o solo stee-o

On Friday I’m going up to the house in which I grew up in Berkeley for two weeks. This is a good thing. My mom is going on a vacation to see a few of our last remaining relatives and I’m going to have the house all to myself. Not only will I get a chance to get out of LA for a while – always a good thing – but I’ll be in a city I love very much. And…I’ll have the house to myself.

I never had the house to myself. It wasn’t because I had such a massive family or anything remotely Eight is Enoughish – one sister and a bunch of animals. It was because people were always home. Always. Never seemed to go anywhere. As a young teenager I didn’t lock myself in my room to hide from my family so I could smoke weed or brood or masturbate – though I did all of that in there – I just wanted a little time alone because everyone was always home. I wasn’t a moody I-hate-my-parents kind of dude, I just needed some space, and my room was the only place that afforded that. My sister was always reading magazines in front of the television. That was her spot. I learned a lot from those magazines (Vogue, Cosmo, etc.) don’t get me wrong, but c’mon, how many hints on how to teach your husband to give you a better orgasm does a fifteen year-old girl need. My mom was always home too. Painting or working in the back yard or cleaning or cooking or watching M*A*S*H or the Giants game or Masterpiece Theatre or reading some obscure English literary newspaper. And then my father. My father was always up in his room drinking and smoking and grading papers or charting our family history back to the cavemen or playing Risk on the Mac. Or he and my mother were watching Torvell and Dean skate around or this awful BBC sitcom Are You Being Served? (the English, man, their collective sense of humor is just fucked) or Murder, She Wrote (An old lady, everywhere she goes, someone dies… Why didn’t they lock her up?) or working on this obscure English literary contest they entered every year called Nemo. So I never had the run of the house. If everyone happened to be gone, I still had to contend with our mean-ass dog, Charlie. And my parents never traveled alone anywhere. Never. Until I graduated from high school and they went to Europe. But basically, never.

So I spent a lot of time either out with friends, riding my bike or my skateboard, or in my room.

But now, it’s mine. All mine!!!

Now if I just had any friends left in Berkeley, I’d throw a kick-ass kegger, I tell you.


This is where I let Larry King take over my body for a few minutes.

As I type, my editor Tom is loading our 6 hours of footage into the Avid. Let the Post begin...This past weekend I watched a celebrity golf tournament with 9 male stars, including Jack, Will Smith, Cuba, Kevin Costner, Pesci, Michael Douglas, Andy Garcia, etc. And man were they a boring lot. Real golfers have more personality...How long before Ricky Martin disappears for good?...

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