A Place To Think, Read, Plot...

We all need a place to escape to. Even if it's in our own house.

This is a story about thinking, reading, writing — without actually writing (I’ll explain that later) and just plotting out a life. It takes place in a corner.

People who know me well understand that the furniture is not going to stay in the same place for more than six months. Unless, of course, I have found the ultimate understanding of the space, of form and function of everything in it and, very likely, there’s some kind of miraculous lunar event that I don’t know about. So, yeah, not a statistical probability. The furniture is going to be moved around. I don’t like things to be static.

It’s probably important to remind you that I work from home — this is my office. I worked from home every day for nine years for The Hollywood Reporter. I had that two year TV deal — again, at home. When the pandemic hit and then receded for 20 minutes and hit again and is now starting to recede again, all anyone in an office talks about is how their work-from-home life has changed or how and when they will be going back to the office. Me? The pandemic happened outside. I was already working from home, never going out. I was fine. (You know, other than the worrying about dying part.)

Anyway, I only really went into the office twice a week when I worked for the San Francisco Chronicle for a decade. One day I went in for my radio show and to be social and get mail. One day I went in to be social and then walk around San Francisco. I would sometimes go see a movie during the day. Looking for inspiration. It’s not lost on me that it was a good gig. I missed those two social days well before the pandemic hit.

That’s a long way of saying, I know a little something about working from home. Basically the last 11 years have been spent working and living in a flat in the Rockridge area of Oakland, California. If you do that, you move the furniture a lot or you go insane. Or maybe it’s just me.