It's Not Tundra

Trying to think about how to best continue this, since I'm pretty much out of moving stories. I put a bunch together in book form and was told by an agent that it seemed I was "trying to hard to be funny" which, after several successful night at a couple of large comedy clubs lead me to believe that this agent is "trying to hard to be smart". So I guess for the next bit, I'll be indulging in a little stream of consciousness chafe trying to get to the wheat (is that trying too hard?) Too many projects going on. The movie version of Cheapjack Shakespeare is limping to a start date, my new play "Internal Continuity" will be staged this fall. "Bullpen Comics" is getting some attention and may have a second life. But there is a lot of waiting around. Also, I think I have a sugar hangover from Easter. Too much candy. That's what agnostics do. That and wonder a lot. I mean, what if he was only NEARLY dead...? Also, tired of "Zombie Jesu...

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...

While most Targets are SORT OF laid out the same, Targets in California don’t sell a LOT of snow shovels, so I had to go looking. When I saw what I thought were them down an aisle, I walked down there and went past a woman with a baby in a shopping basket. As I walked by I thought: “Hm. That looks like Stephanie and Fiona. But they live in Amherst so it can’t be…” And then I stopped. Oh. Yeah. Reality check. This was going to take awhile. Right. We had moved. Check. Luckily, Stephanie, who we had seen just a few weeks before when we were looking for a rental, was just as surprised to see us. We chatted for a bit and then chose our snow weapons. They had a snow shovel with a cooked handle that they called “ergonomic”. Now I’ve looked it up since and I guess it means that it’s easier to shovel because it has a crooked handle. It’s also designed as a “pusher” [1] , but I’d been taken in by that before. Still, it looked like the best bargain and we got two of those and one sm...

About a week later we had another showing. Ingo was really excited about this. It was a guy we’ll call “Mr. Fifteen Percent” who was looking for a house for his ex-wife and child. Ingo was unsure about the details, but this seemed the perfect house. They were divorcing and they wanted to stay near the school down the block. Only two people were PERFECT [1] for this tiny house. And a little kid ---- how much time would they spend in the one bathroom! Hell, there would hardly be any pile up at all [2] ! He seemed REALLY interested, but… “He said it was priced fifteen percent too high for the current market.” Fifteen percent? Where do you come up with a number like that in conversation? Ten percent, twenty, sure. But fifteen? Does your coach tell you to give a hundred and ten percent or a hundred and fifteen [3] ? “Should we talk about it?” “Not yet. It’s too early,” Ingo said. “We’ll let him think on it. But I really think he was ready to write and offer for five-fifty.” ...

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...

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 ...

“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...

Tripper and I went over what the inspector had found. Nothing huge. But it’s continually amazing how different people in the same profession can find different things wrong with a house that you’ve been living in for twelve years and you never knew. We knew that the plumbing was part copper/part galvanized. This was common in L.A., especially in houses that had been remodeled once or twice. You want copper plumbing, but you don’t want to rip the walls out. The problem is that if the correct connecters aren’t put on, it turns into a chemistry set and REALLY starts to corrode in a process called electrolysis – which I thought was hair removal. We also knew that the crawlspace attic was clean – because we never went up there and it hadn’t been opened since the last house inspection. The guy who’d inspected before we bought told us it was a great storage space --- which we could have used, but with an opening in the ceiling the size and shape of a box of corn flakes, I couldn’t see h...