Here’s what I remember from childhood:
* He’s a fine Christian gentleman but he doesn’t read enough.
* Be sure your sins will find you out.
* You might only learn through pain.
* I don’t give a cracker for this world.
* This will hurt me more than it will hurt you.
The other day, I ran into a woman I went out with once. We were friends for years. It’s been about a decade since I saw her last. And as I walked away, I was thinking, I hope I had good reasons for not pursuing her. I hope I wasn’t just a scaredy cat, that because she was available and interested, I got scared. I remember a lot of dancing around on my part about whether or not she would date. I would flirt and withdraw. Once at shul, I was opening my wallet to pay for an event, and a condom fell out. “Oh no,” she said. “We can’t take this.”
I hate facing loss. When I see how I’ve wasted my life, it’s almost unbearable. I want to distract myself.
Robert Weiss says: “An intimacy disorder is the inability to find, tolerate, or stay in relationships that involve the risks that come with being fully known. Having such problems denies our most basic human need to deeply bond with others. Humans are meant to be social. From the very first moment we’re paired with mom, and throughout our life span we seek various pairings or social groups to fit in or belong—it’s an essential part of being alive. Even from the beginning, to achieve health, children need connection, not only for nourishment and protection, but so they know what it’s like to have intense engagement with an interested person. It’s part of the human condition to enter into deep social and intimate relationships; we are not meant to be isolated creatures, and those of us who spend a lot of time alone tend to be the most troubled people in our culture. The challenge for most of the people I work with is that while these men and women are quite intellectually intact or even very gifted, and some of them even able to build a strong career and are interesting, engaging people, they are unable to choose, grow, and maintain healthy relationships, especially intimate ones. This is a major problem because we all need healthy relationships for our survival—it is that important. We do not do well alone.”
* “So there no problem I want to solve right now, no one particular situation, no task,” I say to my therapist last night and she starts smiling and segues into giggles. “I had a girlfriend who got panic attacks at the thought of stepping into a hospital or court room. I’ve never been like that. I’ve never been disabled by emotion and unable to do the tasks in front of me.”
Luke Ford goes on Yoshi Obyashi’s show 3/6/13 to talk to Joey Kurtzman and Lilit Arvahi about his one man play “Eroticized Rage” about sex and love addiction, eroticized rage, and the intimacy disorder that underlies such symptoms, the fundamental lack of comfort with one’s self, with other people and with God.
Listening to Dennis Prager on KABC radio beginning in August of 1988 turned me on to Judaism. I read Prager’s book The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism and by December of 1989, I had decided to convert.
With a lifelong tendency towards extremism, I initially decided that I wanted to be holier than Dennis Prager. Dennis didn’t pretend to be anything he wasn’t. He didn’t pretend to be Orthodox. He just didn’t have an Orthodox temperament. He wasn’t a saint. He’d played the field as a single man. I wasn’t going to be like that. I was going to be holier.
I gave up masturbation. Following the Orthodox practice, I refused to shake hands with women. I grew a beard and wore a yarmulke and tzitzit around my parents home where I was living from 1989-1993 while I struggled with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Dennis Prager struggled with prayer. I read some books on the Jewish approach to prayer and they turned me on before I did much praying from the siddur (Jewish prayer book), when I realized how much drudgery it was. The inspiration only went so far. I decided I’d use prayer time in shul to study Torah, just like Dennis Prager does.
I started meeting girls and I gave up my chastity and found myself having a great time playing the field. I quickly saw that I was not only not holier than Dennis Prager, I was considerably less holy.
I tried to fence myself in by studying more Torah and observing those Torah laws that weren’t too inconvenient. I figured I could cheat on the sexual guidelines so long as I was strict and pious in everything else. I’d be 612 (613 commandments are traditionally ascribed to the Torah).
So did I feel any guilt about being less holy than Dennis Prager? Not really. I figured that so long as I was in the ballpark of what Dennis prescribed I was doing fine.
I came to Judaism by following the personal example of a moderate man and so I never got too down on myself until I blew up my relationship with Dennis in early 1998 (by blogging about him) and that led me to therapy and to eventual realizations about my deep-seated intimacy disorder that manifested in various emotional addictions.
Life lets you know what you’re good at. In the face of female temptation, it was quickly apparent that I was not cut out for moral leadership. Instead, like Rousseau, I found I did better at writing confessional literature.
What’s the dramatic conflict for my play? Will I realize that emotional addictions are ruining my life?
What’s the problem the narrator is dealing with at the beginning of the story? Helpless rage and disconnection from others. What does he grapple with? Lack of ease with himself, with others and with God. What’s the arc? I start out angry and miserable. Through my teens into my early 20s, I fool myself that I’m becoming more normal. After 22, I see the chasm steadily widening between myself and my peers. Every year, I fall further behind the good life (marriage, family, honored place in the community). I sense a way to connect and to escape from my misery — sex. Eventually my gropings lead me to some painful realizations of emptiness and need, that my sex addiction is a mark for an underlying intimacy disorder. I set about doing the 12 Step work to feel more comfort with myself, with others and with God.
How does my problem get worse through the play? I see the gap between myself and my peers widening.
What is the narrator trying to figure out at the start of the story? A way out of his misery. He wants to build something big, angry and powerful. He lights fires. He builds woodies. He feels he’s riding a wave, overcome by pleasure, forgetting his pain, taking control of his life and ridding him of moral responsibility. Then he lands at shore and looks back and sees a tsunami building of all the people he’s used and abused in the pursuit of his addictive needs. He realizes why he feels so much fear and shame — karma is coming!
* I find it easier to be honest on Facebook than in real life because I can just say what’s on my mind on FB without worrying about how a particular person will interpret what I’m saying. In real life, I instinctively find myself tailoring and censoring and adjusting everything I say to my audience. On my blog and on FB, however, I just say what’s in my heart and if people take offense, I don’t care. In real life in interpersonal relationships, I do care if people take offense and hence I’m frequently more honest in this space than in the wider world.
* I keep a lot of doors locked, afraid if I ever go into them, I’ll never emerge.
* Most of the most impressive people I know are in Orthodox Judaism. That’s always been a powerful draw for me — the quality of the personal, family and professional lives of Orthodox Jews I know well.
* I am befuddled but strangely moved by the hoopla Rand Paul received this week for his filibuster. I have many fears but none of them include the US Government using drones to kill innocent Americans in America. As for Americans or anybody working as terrorists? Kill them all.
* I was with this girl who was a ten but I had to keep explaining to her when I was being sarcastic and so I decided to go back to the seven to whom I never had to explain.
* If people are on their phones while you talk to them, if they’re moving around and checking out, it’s not so much that they’re being rude as you are being boring. Social connection depends upon bids. We’re constantly bidding for people’s attention, and when they don’t respond, we usually stop bidding. Even a dummy quickly gets the message that he’s not wanted.
On his show Mar. 8, 2013, Dennis Prager said: “The Republican leadership lives in as much as a hermetically sealed bubble as the Democratic leadership. This is a catastrophe for the country. We have two parties — the damaging and the stupid, and I am a member of the stupid party. Why Republican candidates who don’t tap into those of us in talk radio who make the arguments for a living or we have to get another job is one of the great riddles that would stump the sphinx of Egypt.
“New York and Washington are bubbles. We are there to provide money and votes. Ideas come from New York and Washington. That’s why they are so lousy… The Republican leadership astonishes me.”
“I know Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney knows me. I was at a fundraiser for him at a private home two months before the election. Someone even said, ‘Dennis Prager is here. Why don’t you have him write some speeches?’ And Mitt smiled and made some sweet comment about me but he might as well have suggested that he learn Sanskrit before the election. It was a non-ideological battle. I wrote about that. I couldn’t be too severe because I wanted him to win. Jobs, jobs, jobs. It’s all about jobs. That’s what the brilliant advisers to Mitt Romney decided, that you’re Mr. Fix It, and you can fix the economy better than Barack Obama. Remember how I said that Barack Obama is not the issue, [it is leftism]. The issue is ideas. Left-wing ideas ruin a country. Let’s say that. At least you’ll have clarity. Most Americans don’t understand that it is leftism vs Americanism.”
On his radio show March 8, 2013, Dennis said: “When you legalize a drug, you get vastly more use of it.”
“All of you in Colorado who voted for Amendment 64, I say congratulations, you [have more children using marijuana].”
“We’ve legalized marijuana and we’ve gone crazy on tobacco. It should’ve been the opposite.”
“The ill effects of smoking cigarettes are felt 50 years later while you become an idiot the more you smoke marijuana. You don’t become an idiot smoking tobacco. Nobody who smokes a cigarette becomes a danger on the road. People who smoke marijuana are a danger on the road. You can perform intellectually beautifully on tobacco but not on marijuana. Marijuana is an escape from life. Cigarettes are not an escape from life.”
“As for legalization of drugs, once you don’t have all drugs legalized, it’s over. The war on drugs would continue. Would meth be available?”
“Don’t you realize that for every drug that is legal, there is going to be some new illegal variant created?”
Dennis gets a caller defending marijuana. Dennis asked him if he was married and the guy said no. “The chances of a guy (or girl) getting married who smokes pot regularly are reduced.”
“If you have two candidates for a job, for babysitting, and they are identical in every way except that one is a pot smoker, do you think the employer would flip a coin?”
“Society has gone crazy over health while the spirit of the human being is neglected.”
“I can’t believe that smoking pot will lead to more prosperity. ‘Yeah, I’ve been working harder now that I’ve been having a joint each day.’ It doesn’t strike me as a logical train of events.”
What VP Joe Biden had to say at the AIPAC Policy Conference; can Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet the extended deadline to form a coalition government?; American and Israeli teens come together in song for the 20th anniversary of HaZamir; new kosher pizza ventures give “treif” stores a run for their money; and author Naomi Wolf sits down for an interview about her latest book, “Vagina: A New Biography.”
I’ve been working the 12 Steps hard. I’ve made lists of everybody, everything, and every idea that I resent and worked through the sheet, listing out the reasons I resent, how the person/place/idea negatively impacts my life, what role I played, and then forgetting about the other person/place/idea, I surrender all my resentment to God and ascribe other people’s bad behavior to their own spiritual sickness, just as I am filled with spiritual sickness. By doing this work, I’ve been able to let go of almost all of my conscious resentment. Yet I keep feeling road rage flaring up.
The streets of Pico-Robertson are often too narrow for cars to pass comfortably, so often one car will pull over so the other can get by. I get sick of always being the car that pulls over, so I’ve started asserting myself more on the roads. I don’t like it when people take advantage of me. It arouses an anger in me that goes back to childhood when I was little and bigger people took advantage of me. I remember when I was a kid and I’d fall and scrape my knee and my dad would immediately announce to people, “He’s ok! He’s fine!” I couldn’t even own my own reality. I couldn’t even say myself how I was feeling. My father would announce it by fiat. My feelings didn’t count.
So my road rage taps into my helpless rage as a child and my refusal to allow myself to be victimized again.
I’m not exactly sure how my road rage connects to my perpetual desire to provoke people but I do know that they are two primal ways that I feel and express rage.
If I was in a happier place, I wouldn’t feel as much desire to offend people. I don’t think that comics whose act revolves around offending people are basically happy.
A lot of my teachers have wondered why am I so driven to offend people. What do I get out of it? I get a charge out of it, an addictive high. I feel the center of attention.
Provoking people, driving them into a tizzy, is essentially a form of hurting others. I feel good when I lash out at others. It’s not that I want to stick it to them before they stick it to me.
What goes through my head is that many people are stupid and when I provoke them, I out their stupidity and do a public service. It’s my father’s attitude — that the outside world is the enemy to be debunked.
What do we get out of exposing other people as idiots? A feeling of superiority and grandiosity. It feeds our narcissism. We reveal other people as small, inculcating helpless rage in them, and by comparison, we are amused and feel important. The more innocuous our sentiment and the greater the conflagration it sets off, the better. If you’re obviously trolling, that’s not as much of a high as doing it with the appearance of innocence.
Just writing about this excites me. I feel grand, even though I know it has many negative consequences for me and others. I know these practices of mine are not enhancing the quality of my relationships with others. I’m bringing negativity into my life and into the lives of others. I’m causing them misery and for some reason, this brings me joy.
Why can’t I bring others joy? Well, I have so much joy that I want to bring to one person in specific.
I’ve been through agony, I know what it is like to be on the receiving end of the rhetorician’s barbs, yet I feel driven to dish out this agony to others. And it makes me happy, in the moment, to do this.
