Doc, I’m like a thirsty man rowing on a lake of fresh water.
I have all these people who want to hang with me yet I sit home alone. I’ve got college starting up January 5 — I’m learning to teach Alexander Technique — so I’m trying to get everything I can accomplished now and then coast for three years on my Adsense earnings.
I can’t sleep. I go in these cycles. I’ll go six weeks without a good night’s sleep and then I’ll sleep solidly — six hours a night — for six weeks.
So I’m tired all the time and don’t want to socialize unless it is going to be primo socializing with hot chicks. Otherwise I can’t be bothered.
I’d rather be lonely than stuck with people who don’t thrill me.
I’m aging too quickly. Support stockings? Foot splints? Mouthguard? Levitra? Abnormal liver function. Low HDLs. I’m tormented by having a beautiful doctor. Oy, the pain. But if a gorgeous 30-year old doctor can wear support stockings, so can an aging blogger.
Q: Do you find it shameful when someone asks if you are lonely?
Not shameful. Just like someone has put their finger on a sensitive spot. I’ve been lighting my Hanukkah candles live on my cam. How pathetic is that? But with my cam, I feel like I can turn it on and get company when I want it, and then I can unplug it when I want and go back to my books. Real live people in your hovel are more trouble. It’s easier to just interact with people through my keyboard.
So there are these chicks at the Jewish Journal I write about a lot. They are like objects to me. They’re material for my blog. They’re not real to me. Then I run into them and I feel abashed. I don’t want to push myself on them so I stay away. But the other night, they were friendly to me and we had nice chats and then I went home and sent them Facebook friend requests and they turned me down and I felt ashamed. It made sense that they would turn me down because they wouldn’t want to have to censor their status updates out of fear I’d blog about them.
Oy, I feel shame. Just like in sixth grade. I didn’t know you could call girls. Then one Sabbath afternoon, I was hanging out with my friends Kevin Carambot and Cary Tamura and they called Denise Bernard, the most beautiful girl in the class, and asked her who she liked. They asked her about me. She said maybe. She said maybe about three guys.
So I learned then that you could call girls so I then called Denise every day for six weeks and asked her if she had made up her mind yet about who she liked.
I got on her nerves real quick and she complained to her friends that I wouldn’t stop calling her and I felt so ashamed.
I’m way too eager with chicks when I like ’em and it’s just so embarrassing.
So I feel this straight line between rejected Facebook friend requests and sixth grade. My life is one big shameful episode. And it’s all at the hands of hot chicks.
Doc, let me tell you about how I got my revenge on them via a piece of veal and my sister’s brassiere.
When I came to LA in 1994, I hit on every chick who moved and nailed about 20 that year. I was pushy. I was on nardil and I had no fear and no boundaries and no sense. I’ve always hit .100. You give me ten girls and I’ll get with at least one of them. That year I hit on ten times as many girls as normal.
I could call that novelist in New York but I’m kinda depressed right now and I know my voice would give me away and I just met her so I don’t want to give her grounds to disqualify me right off as a nut job. And I don’t have anything to boast about and be up and chipper and exciting so I don’t call.
Q: You don’t want to show that side of you to her?
I just met her. I don’t want to call and be a wet blanket. I barely know her. Who wants a depressed sociopathic blogger calling you? Much better to wait until I am on the upside of my bipolar cycle.
This shame all comes from my first five years, when my mom was dying of cancer and I was living two dozen different families. Some were weird and harsh. They’d throw me under a cold shower at night if I wet my bed. I felt pretty ashamed and appalled and cold.
I don’t hate my mom for dying and abandoning me. I don’t blame my dad for looking after her and his work. I was just stuck with some weird people who’d hit me for stupid reasons. I couldn’t leave the table unless I ate my vegetables, so I sat at the table for hours. I couldn’t eat anything if I didn’t eat my vegies, so I didn’t eat.
When I was four years old, I looked like a Holocaust survivor. I just had that rage and those sunken eyes.
I learned to get along with a wide variety of people. I learned to survive and to hate. Now I’ve got a blog and the ability to fight back if someone screws me over.
I remember throwing manure at these kids and screaming, "I hate you, I hate you." There’s a freeway between my emotions of hurt, shame and rage. I just speed along between the three. Sometimes it takes months. It usually takes three months after I’ve been tossed from a shul for my hurt to turn to rage.
I couldn’t get mad at my rabbi the past seven years. He’d discipline me and there was nothing I could do. But I could take out my rage on other rabbis. Not unfairly. I simply reported the news. But if the news was rabbinical wrongdoing, particularly by someone who’d hurt me, I loved reporting that. This is where I go gangster and flash signs and say, ‘I’ll —- you up.’
For seven years, I’ve lived in fear that that ping from my ‘puter meant an email from my rabbi kicking me out of shul, which of course made it easier to toss me as I just oozed fear around him. I don’t live in fear no more.
I used to feel helpless when rabbis ejected. Now I got the power. The power of truth. The power of accurate reporting.
Let me reach for this rock triangle and smash it into my hand, let the pain in my hand distract me from the pain in my soul. I only do this in painful high-quality conversations with people trained to listen. I can’t forget that scene in ‘How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days’ where the faux-shrink spreads her hands and says, ‘This is a safe space.’
I don’t send cards or give gifts, unless I am in an intimate relationship. I remember Cathy Seipp complained to me on her birthday, ‘What does a girl need to do to get flowers around here?’ I told her and she said, ‘Well, if that’s what I’ve got to do…’ We never had that kind of relationship.
BernieMadoff: Nobody cares about your interior life. It just isn’t that interesting
FATS: Does you therapist read your blog?
BernieMadoff: Nobody cares about the feelings and emotions of a middle aged man unless he straps on a flame thrower and gets busy
BernieMadoff: The successful bloggers out there – politico, drudge, others, don’t spend all day describing their feelings
