Luke Ford

* I never learned to dance because I grew up a Seventh-Day Adventist and such a thing is a sin. Before I die, I would really like to learn to dance to disco.

* I don’t like it when women with a tubby tummy wear tight dresses. I just don’t like a bulge in the tummy area on my women. So let’s say my wife develops a bulgy tummy but insists on wearing tight clothing. How do I tell her I find this distasteful? Also, no kerchiefs on her hair. It would make me incapable of being a true husband to her. Other than this, I’m the easiest man in the world.

I just want to be of service. If you’ve got a bulging tummy, don’t wear tight clothes around your midriff or go bare.

You never see in public an upper-class English woman with bad legs because those with bad legs, cover them up as God intended, but in America, those with wretched bodies insist on displaying them in all their depravity. Makes me ill.

* In second grade, classmate Gavin Brown didn’t want to invite me to his birthday party because I was a jerk, but my best friend’s mom forced Gavin’s dad to invite me, so along I went and as we biked into the bush, the other kids let me know that they didn’t want me along, but when they see how great I’ve become, that wound will heal and I will have proven myself a superior man.

I have this vision that when a man like me is most filled with testosterone and feeling great about himself, his woman is sure to cut him down, look for his weak points and poke them until he’s not so full of himself. When he swells up with pride over something he’s done, his woman is usually there to bring him down to earth.

* I look at Dennis Prager and see a bloke who really loves people (while I feel so ambivalent about 99% of those I meet) with a gift for maintaining friends (while I don’t attach normally). I feel wistful. Dennis was always class president (for 12 years). All my life, I’ve had a burn against the popular kids because they seemed to set the rules and they looked out for their own and I wanted to be one of them but I was so far from them most of the time (occasionally they let me in). It feels like the MSM is run by the popular kids and they decide on the appropriate emotional tone to stories and they tend to be careerists and they’re careful to never say anything inappropriate and the MSM just seems so sanitized and I see myself as a courageous truth-teller, but baying at the moon on FB and my blog instead of in the hallowed pages of the New Yorker, where I belong but the popular kids won’t play with me, and so the greatest writer of his generation spends his days filing and typing other people’s letters.

* More than a decade ago, my therapist said to Old Luke, “You’re attracted to innocence and you try to corrupt it.”

Trying to get my lips around, “That’s a sanctity I can’t violate.”

* Most people I know have flaws as big as their virtues and I just don’t want to deal with them. I’m particularly not into angry and bitter. Goodbye! I’m not doing well looking past the bad behavior of those around me to the wounded inner child. I wouldn’t even want to show up to their funeral, unless I could meet chicks or do some networking.

* I don’t understand how people take Leon Wieseltier seriously (he’s unreadable except in short bursts of stunning clarity, I defy you to claim you read all of his book Kaddish), such as this joke: “Leon Wieseltier fears Israel may be in jeopardy, he said in an interview this week while accepting the Dan David Prize… The prize recognizes his contributions to humanity through science, art, public service, humanities and entrepreneurship.”

* Der Fuhrer says: “God sent you to me to raise you. I’m stuck. Your mom was dying, you were raised in foster homes and you didn’t learn certain skills and now you’re 47 and you don’t have certain life skills, a certain attention to detail, and after I tell you something 27 times and you still don’t get it, I have to get nasty so that you learn.”

My dad would say, “You’ll only learn through pain.” I don’t pay attention to things that don’t interest me and I only learn to pay attention when I am sufficiently hurt for my carelessness.

Life and women keep seeking out my weaknesses — a certain lack of attention to detail — and throwing it in my face and this is going to keep happening until I learn my lesson. Oy.

I took Friday off and spent the morning listening to Family Tree Counseling videos and writing in my journal. Then I spent the afternoon finishing this book on 1948 Australia vs England cricket.

And now it is Sunday and I want to spend my day off listening to more Family Tree Counseling videos and writing in my journal but I have a nagging voice in my head saying that I should be more productive, I should leave the house, I should mix with people, most of all, I should get something done. I should work on a book. I should hone some writing. Whose voice is this I hear in my head telling me to get off my bum and get to work rather than lying around watching documentaries on Everest? It’s my father’s voice. He taught that everything you do should have a purpose. If you choose to relax, it is for the purpose of becoming more productive.

I have therapy Monday evenings. I keep checking with my therapist if I am wasting my time and my talents and she says it is fine to do things I want to do, even if they aren’t productive in the sense of finishing another book.

If you feel betrayed, it is only because you want to give an irrational and emotional reaction to somebody having different priorities from what you imagined. Your spouse didn’t betray you by having an affair, she simply had different priorities. Your friend didn’t betray you by choosing another over you, he simply had different priorities from what you imagined. Your boss didn’t betray you firing you, he simply had different priorities from what you counted on. I’ve only rarely felt betrayed by friends, and only when I refused to look at either how my behavior precipitated acts from others I didn’t like, or how my irrational thinking about how others should behave set me up for unnecessary pain.

* I’m a mismatcher. Give me three things and I’ll look for what’s different among them. Mismatchers have a hard time relating to other people because they focus on dissimilarities. I get along best with other mismatchers. We’re always looking for the new, routine is boring. I connect quickly and deeply with about 1% of the population, and the other 99% require a lot of effort and patience (of which I have little) on my part to get along with.

* Only one Persian friend repeatedly grabs my cheeks and tells me how cute I am.

* My first year in Los Angeles (1994-1995), I batted like Yasiel Puig.

* A friend hopes I go blind so I’ll stop caring so much about a woman’s looks and settle down with a normal woman.

* My friends know me. They have no illusions about my self-centeredness and they don’t hold it against me. One bloke, who repeatedly ridiculed my play (without seeing it), gave a lecture and I didn’t go (because the topic didn’t interest me, if the topic had interested me, I would’ve gone). He upraided me over lunch for not coming. “If I had given a talk about Luke Ford, you would’ve come,” he said.