This website has a “guest blogger” in residence for a bit. (It’s hard to say no to someone who can watch you go pee.)

See the entry below.

I’m not trying to be all Christ on the Cross or anything, but sometimes, I’ll tell you, it’s hell being a guardian angel.

This one client of mine, Eric Poole (who’s kind of a piece of work, not that I’m judging or anything, but let’s face it, I see everything he does) whose blog appears on this website, is busy trying to finish his second book. As an enormously evolved and, if I say so myself, quite attractive spirit who is charged with the care and protection of a number of lesser-evolved souls (don’t get me started on how much lesser or we’ll be here all millennium), I could see how stressed he was. After all, his last book was published two years ago and he’s only 75% finished with the second one. He’s not exactly setting any land speed records.

“What is taking so freaking long?” I said when I appeared to him in physical form around 2:00 a.m. one night.

“I have a gun,” Eric said, bolting upright in bed.

“No, you don’t,” I replied. Not that it would matter – kinda hard to shoot a spirit. (I know, I should appear in the middle of the day at his office or something, but it’s so entertaining watching humans freak out – it’s really one of the perks of the job.)

“Who are you?” he said, his voice trembling.

“I’m Otis, your guardian angel,” I said wearily, “and you’re not writing War and Peace, here. What’s the holdup?”

“I work kind of long hours at my job,” Eric said, fishing for a baseball bat that he did have under the bed.

“Join the club,” I replied.

“And I write a blog,” he added. ” There are only so many hours in the day. Don’t you know all that?”

“You write like one blog entry every two weeks. And it’s not like you have kids. What do you do when you get home at night?”

“Again,” he said, “isnt that something you would know?

Such attitude for a Level 3.

“You think I’m just sitting up here watching The Eric Show?” I replied. “I got a lot of channels to flip through. I’m not watching you go pee.”

“Well, that’s…good.”

“Alright, look,” I said with a sigh, “it’s my job to get you out of scrapes. And boy, have I. You really need to stop reading your email while you drive.”

“I only do it at stoplights!”

“Uh-huh. How’s about I step out of the other-dimensional shadows and write the blog for a while? Would that help you get that book finished before 2014, for Lloyd’s sake?”

“Lloyd’s sake?” Eric said, still fishing wildly under the bed as though I couldn’t tell what he was doing. “Who’s Lloyd?”

“Oh, that’s God’s nickname.”

“Doesn’t a nickname normally refer to an attribute, like Spaz or Fat Ass or Wombat?”

“Are you calling the Almighty a fat ass?”

“No, I just mean –“

“He nicknamed himself. He just thought Lloyd sounded more fun, you know, more accessible. God’s kind of a loaded word.”

“Well, then why doesn’t he just go by Lloyd?”

“Oh, it’s the whole branding thing,” I explained. “There’s so much material where he’s referred to as God. It’d be like Kleenex trying to change their name to Snot Rags.”

Eric finally stopped flailing around under the bed. “So you’re saying you’ll write my blog? How exactly does that work?”

“I’ll just make the entries magically appear on your website. What, I can stop a semi from running into you but I can’t operate WordPress?”

“You know,” he said, “I always believed there are spirits around us. I once saw the ghost that inhabits this house I used to live in. The house was built by Carl Laemmle for his son, and the son -“

“Yeah, I was there, listen, you’re not my only customer, can we wrap this up?”

“I just never thought I’d see another spirit, much less a guardian angel.”

“Well,” I replied with another well-earned sigh, “ta-dah.”

So, for a while at least, until Eric finishes that second memoir, I’ll be enlightening you with my own angelic brand of wit and wisdom. A lot of you have expressed interest in knowing the meaning of life and why good things happen to bad people and whether angels have lady parts. So here I am to explain it all for you.

You’re welcome.

Few things in life make you feel as delightfully violated, as deliciously desecrated as having your home broken into. It’s like being date raped without the festive flirting and roofies.

Several years ago, my partner and I returned home from Chicago, exhausted from a nine-hour housewarming party the night before. (What can I say, that house requires a nine-hour party. Imagine if Kelly Werstler, Elton John and Dr. Suess had an interior design orgy. And then blew themselves up.)

When we walked into our own, less opulent (by a factor of ten) house, nothing seemed amiss. We stumbled down the hall to the master bedroom and threw our suitcases on the bed.

Suddenly, we noticed that several drawers were open, as well as the closet doors. And some of my watches were flung across a chair. I walked into the master bath. The medicine cabinet was open, and a couple of pill bottles were lying on the vanity.

Did we leave in a hair-on-fire hurry? I didn’t think so.

And then, in positively Columbo-like fashion, it began to dawn on us.

We rushed through the house, looking for signs of forced entry, finally finding the door they had entered through. We were panicked, in denial, horrified, angry – we’d been robbed, ROBBED I tell you!

We flew from room to room, taking inventory. Nothing seemed to be missing except a small amount of cash I had stupidly left in a drawer as a welcome gift to ransackers, and a bottle of expired Vicodin which would probably still do the job if you’re a hillbilly snorting it off the hood of a Chevy pickup. (Their standards tend to be a bit lower.)

For a moment, we were kind of insulted. I mean, what, we’re not good enough to be stolen from? True, neither of us wears jewelry, we have no high-end electronics, and we don’t collect Precious Moments. There’s really not much to take outside of a lot of used furniture, which doesn’t tend to fence well since it can’t be displayed in the lining of a coat or on a tie-dyed folding table on 42nd St.

Then the rage part set in again. How dare these monsters violate our space? How dare they think that they can just come in and browse, like our home is a Supermarket Sweep episode?

But as we replaced things that were askew, and called the police, we began to realize something: there was no broken glass. No ruined door frame. There was no spray paint on the walls or feces on the floor. (Friends of ours had a burglar take a dump on their living room floor, clearly commenting on their taste in decorating.) They had not taken whole chests of drawers and emptied them in the middle of rooms, or pulled food out of the refrigerator and left it rotting on the counter.

They were, more or less, courteous. And I really appreciated that.

Don’t get me wrong, we subsequently fortressed the place like we were about to be invaded by the Huns. Security system revamp. New deadbolts. Security doors. New outdoor motion detector lighting. Bear traps set randomly around the grounds.

But I understand that sometimes, people feel the need to take what isn’t theirs. Let’s face it, the chasm between the haves and the have nots in this world grows ever wider and deeper. Although nothing about stealing is right, I must say, if you have to break into someone’s house, it really helps if you act like a houseguest.

And, as the victim, in the venge-filled moments that follow the discovery of such an act, it really helps if you can find that one little kernel of good fortune – the part that could have been worse.

‘Cause it makes stepping into a bear trap when you’re coming home from work a lot less painful.