Lately, it has come to my attention that I have, over the course of my fairly long and completely stupid life, constantly envisioned myself to be grander, wiser, more successful, and less of a boob than I actually am.

And I’m starting to think I should be concerned about it.

Those of you who’ve read my first book know that the image problems started around age eight – the year when I first began pretending to be Endora from Bewitched.  Now, given my youth at the time, my stunning dearth of friends, a virtual cavalcade of bullies, and my mother (enough said), this particular detour through Crazytown could probably be written off as only slightly disturbing.

But it continued. As a teen and young adult, I was constantly imagining myself as various celebrities – from music superstars to fashion icons to authors. And while knowing where all the swells in applause were on the Liza Minnelli Live at Carnegie Hall album – so I could grandly sweep from the hallway (backstage) into the living room (onstage) to take my bows – might be considered a tad disquieting in a sixteen-year-old, they were downright alarming when I was old enough to knock back a whisky sour.

And now, as a middle-aged man, they have, apparently, worsened. What was once (according to a therapist) an unconscious device to help me cope with alienation and discover my place in the world has now ballooned into what appears to be Dial 911-level psychosis. To the consternation of those around me, I now imagine myself to be Oprah – albeit a tall, gawky, deeply un-tan facsimile.

Of course, I’m not completely insane. Although my best friend Kirk does call himself Gayle, I am relatively certain that I am neither female, nor black, nor beloved. Yet I do believe that I have a life path similar to Oprah’s. Maybe I’m not supposed to spring free houses on deserving people, or pay for the secondary educations of 68,000 kids, or haul my fat out in a Radio Flyer on TV. But I do sorta think I’m supposed to encourage mankind to be their best selves, by simply sharing the ludicrous things I do and the lessons I glean when it all comes crashing down around me.

So, is this crazy? Should I be concerned?

For now, I think I’m just gonna keep on doing it and hope for the best. I figure that as long as I don’t start signing letters with a Big “O” or yelling at the president of Hermes when they won’t let me in after closing, I’m golden.

As a general rule, I do not endorse the act of falling off things as a method of personal growth. But I have to admit – sometimes, it does kinda work.

You see, I’ve always taken my body a bit for granted. I’m a busy guy, forever running to and fro as if in some alternate universe I’m actually important. And it is my nature to just assume that my body is along for the ride, a total team player when it comes to being tortured in ways that defy the Geneva convention. Like Super Dave Osborne or the I-have-no-other-talent stars of a Jackass movie , I think I’m invincible.

To my dismay, however, I just discovered that, apparently, I am not.

The weekend before last, I was in Palm Springs celebrating the birthday of a friend. When my best friend Kirk and I returned to the condo complex where my partner and I have a unit (which we rent out, since it’s worth roughly 7% of what we paid for it), I realized that I had forgotten the gate opener and could not get in.

This was not, unfortunately, the first time this had happened. My friend Kirk sighed with the exasperation of a vegan at Jimmy Dean’s house and said something to the effect of, “You are dumb as a stump.”  We waited a couple of minutes for someone to drive through so I could jump out and whisk through the gate; but no one came. And in my embarrassment at having forgotten the opener yet again, I said, “Ahh, I’ll just jump over the gate.”

After all, I’d done it before.

I used to have an actor acquaintaince who fell off his roof and was paralyzed – and in the sloooow process of recovery, became a much better person. And since that incident I’ve always said, “God, please don’t make me fall off a house to ‘get it’.”

But apparently, that is more or less what I needed to do.

As I climbed onto the massive gate opener arm and hoisted myself to the top of the 8-foot gate, I reminded myself not to let my legs swing too wildly, since I still had a big, fat bruise from the last time I’d tried this. Then, I threw my legs over the top of the fence. And that’s when everything began to go horribly wrong.

It was raining this night, and the iron was slippery, and when I swung my legs over the top, I lost my grip. My foot got caught in the bars of the gate.  And suddenly, I felt myself falling backwards, eight feet, and slamming onto the asphalt. On my back.

The wind was knocked out of me so badly that, for about 30 seconds, I couldn’t inhale. Kirk stood on the other side of the fence, unsure what to do. Scream? Call 911? Check with my lawyer to see what his share was?

I laid there on the pavement, gasping, as the gate slowly swung open and a car sailed through, turning sharply to avoid the body on the pavement (which was clearly an inconvenience for the driver, who couldn’t be bothered to wave).

Kirk ran through the open gate.

“Are you okay?”

I laid there, wiggling my hands and feet, pleased to note that I had not performed a full Christopher Reeve.

“I can’t breathe.”

Several hours later, following a full-body MRI and x-rays at the emergency room of Desert Regional Medical Center, I was given some terribly unearned good news: I had not broken anything or hemorrhaged. I did not have a brain injury (Kirk would argue this). What I did have was a lot of blunt force trauma on the tendons and muscles of my side and back that would require 3-4 weeks and a few fistfuls of Vicodin to heal.

And this healing time has, curiously, been a good thing. Because I now find myself being more aware of my surroundings and more careful within them. I’ve realized that I am not indestructible. And I find myself totally, incredibly grateful for this body I have. It may be long and gawky and not exactly a 10 on the Calvin Klein Underwear Model scale, but it works.  And I’m happy to be inside it, like an astronaut with a sparkly new spacesuit.

Of the many blessings I’m counting this holiday season, one of them is that – although I did have to fall off a roof, so to speak – I didn’t have to suffer the worst outcome to “get it”.

But just in case – remind me not to climb any ladders.

I love kids. I love my nephew, my partner’s niece, our friends’ kids, unsuspecting four-year-olds that I try to lure into my van with candy, all of them. They bring me joy, they light up my heart, they give me hope for a better world, because as pre-crack Whitney Houston once said, the children are our future.

Yes, I love kids. I’ve always loved kids.

But after what just happened, I think I may no longer love kids.

Last week, my partner and I (and 15 other friends) went on a cruise to Mexico. We’ve been on a number of cruises, mostly international ones that left out of places like London, Barcelona, etc., where the children on board numbered maybe 50.

This was a cruise to Mexico. Over Thanksgiving week. Leaving out of LA, where most of the schools gave kids the whole week off. And among the 3,500 passengers were at least 1,000 kids – of all ages, from roughly 15 minutes post-epidural to teens.

And all, seemingly, unsupervised.

Apparently, there’s an underground network of parents who know that if you take your kids on a cruise, you can be off getting hammered somewhere while they’re busy depositing bowls of cereal in the elevators, tearing through the adults-only pool area screaming like burn victims, and throwing up in the swimming pools.

After all, you can’t really lose them. Little kids are too short to fall overboard, and the older ones are too busy popping their zits in the hot tubs and hitting on each other in the buffet lines to try. And what better place to unload your offspring than into the arms of 998 other kids who would love nothing more than to try to either, a): beat them senseless with a floating noodle in the water park  or, b:) make out with them.

It appears that what I really should say is, “I love well-behaved kids.” “I love properly dressed kids.” I love sanitary, non-pukey kids.” “I love chaperoned kids.”

So, really, it seems quite clear to me that I do, in fact, love kids.

Provided we’re sailing on the Queen Mary.

In 1937.

My mother has been going through a rather dramatic extended illness this year, and at one point, I announced to my partner, “If I ever get this bad, just hit me over the head with a brick and call it a day.”

Of course, I was kidding. A brick is unwieldy, and most people don’t have them just lying around. Sleeping pills are the way to go – you can make pithy last-word proclamations, and then drift off attractively as your family members gather around you in a circle of love and light and start slipping off your jewelry.

Actually, I’ve always believed that even the most difficult of circumstances has lessons in it for everyone involved, annoying and inconvenient as they usually are. But when you watch someone you love lose almost everything that mattered to them, that idea gets tested more than a Jersey Shore castmate for brain damage.

My mother, who has always been an incredibly dynamic woman, now spends her days in one room of their house. She hasn’t seen the lower level of their home since Jesus rose from the dead last spring.

Although she has always preferred books and magazines to television, she now watches endless hours of the Food Network because, thanks to a wide variety of medications, she can barely read a watch without falling asleep.

She used to love sitting amidst the three acres of lawn and trees in their backyard, but the only trees she has seen since April are the ones whizzing by the car as Dad drives her to the doctor.

All her life she has worshipped a, shall we say, “orderly” house. (Growing up, our home was so disturbingly clean the CDC could have used it to store vaccines, and I used to have to rake myself into my bedroom at night so that our carpeting was a pristine, undisturbed meadow of shag.) Now, although a maid comes occasionally, Mother barely has enough energy to write her own name, much less a To Do list.

She loved to go to the Missouri wineries, some of which are quite beautiful (and which would provoke a Norm-from-Cheers response upon her arrival). Now wine interferes with her medications, and even one glass would likely turn her into a cast member of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Her hair is no longer perfectly coiffed. She wears no makeup. She sports no diamond rings or fashionable pantsuits. And this woman, who has always had a steel trap mind, will ask me three times, in the space of seven minutes, if she’s had her pills.

“You should have been here the other day,” she’ll say and begin to recount a story. One that occurred 20 minutes ago. While I was sitting there.

Yet, curiously, this formerly glamorous go-getter doesn’t seem to mind that everything that was once important to her has, at least for now, fallen away.

I, of course, initially ascribed this to the drugs. “She must be high as a hot air balloon, or she’d be really pissed.”

But as I’ve watched her very slowly improve, and she’s no longer stoned on drugs, I’ve realized that some of those things just aren’t so important to her any more. It seems that now, her happiness comes from her determination to enjoy each day, no matter how small the events, or how large the annoyances. (And when you go to the bathroom twenty times a day, the annoyances add up.) She’s enjoying the slow process of recovery, not the idea that, once she’s recovered, she’ll be happy.

Every Friday, Oprah’s Lifeclass show is about what Oprah calls “Joy Rising” – those moments of pure joy when something wonderful happens. And although I think we’d all agree that Oprah giving you a house could be considered “joy rising”, my mother seems to have discovered her own version. The diamond rings and trips to far-flung locales and a perfectly ordered house are no longer her joy. Her children coming to vist, my dad quietly holding her hand, or a really good episode of Paula Deen – that is some joy rising.

You know those sweet, toothless, double-wide dwelling hillbillies you see on newsmagazine reports who’ve gotten scammed out of their life savings?

As an extraordinarily compassionate human being, I used to cluck my tongue at these tragic situations and think, how sad that these idiots are foolish enough to hand their money over to some grifter. How ironic that they’re too clueless to see through the ludicrous promises of extravagant returns. How pathetic that they’re reckless enough to trust someone they barely know.

And as a benevolent and empathetic soul, my heart would break for these boobs.

And then I met Lloyd Belsmack (named changed to protect the guilty).

Lloyd is a commercial real estate developer who my sister – in her kind and trusting naiveté – got us involved with. Together with a couple other investors, we bought a piece of commercial property with the intent of building office condos.

Six years later, we’re nearing a trial date against Lloyd – and his posse of degenerate cohorts – for a scam that has cost us in the neighborhood of a half million dollars. And I’ve come to realize that: a) not everyone who gets swindled is a cousin-humping mouth-breather; b) they are, and I might as well buy a home with a steering wheel in the living room, knock out some molars and start humming the Deliverance theme, because I’m one of them; or c) even reasonably savvy folk can lose their shirt in a con.

Oprah’s Lifeclass topic the other night was on the power of forgiveness. Which was particularly ironic given that I’d written the latest $5,000 check to our attorney that day. Although I no longer spend countless hours envisioning Lloyd dying in a fiery – and highly entertaining – car crash, having to constantly deal with the court case, and having our (albeit wonderful) attorney attach an industrial vacuum to my savings causes the issue of forgiveness to continually to rear its ugly head.

Oprah says that forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could be any different. In other words, it’s the process of accepting that something happened exactly as it did.

But here’s the thing: when I first met Lloyd, my intuition – what I like to refer to as God whispering in my ear, although, since I’m deaf in one ear, I always hope he remembers to whisper into the right one – was screaming at me that there was something fishy about this guy. But, I didn’t listen.

So I guess I’ve had a little trouble accepting that things happened the way they did, because I’m mad that I didn’t listen to myself. If I could just get Doc to fire up the DeLorean and take me back to the future of 2005, I could save my sister and I a world of pain.

I’m really not angry at Lloyd anymore. I view him simply as the messenger of the lesson of forgiveness. (Don’t get me wrong, we still hope to have him living in a Kenmore box by the time we’re done, so that he doesn’t do this to anyone else.)

The thing that’s weird is that, apparently, it’s not really even Lloyd that I ever had to forgive…it’s myself. And that’s one bastard that REALLY doesn’t deserve it.