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.

My friend Tom (name changed so he doesn’t knife me in a dark alley) is a confirmed bachelor. I don’t mean in the coy, 1950’s he-likes-the-opera-but-we-don’t-talk-about-it kind of way. I mean, he’s never had a relationship that lasted longer than an episode of The Client List.

As is typical of people who don’t have to worry about what hijinks their genitalia gets into, Tom occasionally picks up random women at bars. And since he is single, and since any hookup is comprised of two adults old enough to spell the word “consenting”, this is probably none of my holier-than-thou business.

But then, there’s Lisa.

Lisa is a seemingly nice, 27-year-old girl who Tom has brought home several times. She’s cute, she’s fun, and – here comes the slightly problematic part – one could say she enjoys a festive libation, because she’s routinely, eye-crossingly HAMMERED when Tom encounters her, generally around 7pm.

“Yeah,” Tom says with a disturbing measure of either pride or laissez-faire (I’m not sure which), “I’m a Hot Mess Enabler.”

Upon arriving at Tom’s house, Lisa allows Tom to take photos of her which could most politely be described as Unfit for Facebook. And he gets her to perform acts that would make Heidi Fleiss roll over in her grave. (I know she’s not dead, but this would kill her.)  

He then holds her hair while she hurls (always an attractive quality in a booty call), and he thoughtfully forbids her to drive home, dropping her off in front of her home where she presumably “naps” with her skirt up around her head.

Exactly how starving for attention must someone be to take advantage of a girl who is so clearly FUBAR? If there is one truism in life, it’s that we all crave intimacy and companionship, even people like Tom who claim to love being a “playa”. (He’s white, which makes it worse.) And we all want to feel attractive and desired, but I’m not sure how validating it is to have someone think you’re incredibly hot when they’re seconds away from being out cold.  

Tom’s a great friend to the many people who love him. He just sucks at relationships.  He, of course, blames it on the crappy women. I blame it on the man who picks up the crappy women. As Marianne Williamson once said, “It’s not that you attract the wrong people, it’s that you give them your phone number.”

I think it’s never too late for us to discover our inner benevolence. Maybe the next time Tom picks up someone like Lisa, he’ll play Farmville with her instead of asking her to squeal like a pig. And maybe then, a nice girl can stumble across his path. A girl who doesn’t wake up in her driveway and call the police to report a stolen car.

I had dinner the other night with my friend Jenny and a visiting co-worker of hers, Darren, a 49-year-old gay guy. He was warm, sophisticated and well-traveled, and he brought along his 23-year-old son.

Oh, wait, sorry, that wasn’t his son, that was his boyfriend. You can understand my confusion (as could the concierge at the Andaz Hotel in West Hollywood, who said to Darren, “He looks just like you”). When there are more years between the ages of a couple than one of them has been alive, it’s rather easy for unsuspecting onlookers to mistake the younger one for either spawn or a rental.

As someone who came out in my mid-twenties (which was already five or ten years too late and which involved a lot of unnerving man-on-girl activity and a near-miss wedding), I did not spend a ton of time dating guys for whom being able to order a drink was an exotic novelty.

But I’ve noticed that men who don’t come out until they’re 40 or 50 have a tremendous appetite for youth. They want to date it, they want to dress like it, they want to talk like it. My friend Sallie once said, “Guys who come out late spent so much time being someone they weren’t, that by the time they allow themselves to be who they really are, they have to live out the years they missed.”

Wiser words were never spoken. This late entry into the gay game results in a lot of men in their 40’s wearing super skinny jeans and hoodies emblazoned with One Direction, and using words like “Chillax” and “Hater”. It also results in relationship drama that would make the characters on Gossip Girl cringe. A 40-year-old man who has just come out has the emotional maturity of a 14-year-old girl, without the hormonal insanity to blame it on.

On the plus side, if you’re a 50-year-old man who was once married, your 23-year-old boyfriend can be BFF’s with your children, since they’re often the same age. Darren’s boyfriend spends more time with his kids than Darren does, although the kids sometimes tire of the boyfriend’s enthusiasm for skateboarding and prank calling the Apple genius bar.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against dating younger – you need somebody to wheel you around when you’re old. And unless you have kids that you can guilt into it by showing them pictures of the third world orphanage you plucked them out of, or an estate that makes nurses uncommonly interested in your romantic side, it’s up to the spouse. My partner is 8 years younger than me and will gladly push my wheelchair (off a cliff, I suspect).

I just think that one should marry someone within cultural striking distance of one’s own age. Because, after all, if you can’t share memories like Wonder Woman and Hot Wheels, what on earth do you talk about after you’ve redecorated the house?

I spent most of today bitching about President Obama.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I mostly love the dude. He’s done a reasonably heroic job fishing America’s lifeless body out of an economic dumpster. And this whole gay marriage stance is pretty nervy in an election cycle. The guy’s got nads.

But every time he visits our fair city, my 90-minute roundtrip commute becomes four hours, as the police  -and whatever secret service agents are not currently busy talking hookers down on price – close every thoroughfare within, it seems, a 30-mile radius of the President’s motorcade. Sure, I’d like to eat Peking duck and artichoke salad with George Clooney, Barbra Streisand and Tobey Maguire, too, but not if it means 5 million people have to spend two extra hours wishing the guy selling oranges on the overpass was selling guns.

So I spent a lot of time bad mouthing the leader of the free world today. And then I read that, along the canyon roads that the he took to Clooney’s house, families gathered to cheer the motorcade.

And children manned a lemonade stand with a sign that said, “Presidents drink free”.

At another corner, a boy held up another hand-drawn sign that said, “Will trade Lakers for Bulls if you stop”.

And finally, two guys and two children stood at the end of their driveway with what may be the best sign of all:

“Our gay family thanks Mr. President.”

Maybe I shouldn’t complain so much. Any event that brings out that kind of togetherness and sense of community without planes being flown into buildings is probably worth those two extra hours in the car.

But next time, I’ll wear an adult diaper. ‘Cause once you pee into a coffee mug, you kinda don’t want to use it again.