August 4, 2002
Dr. Love
Way back in the past, deep behind the veils of time, I went through
a period where, in addition to my day job, I sidelined as a working
journalist. I worked as a stringer for several local papers; I covered
high school sports for the L.A.
Times, City Council meetings for the Pasadena
Weekly, Glendale/La Canada community events for the (now gone)
Foothill Leader, and edited at least one Special Edition for
the Leader. Nothing much is left of those days, at least not
in my records. Somewhere around here, slowly fading in a cat-pee-stained
cardboard box, is a copy of the Weekly with me posing nude on
the cover holding a strategically placed folder labled "Taxes"
as an illustration for an IRS piece they did, but that’s it for,
um, hard copies of my journalistic excellence. But I also wrote a column for the Weekly. An advice column on
dating, if you can believe that: Calling Dr. Love. Yes, it’s
true: I was Dr. Love. Stop laughing. I was Dr. Love and I dispensed Prescriptions for Love on a weekly basis.
The column ran in conjunction with the paper’s personal ads and
part of my job was to pick an ad each week, interview them, and give
them a little write-up in the column. It was about as lame as it sounds
-- and the ads were even lamer. This was back in the pre-Dawn era of the Internet. BBSes were the big
thing back then – for geeks, that is. "Normal" people
thought a bulletin board was something you stuck thumbtacks in. The
‘Net was still several years away yet. But we did have modems by
then – 1200 baud was smokin’ fast – and I was able to
submit my columns electronically. I still have those columns. Just recovered them from a dusty stack
of 3.5 floppy diskettes, in fact. Cleaned them up, edited out the lame
interviews with the lame personal ad writers, coded them into HTML,
set up a Dr. Love lounge for the site, uploaded them to deadpan. Thought
it might be fun to put them out there again. So let’s set the Wayback Machine for 1992, shall we? Come, Sherman,
the Doctor is in.