I don’t drink or smoke or lend my bum to other blokes, but I have a weakness for sex, money and power, particularly when they’re combined in one alluring scenario with a secretary in a power suit, black fishnet stockings and high heels who doesn’t want to lose her job despite her atrocious typing and poor filing skills.
Luckily I have Torah, yoga and Alexander Technique to keep myself calm, as well as wholesome movies such as The Karate Kid and Adventures in Babysitting.
Dennis Prager said on his radio show Friday: "Last night I saw The Twilight Zone. It was probably the most morally serious series ever made for television. People don’t think of it that way. I have seen most of the episodes. Last night it was about a man fixated by a slot machine in Las Vegas and it ruins his life… Anybody who has a gambling problem should be shown this Twilight Zone.
"Why do people get into gambling, drugs, a lifestyle of constant sexual addiction? There are criminals who do it for this reason — excitement. There is an adrenalin rush that is achieved here that people love. It’s physiological. Kids particularly love this. They love to be excited. They feel alive when the adrenalin is rushing."
I get my biggest adrenalin highs from scoops. Nail me a big one and I walk around Pico-Robertson muttering, "There’s a new sheriff in town and his name is Levi."
My fingers twitch and I know that if I apply them to my keyboard and let my psyche free, I will shift people. I will move them around. I will get some people fired and other people hired and give others sleepless nights. I feel big and manly and important. I feel like nothing can touch me. That the ordinary rules don’t apply to me. I’m special. I’m on a mission from God. I’m on earth to deliver divine karma.
Sweet!
I no longer fear approaching women.
I feel like there are no consequences for what I’m doing. Oh, the smooth soft tropically-scented flesh that ripples under my hand…and I can say anything if I touch her just right, touch my keyboard just right, make the keys sing, make the Jews dance, oh what wild ecstasy when I play the Jewish piano.
The rabbis line up on Pico Blvd and they posken:
Sing us a song, you’re the piano man
Sing us a song tonight
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody
And you’ve got us feelin’ alright
Dennis: "Much of what brings us happiness is not fun and much of what is fun does not bring us happiness.
"What’s true about fun is even more true about excitement.
"I think we are born with a tendency to need or not need these adrenalin rushes of massive excitement."
"One of the problems of excitement is that the next dose has to be more exciting or it is not exciting. In the movie Carnal Knowledge, the Jack Nicholson character is addicted to sex. After a certain time, it got to the point where almost nothing that would generally excite him would excite him. He couldn’t be excited by simply making love to a woman, it had to be a specific variation of a variation of a variation or he couldn’t get excited."
"If excitement is the goal, you are in trouble. There is only so much excitement that life can afford. One of the reasons that criminals do what they do is the rush for excitement."
"There are many things that make people feel joy and alive. They can feel it walking through a botanical flower garden. For other people, that is boring.
"Can we train ourselves to be excited by the non-adrenalin producing?
"I believe that almost addictions are a pursuit of excitement and a dulling of pain."
"There’s nothing wrong with excitement, it’s what you need to feel it. Do you have to jump off buildings because the 3,000 sky jumps are no longer exciting?"
"It’s a good test of your own emotional make-up."
The jumper said he found relationships boring by comparison.
"A bad excitement — there are people addicted to emotional crises. There are people who sew crisis in all the lives of the people around them. They don’t even know they do it… The person who sews chaos…are as addicted to adrenalin as the guy who jumps off buildings."
