My Denial Of Death

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Luke Ford

1. Ernest Becker says we build “hero systems” to deny our death. I became an Orthodox Jew, streamed on YouTube 5x a week, and joined 12-step groups—I’m covered. If that doesn’t beat death, it at least keeps me too busy to notice I’m dying.

2. Most people deny death by having kids. I deny death by debating Grok about immigration policy at 11:45pm on a Saturday night.

3. My hero system used to be “if I say something profound enough, a busty shiksa will love me.” That failed. Now my hero system is “if I livestream enough, Dennis Prager will text me back.”

4. You know you’ve got a fragile hero system when a bad comment from “@TruthSeeker1488” can collapse your whole sense of immortality.

5. Becker says we’re all terrified of being worm food. I say—speak for yourself. I’m terrified of being ignored while becoming worm food.

6. The ancient hero system: slay the dragon, save the village. My hero system: quote Rony Guldmann, alienate my audience, and cry to The Cars.

7. Becker says culture is a collective denial of death. That explains Instagram. We’re all dying, but we’ve got filters. Look at me, I’m glowing and decaying at the same time!

8. Sometimes I envy people with simple hero systems—like CrossFit guys or people who sell essential oils. I have to wrestle with death and Maimonides.

9. My hero system is so conflicted I once tried to impress a girl by quoting Becker while describing the plot of Legends of the Fall. She ghosted me. Honestly, it was an act of mercy.

10. Denying death is what keeps us sane. But if you’re too good at it, you become unbearable. That’s how you get TED Talk atheists who start cults around hydration and sleep hygiene.

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I Courted My Way To NYC In 1994

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Luke Ford

August, 1993. I’m 27, horny, and full of unprocessed spiritual ambition. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, but instead of Jesus, I met T.—a woman who flew out to see me at my parents’ house in Sacramento. Very romantic… until my Seventh-Day Adventist parents caught us mid-fornication, which, apparently, is not covered by the honor thy father commandment.

Next morning, I’m not just out of their will—I’m heading out of the state. I flee with T. to Florida, hoping we can start fresh. But within a week, she’s back with her ex-boyfriend, whose main qualification appears to be… more girth.

So I turn to where all lost Jews go for redemption: the Jewish singles ads.

Boom. I meet an heiress. Upper West Side, Manhattan. She flies me out. And not just to sleep on the couch—she puts me in her apartment, gives me more than $10 a day to wander the city. This is what Moses promised: the land flowing with vegie burgers and MetroCards.

She’s very bossy. She has opinions—on everything. Sex, Torah, and what I should do with my l ife. But I figure, hey, I can take it. This is New York City! I’m a struggling writer with a foreign accent and unresolved daddy issues. I can clean up here.

So while she’s at therapy working out her childhood, I’m placing another singles ad in the Village Voice. Like an idiot. Because God sees everything—and apparently, so do girlfriends in Manhattan.

She finds the ad. Confronts me. Her therapist says I’m “using her.”

Using her? Lady, I’m giving you my body, my charisma, my spiritual neurosis… for free!

It gets worse. I crawl back to LA. Back to Beverly Hills, living out of my car—which now won’t start. And I’m courting a nurse who hates me because I left her for the heiress for a three-week romp. A beautiful, nurturing woman who gives insulin shots and tough love in equal measure.

But guess what? Her friends and family all say I’m using her. Why? Because I borrowed $500 to fix the car I was living in so I could continue dating her.

Using her? No, no, no. I was investing in our future.

But I get it. It’s hard being the suffering servant of Isaiah 43 while trying to date middle-class women with boundaries. Every time I try to find a life partner, I get accused of being a con man with a library card.

In the end, all I wanted was a place to sleep, a woman to love, and maybe a little walking-around money for vegie burgers and bagels. Is that so wrong?

Is that using people?

Or is that… the American dream?

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Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of “Conservaphobia”

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Luke Ford

1. Rony Guldmann writes about conservatives feeling like they’re being culturally oppressed. I’m like, finally, someone wrote a scholarly defense of my last 12 livestreams.

2. Reading this book felt like reading my own diary—if my diary had footnotes, more Jews, and fewer complaints about how shiksas ruin your hashkafah.

3. Guldmann says conservatives are treated like deviants in elite institutions. Mate, I converted to Orthodox Judaism and tried dating in Pico-Robertson. I know exactly what it feels like to be the unclean thing that defiles polite company.

4. He calls it “soft persecution.” I call it “every time I mention immigration on a livestream and lose 12 subscribers.”

5. The book is like Isaiah 43 meets campus Title IX. “You are my witnesses, saith the Lord… also, please submit your bias incident report by Friday.”

6. Guldmann’s big idea is that conservatives are the new counterculture. I’ve been saying this for years—mainly to my Uber driver, who gave me one star and reported me for emotional oversharing.

7. He says left-wing norms function like an established church. Which makes me what? A crypto-Baptist hiding out in Yeshiva World, dodging heresy trials over my fondness for Chesterton?

8. It’s comforting to know that when I got cancelled for quoting Enoch Powell in a panel about “emotional safety,” I was just a minor prophet in the Guldmann canon.

9. Sometimes I wonder if I’m crazy. Then I read Guldmann and realize—no, I’m just traditional. I’m like a moral time capsule, waiting to be cracked open by some future civilization that still believes in God, borders, and bras.

10. Guldmann’s conservatives are accused of “making everyone uncomfortable.” Mate, discomfort is my love language. It’s my brand. My livestreams are like Yom Kippur sermons delivered by a horny Jeremiah.

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A Moral Lesson

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Luke Ford

So, more than 22 years ago, I met this cute, curvy Jewess at Sinai Temple’s Friday Night Live. You know the type—age-appropriate, Sephardic fire, Ashkenazi vocabulary. She had hips like a halachic boundary—meant to be respected but very hard not to cross.

First date? We go hiking. Romantic, right? Nature, sweat, modesty in tank tops. At one point I say—trying to be charming but probably sounding like a sex offender with a thesaurus—“I look forward to gaining easy access to your greatest assets.” I meant her personality, obviously. But she looks me dead in the eye and says, “Deep in your neshama, you want to work that reward.”

I mean, come on. This is Torah meets Tinder. Her hips didn’t lie. They chanted Lecha Dodi.

So obviously, I panicked. I’m like, “This is too good. She’s too curvy, too clever, too Jewish. I’m gonna screw this up. I need to sabotage this with someone more… docile. Less frum. Smaller… expectations.”

So I go out with a shiksa. Blonde, A-cup, nose ring, the kind of girl who says, “I’m spiritual, not religious,” while vaping during therapy. On our second date, she—how do I say this halachically?—she deployed her talent. You know what I mean. Let’s just say she put the “blessing” in Birkat HaMazon.

And just like that, I stopped chasing the curvy Jewess and spent the next year trying to convert an A-cup into a soulmate. Like a schmuck. I thought I could mold her into a nice Orthodox wife. Instead, I got a yearlong lesson in how “namaste” is not Hebrew for “clean the dishes.”

Fast forward five years. I’m trying to date this woman—very earnest, very sweet, in the middle of converting to Judaism. She lives in a backhouse. Her landlady? Guess who?

The Curvy Jewess.

I’m like, this is bashert! This is God giving me a second shot at my neshama work. But my new friend-zoning friend with the secret Jewish boyfriend (don’t let the rabbis know or they’ll kick her from the conversion program, her Jewish BF doesn’t want to be bothered going to shul every morning to prove his bona fides) is like, “Oh, you knew her? Yeah… my landlady is totally nuts. You dodged a bullet.”

Dodged a bullet?! Lady, I was the bullet. I swerved out of her path and shot myself in the ego.

So what’s the moral? Never trade a curvy Jewess for a shiksa with a fast tongue and a yoga mat? Maybe. Or maybe the moral is this:

The past has a funny way of renting out the upstairs apartment just when you’re trying to build a future downstairs.

Or maybe—just maybe—your greatest assets are the mistakes that keep you from making even worse ones.

Either way, don’t ghost a woman who talks like a rebbetzin and moves like she’s smuggling Sephardic spices under her dress. That’s a rookie move.

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The Wall Street Journal Claims I Wrote A Bawdy Letter For Jeffrey Epstein For His 50th Birthday Album!

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Luke Ford

This is fake news.

I would never write something like this:

Dear Jeffrey,

Mazel tov on hitting the big five-oh. You’ve done more by 50 than most of us accomplish in a lifetime: built an empire, made a name, and somehow stayed out of jail—until you didn’t. But hey, who among us hasn’t had a few awkward run-ins with the law, an island, and a Rolodex full of prime ministers and pimps?

You always had a taste for high IQ and low inhibitions, a perfect storm for the kind of philanthropy they don’t teach in shul. People say you were mysterious, brilliant, reclusive—I say you were the Woody Allen of finance, minus the Oscars and with worse friends.

I remember your parties—equal parts Mensa mixer and Maxim shoot. You’d greet Nobel Prize winners and Brazilian models with the same firm handshake and the same “What’s your SAT score?” Classic Jeff.

If I had your money, I’d buy a Westside shul and fill it with porn stars in modest skirts. You went another way, more Clinton than Cohen, more Lolita Express than Lithuanian yeshiva. Who am I to judge?

You lived like a Gnostic tech bro with a Nietzschean libido—doing science, dodging sunlight, whispering to Harvard nerds about AI, DNA, and underage ballet dancers. It’s all very on-brand for a guy whose legacy reads like the Book of Job if it were rewritten by Larry Flynt and funded by Les Wexner.

So here’s to you, Jeffrey—wherever you are. May your 50s be less… incarcerated. And may your next birthday album be curated by someone with fewer lawsuits and more moral clarity. Or at least better taste.

Yours in eroticized rage and fallen dreams,
Luke Ford
A convert, a contrarian, a chronic oversharer
(But not that kind of sharer)

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