So I’m busy yesterday working on some music, when I hear a loud pounding on my front door. My dog Rage goes ballistic, and the knocking quickly becomes much more insistent, almost panicked. Something is obviously WRONG! Heart beating, I race to the front of my house, Rage running circles and screaming bloody murder at my feet, struggle with the lock for a moment, then finally manage to unhinge the old wooden beast. Imagine my utter shock and dismay when the door swings open to reveal my mailman, who immediately exclaims…

“I CAN’T BELIEVE ANNA NICOLE IS DEAD!”

Dead, kids… She’s no longer with us.

Now I’m not making fun of the fact the someone’s light as been prematurely snuffed out, I’m simply observing the fact that this news ROCKED my mailman’s world. In our day and age, I suppose that this kind of event does constitute SOME kind of newsworthiness, but my postal carrier has never gone nuts on my front door with exclamations of “I can’t believe a truck blast in Baghdad killed more than 120!” or “I can’t believe suicide amongst Australian farmers is at an all-time high!” or even “I can’t believe O.J. didn’t do it!” But we lost Anna Nicole yesterday, and he NEEDED to talk about it.

In his defense, it turns out that HE was Anna Nicole’s mailman. Apparently she lived up the street, and this guy is convinced it was the heroin. I can’t argue with him because I never looked into her bloodshot eyes, or imagined the hideous track marks hiding beneath the sleeves of her dirty bathrobe. He has. And he spent the next ten minutes or so telling me how it was the same thing with all the other “celebrities” on his route: Sam Kinison, Andy Griffith Jr., even Johnny Carson’s kid. It kinda made me feel sorry for my postman — I mean, this is the Entertainment Capital of the World, and those are the best celebrities he could come up with? What a lousy postal route.

On second thought, maybe I should be feeling sorry for MYSELF. Let’s be honest, I’ve been in L.A. for over ten years now and I’m still living in the same D+ Celebrity-infested neighborhood as the late Anna Nicole Smith, Sam Kinison, Andy Griffith Jr. and kid Carson. My career is obviously going nowhere fast, and if I don’t start self-destructing soon I may never make a name for myself in Valley Village. I think I owe it to my mailman to get all strung out and perhaps even consider dying in some alleged drug-related disaster. It would give him one more reason to deliver — and if Anna Nicole can do it, I gotta believe that anyone can!