Cruise Control

Okay, everyone with a Yahoo home page saw this interview with Mr. Cruise. But I couldn't resist adding what I feel is the all too obvious subtext to his words:

"I had no really close friend," he reveals in the April 9th edition of Parade magazine. "I was always the new kid with the wrong shoes, the wrong accent. I didn't have the friend to share things with and confide in."

I was desperate to belong to something. Anything.

Let's face it, I was ripe picking for whatever strange, cultish psuedo-religion might happen along and offer me a free personality test.

Tom reveals that his father was also someone he was unable to turn to. "He was a bully and a coward," he says frankly. "He was the person where, if something goes wrong, they kick you."

He was also the person where, if help was needed with grammar or sentence structure, they kick you again.

The headline-making celebrity says the poor treatment actually taught him a lot. "It was a great lesson in my life -- how he'd lull you in, make you feel safe and then, bang!" he says. "For me it was like, 'There's something wrong with this guy. Don't trust him. Be careful around him.' There's that anxiety."

Anxiety so intense that it compels me to way, way overeact to the most insignificant of betrayals, like someone spraying water in my face from a trick microphone as a joke.

Despite their tumultuous relationship, Tom says he did see his father one last time -- after a 10-year estrangement -- while he was terminally ill. "He was in the hospital dying of cancer, and he would only meet me on the basis that I didn't ask him anything about the past," he says. "When I saw him in pain, I thought, 'What a lonely life.' He was in his late 40s. It was sad."

This story explains why the only decent acting I ever did in my life was in that movie Magnolia, where I play a son estranged from his father, who is dying of cancer, and that I agree to meet with one last time.

Also, L. Ron Hubbard is my spiritual father anyway, so I didn't need that loser who never loved me or gave me the kind of emotional support that you need to develop into an adult without pathological control issues.

The A-lister also opens up about his battle with dyslexia and recalls how perplexing it was for him to receive the diagnosis."The school took me to a psychiatrist to get tested," he says. "They said, 'Oh, he's dyslexic.' I'm labeled. It instantly put me into confusion. It was an absolute affront to my dignity."

And to someone like me, whose neglect as a child forced me into a worldview so simplistic that it borders on infantile, my only recourse was to condemn all psychiatrists everywhere as body thetan-riddled pawns of the evil overlord Xenu.

It made him determined to get to the bottom of the condition. "I remember thinking, 'I've got to figure this out. What's normal? Am I normal? Who's to say what's normal?' I didn't understand what 'normal' is. It still doesn't make sense.

And thanks to Scientology, it never will.