It's Not Tundra

They rolled me out the door and into the ambulance. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! [1] And we were off to the hospital. Which luckily was right around the corner. Except… There had been a fire in downtown L.A. that day and the emergency room around the corner was full. Here’s the deal: There have been a couple of scandals in L.A. emergency rooms. Little things like, oh, people DYING while waiting to be taken to see a doctor. Partly this is because emergency rooms have been closing, leaving the remaining emergency rooms to take care of the overflow. A lot of this is uninsured people looking for basic care or letting things go until they HAVE to go to an emergency room. [2] And people keep coming to Los Angeles, compounding the problem. Luckily, when they wheel you in on a stretcher bleeding from places you’re not supposed to bleed, you tend to get attention. That and we were carrying my wife’s insurance. But the face remains that there was an emergency room less than a mile away...

“Well, she’s worried about this beam…”, Tripper said, continuing on about the apparent danger in the garage. “Stuff’s been up there since before the Martin Luther King Day Earthquake, Tripper,” I said. “The only time I went up there was to pull a door down to see if I could fit it on to take the kids’ door with us.” “What?” “We’ve been measuring their height on the door since they could stand. Seemed like a good thing to take with us.” He looked through the papers on the house sale agreement. “I don’t think we have an exclusion on that.” “It wouldn’t work,” I said. “The door didn’t fit and it started to seem like too big a thing. But the point is, I pulled the door down and nothing fell.” “Well, we’ll have to get it looked at.” “The agent’s trying to screw us, isn’t she?” “Well, she’s…” “It’s okay. Just say it. We’re in a corner and she’s trying to take advantage of us.” “They’ve got someone coming out to look at the garage. Okay?” I knew he was serious, be...

I never thought it would be EASY to sell my home. I’d never sold one that I owned, but my parents were serial monodomusites and we moved 5 times in my first thirteen years [1] . But I’d never been involved in the sale beyond having to toss some of my stuff in boxes or once going to the lawyer’s office to make the down payment and being all googly-eyed at the wad of bills my bank-distrusting father carried. But while I never thought it would be easy, I didn’t think it would be the razor wire mobius strip it became. It’s not like we hadn’t thought of it. We’d been on our way out of L.A. and I was going back to grad school when I got a temporary job at Warner Bros. Animation as a P.A. [2] That became a permanent job with promotions and the next thing I know I have an office, a secretary and a career. [3] Every year or so we’d reach the requisite number of episodes for an animated series and I’d start thinking of life after cartoons and every years we’d get picked up for another se...