It's Not Tundra

I have to tell you that it's not paradise here. We have morons here, too. It's just that there aren't as many of them but those that we have are trying harder to be more annoying. There's also, I suppose, a certain freedom in knowing that you are blazing a new trail of douchebaggery, going where no asshat has gone before. I'm riding my bike home from the gym and I turn down a quiet street so that I can ride though the park. The school on the street, a church school, is letting out for the end of the year. If you look back at the stuff I've written, I should have learned by now that people can be especially dopey around schools. It should be no surprise. But every time I've gone by there and it was any kind of school event, it's a madhouse. 1/4 the madhouse as in Tarzana, but there are fewer folks around. So I'm tooling down the road on my bike. And here comes a woman holding hands with her son. Awwwww. Walking down the middle of the street. And by ...

Some thoughts after flying across the country to move. You try to teach your kids good manners,but sadly, the rest of the world doesn't want to help... The behavior on commercial flights has changed since my father insisted on a coat and tie to fly coach. It is not well known that Lindbergh flew his legendary trans Atlantic flight togged up in white tie and tails. Memoirs of barnstorming pilots would include passages about flying biplanes in top hat with his platinum tipped walking stick doubling as an especially dashing aileron control. Sad to say, these standards no longer apply even to first class cabins, let alone steerage. Please allow me to offer a few humble suggestions to make air travel a more pleasant experience. Do not berate TSA employees for their lack of speed. Most of them are honest, caring, hardworking people dedicated to ensuring our safety. The rest are mildly retarded and may cry if confronted. Such behavior will result in a cavity search and proper standards of...

Saturday morning I got up, put on my snappy all-cotton genuine Japanese kimono and walked downstairs. I turned at the bottom of the stairs, heading for the kitchen and then stopped, thought for a second and walked back to the front door. Did I really see what I thought I saw? Why, yes. I did see what I thought I saw. There was a dead deer on my front lawn. Now that was something I never saw in L.A. Dead cats once in awhile, yes, usually with their innards chewed out by a coyote who went only for the tasty parts. Perhaps by a raccoon. I'm not Daniel frikkin ' Boone. But not a deer. You'd see them sometimes in the Hollywood Hills, very occasionally. A few times I'd seen them at the corner of Coldwater and Mulhullond and they WERE near Dead Man's Curve, but the deer were alive. Once during a heavy rain I'd seen a family of deer on the 405. Well, actually I'd seen them on the side of the 405. Traffic moves slow but still not slow enough for deer. But even thos...

IN HONOR OF THE FIRST BIG SNOW IN THE 367 DAYS WE'VE LIVED HERE... THE DRIVEWAY!!!!!! [1] “Oh, how can you handle shoveling all that snow!” people would say. The cold was the first thing people commented on, the snow was the second. And it’s true. You did have to move it out of the driveway and the sidewalk. God knows that I was yelled at often enough to get off my ass and go shovel the driveway. My father would get pissed off occasionally at my lack of concern for snow removal and would bestir himself to do it. My mother would then go into something resembling a religious fervor [2] and scream: “Your father’s going to have a heart attack! Your father’s going to have a heart attack!” And the implication certainly was “Because of you”. And I would drag myself outside. Begrudgingly. [3] We had a large collection of snow-removing implements in my childhood. My father, far from a handy man and who I don’t think I ever saw swing a hammer, seemed incapable of parting with ...

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...

So we asked Ingo to give us at least forty-five minutes notice before someone came over. That way we could keep the house in a decent state of readiness and could do a quick vacuum/Fabreeze spray and not get surprised in my underwear. It never ceases to amaze me how many people do things last minute. When I was doing a little acting, I almost never got a call to go to a casting session a day or two in advance. It was always a ten AM call to be across town at eleven. Occasionally they’d call the day before [1] . I mean didn’t they KNOW they were going to have to cast something at least a week in advance? Did they get to the office that morning and have three phone calls: “We need a cop, a mechanic and a Pope and we need it cast before noon!” But everyone seems to do things at the last minute and operate at a def con 9 level of panic on a regular basis. It may keep the growth hormone running, keep wait down and make sure your adrenal glands never get too bored, but it sure is a p...

For a creature that naturally gets by in the wild, everything you read on rabbit pet blogs (and yes, there are a ton of them) point out what a fragile creature a bunny is. They can’t stand direct sunlight, they can’t stand extreme variances in temperature, and a sudden shock can kill them. It was like keeping my grandmother as a pet. [1] So you had to be careful, especially with stories flying around of prize-winning super-champion dogs dying in cargo holds because they froze to death or someone didn’t get them water or they got their rhinestone collar mysteriously magnetized to the propeller or something. So you have to choose carefully. You have to ask them what experience they have in transporting rabbits – no matter how embarrassing it is. [2] I finally settled on the company that said they had just transported a rabbit to Germany from Los Angeles for a family where the father had been transferred by the army. Well, not only did they fly rabbits, but they flew them for t...

Gravy was a part of the family. A fat lazy part of the family who would cuddle up next to you, would assassinate me if it meant more time with my wife and was a total whore for a piece of banana, but a part of the family [1] . After re-reading that description, he actually sounds like my brother. And you can’t leave a part of the family behind. No matter what Connor thought. “If we give Gravy away,” he said, “We could get another bunny. Or a dog. If we got a bunny and it was young, it might let us hold it.” “YEAH!” Lauren said. I confess, that I started this in a playful manner saying, “You know, if we gave Gravy away…” never dreaming that they’d bite. See, the BIG problem with Gravy was the holding, lap-sitting issue. He’d come up next to you. He’d snuggle himself up close. He’d nudge you. But he did not like to be picked up and he didn’t like to sit on anyone’s lap. To be sure, part of this is God’s fault, because he made rabbits prey and therefore chances are when ...

Lauren was in Seventh Grade when we moved. Middle school starts in sixth grade in Los Angeles. So Fifth grade was her last year in elementary last year at the Magnet School she’d started in second grade and it was the year she met her first true love. His name was Gravy [1] . Gravy was a bunny. The fifth grade classes all had pets. Lauren’s class pet was a little bunny named Gravy because he was gray over white. It was a color thing. Gravy had a brother who was brown over white and he was called Caramel. He had another brother named Harvey that had nothing to do with color, but was, of course, the character in the Marcy Chase play and movie adapted from it. [2] Each weekend and on holidays, one of the children in the class would get to tote Gravy, cage and all, home. The rest of the time he stayed in the classroom, in the cage and, I guess, learned fractions. Early on, we were plagued with requests to let Gravy come home on the weekends and holidays. We acquiesced, though ...

If we’d had a stand-up guy like Tripper from the start, not only would we have been out of there much sooner, the family would have been under a lot less stress for a prolonged period of time, the kids would have started school at the beginning of the year, we would have had a decent amount of time to look for a home, we would have been able to drive across the country… AND we probably would have done all that with a hundred thousand dollars more in our pocket. Seriously. The first week the house was up someone offered a five hundred and Ingo laughed it off. The house was RIDICULOUSLY over priced for seven months. I have a part of that. Patricia has a part of that. The SoCal real estate market has a huge part of that. But no one owns a bigger piece of that than that piece of feces Ingo . [1] To begin: We’re not freakin ’ Realtors . It’s not out job, our career, our expertise to know how to price and get houses sold. Now, more than a year later and able to watch ...

Understand: When I first moved to California, I was told that there was only one thing holy and that was the crosswalk under California law. You have to stop when there are people in the crosswalk. Even if there’s no light, if there are two parallel white lines on the pavement and they aren’t cocaine, you gotta stop. I’ve seen old ladies dragging shopping carts across Ventura Boulevard at 8:45 in the morning and cars, even cars carrying very important movie executives, stop to let her hobble across. Admittedly, this rule had become a little less firm in the popular consciousness than it was when I was first there. Pedestrians once beset me when I tried to make a legal-in-New York right on red and the people in the cross walk attacked like villagers in a Frankenstein movie. Now cars creep into the cross walk, they wait until the pedestrian is out of their lane and gun it. But a SCHOOL? Crosswalks in a school SHOULD be sacrosanct. They’re not, but if you’re going to run your over...