Overachiever

I   started putting this collection of stories after I was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease and realized it was going to cut my life short. At the time, I didn’t know how long I had, but as I complete this piece now (September 2022), it is clear I only have a few weeks to live, and I will have died shortly after my 49 th birthday. This book is not meant for the public, so I’m not going to publish it, though I’ve made sure my partners are aware of it, so if someone were to want to read it, they can. Printing this commercially would cost an arm and a leg and I don’t imagine anyone going and spending $30-40 just to read my bullshit, but who knows. Maybe someday I will be thought-of as someone special or worthy of that kind of attention. Otherwise, the main purpose and audience for this book is my son Sol. After a long and frustrating legal battle with my ex-wife, I was prevented from spending time with him since mid 2021 and I have reason to believe he was lied to and manipulated to

This is a collection of photos of me over the years, from age 1 in 1974 to today.

  This last few weeks, several friends wondered why I don’t go to Pride and why I don’t go to see the 4th of July fireworks shows. After all, Pride is a big part of my life, and the fireworks are something everyone likes, pretty-much. The reason for this is that I am repelled by the kind of massive crowds that flock to these events. WHY??? The following may not make me appear to be a good person, as it could be seen as if I’m arrogant or thing I’m better than everyone else. The thing about crowds is that when I look at the crowds that flood many public events, or even think about them, it makes me sick. Event organizers treat their “customers” (even if those are not paying customers) like animals. If people need to get-in or get tickets, they will almost always under-staff the entry doors and ticket booths, leading to creation of endless lines. Such lines are often in the blistering sun, freezing cold, and even pouring rain, with little or no cover. If concessions are available, they

  There's something that I never understood about myself: seems that I don't like to win. Not that I don't enjoy being good at what I do, or scoring achievements. I do, quite a bit, but for some reason, I’ve never been competitive. As a result, I don't enjoy games. I have played stuff occasionally over the years, from sports through board games to computer games, but the only stuff I enjoyed were single player computer games, and even that has waned by age 16 or so. My ex-wife was a huge fan of games, and one of our main contentions over the years was her constant attempt to make me play with her. Once a year or so, I would capitulate (until 2016, when I finally got her to find some friends to play with instead of me), but I hated it and was just zombiying my way through the game, often times playing intentionally suboptimal to lose and get it over with. What I still don't know is WHY. What is it that makes me not only dislike the games, but feel no interest in

  This is an update to stuff I wrote before, a continuation, maybe conclusion to my parenting saga. Recap: after our separation, Paula vowed to keep me and Sol apart (“TYou’ll never see Sol again”, she yelled at me in November 2017 one morning when she was picking him up from my apartment). In 2019, she sued me in the hopes that the court will agree with her that I was some kind of a monster and keep us apart, but she failed and I was acquitted in May 2021. Following that, she decided to just go rogue and refused to let me see him. Neither pleads nor threats helped. For a few months, I tried to find a lawyer to represent me, but both lawyers and courts were still dealing with massive back-logs due to the covid pandemic, and I couldn’t find any to help (most lawyers I called never called back, or called back a month later to tell me they cannot take any new cases). It was also around that time that my kidney disease was discovered, and between testing, therapy and shit hitting the fan

  This week I finished watching the 9 th season of Dexter. This is a new season, produced this year (2021-2022), after the original 8-season series ended in 2013. As I was watching this season, I felt it shares several themes with me and my life. While I’m no murderer, I did abandon my son, just like Dexter did when he faked his own death in the original series finale. Early in the season, Dexter’s son finds him, and they reconnect, with the son later shown doing pretty violent stuff. As part of that, Dexter is pondering whether he, being a psychopathic killer, has affected his son. The season explores themes like whether the son will become a violent killer like his dad, and whether that’s because of his early childhood (seeing his birth mother murdered) or something else. The season ends with the son blaming Dexter, saying he is having these violent tendencies not because he’s like his father, but because of his father (he’s angry due to his father abandoning him). He also says to

As the Unites States is making giant leaps towards fully vaccinating the population, with many states expected to reach “herd immunity” within weeks, and with many either fully open, or almost-there, I feel it’s time to reflect back on the past 15 months. When COVID hit us in early 2020, at first, I was optimistic. I didn’t think it would become a major issue, and I never believed America would reach a point of forced business closures. Being a capitalist country, I was sure no government would dare try stop commerce. As we all know now, I was dead wrong, and on March 11, Washington State shut down and went into a lockdown that reached scenarios I only have seen back at my home country, during full-on war. The impact on me was devastating, at first. My fledgling young business, the cuddle club Spoonz, was only 6 months old, and while it was growing fast, it was just on the cusp of breaking-even (the point where the monthly income would match the routine operational costs). On the d

TL;DR version: I have an unhealthy need to be loved. Many people wonder why it is that I put in so much effort and energy into my cuddle events. The technical/official reason is that it makes the world a better place by bringing them together, but the question is what motivates me personally do this. What’s inside me that makes me willing to do all this? Is it really just altruism? The truth is that I’m fucked up, and have an unhealthy need to be loved. I do these events, and in general do everything I can to help and support people because I’m desperate to earn their love. I donate money because people love generous people. I create social events, because people love people who give them good experiences. I offer help and advice to almost anyone (including on public forums like my old website PCPhobia) because people love people who are helpful to them. This is also why I’m poly, because being loved by multiple partners is better than being loved by one, and that’s why even as a p

  Two years ago, my uncle Danny went to Switzerland for a drink. That’s an Israeli expression that’s related to the fact that some Israelis go to Switzerland to be euthanized by drinking a cup of sedative (lethal dose of Pentobarbital, which is 15,000 milligram). Israel does not have a death-with-dignity law, and even though some doctors do secretly help their patients, it’s very risky to them and rarely done. For a terminally ill patient, odds are that he or she would be forced to suffer for months or years, until they die naturally, without recourse other than committing suicide (which in itself can be quite difficult for people who are very sick). Israelis who choose to can go to Switzerland, where euthanasia is legal, and a non-profit organization called Dignitas arranges for their euthanasia for about $8000. The reason my uncle did this was because he suffered from severe Parkinson’s disease, which has ravaged his body and brain. He was diagnosed in 2006, at age 56, and with tim

  “Till death do us part” is the line all people say when they get married. It’s a very human thing to want to repeat something fun or good. Whether it’s pizza, or sex, or a game, or a relationship, we all want the good stuff to last forever. However, that rarely ever works. What most people don’t realize is that things change. People change, their feelings change, the world changes, and the concept of “forever” is inherently flawed. This is a bug in the human brain, and the problem with this flaw is that it makes us do things. People who don’t understand the nature of entropy spend their entire lives trying to fight it. Trying to look for a better pizza after the pizza they usually have is no longer as exciting and tasty. Trying to come up with new tricks in the sack to make the sex as fun and exciting as it was when they just met the person they are with. And the worst thing…. trying to force a changing relationship to stay the same. People change, and so their relationship changes

When I divorced Paula in 2017/2018, She assumed I would want to spend as little time as possible with Sol, and suggested a visitation schedule where I would have Sol with me twice a week (4 days out of every 2 weeks, give or take), plus extra time on special occasions, like school breaks and national holidays. This made sense at the time, so I went along with it. As part of this, Paula had her lawyer insert two clauses that severely limit my interaction with Sol. One was a clause designed to keep Sol in the dark about polyamory, and about my choices in that realm. The clause forbade me from involving Sol with any social activities where poly might be discussed, and forbade me from disclosing to him I have more than one partner. The second clause forbids me from discussing sex-ed with him, including any kind of discussion about his sexual identity or gender. At the time, my state of mind was to appease Paula after the divorce, and these clauses didn’t seem to be enforceable, as they wer

  A lot of people who suspect or know I’m an immigrant ask me how to pronounce my name properly. “don’t worry about it, I’m not sensitive”, I usually say, and that’s true. Having your name butchered is part of life for any immigrant, and mine is relatively easy (as opposed to some Israelis like Tsachi or Chen). To those who press-on, I tell that the big one is the letter R, which is different in Hebrew than what they expect. Most Americans are sure that it would be a rolling R, like they do in Spanish, and virtually none of them are able to pronounce the Israeli soft R properly. What’s even more of a problem is that my name stresses the 1st syllable, and Americans typically have a phenomenon called Hyper-foreignism, where they assume the 2nd syllable is stressed, as people might do in Spanish. In Hebrew, of course, there are little vowels, and we typically use “nikud”, meaning “points”, which are a system of adding dots and small lines around letters to signify how to pronounce them.

Many people who know me have commented about how it looks like my brain works like a computer. Since I can actually see inside my head, I can confirm that indeed, it does do so in a lot of ways. While my short-term memory is actually quite fucked-up, and I rely heavily on things like a calendar and other data storage technology (usually accessed with my phone and computers), my long-term memory is incredibly effective, as well as my thinking and calculation power. This comes into effect in several ways. 1.      Memory. As opposed to many people who appear to store memories as photos, my memory appears to store stuff as “vectors”. This is not a perfect description or analogy to computer terms, but it does mean I store a significantly larger amount of info than most people, and I store it more accurately. For example, I can recollect instantly and with high-precision the exact location of things I’ve seen, often to within an inch of where they are, and even for stuff that others don’t

Everyone who knows me knows I’ve never went to college, and that I’m pretty proud of it (in fact, I did actually go, and went through 2 classes, one on statistics and one on economics, but I never tested on them and never went further). People also know I’m quite vehemently against college, and I felt I should write this down once and for all. I’m pretty sure no one will ever make or break their higher ed plans based on my opinions, but since my son might be going to college around the time he receives this book, he might at least have these in mind and be able to avoid some of the stressors associated with colleges. Let’s get one thing straight: I have nothing against education. On the contrary. I’m an exceptionally well read and educated man, and that has been key in my career and in my success in-general. However, in my mind, colleges aren’t really education any more than McDonalds is a restaurant. The original intention of higher-education organizations like colleges was to give

  A few days ago, I thought about the fact that I’ve always measured myself against my grandfather Arie. Arie was a war-hero, one of the highest-decorated ones in the history of Israel, who later became a very successful and rich businessman. He opened a car garage in the Hadar neighborhood, which was the main business-district of my hometown of Haifa, and as such, it was heavily utilized and made him a solid income, which allowed him to buy a fancy apartment at the 14th floor a super-modern high-riser. It probably wouldn’t be too impressive by American standards, but at the time, it was the tallest residential building in the city (18 stories), had its own supermarket, giant playground, and underground garage. A few years later, he became an agent for Hertz, the international car-rental company, and with the frequent visits by the United States Navy to the gulf, he became extremely wealthy, renting cars to many of the sailors on shore-leave. No one ever talked about how much they made

I   don’t drink coffee. This is something most people notice about me – I don’t take coffee breaks, I rarely accept an offer of it, and I don’t even drink it in the morning. To many, this is unbelievable. “How can someone wake up without coffee?”, they wonder. This scrutiny is even more noticeable in America, as I live in Seattle, considered by most to be the coffee capital of the United States. The answer is that for some reason, caffeine doesn’t “work” on me. It doesn’t wake me up in the morning, nor does it keep me up if I’m tired. I do enjoy the flavor of coffee, as long as it’s sweet enough, and so I sometimes do drink it, if offered. I also consume the Frappuccino-type drink that Starbucks and other makers distribute in bottles, a few times a week, but that too is for flavor only. Why doesn’t Caffeine work on me, I don’t know exactly. One potential explanation is that my body’s adenosine receptors are “non-sticky” (weak), and since they are the part of our body that binds to Ca