Luke Ford

“What did you do with my watering pot?” asked his neighbor. “I let you borrow it to put your flowers in and then you left it in the common room and now it’s gone. That was my favorite watering pot for 20 years and now it’s gone. You Orthodox Jews.”

I want to float on an air mattress on Lake Berryessa with my girlfriend and to feel all the elements, the sun, the water, the thunder and lightning, the tranquility and the rage.

Stephanie* would’ve dropped her swimmers for me. I think it was the summer of 1983, the summer before my senior year of high school, and I was at Lake Berryessa with some of my classmates from Pacific Union College Elementary School (where I went sixth through eighth grades). I dared Stephanie to drop her bathing suit and she said, “You first.”

I was too chicken.

I think more about high school than any other time of my life.

I was bonded with people at PUC because we shared the same religion, the same diet, the same school, the same lifestyle. Diversity shatters community.

Curiosity is a great motivator for creativity. All stories are about what we’re grappling with.

A big reason I have not gotten into more trouble with my life is my fears. Safety has always been a big value to me. No messing around with the same sex, no animals, no married women, no paying for it, nothing unethical.

Remember woodshop class in seventh grade? How we used to hear it is better to give gifts that you’ve made than gifts you bought? So for Mother’s Day you gave your mother a mini bookshelf you made in class? And how badly it went over. So that afternoon you went to the bookstore and bought her several books.

I was in more than my share of car accidents when I was a child. I found them terrifying.

I remember this one woman who was quite attractive. We were traveling with a goat and I told the goat to eat her bra, even though I was not quite sure what a bra was. The lady told me to never speak to her in such a way again. I got scared and agreed.

So we were driving back from the country and I was all drowsy in the back seat when whack, screech, crash, we were in an accident.

I don’t remember many details but I don’t think anyone was seriously hurt. Our car was finished and we had to wait around for a ride.

I did not get seriously hurt in any childhood accident, but they scared me to death and I formed a strong preference early on in my life for safety.

When I was a teenager, I had some friends who liked to get squirrly behind the wheel. I’d be stuck in the back seat and if the roads were slick from rain, they’d deliberately start sliding all over the place. For them it was great fun, for me it was pure terror.

At one point when I thought I was going to die, I pled with my friends to drive safely “because I haven’t even had sex yet.”

Eventually, when the car stopped, I jumped out and walked miles home.

When I learned to drive, I was in several accidents in my first couple of years, all my fault. The most serious and the most embarrassing was at age 19 when I drove around a corner into the morning sun tuning the radio dial and ran into a parked school bus at about 25 mph. Even though I had my seatbelt on, my head smashed into the steering wheel. The front end of my VW bug was totaled. I looked up to the windows of the school bus and the kids were staring down at me.

I staggered out of my car and sat on the ground until an ambulance came and took me to the hospital. I got about 30 stitches and have the scar between my eyes to this day.

A few years ago, an Orthodox rabbi responded to my interview request. He picked me up in his car and driving erratically, he got on his cell phone to make calls while we traveled down the freeway at about 65 mph. I was terrified. I asked him to desist.

The next time I was to drive a long distance with him, I made him promise not to talk on his phone while he was driving unless it was an emergency. He promised.

So we’re flying down the freeway at about 75mph one Friday afternoon and he’s on his Blackberry looking through his email. “You didn’t say anything about checking my email,” he said.

The guy is reckless.

Another time, he started driving crazily just to taunt me. I cursed him out and he realized I was serious.

“I guess you’ve been in some serious accidents,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

I remember riding with another friend. We’re going down the freeway at about 65 mph and he starts scanning his iPod for the particular song he wants me to hear. I plead with him to keep his attention on the road but he won’t be deterred.

I have such fury about this incident when I recall it many years later. I’m filled with such resolve to not let it happen again.

Another time, my girlfriend picked me up to drive 20 minutes east on the 10 to downtown Los Angeles. She didn’t tell me until afterwards that she’d had a valium to handle her anxiety about this party and was not all there while she had my life in her hands.

I asked her to stay off her phone while she drove. She agreed, and then, traveling at about 60 mph, gets on her phone. “I’m just checking my messages,” she said. “I’m not making any calls.”

I hate people who unnecessarily and carelessly and cruelly put innocent lives in danger. I hate people who screw around on the road.

I’ve worked hard to create a protected life. I’ve arranged things so that I can be safe and yet still write what I want. But when I’m on the road, particularly as a passenger, I feel so vulnerable.

A couple of weeks ago, my blog was infected by some virus that tried to install malware on the computers that visited me (Google quickly blocked my site when I got infected).

I feel that shame has similarly infected my life. It’s a virus buried deep in psyche. Every day it interferes with my ability to connect to people. When I get laden down by shame, I don’t want to be close to people. I just want to withdraw.

Everywhere I see people I know, I feel smitten by shame. It’s such a crippling toxic emotion.

The shame is coming up so vividly for me now. Usually it is shame about something I’ve written, and I know that in different company, I’d be proud about what I published rather than ashamed. But when I’m around people who’d take offense at my writings, I feel shame. I don’t have a strong personal identity. I keep looking to other people to tell me who I am.

Why do losers attach themselves to me? What’s the barnicle? Posts like this are only going to trigger more such attempts at connection. I put despair out into the world and I get despair back.

I feel like my honesty is at war with my self-interest. To up my social status, I need to write like a winner. I need to curb my expression and behave in appropriate ways. I like the results of those choices.

The core beliefs of the sex addict that I share:

* I am bad.
* If people knew who I really was, they would not want to get close to me.
* Other people can’t meet my needs.
* Sex/love/fantasy meets my needs.

I’ve lived my life slightly more popular than the loser crowd and significantly less popular than the popular crowd.

My social status hasn’t changed much since I entered school in second grade.

As a bachelor, I naturally orient upwards in my social aspirations and ignore the suffering. It usually takes a wife, family and community to broaden a man’s concerns.

What do I mean by “loser”? A loser is somebody people avoid. A winner is somebody who attracts people. For instance, when Dennis Prager walks in a room, people notice and try to get close to him.

From first grade to 12th grade, Dennis was always elected his class president. That’s a winner.

A panhandler is a typical loser. Very few people want to engage with some smelly bloke on the street asking for a handout.

I don’t like to write about my triumphs. I prefer to specialize in my humiliations. The down side of this is that people who vibrate the strongest to my tales of woe tend to be losers and they consider me one of them.

No way, dude! I’m a winner who just happens to focus his writing on losing. This distinction is a bit fine, however, for the crowd with IQs under 120.

In 1992 while I was bedridden by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and living with my parents in remote Northern California (95658), I placed a singles ad in the Northern California Jewish Bulletin talking about how lost and lonely I was. It was the featured ad.

It got one response from a woman every bit as screwed up as me. But not nearly as attractive.

She empathized with my ad. She had few friends. She had a difficult personality. Her family was socially awkward.

When I talked to her on the phone, I kept wincing because she’d get upset at things I said. She was always offended. And she wasn’t cute.

I wouldn’t have kept up with her if I wasn’t so lonely.

I placed a new ad in the Jewish Bulletin that read something like this: “Australian-made world traveler convert to Judaism…”

This got responses from my targeted demographic — attractive high-achieving Jewesses. Most of them lost interest when they learned I was bedridden but some of them made the trip up to visit me.

When I was in constant contact with the girls I wanted, I dropped the loser girl. I told her I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. “I was just getting fond of you,” she said in a small voice.

I’ve been blogging since 1997. I learn time and time again that what I put out into the world comes back to me. I love to write about my humiliations but if I am not careful, that can increase them. You have to be precise when writing about feeling like a loser to make sure that your observant reader realizes that you’re on the right side of the social divider.

Since my own experience of chronic illness, I’ve consistently enlarged my soul by dedicating some of my time and money to helping those less fortunate than myself. But I don’t want to let losers into my real life. They’ll suck the life out of you.

I remember one guy in grade school with low social status who wore a t-shirt to school featuring some Peanuts character talking about how he hates jogging. The shirt was a hit.

Then the guy made the mistake of wearing it two or three days in a row, by which time he had a bad odor.

One of the great things about growing older is that people rarely try to humiliate you in person after age 40. Rather than believing that people are born good and society corrupts them, I think most people start out rotten and society makes them better.

I have a friend in his twenties who constantly tries to embarrass me in public by telling people about embarrassing things I used to do. I’ve asked him many times to desist. I remind him that it is forbidden by Torah law to bring up a person’s sins prior to his conversion or penitence, but this reference to Jewish law does no good. Time however will fix the problem. By the time my friend is 40, I doubt he’ll still be doing this.

We all feel like losers much of the time. The world keeps spinning and we all keep moving in and out of four different stages — dependency, feeling small in a big world, mastery and grandiosity (Stephen Marmer). But wherever we are in life and no matter what we’re feeling, we can always work on mastery. Losers don’t work on mastery much and it shows.

One of my nightmares while reporting on the porn industry was that I would be considered one of them. “One of us, one of us,” they cackled, while hauling me off to hell.

I blog about the heartbreak of ostracism and losers relate to that. They think that you can recreate yourself on the internet and change your social status, just like Mark Zuckerberg did with Facebook. They see me as somebody who ran away in 1997 and joined the internet circus, earning an independent living by telling all. No boss. Lots of women and media attention and enough money to pay for psycho-therapy.