Luke Ford

I was at this Jewish event one Friday night in Pico-Robertson circa 1995 and I thought I was being terribly amusing because people were laughing.

The organizer pulled me aside and said I was being inappropriate. “But they were laughing,” I said.

“They were laughing out of embarrassment,” he said.

That took me aback. I hadn’t thought of that.

I was reading one of my brilliant stories the other night and my teacher suggested that when my therapist pealed off into a fit of uncontrollable giggles, she might’ve been laughing out of embarrassment, not amusement.

I think I’m terribly amusing, but much of the time I’m just embarrassing. I see my behavior as grand when really it is beneath contempt. I think I’m contributing when I’m really just horrifying.

I notice that many psycho-therapists give their patients assignments of writing out their feelings and frustrations in long letters to their parents. Did your dad wound you when you were eight with a withering comment at the dinner table? Write him a letter about it. Did your mom emasculate you at age six when she took away your toy gun? Write her a letter about it.

One Gentile couple I know were absolutely devastated when they received such a letter from their son. This was not the way we generally did things in my WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) upbringing. We learned not to complain and we kept a stiff upper lip. Therapy was for troubled souls. And you definitely did not write long letters to your parents describing your frustrations with them.

I’ve never written such a letter to my parents and I can’t conceive of doing so. My parents did the best they could and I had far better parents than they did.

The price of not dealing with your own stuff with your parents is that you will take it out on others. Your relationship with your father will shape your work and financial life and your relationship with your mother will shape your relationships.

Assignment: Write about a time in your early life when you felt powerful.

In seventh grade (1978) at Pacific Union College Elementary School, my teacher tried to integrate me. She gave me a big part in an audition for the school Christmas play (was it Joseph or one of the wise men, it was definitely not Jesus nor God the Father), and while flattered and moved and knowing that this was natural for me, I deliberately sabotaged my performance, showing no emotion, and ended up with a non-speaking shepherd’s role.

Her next attempt to rev me up was more successful. She asked me to write a story using everybody in the class (about 30) as a character. This was fun! I decided to shipwreck us on a desert island. I particularly loved writing the role of one attractive classmate, Denise Bernard, and was sure I had done it subtly and until the girls said I had given my feelings away.

The class loved my story. I felt the center of attention and realized I could be powerful by playing to how much people loved to read about themselves.

In eighth grade, entranced by American media (from newspapers to magazines to books to radio and television), much more exciting than fusty old Seventh-Day Adventist religion, I decided to dedicate myself to journalism. Over the next few years, I learned that if your audience was big enough or your story was important enough, you could interview anyone. And I did for KAHI/KHYL radio, talking to people like Jim Lampley, Tom Landry, Randy White, Bill Walsh, Steve Young, Joe Montana, Roger Craig, Senator Allen Cranston, Supervisor Mike Antonovich, Larry Bird, etc.

A critic of mine told Rolling Stone in 1999 that the industry loved to read about themselves in my column, my blog, my development of a lesson I learned in seventh grade.

I had intimations of this power in second grade, when I entered school at Avondale College Primary School. One day, perhaps it was third grade, we walked a mile into the bush and sat on a narrow bridge over a muddy creek that I crossed twice a day going to and from school, and we looked into the water at the ancient mossy logs and we wrote about what we saw.

I jotted down phrases about ghosts buried in the stream. I was embarrassed I couldn’t get the thing to cohere. When I read it, I was sure people would protest that it didn’t make sense, but that didn’t happen. The teachers anyway, they loved it. They were moved, touched, excited. They said it was poetry.

I basked in their praise, more warming than the sun, and felt confirmed that I was very good at something. Some kids were good at cricket and other kids got As. Some kids were popular and other kids were rich. I was something too. I was a writer.

I had power. I could move people. I could infuriate them or make them cry. And just as important, I had not just a skill, but a mission. Whatever I would do in life, I knew it would be preparation for writing. No matter how sad I got, how humiliated, I knew it would just be fodder. And those cute girls in school who ignored me, one day they’d be sorry. I’d become more famous than any of them.

I had this idea that the friends you make in childhood are friends for life.

Boy, was I wrong.

When I came down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at age 22, most of my friends dismissed me when I could no longer keep up with them. The empathy I got was usually from people in the second-half of life, often from those who barely knew me.

Now there’s Facebook. It’s a wonderful way to reconnect with friends from childhood. But some of my friends from childhood, from my teens, have no desire to reconnect. It’s painful when they refuse my friends requests, when they don’t return my phone calls. I’ve tried to stay in touch with several of my closest friends from my high school years and they have no desire to talk to me.

I think my conversion to Orthodox Judaism freaked them out (I’d rather blame the Jews than myself). And my blogging. I have become too dangerous. Too much trouble. Too much risk.

Over the past year, I’ve been going to 12-step meetings for love addiction, sex addiction, co-dependency and the like. I’m trying to figure out when I hit bottom. Perhaps it was the evening 13 years ago that I went searching the internet for beastie vids. Or perhaps it was the time in 2009 that the Torah lecture was so powerful that I just had to Google “rape videos.” Maybe it was my perverse multi-year fearful fascination with white supremacist and Jew-hater William Pierce. I’ve indulged in many depraved pursuits.

On the surface, I’m an upstanding guy. I’ve never been violent. I’ve never committed major theft (a few sloppy time cards, cheating in high school and college, and the like) I’ve never been arrested and never broken a serious law. I’ve never hired a hooker. I’ve never tried illegal drugs. I’ve never tried to seduce an under-age girl and never tried anything illegal in the sex department.

Going to 12-step programs was my idea, not my therapist’s (though he endorsed it). Nobody in my life was pushing it (though some people close to me had suggested it at various times over the years).

For many years, I’d say from 1994-2007, I was frightened by how easily I became unmoored from any moral foundations. Throughout my blogging career, I’ve scared myself with my unhinged postings, like this one. “What will people say?” I wonder when they read about my latest depravity.

I remember my tortured relationship with a photographer and a few months in she told me, “My therapist says I’m a love addict.” I immediately Googled the term and checked out some books from the library on it and recognized a few such tendencies in myself.

I think I got afraid of perpetuating the same type of relationships (which never lasted much longer than a year). I think I realized that religion and therapy and Alexander Technique were not enough. My hatred of women was hardly changed by such noble pursuits. I had to go deeper.

Throughout my life, I’ve had painful flashes of moral clarity where for a few minutes, sometimes hours, I became cognizant of the pain I was wreaking all around me and I felt some of the suffering I was causing.

As a consequence, I’d try to become more empathic in my daily behavior, particularly with my blogging. But this would only last days. Eventually I’d feel a surge inside and go back to my f*** everybody mentality. And then the tide would recede and I’d conclude, it’s hopeless. I’m hopeless.

Having a job is a great thing. This is my first time in 15 years where I report to an office every weekday and work alongside the same people. I can’t be as carelessly cruel in such circumstances (as opposed to when I live alone and communicate primarily through my blogs).

Here’s one amazing thing I’ve encountered through 12-step work — it has even changed my fantasies. Normally, I could go through an elevated day, but when night fell and I crawled into bed, my desires would be as filthy as ever. But after I go to a 12-step meeting or immerse myself in a 12-step book, I find that even my longings –much of the time — are less cruel. I feel less need for women to be humiliated and degraded for me to feel happy. Their loss isn’t necessarily my gain.

I love bigotry (much of the time). I am terribly amused by much racial and religious humor, the crueler the better.