. The Christian who healed me was pretty much busy all the time and disappeared. Pretty much nobody to whom I sent text messages answered them. I’ve really never felt so invisible in my life.
The Christian guy who healed my lung lesion had another friend who was an author, and when I told him I was too, he just assumed I would be writing Christian fiction like he would, and that I wouldn’t be interested in finding an agent or a publisher as he wasn’t. Those two guys disappeared off to a mission trip to Pakistan, and then the author guy had a death in the family. Pretty much everyone was busy all the time, disappeared, or never got back to me. At one point the author guy had given me his website with his books on it, but I lost the site information at one point because the Technodemons messed my phone up so bad the only way I could get it to work was to completely blank and reformat my phone, at which point I lost tons of I formation. So I sent him a WhatsApp message asking him for his site again. He didn’t respond.
While I was on tour I was always anxious to settle down and be able to share my life experiences in common with those around me, but to be honest, after months and months in the country, I was still by myself, suffering from technodemons all the time, but nobody really noticed much of anything. I began to be frustrated with that situation. You’d think a culture based on the brotherly love of the Almighty God would involve people knowing who the person next to them was.
Then, on February 28th, my daughter’s birthday, America and Israel attacked Iran. The world changed overnight. I began to obsess over politics, hoping that events would lead the world to Armageddon and the arrival of the Messiah. Things got rather bad in Israel. The country began to suffer exhaustion and stress from the heightened military attacks, and several Israelis fled to Cyprus for reprieve. Israel shut down its airports for a while, and a number of them were stuck in Cyprus for a time.
My apartment building, Eden Beach apartments, contains several units that are rented out through Airbnb, and one night I ran into some Israelis who were having a problem with their reservation. The people who rented them the Airbnb did not show up to let them in. These three guys saw me in the lobby and asked if I could help with their reservation. I was unable to do anything for them, so they got a hotel nearby. As they were preparing to leave my apartment building, one of their bags came up missing. Someone else going into the apartment took the bag by mistake. They asked me to help them find it, and I did.
These three guys said they were bus drivers. Haim, Ilan, and Lior. I hadn’t so much as seen an Israeli over the last couple of months. I hadn’t used a word of Hebrew. My diet was loaded with pork. I wasn’t wearing my signature blue and white tzitzit. Thinking back, it was really amazing how absent Jews and Israelis were given that they are apparently rather common in Cyprus. I spoke to these guys in Hebrew, however, and helped them find the lost bag.
In my life, when things turn up missing, they are usually gone. Signs like the one that I made for them rarely avail. However, the tenants who took the bag by mistake did in fact see the sign, and I was able to get the bag back to the trio. They were quite grateful. I would say shocked. One of them commented that I was an angel. That really piqued my interest, as a Singaporean newspaper salesman had called me the same thing on Easter Sunday in Frankfurt the year prior. A Singaporean newspaper salesman who himself may well have been an angel himself.
The three men invited me to Purim with the local Jewish community as an expression of their gratitude.
Above are the three guys. I thought I had made some real friends. I was also surprised by the expression of faith that I saw written in various places.
People spoke of God and honored him everywhere, and I really could not square this with the Christian perspective that I had been surrounded by for the last couple of months that nobody could have anything to do with God unless Jesus’ name was included.
Although the culture was absolutely different from that of the Christians I had been hanging around with, I simply could not square this with the notion that there is no valid expression of relationship with God without the name Jesus stamped on it. I talked with these guys about God, and had the impression that they knew him well. My feeling is that these different groups, religious Jews and Christians, are in many cases worshipping the same God. Yet in both groups there are great numbers who don’t know the first thing about God. I’m sure if I had run around talking about Jesus with everyone, there surely would have been problems, but that this was more the result of two thousand years of cultural hostility and intellectual animosity of the two religions.
I think that if these people could have actually looked at the Gospel accounts, they personally wouldn’t have had much of a problem with a Galilean carpenter guy running around healing people. Please understand, I am absolutely not saying that if you go to a Jewish Purim and pass out gospel tracts people will just all the sudden see that Jesus is God incarnate or anything. The two religions do indeed have vastly different theologies and doctrines and ways of describing God that are in fact diametrically opposed at a number of points when it comes to dogmas of faith. I’m talking about things at a more basic level.
Likewise, and I have written about it in previous chapters, I did at certain points see atrocious godlessness on the part of the Christians I had been hanging around with. I think both of these groups have people who know God quite well, and a great number who are absolutely clueless, and among those of the two groups who do know God there are those afflicted by personal demons to the point of being overtaken at this time or in that way to behave as defacto enemies of the divine. I myself have fallen to such spiritual afflictions at points on my trip. There are chapters about that as well. Remember Paris, where I described being overcome by some force and lead into some bizarre circumstance involving street people (possibly) giving me some sort of drug in some circumstance so strange I wonder if it even really happened, and just as strangely my feet carried me out of there without my willing it as if some invisible angel snapped his fingers and whisked me to safety. So while I can accuse these some of these Christians rank godlessness at points, I cannot claim that I myself have been immune to to such episodes.
I guess, in short, everyone has a dark side, even the servants of God, and you find Jews and Christians alike who know nothing about God, and Jews and Christians alike who know him intimately, although even these friends of God in the two religions are certainly capable of being overtaken by their personal demons here and there. All in all, it really seems that the primary differences stem from historical animosity that has made such a mess of things that these guys just judge each other and stigmatize each other.
I don’t know. It’s a mind-boggling subject to observe and contemplate. I think if the Messiah came down to planet earth, we would all really be shocked at how people would react. Say the Messiah actually was Jesus and he came down with a bunch of angels but didn’t tell anybody his name was Jesus. I bet most of the Jews there wouldn’t have any problem with him. When the Messiah does show up, whoever he may be, I think it really will be amazing to see who does what.
All in all, the experience with the suitcase and Purim convinced me that the last trip had not exactly ended in Cyprus. I put my Tzitzit back on and started keeping the same kind of kosher that I had been practicing for the last few years as a convert to Reform Judaism. The whole experience constituted a kind of a sign for me that I needed to take another look at the state of my trip to the Holy Land one more time. However, the heavens would not open and I would not be whisked into Jerusalem on the shoulders of an Army of loving rabbis. The devil doesn’t roll over and make dead. He is an absolute master of distraction, of temptation, and of confusion. He absolutely does not want me hanging around any Jews, or going to Israel, and he absolutely does not want anyone to know who I am or to talk to me at all. But that will be another story.