Bill Maher had a girlfriend when he was 16? I didn’t do the deed until I was 18, and that was because a girl had put the moves on me, not vice versa. I was so beset by insecurity and low-self-esteem in my teen years I could barely function socially. Movies had been my only escape from the time I was eight or nine, and then I coupled that with serious weekend drinking (100 proof vodka!) when I turned 15 or thereabouts.

I didn’t feel even half-confident in a sexual sense until I was 22 or 23, but once I knew how to turn that key I became a shameless hound. (Not a predator but a hound — there’s a difference.) Before long I was batting .400 or better, and that streak lasted throughout the rest of my 20s and into my 30s, and then re-ignited in the ’90s after Maggie divorced me.

“Entirely Natural and Inevitable,” posted on 10.1.22: HE’s big office romance…I’m sorry, I meant to say the emotionally devastating extra-marital affair that I fell into during my time as an in-office freelancer at People magazine and which continued until her husband found out a couple of years later…it was almost the emotional death of me. (The actual span was between early ’98 and the early fall of ’00…call it 32 months.) No relationship had ever brought so much heartache, hurt or frustration. Graham Greene and Tom Stoppard had nothing on us. I was a man of almost constant sorrow. I was so upset by one of our arguments that one afternoon I made a reckless left turn on Pico Blvd. and got slammed by a speeding BMW, and for weeks I told myself it wasn’t really my fault — it was the married girlfriend’s. Definitely a form of insanity.