During my 17-year struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), I’ve often felt as U.S. women’s soccer player Michelle Akers says in this movie — that she died on the day she got sick.
This is a superb documentary on CFS.
From IMDB.com: “In 1984-85, people at Lake Tahoe fell ill with flu symptoms, but they didn’t get better. Medical literature documents similar outbreaks: in 1934 at LA county hospital, in 1948-49 in Iceland, in 1956 in Punta Gorda, Florida. The malady now has a name, chronic fatigue syndrome, and filmmaker Kim Snyder, who suffered from the disease for several years, tells her story and talks to victims and their families, and to physicians and researchers: is it viral, it is psychosomatic, is it one disease or several (a syndrome) ; what’s the CDC doing about it; what’s it like to have a disease that’s not yet understood? Her inquiry takes her to Punta Gorda and to a high-school graduation.”
Roger Ebert writes in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Snyder is an investigative journalist who does her own detective work…a documentary which does what the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta shamefully failed to do: connect the dots.”
I wonder what happened to high school senior Stephen Paganetti, who was too sick to even feed himself. Few of his friends visited him once he got sick. (His mailing address is POBox 145 Durham, CT 06422-0145.)
Most of my friends my age ignored me once I got sick, or said that it was all in my head.
One of my strongest beliefs from my illness is that older people are more compassionate with illness than younger people. They are more likely to visit you and to help you.
* When I was a child, I had these bouts of conscience where I confessed my sins to my step-mom. This began my life-long habit of confessing, which has repaired many a relationship. For the last 16 years, I’ve done much of this confessing with my blogging. No matter how awful I’ve behaved since childhood, my redeeming quality of coming clean has served me well. If you’re open and honest with people, they’ll put up with a lot.
* In the fall of 1986, a year into Sierra College, I dropped all of my classes but two to work full-time in landscaping. I didn’t mind working in the heat but found I hated working in the cold. When I returned to school full-time in the Spring semester of 1987, I was a serious student. In my first year of college, I got just better than a B average. From here on, I got nearly straight As and took my education with great seriousness. It didn’t happen until I was 20 but from here on I was dedicated.
* In my Senior year of high school, I decided to go to college at Cal-State Fullerton and major in Journalism. Later in that school year, I decided to take a year off after high school, return to Australia, live with my brother and work. I decided that when I returned I would go to Sierra Community College and then transfer to a four-year school for my BA, which, by 1985, I decided would be in Economics. I planned to go to Sac State until one day in 1986, I think, I mentioned my plan to my friend Kevin McKee’s dad, Bob, and he said, “You know what they say about Sac State, don’t you?” “No,” I said. “Somebody’s got to go there,” he said. I was so stung, I decided I would transfer to UC Davis instead. I still planned to major in Economics.
Then, in the fall of 1987, as I was dead-serious in my studies, I was deciding between UC Berkeley and UCLA. My advisor recommended UCLA to me, a little less serious and mathematical. I decided to go to UCLA. That changed my life because in Los Angeles, I encountered Dennis Prager and Russell Roberts and they turned me on to Judaism.
* In the summer of 1987, I decided to quit working at the radio station and devote myself completely to my studies (and to landscaping in my spare hours). That fall, I got straight As for the only time in my life.
* In the summer of 1988, a few months into a confusing disease later diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), I decided I would transfer anyway to UCLA and hope for help in the south. If I had not transferred, despite my illness, I would not have encountered Dennis Prager and Judaism. I only finished three classes that school year at UCLA (1988-1989), but those nine months changed my life through my exposure to Jews (for the first time in my life).
* In the summer of 1986, I started working construction for $3.50 an hour, a fourth of what I made in Australia 1984-1985. Despite the low wage, later raised to $4.50 and eventually $5.50 an hour, I fell in love with the work and often put in 90-hour weeks. On the one hand, the hours I put at this low-paying drudgery over the course of more than two years was absurd. On the other hand, the wages I got allowed me to pick up a decent disability check for about seven years when Chronic Fatigue Syndrome kicked my butt (1988-1995).
* Living in a secular environment in Tannum Sands in December of 1989, I decided to convert to Judaism.
* In 1992, I was living with my parents in lonely Newcastle, 95658. After many years of CFS, I became convinced that if I stayed where I was, I would never get well. I had to get away. I had to connect and that the best way for me to do this was by placing and answering singles ads. I believed that about 1% of women in my demographic would find me mesmerizing and through connecting with one of them, she’d find a way for me to get out of my illness. This is what happened. Sleeping around is not blessed by any religion, and certainly not by my family and my religious friends, but using women to get well enabled me to find the woman who’d connect me with a great psychiatrist, get me out of my parent’s home, force me to stand on my own two feet, though sick, and get me the medication (nardil) that would turn my life around, even though I quickly left behind all the women who made my recovery possible (one of them, nine years older, said she’d have to hit the lottery to get me to stay with her).
* I returned to Los Angeles in March of 1994 at about two-thirds of normal health. I feared returning to UCLA in my weakened condition and instead pursued acting and modeling work for 15 months until I realized I was not cut-out for collaborative endeavors and tried to make a documentary (What Women Want). My technical skills doomed that and so I got to work on a book. Writing became my main work, source of income and prestige after the fall of 1995.
* In December, against the wishes of my friends, I began work on an unauthorized biography of Dennis Prager. Though the price was heavy in lost friends, I became free of things holding me back. In Freudian terms, I slew my adopted father.
Every time I’ve made a major change in my life, I’ve had to leave behind friends (of whom I’ve never had a surplus).
* For my 40th birthday, I got Neil Strauss’s book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Two years later, for my 42nd birthday, I used an Amazon gift certificate to purchase Neil’s sequel, Rules of the Game. This book had one sentence on the Alexander Technique. It said that women prefer guys with good posture. I was intrigued, read up on the Technique, took 30 lessons in the fall, and began three years of teacher training in January of 2009.
* After getting asked to leave a shul in September of 2008 (or shutting down my blog and submitting to the elders my new blog entries), I sought out two sessions a week of psycho-therapy, which I’ve been in since then. This therapeutic work led me in 2011 to start 12-stepping for love and fantasy addiction.
* I have a hard time submitting myself to authority, but I swallowed my pride and successfully enrolled in conversion to Judaism programs in 1993 (Reform) and 2008 (Orthodox), and in Alexander Technique teacher training in 2009-2011. To pay for my training, I swallowed my pride and kept asking my family for financial help (for the first time in my life) and they got me through.
* In 2008 and 2009, various Orthodox rabbis in a position to hurt me almost cowed me into shutting down my blogging and placing my future writing under the supervision of the rabbis. In the end, I did not cave, and nobody tries to intimidate me in this way any more. When you fight back hard enough against bullies, you eventually become free.
* In September of 2012, I began a five-month class to create a one-man play. Mine was on eroticized rage.
* In June of 2013, after more than four years off all medication (previously I was on lithium, clonidine and clonazepam for about eight years), I read about modafinil, became intrigued, saw a psychiatrist and got a prescription that dramatically improved the quality of my life.
* In 2012, I adopted the phrases, “I have no opinion” and “I try to stay out of fights.”
I just watched this movie for the third time. I love it. It’s about growing up an Adventist in Australia.
It made me think, what was the last day of my youth?
Here’s my answer — the morning I woke up with a bad flu in February of 1988. That led to almost six years in bed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I was never the same afterward in either my physical or mental strength.
Here are other possible dates for the end of my youth:
* The morning in May of 1984, the end of my Senior year of high school, when I cut Media class (I think with the permission of the teacher) and went to Alice’s home and played in her pool with other Seniors. Alice was a brunette beauty. I admired her from afar. I ran into her a few times at Sierra Community College. She transferred to UC Berkeley and got her degree in English.
I had never cut class before. It seemed so rebellious and transgressive. I loved playing in the pool and I felt almost normal.
* Later in May 1984, when I was 18, I finally got my driver’s license. Once that happened, I had a ticket to drive and could take on an adult life.
* Perhaps it was the afternoon I drove away from home on August 22 of 1988 and took the I-5 to freedom at UCLA. It would be the first time I would live apart from family and friends. This would be the year I would cease to see my father as my hero — he didn’t change, I did — and begin my first steps towards Judaism.
* Perhaps it was August 28, 1988, when I heard Dennis Prager’s voice for the first time (on KABC radio) and became a big fan and ended up converting to Judaism and dedicating myself to writing an unauthorized biography of my hero.
* Perhaps it was the evening that week of Valentine’s Day, 1989, (Thursday, February 16, I believe) when I would lose my virginity.
* Perhaps it was the day in July 1993 when I fled my parent’s home and despite crippling Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and a relationship in the toilet, I flew to Orlando and moved in with my girlfriend. I knew almost no one but her in the city. I started going regularly to my first synagogue, Ohev Shalom. I started going regularly to her psychiatrist, Daniel Golwyn, and he got me on nardil, which began the turnaround of my health. I was 27 and about to re-enter the world. This would not have happened if I hadn’t left home to move into a terrible heart-breaking relationship punctuated by her infidelity (done to get me out of the house). I picked up the pieces of my heart on my first evening away and slept with an old alcoholic black woman and soon I was on my feet again, slicing through the ladies back to health.
* Perhaps it was August 14, 1980. I was 14. The setting was the high altitude (about 7500 feet above sea level) Glacier View Ranch in Colorado. On Thursday, the General Conference President of the Seventh-Day Adventist church (aka the leader), Neal Wilson, went after my father from his seat high above the gathering of the Church elite. He got angry. He said to dad, “Why won’t you listen to your peers?” My dad didn’t get much of a chance to reply. He just had to take it. I was sitting in the audience with my step-mom Gill. I got upset watching my dad torn apart by the church administrators. I really didn’t care about dad’s theological positions but I felt defensive about my father like never before. I became upset on his behalf like never before. I felt like he was being bullied and humiliated by Neal Wilson. I was familiar with dad’s constant controversies but nothing like this had happened before. Gill told me to calm down because the emotional way I was acting argued for Neal Wilson’s position that I should not have been come to the conference.
I would never again consider myself a Seventh-Day Adventist (though I lived around that milieu for another four years). I would never again find a home. Perhaps this was the last day of my youth?
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When I read the stories I wrote in the 1980s, the ones I didn’t burn during my religious phase, and I listen to my favorite music at the same time, I’m able to drum up compassion for the man I was.
If I read the stories without the music, I don’t feel a thing.
I’m glad I can develop some compassion for my younger self, even when it is induced through artificial means. I’m sure this is important for my recovery.
I’m keenly aware in these stories of the writer’s yearning for at least normal levels of human connection. He plainly has an attachment disorder but has yet to go to therapy. On the outside, his life looks like a success with money in the bank, good grades at college, and boundless ambition. Below the surface, however, he’s about to hit the iceberg of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and collapse and from that wreckage he will remake his life, though the themes he’s hitting in these stories apply just as strongly to my life now.
Early on in my first story, written in 1988 about events in 1984, I write: “Then one Friday, knowing that my brother Paul would be away all weekend and that I’d have the car, I resolved to invite Rachel to dinner and dancing that evening.”
This gets me to thinking, when did I first ask a girl out to dinner?
The first time I successfully asked a girl out full stop was August 9, 1981. The object of my affection was Denise. I’d met her in September of 1977. I was eleven and new to America. We were in sixth, seventh and eighth grade together. Then in 1980 my family left Pacific Union College (PUC) for Auburn and life outside the Seventh-Day Adventist church, but I made it back to PUC whenever I could and I was spending the summer before tenth grade with my friends the Muth family.
I was fifteen years old. I’d asked out Denise twice that summer already but she always had something else going on, like a horse shoe. This evening, however, she says yes to the baseball game the next day. The Muths happen to have tickets to the resumption of the baseball season after the strike.
Two college students drive four of us kids to Candlestick Park where the Houston Astros beat the San Francisco Giants 6-5.
On the drive, my best friend Andy’s little sister, Jenny, remarks that I’m wearing mismatched socks. Once we get to the stadium, Andy, Denise and I go looking for our seats. I lead the way, nervous and frenetic. Throughout the contest, I’m leaning over to Andy placing bets on various aspects of the game. Denise is not impressed and we never go out again.
The next summer, I have my first love with a girl a year younger, Rainy. I never ask her out, however, except to the PUC pool, where we spend many an afternoon. I hate asking girls out. It’s frightening. I dread the awkwardness and rejection.
I don’t get my driver’s license until right before graduating from 12th grade in May of 1984. The next month, I fly to Australia and live with my brother Paul for a year. I hope to get a real girlfriend and lose my virginity but I’m scared by women and I come across as just as weird and needy as I did in the States. I don’t think I ever formally asked a girl out that year, not for a date by ourselves. I did ask this girl, LeeAnne, to come to a dinner and party organized by some charity and we ended up driving to the beach and hanging out till sunrise but it was all very chaste and we never went out again.
The one girl I made out with that year was brought along on a camping trip. We went to a pub around Christmas and she got drunk and we outside and made out in the bushes before she needed to vomit and that was the last time I saw her.
I came back to California in 1985 and bought a 1966 VW Bug and slowly awkwardly asked girls out to movies and the like. There might have been a few dinners as well. There were definitely lunches. But I didn’t get my first girlfriend until I transferred to UCLA and got together with this Chinese girl in February of 1989, the week of Valentine’s Day. We spent the night and that launched us. I never had to go through the agony of asking her out.
I had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at the time and that limited my going out. I had several relationships over the next few years, but because of my illness, I couldn’t exactly ask girls out. I could only ask them to come up to visit me at my parent’s home.
In September of 1993 while living in Orlando, I get on the medication Nardil and begin to recover my health. The next month, I meet Paula through a singles sit run by a Messianic rabbi. We hit it off over the phone and I ask her to dinner.
In my memory, this is the first time I’ve asked a girl out to dinner and she accepts.
Paula drives her mother’s station wagon and picks me up and we go to the Olive Garden and I talk a lot about sex. I’m 27, Paula is 36 and thrice divorced (twice to the same man). She has three kids. She is not Jewish.
The night ends with a chaste hug.
I ask her to dinner at my Conservative synagogue Ohev Shalom on Friday night. She accepts. I pay for two tickets.
She comes over that Friday afternoon and she’s weirded by the family I’m living with across the street from my shul. She flees. I’m mad. After the evening is over, I call her and say I’m not going to chase her.
She comes to shul the next morning and she gets along with everyone and that night we go back to her place. She’s staying with her mom. And we’re launched. From here on, I’m as comfortable as a bloke can be asking a girl out for dinner.
***
Another thing that strikes me as I read these stories — the difference in wages between Australia and America. In Australia, I had a cleaning and gardening contract for the Boyne Island Shopping Center that was worth about $40,000 a year. I came back to California, and the only job I could find was in construction for $3.50 an hour. (The Australian dollar during this time varied between rough equivalence in value to the American and two-thirds the value.)
***
I’m struck that when I see the woman I love in this story, I cross the street and try to get away unseen. Getting close to what I want frightens me to this day. Why? Because my heart gets so full and I’m emotionally flooded and like a car that floods, I don’t run. I have to get distance to soothe myself. What’s my anxiety? What was I scared of that Friday night in 1984 on Gondoon Street in Gladstone?
I think my primary fear is of connection to someone I want so badly that I won’t have the inner resources to handle rejection. Love feels to me like stepping off the edge into a free fall. OK, so I’m scared of how much I could get hurt and embarrassed if I approach Rachel. I’m trying to relate to her from a safe place, from humor and sarcasm, to ward off the vulnerability. And these fears plague me to this day.
These fears must go back to earliest childhood when I lived in foster care and home and attachment was not safe because it would get torn up again and again, so I learned to disconnect from my emotions and to avoid being vulnerable. Eventually, I learned to express myself through writing. With enough distance, with a keyboard, I could be honest.
When Rachel wrote her phone number on a Spearmint gum wrapper, I could safely attach to that wrapper. That didn’t cause me anxiety. I could get all emotional about that wrapper. It represented human connection. It couldn’t hurt me.
My fear of getting what I wanted has not affected me nearly as much in my professional life as it has in my love life. I guess I need to conduct my personal life more in line with the way I go about my work life.
***
I’m struck that there are details in the story, such as the name of Gondoon Street, that I have forgotten.
I’m still crazy about quiet, shy, proper brunettes like Rachel. She liked me but I couldn’t put us together and she got snatched up by another bloke.
***
The stories are composed of the themes I return to again and again — loss, thirst for connection, ambition, loneliness, the seeking of love and lust to stop the ache.
Why do feelings of loss, longing and nostalgia create a literal ache in the throat?
During my years in the construction business (1986-1988), I mixed with high-school dropouts, Vietnam veterans, alcoholics, drug addicts and men with big tattoos. Jesse had all these qualities. That man with the screaming eagle tattoo played a prominent part in my writing while I was at Sierra Community College from 1985-1988. I wrote the following for an English Composition class in the fall of 1986. I got an A- grade from a teacher who proudly proclaimed how tough he was on grading our first stories for the class. I think I got the only A grade in the class for that initial composition.
The teacher droned on. Would he ever quit? I shifted my attention from the blob at the front of the room and stared out a side window. My eyes lost focus in the spring sunshine and I imagined I could see Jesse.
Curly blond hair matted with sweat sat on top of his block head. He wore horn-rimmed glasses. Shirt off, his bronzed skin glowed in the sun. The outstretched talons of a screaming eagle tattoo reached across his back and dug into his broad shoulders. I laughed when I first saw the eagle, thinking I could hear it scream.
Jesse joined our landscaping crew at the bottom of his luck. He had earned eight dollars an hour with the paint crew but with us he’d make four.
I was Jesse’s foreman. Initially confused and uncomfortable with telling a man twenty years my senior what to do, I soon learned that when it came to digging a 20-foot ditch for PVC pipe, well, better he than I.
Jesse worked hard. Hunger does that to a man, and Jesse was very hungry. Our boss wouldn’t give him an advance to buy food. The boss had been ripped off too many times before. I, however, was young and naive. I lent Jesse $80.
I worked with Jesse for about a month and we had a lot of time to talk. Jesse said that he dropped out of high school to serve in ‘Nam. He didn’t like the war. The tight leathery skin on his face grew even more constricted when he talked about seeing his friends die.
Jesse had been a sniper and an excellent shot. He didn’t die. He wasn’t even physically hurt. War means kill or be killed, and Jesse killed.
“Several people,” Jesse said.
Jesse began drinking heavily in Vietnam and he took drugs. “Everyone did,” he said.
After the war he returned home to Pennsylvania. He bought a small farm, married, fathered two daughters, and worked as a pastry chef.
During the recession in the early 80s Jesse lost his job, then his farm and finally his wife in a divorce. Jesse moved to California – the land of opportunity.
Jesse worked construction and saved several hundred dollars which he sent to one of his daughters. “I thought I’d be OK,” said Jesse. “I had a good job.” Not for long, though. He moved on to another job as a painter. After several months, he lost that job also. He moved on to another one. Lost it and moved on.
In his latest job Jesse built fences around the Springview Apartments in Rocklin. Now he dug with us and lived in the woods.
“Woodstream?” I asked, referring to a moderately priced apartment complex in Rocklin.
“No,” said Jesse. “In the woods… In a tent across the railroad tracks from Pacific Street and just behind the Springview apartments.”
Ants had been a problem, said Jesse. They had gotten into his last loaf of bread. He’d eaten some of it but had had to throw most of it away. He had no money. Could I help him? I could.
For a man struggling to eat, Jesse smoked a lot. I never saw him when he wasn’t dragging on a cigarette. Often in the morning he looked bleary eyed and smelled of beer. At those times his shoulders hunched, and the eagle seemed to dig its claws deeper into his back. I learned later he was an alcoholic.
Despite his problems, Jesse worked hard. Looking out from his shiny blue Mercedes, a real estate titan was impressed. He asked me for an evaluation.
“Jesse is a top guy,” I said. “Salt of the earth. I recommend him highly.”
The rich man nodded and said he was going to hire Jesse.
“We’ll miss him,” I said.
We did miss Jesse, but not because he quit to take another job. He just didn’t show up for two days. The third day he did show up, reeking of alcohol. He wanted his check. He said his mother had died and he wanted to go back to Pennsylvania for the funeral.
“Not so fast,” I said. I took his check from the boss and drove Jesse to the bank. I cashed Jesse’s check for him and took out all he owed me. I then gave him the small amount left and he walked off.
The last I remember of Jesse was seeing the outlines of that eagle on his back. Its talons seemed to dig even more deeply than ever into his shoulders. I thought I could hear the eagle scream.
“You remember Jesse?” my boss asked me a couple of days later. “Yes,” I replied. “He’s in jail. Police got him for stealing a car. He tried to get back to Pennsylvania on the cheap.”
A commotion roused me from my reverie. Students leaving their desks headed out the door. Class over. I walked outside. The sun hit me in the eyes. I squinted and kept walking. My head filled with a picture of an eagle alighting on a man’s back and digging in its claws. I saw blood and I knew the eagle would never let go. I could hear it scream.
POSTSCRIPT: I talked about Jesse in my persuasion presentation for Speech class in the fall of 1987. I think most of the quotes in the following are accurate to my speech but the sex stuff was all made up in this 1988 write-up.
“Shit.”
I jarred them out of their suburban complacency. Confused, edged forward on their seats, they listened to me berate them.
“That’s how you think of the homeless. As shit, as the excrement of society. If the homeless were human, we’d have obligations to them, wouldn’t we?
“I think that you’re more disturbed by my use of the S-word than by homelessness in America.
“I can still see Jesse walking into the hot afternoon, that screaming eagle digging into his back. So disfigured that he hardly looked human.
“He returned from fighting communism to get spat on. Talk about vicarious atonement. Talk about suffering for sins.
“Jesse suffered so that Americans could feel good about imposing their morality on ‘Nam. Talk about a suffering servant.
“I quote again from Isaiah. ‘He endured suffering and pain. No one would even look at him – we ignored him as if he were nothing. But he endured the suffering that should have been ours, the pain that we should have borne. All the while we thought that his suffering was punishment sent by God. But because of our sins he was wounded.’
“Jesse was despised and rejected. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
“There are many Jesses out there. Many homeless men are Vietnam veterans. What have we done to help them?”
The blonde in the front row leaned forward. Her lips opened and she breathed rapidly. Her breasts trembled. I paused, stood on my tiptoes to look down her shirt, and then continued.
“Jesus said the poor would be with us always. I say that’s an excuse. Jesus was wrong. The poor do not have to be with us always. For the price of 20 Stealth bombers we could eliminate hunger in America. Let us build low-income housing, instead of MX missiles. Make homes not wars.
“But if you must make war, make war on poverty.
“What’s in it for you? How will it help you to reduce the number of homeless? What’s so wrong with a sink-or-swim society?
“This is what’s wrong. People who drown like Jesse, first thrash about in the water. They may take you down with them.
“It’s in our self-interest to love our homeless neighbors as ourselves.
“I close with a specific request.
“Tonight and every night, St. Vincents homeless shelter in downtown Sacramento needs volunteers. People to cook, to serve food, to arrange bedding, and perhaps most important of all, to listen. I know it’s in the downtown and I know it’s Catholic, but there are people out there tonight who need our help. I’m heading there right now. Will you join me?”
They would. They clapped loudly, took down the address I wrote on the board, shook my hand, climbed into their cars and drove away to do good. The blond lingered and I lingered with her. We decided against going to St. Vincents that night. Instead we went back to her place.
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Through the fog of another sleepless night,
I see her beside me dancing in the sand.
Twisting, turning, leaping, and spinning,
Leaving her mark on the grains of time.
A crack of lighting pierces winter sky,
A burst of bright on a December morn.
Nature’s anger fails to disturb her, she
Glides over cold and jagged rock,
Floats over cruel and raging surf.
Foam-flecked waves crash to shore
Exploding in rage against the cliff,
Drenching her in diamond showers.
Wind whips back her blond hair
Brings a flush to her pale face.
Her lips caress a Mona Lisa,
Her eyes glint of steel, of
Shining determination.
Surf roars in my ears
Sea stings my eyes.
I shout but the wind
Swallows my voice.
She can’t hear me,
She can’t see me.
Just a shape now,
Dancing o’er sea,
Farther and
Farther
Away
From
Me.
Flashes of Color
The old man grimaced into the wind. Bundled in blankets, he sat in his rocking chair on the porch watching the sun throw flares of red, pink and orange over the ocean. Thin strands of white hair blew back against his forehead as the wind picked up force, whistling across the sea, flecking waves, spraying sand, charging inland leaving scatterings of autumn leaves in its wake.
Half an hour ago, before the wind started blowing, the yard had been perfect. Every leaf, every blade of grass was in its place. Now, rocking in his chair, the old man watched his day’s work destroyed in a moment.
Strains of Handel’s Largo came from inside the house, waves of sound cascading over piles of books and old photos–photos of the old man with important people, photos of the old man doing important things, photos of the old man thinking important thoughts. There were photos everywhere. The old man dominated all of them, looking the same in different poses–tough, cool, and ambitious.
Outside the temperature dropped quickly, down five degrees in the last twenty minutes. Blankets were a puny defense against this wind. It pierced them and knifed through his thin body, convulsing him in bouts of coughing. Recovering, he wiped the blood off his lips and sat straight in his chair, all dignity.
Occasional flashes of color caught the old man’s eye in the fading light. Some of his azaleas were in bloom, a ragged bloom, a foretelling of a magnificent spring to come, should they survive winter. The color triggered something in his mind and the old man struggled with a memory–a memory of beauty dancing in the sand. For the last time the old man smiled, as she drifted away from him, dissolving in the waves and dying with the sun.
I wrote this in late 1988, reflecting upon the women I’d met while at Sierra Community College:
“Here you must choose,” said the guide. The boy and girl nodded and looked ahead. Their comfortable trail had fragmented into hundreds of different paths. Some turned to the right of the mountain and others to the left. One went straight up the mountain and others seemed to go nowhere at all. She liked one of those ones. In particular a gentle path that meandered through the chlorophyll, keeping far away from the mountain. The trail was well-worn and easy to the tread, going in no direction, dissolving in flowers.
He fastened on the trail up the mountain which disappeared into the clouds. That’s if you could call it a trail, for in many places it vanished and each traveler had to blaze his own way. The climb was steep and over jagged rocks covered with moss. Reliable holds were few for most gave way under pressure. Many travelers had fallen. Some got up and tried again. Others got up and took a different trail. Most never got up at all.
The climbers stood out as they clambered upward, and he liked that and the challenge the mountain presented. Few climbers made it as high as the clouds and none had emerged out of them into the sun again. Therefore the actual height of the summit was unknown because no one had ever made it to the peak. Some who had climbed very high and voluntarily come back down again, reported that the summit seemed to get higher the farther one climbed. The climbers usually worked alone, as opposed to the other travelers who strolled along side trails hand-in-hand. But he wasn’t worried and impatiently flexed his muscles for the struggle ahead. He had made his decision. The guide nodded and looked up with him at the mountain.
“The standing is slippery,” warned the guide, “and the regress is either a downfall or at least an eclipse.”
The boy nodded and pretended to understand. Shivering in the wind, he waited for her to make a decision. It seemed that she wasn’t coming along, or was he going away? It didn’t matter. There was no more time for thinking. He stepped out.
“Aren’t you afraid,” she called out to him as he moved away towards the mountain, “that there may be no one to catch you if you fall.”
He paused and looked back into blue eyes. Her gaze locked on to his and froze him. Neither moved. He dug his heels in as he felt her pulling him across time and space, the vision of the mountain disappearing into crystal-blue waters. But her eyes couldn’t hold him as they once did. He blinked and moved away.
She watched him go. Surveying the landscape, she didn’t like any of her options. But the wind pushed hard behind her, forcing a decision. Buffeted forward, she slipped onto a well-worn path and disappeared. The way was easy over leaves trodden black. As the trail wove back and forth, going nowhere, she hoped she’d emerge again at the beginning. Maybe she could choose again. The day was still young.
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I’ve never forgotten Rachel. In the fall of 1988, while beginning UCLA with a head full of Calculus, I paused to reminisce about the brunette I met in Gladstone, Australia in the last few months of 1984:
Drive
Who’s going to pay attention to your dreams?
Who’s going to plug their ears when you scream?
Who’s Going to Drive You Home Tonight?
Four years later it still hits me hard, piercing my skin and clawing at my heart. The effect is always the same, whether I’m flying 800 miles per hour over the Pacific Ocean, hurtling my VW Bug along the snowy Interstate 80 across the Sierra Nevada mountain range, covering the San Francisco 49ers vs the Dallas Cowboys at Candlestick Park, or dancing my mind to sleep on the crowded floor of a Californian nightclub.
Drive by The Cars is about the only thing that knocks me off schedule these days, jarring econometric formulae out of my mind. For three minutes and fifty seconds life no longer reduces to differential calculus. For three minutes and fifty seconds I question and doubt.
Is there more to life than sex and success?
For more than three minutes and fifty seconds my mind washes with memories of walking along the Gladstone wharf in small town tropical Australia in 1984 with her – Rachel – a phantom of delight.
Sweet sixteen and shy, she had black shoulder length hair, short on the sides and top a la Flashdance.
I walked past her every day at 5:18 PM, closing time. I smiled and joked. She’d look up at me and giggle. Then her mother would come by and pick up Rachel and her twin-sister LeeAnne and take them home.
I spent my days composing witty sayings to lay upon Rachel. Sometimes they jumbled but Rachel pretended not to notice. It took me several weeks to work up the courage to ask her out.
Then one Friday, knowing that my brother Paul would be away all weekend and that I’d have the car, I resolved to invite Rachel to dinner and dancing that evening. I shot out of work at 5:15 PM and rushed up the street to talk to her. When half-a-block away, however, I saw her mother was there early. I could only wave as Rachel rode away.
Once at home, I stormed through the phone book and found four families with Rachel’s last name. I called each in vain. My house was empty and this was one evening that I couldn’t spend alone. I showered, dressed and drove back to Gladstone, resolving to lose my troubles in the smoke and noise of the Shanghai disco. As I drove the radio played my song, drenching me in questions: Rachel, Rachel, who’s going to drive you home tonight?
I came into town with the irrational thought that I would see her tonight. The rational side of my brain, however, told me that I wouldn’t. She was too young to get into the Shanghai and I knew of nothing else in Gladstone that night to attract her.
I found the disco packed. I disappeared easily into the mass of moving bodies, emerging at last into a little corner overlooking the dance floor. I found a friend, Sue Scott, my brother’s new girlfriend. He had left her behind on his weekend jaunt to the Great Kepple Island resort.
“It’s a special trip just for the soccer team,” Paul told her. (He told me that taking Sue to Great Kepple Island would be like taking coal to Gladstone.) Sue said she understood but she didn’t.
We found a table and sat talking. She drank heavily and needed little stimulus to spill her pain. I sat there hour after hour listening to her problems and watching her face fade in and out of the smoke and flashing lights. When she finished it was my turn and she listened sympathetically. (It would be about the last time the two of us got on. She moved in with my brother a few weeks later. Each jealous for Paul’s attention, we hated each other.) By eleven PM we both felt miserable. Needing a break from the noise and gharish atmosphere, I walked out of the Shanghai and into the calm spring night.
I walked alone (a familiar feeling to me to this day) past my brother’s real estate office, past Rachel’s law office and all the way down Goondoon Street until businesses turned into homes. I circled back again, walking quickly to get Rachel off my mind. Then out of a coffee shop she came.
She walked fifty yards in front of me with a female friend. Rachel couldn’t see me in the darkness but I could see her silhoutted against streetlights. Oh, what was it you said, Mr Wordsworth:
A dancing shape, an image gay
To haunt, to startle, and waylay
With the phantom of delight just ahead of me, I could hardly breathe. I listened to her laugh with her friend. I could smell her perfume. That she was so sweet, so innocent and so right there, was so too much. I fled across the street and tried to walk away from her.
“Oh Luke.” I heard her cry my name. She smiled at me and beckoned. I crossed the street and walked to her; unable to breathe, unable to speak. Rachel introduced her friend but I could only nod. I fell in with them and we walked down the street, past the Shanghai and on to the Gladstone Harbor.
She’d seen a play in town and afterwards had paused for a chocolate milkshake at the coffee shop. Conversation came easily. Another of Rachel’s friends joined us and then we paired off.
I walked alone with Rachel on the wharf. I would have been glad to talk to her until morning but she needed to get home. “Who’s going to drive you home tonight?” I asked.
She laughed. She loved that song by The Cars too.
Rachel didn’t need to call her parents for I was going to drive her home tonight.
I made my way uncertainly along darkened streets, unused to driving on the left side of the road. The radio played Drive and I felt Fortune smiling on me. Rachel’s white teeth flashed smiles at me in the flickering light. We stopped outside her home and I turned to her and stammered “Would you like to come with me to a party hosted by Sue Scott tomorrow night?” She would. Before she left, she wrote her phone number on the only paper I had – a Spearmint gum wrapper (which I still cherish.)
I did not kiss or even hug her goodnight for I felt no need. The future promised complete satisfaction.
Future’s promise shattered. Rachel’s parents forced her to cancel the date because, I later realized, they confused the name of the host with another woman in town who had a bad reputation. The next weekend I couldn’t get hold of Rachel, and ended up asking out her twin sister LeeAnne – a vivacious personality in her own right. We spent an active evening together – eating, drinking and swimming. Around eleven PM while walking beside the harbor we met Rachel and her date. We all laughed and LeeAnne and I moved on. We spent the early morning on the Tannum Sands beach. I returned her home at sunrise.
I never got to go out with either of them again. They found other men.
POSTCRIPT: In a trip back to Gladstone in 2000, I found out that Rachel died in a car accident a few years earlier, the victim of a drunk driver.
A few weeks later, in a visit to my parent’s home in Newcastle, 95658, just before they retired to Australia, I finally threw away the gum wrapper where Rachel had scrawled her phone number that Friday night by the wharf.
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I don’t remember my first year of life. From all accounts, my parents loved each other and my home was a happy place. I know I’ve drawn tremendous strength from that first year, completely lost to my memories.
Over the course of my life, I’ve never doubted that my family loved me, that I could accomplish great things just as my father did, and that my family would be there for me if I needed them.
On my first birthday, my mom got sick and was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. Over the next three years, I lived in many different homes while my father cared for my mother and for his job. I had only intermittent contact with my family.
I have few memories of this time. I remember mom crawling out of her sick bed to protect me from my sister’s blows after I broke into her perfume collection and mixed it with toothpaste and smeared it around the bathroom. I remember mom making me scrambled eggs. I remember having an older brother and sister.
Before I turned four, my mom died. Eight months later, my dad remarried and in early 1971 we all arrived in Manchester, UK, so dad could get his second PhD. I spent much more time with my step-mother over the next two years than with my dad. He was a tower of strength and stability. He loved the fresh air, even in winter. Home was cold and sad. My sister left for boarding school as soon as she could. My brother got beat up at school.
Every day after lunch, I got put down for a nap, and I’d scream and cry my eyes out and thrash around in my bed until I fell asleep. I’m guessing that the naps felt like a return to an earlier abandonment.
I don’t remember thinking during these years that my dad was an important man. He just seemed set on accomplishing something that the rest of the world appeared oblivious to.
I enthusiastically took to washing the dishes after every meal in Manchester because I could soak my arms in the hot water and my whole body would warm up.
My brother bought me toy soldiers and they were a tremendous source of joy. I could play with them for hours. I didn’t have a lot of friends. I did go to kindergarten but I had to be careful about getting close to other kids, because if I ever started acting like them, such as eating cookies or snacking, I’d get hit by my step-mom, who suffered from raging PMS two weeks of the month. Eating between meals was a big sin in my Seventh-Day Adventist church and as the preacher’s son, I had to be a particularly good boy.
Navigating social interactions with those who didn’t follow the Adventist rules according to the way my parents decreed was complicated and frightening. I couldn’t get too close.
My father was the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong in our home but it was my mother who did most of the enforcing to me.
We didn’t have much of an Adventist community in Manchester and it was nice to get back to Avondale College in Australia where everyone I knew well was an Adventist.
I’m looking through the early pictures of my family in Milton Hook’s biography of my dad to try to recapture my early feelings and thoughts.
Over the next five years, I began to clearly understand that I was Desmond Ford’s son and that anything I said or did that broke the rules would get reported back to my parents. I understood that my father had an important role in the community. I understood that people were always wanting to talk to my dad and he was always trying to get away. We never had a phone in our home until the end of 1977 when circumstances forced its installation. Without a phone, people would drive up to our community and hunt my dad down for theological chats.
I remember my father saying, “Hell is other people.”
The primary way my father related to me was meeting his responsibilities. He made sure I had everything I needed. He instructed me about right and wrong. He told me how to conduct myself in the world. He pointed out my virtues and my character defects. He was a traditional father. He was the head of the home. His work was primary to him but family was second.
My parents are WASPs and like good WASPs, they don’t try to live through their children. They didn’t try to push me too hard into any particular career path (though they said I was well-suited to the law). They gave me as much freedom as religious people could. I’d often take off all day to visit friends or explore the bush or traverse the city (when we lived in Washington D.C.) and they didn’t worry.
Dad was always stirring up theological controversy but I never thought about it much until the end of 1979 when he went too far in the Church’s opinion and I saw that my life in the church was going to get turned upside down and that we would have to leave town.
In Sabbath school and in my Adventist school, I was expected to know things that my father specialized in such as Apocalyptic but this just made me feel special.
As a child, after my father’s sermons, I would stand in the pew and imitate his gestures for my step-mom’s amusement. The content of dad’s sermons however rarely moved me. There would be good stories here and there, but the chief idea that faith in Christ gives you salvation got boring fast. And now what? My interests were located on this earth.
For third, fourth and fifth grade, as a punishment for telling lies, my dad decreed that I had to read 30-40 pages of dense works of Christian apologetics every day, type a one-page summary and then hand it in to him (and sometimes discuss it). This gave me a good intellectual understanding of my religion and an emotional hatred of it.
My father and step-mother sometimes told me the story that when my mother was carrying me in her stomach, she had this great conviction that “This one would do something special for the Lord.” I felt like I was born to greatness but wanted to do it in this world, not the next.
I was never strongly committed to my father’s teachings but I took them for granted as divine truth until about age 18, when I graduated high school and left home to live with my brother for a year. Then I took up atheism.
Other kids didn’t care who my dad was. His successes and failures in theological combat didn’t seem to make much difference to my life until late 1979. My parents schooled me in what dad was fighting for but it never made up the core of my life. It was just another rule I had to accept, except it was called grace.
The great thing about being Des Ford’s son and growing up on Seventh-Day Adventist college campuses from ages six to fourteen is that we were all close to many Adventist intellectuals who not only had a good secular education but loved and feared God and strove to do what was right. It never occurred to me to get close with non-Adventists. They didn’t seem safe.
My dad was like the rock star of the Seventh-Day Adventist church. Adventists are Protestants and Protestants have few rituals. The center of their church service is the well-argued sermon, and my dad with his PhD in Rhetoric, could argue a good sermon.
People who hated my dad were extra nice to me to show what good Christians they were, and people who loved my dad were often particularly nice to me, so this was a good dynamic for me, but it didn’t go far. After initial meetings, people pretty much treated me on my own terms.
As a child, I primarily thought about my dad in terms of what he could do to and for me. I didn’t much think about him as an autonomous person in his own right. I didn’t think about his mission, except when I was forced to. Dad was the rule-giver and the provider in my home. He often liked to joke around and he sometimes played games with me when I asked, but as I approached my teens, I asked less and less often because I knew it wasn’t his thing and he was very busy.
It never occurred to me until my late teens that dad could be significantly wrong about something and until I was 22 and away at UCLA, I thought of him as a great man.
When I came home at age 23 in June of 1989, I thought of him as fatally flawed and I knew that I had all of his flaws (without all of his strengths) and that they might kill me and that I should probably convert to Judaism and create a very different life from his.
As a kid, I don’t think I had much awareness that I love stirring people up as my father did, that I had a knack for pushing on sensitive points like my father did, and that I was skilled at manipulating situations to gain the maximum of attention for myself, as I saw my father do. I loved arguing as a kid, just as my father did, but I was not as emotionally controlled as him. I’d get upset while my father kept his cool. I’d raise my voice while my father didn’t. I’d take things personally while my father appeared above it all.
I remember as a kid people would often ask me about my dad and it was not a topic that particularly interested me. I learned to recite family legends about his discipline (two PhDs in 18-months each), strength (he walks and runs 10 miles a day!), drive (he rises at 4 a.m. almost every day), commitment and righteousness (I never saw him do anything wrong!).
My father seemed like a simple man to me. He was 100% dedicated to God and everything else was commentary. That didn’t make him a lot of fun but it did make him reliable and admirable. I figured that people who didn’t love and admire my dad were ignorant. It didn’t occur to me until I got to UCLA (at age 22) that my father might’ve been wrong in important matters. I wasn’t able to distinguish God and the Bible from what my father said about them until I discovered Dennis Prager (at age 22).
I started reading regularly at age seven and I found myself particularly interested in the stories of great men (in this world, not those pious souls who lived primarily for the next world). It was important to me that my father be great. My home was not happy and I often wished to live elsewhere, but I kept coming back to the belief that it was better to be Des Ford’s son than to be happy. It was better to live in my cold home than the warm ones I visited. It was better to be significant than at peace.
I grew up seeing my older brother and sister distancing themselves from my home. I saw my dad putting his work ahead of his family. And I experienced myself as happier when I was in homes other than my own. By late 1979, when I was 13, and my parents moved to Washington D.C. and allowed me to stay behind at Pacific Union College and finish eighth grade with my friends, I thought about my life with little reference to my family (I had moved with my parents to California in 1977 and my older siblings had stayed behind in Australia and I would see them rarely). I desperately wanted to become a great person. I didn’t think about perpetuating the values of my home. I was more attracted to rebelling against the values of my home through a more whole-hearted dedication to this worldly ambition.
As dad flamed out of the Church at the 1980 Glacier View conference, my primary interest (aside from its impact on where we would live, the closer to PUC the better in my view) was in how famous this would make dad. We’d just bought a TV and dad was predicting he’d be interviewed on the Phil Donahue Show (which never happened). I wanted to be a journalist when I grew up and so I was interested in the people who’d interview dad and how they’d write about him. I felt that by virtue of being Des Ford’s son, I caught some of his reflected glory.
From the time I started reading books, my greatest conscious need has been for glory. When National Film Board of Canada director Paul Cowan followed me around from 1998-1999 for the documentary Give Me Your Soul, he noted that I thirsted for glory.
My yearning for significance, for distinguishing myself from others and for trying to show myself as better than them, has consistently caused me more trouble, strife and dislocation than all my other strivings put together.
I moved to Los Angeles in March 1994 and in 1997, I worked for three months at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, where I ran into a black doctor who knew my dad. Other than that, I’ve never run into anyone in Los Angeles who knew my dad. My brother lives in Tannum Sands, QLD, and he never runs into anyone who knows our dad.
I used to tell a therapist that I feared I was recreating my dad’s life (by creating controversy and getting myself kicked out of places) and she asked me why would I want to do that? “I wouldn’t want your dad’s life for all the tea in China,” she said.
I’m writing now on July 4, 2013. When my father was my exact age now, it was March 8, 1976. He was 14 months away from leaving Avondale and moving to PUC. I was nine years old.
I’m rereading Milton Hook’s biography of my dad. On page eight, he writes: “Their concern was just as focused on the man as it was on his theology, because he had attracted a significant following of devotees enthusiastic about his gospel preaching. They wondered, “What was to be the fate of Professor Ford…?”
This passages strikes me. It makes me wonder, why was my father, the person, at the center of concerns? Why not just the theological beliefs he articulated? Why was the concern so personal? Why was dad the man in the middle of things? What can I learn about myself from this?
Like my father, I’ve been at the center of a number of controversies and much of it has been personal. People really did or didn’t like me and really did or didn’t want me around.
* My dad’s parents died in 1987. He lived in America and did not attend their funerals. The deaths of my grandparents (my maternal grandparents died around 1985) had little effect on me as I hardly knew them when they were alive.
I’m reading page 106: “At one time [in 1968], when Des was visiting Gwen [my mother dying of cancer], John Brinsmead said to him, “If you cast in your lot with the Brinsmead family, accepting our teachings, then God will heal, Gwen.” Des was appalled at the bribe.”
That kind of talk was common in the Adventism I grew up in. My father only said that kind of thing once to me when I was bedridden for years in my 20s. He once said that if I accepted Jesus as my Savior, God might cure me. He didn’t push it. He didn’t try to interfere with my studies of Judaism and eventual conversion.
* I’m reading about my mother’s final days in Milton Hook’s biography. She was down to 60 pounds in 1969. “She said her goodbyes to Luke and he was taken to New Zealand.” I don’t remember my mom saying goodbye to me. I wasn’t yet four.
* “Bete noir” (black beast) is a term applied to my father by old Adventist Walter Scragg. (pg. 138) It was also a term applied to me by the Los Angeles Times in June of 1999 vis-a-vis the industry I covered at the time.
* Old Adventist George Burnside published in the 1970s anonymous pamphlets against my father with titles such as, “Dr Ford DD: Doctor of Doubt” and “Dr. Des Ford’s Dangerous Doctrines.” (pg. 1139)
* The setting was the high altitude (about 7500 feet above sea level) Glacier View Ranch in Colorado. On Thursday, August 14, 1980, the General Conference President of the Seventh-Day Adventist church (aka the leader), Neal Wilson, went after my father from his seat high above the gathering of the Church elite. He got angry. He said to dad, “Why won’t you listen to your peers?” My dad didn’t get much of a chance to reply. He just had to take it. I was sitting in the audience with my step-mom Gill. I got upset watching my dad torn apart by the church administrators. I really didn’t care about dad’s theological positions but I felt defensive about my father like never before. I became upset on his behalf like never before. I felt like he was being bullied and humiliated by Neal Wilson. I was familiar with dad’s constant controversies but nothing like this had happened before. Gill told me to calm down because the emotional way I was acting argued for Neal Wilson’s position that I should not have been come to the conference. I was 14 years old. I would never again consider myself a Seventh-Day Adventist (though I lived around that milieu for another four years).
* A childhood friend (more specifically, the husband of my third and fourth grade teacher and the father of my schoolmate Leighton), the late Arthur Patrick, describes “Glacier View” as “Adventist shorthand for pain, dissension and division,” but that same description could be given for almost every controversy my father and I engender. We cause dissent in every group we join with passion.
* Random thoughts upon re-reading this biography of my dad. His life was tougher than mine. He had more neglectful parents. We both lacked a secure mother’s love in our early years (dad never got this) and this left us both anxious for life and prone to addiction. My father poured himself into work and I did what I did. My father is stronger than I am, he pushed himself more, he achieved more, he was willing to undergo more suffering to do the right thing. My father led a more righteous life than I did. My father never sought out psycho-therapy and 12-step work, while I embraced both, and this might be the biggest difference you’d find in interacting with us. People who know us both say they find me a happier person. My father married, had kids and achieved far more personal and professional success and human bonding than I did. I’ve been a leach on my family financially (particularly over the past six years) and in other ways, while my father was always a giver and I’ve usually been a taker.
* “Being a Seventh-Day Adventist was hard but it was kinda fair. They quickly sorted out the ones they couldn’t trust and branded us with the mark of Cain and sent us wandering, fugitive sinners, through the Land of Nod for all our days.” (The Nostradamus Kid)
* The movie that reminds me most of myself is The Nostradamus Kid. The movie that reminds me most of my father is The Road to Wellville. I feel like the wicked son George in the film. The movie that reminds me most of my family is Terms of Endearment.
* My father’s life as a Seventh-Day Adventist evangelist and intellectual was constant stress, so much so that Milton Hook’s biography says he thought about becoming a postman. This kind of stress is part of the package when you stake out controversial positions in any high intensity religion. There are many benefits to belonging to a high intensity religion such as Adventism or Orthodox Judaism — adherents make greater sacrifices for their faith and for each other than do adherents to mainstream religions, but this intensity comes with a price. People get in your face, get in your business, challenge you, and try to push you out if you don’t follow the rules. This kind of challenges is inherent in high intensity religion. Religion (and any transcendent commitment) binds and blinds (says Jonathan Haidt).
* Unless you’re an original genius, there’s no point in fighting about theology (and nobody in the Adventist church, not even my dad, has ever been an original genius in theology). With few exceptions, it’s not worth fighting period (in inter-personal relations).
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I’m rewriting my rules for when I feel happy, successful, and loved (based on a Tony Robbins lecture) and they all start with, “Any time….” As in, any time I do a mitzvah, I feel happy and successful in my Judaism and loved by God and the gadolim.
Any time I enjoy spending time with someone, I’m gonna feel loved. Any time I love someone or do something for someone, I’m gonna feel loved and connected. Any time I receive something that I like, I’m gonna feel loved. Any time I’m able to understand or to be understood by someone close to me, I’m gonna feel loved. Any time I can stay in touch with someone I value, I’m gonna feel loved. Any time I think about getting together with someone I like, I’m gonna feel loved. Any time I get a FB like by someone I like, I’m gonna feel loved. Any time I trade email with someone I like, I’m gonna feel loved. Any time I study Torah or do a mitzvah, I’m gonna feel loved by God and by my Jewish community. Any time I refrain from doing something unnecessarily harsh or hurtful, I’m gonna feel my love for others.
Any time I enjoy a drink or a meal or a book or a TV show or a walk or a conversation, I’m gonna feel happy. Any time I do something I’m good at, I’m going to feel happy. Any time I learn something, I’m going to feel happy. Any time I meet my obligations, I’m going to feel happy. Any time people and machinery come through for me, I’m going to feel happy. Any time I get a check, I’m going to feel happy. Any time I get a compliment, I’m going to feel happy. Any time I can give a compliment, I’m going to feel happy. Any time I can help someone, I’m going to feel happy. Any moment I’m alive, I’m gonna feel happy. Any time I can drink when I’m thirsty and eat when I’m hungry, I’m gonna feel happy. Any time I’m not in pain, I’m gonna feel happy. Any time the sun shines or the rain falls or the fog rolls in, I’m gonna feel happy.
Any time I learn something, I’m going to feel successful. Any time I stop myself from doing something needlessly destructive, I’m going to feel successful. Any time I devote myself to writing or to the Alexander Technique or to Torah study or to anything else I’m good at, I’m going to feel successful. Any time I’m asked for an opinion, I’m going to feel successful. Any time I’m asked for help, I’m going to feel successful. Any time I publish a blog post or Facebook post that I enjoy reading, I’m going to feel successful. Any time I get a FB like or interesting comment, I’m going to feel successful. Any time I talk to people I admire (either in person or via email, etc), I’m going to feel successful. Any time I get a compliment on my hard work, I’m going to feel successful. Any time I pay a bill or meet an obligation or repay a favor, I’m going to feel successful. Any time I do a mitzvah, I’m going to feel successful. Any time I increase my Klout score or Adsense earnings, I’m going to feel successful. Any time I have a new idea, I’m going to feel successful. Any time I recall a past success, I’m going to feel successful. Any time I visit a new city, I’m going to feel successful.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
