When my mother died, the social worker at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles where she passed away gave my dad a brochure for a spousal loss therapy group. Since I just happened to be the last sibling to leave town to go back home, my dad suggested we go together. On the following Tuesday night, we drove back to the hospital where my mom died to meet with a dozen widows and widowers. The grief counselor asked my dad to introduce himself and talk about my mother, which he did lovingly and with a smile on his face the entire…

Written by Robert Schwartz

While most kids growing up wanted to be a cop or an astronaut, Jason Porta wanted to be a sitcom writer. Jason didn’t just watch TV shows, he waited for the credits to see who wrote or produced the series, then memorized the names. Eleven minutes after graduating from college, he gassed up his car, moved to Los Angeles, and got his first job faster than it takes most other writers to even secure an agent.

Jason’s career ended up being a classic case of fits and starts which happens when scripters make poor choices in writing rooms and alienate…

At 8:40 PM on November 8, 2016, as the presidential election results were pouring in, I turned off the television and have not watched broadcast or cable news since. While I would not equate this to quitting drugs or alcohol, it’s pretty damn close.

Once upon a time, I had an unhealthy addiction to cable news. I’m not talking about a few hours in the evening or on the weekends. I mean from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to sleep, the sweet sounds of CNN, MSNBC, and my beloved Fox News filled the room with…

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“Excuse me. Could you please repeat that?”

“I didn’t understand you. What was the second part of what you asked?”

Prior to marrying my wife, every friendship of significance in my life had been with a woman — but platonically. These relationships consisted of girls I worked with, friends of friends, or women I dated briefly before discovering that we just didn’t work as a couple. I was “the hang out guy,” “the buddy,” “the wing man,” before that last term became ubiquitous and annoying.

I also had girlfriends. But, those were mostly knotty…

“He’s 22,” the vet told my wife and me, “it’s time to let him go.”

When our cat Santo recently died, my wife Evin and I had been in denial about his behavior those last few days — the not eating, not playing, the hiding. We had thought the vet would examine him, prescribe something, and we’d be off to dinner with friends.

Three of us went to the vet that Saturday afternoon, but only two came home. …