Sure, I pretend to be cultured now, but here’s who I really am. This is me out in the wild, so to speak.

I’ve known these guys for 20 years or more. Thank God they haven’t changed one bit.

The Black Cat Inn has, though, for good and ill. As Paul (in the middle, in the yellow shirt) immediately pointed out as we pulled into the parking lot, “Oh my God, they cleaned up the Black Cat!” For one thing, it was now paved. No more transmission-challenging foot-deep gravel ruts, and in a way that was a shame. Moreover, you can’t smoke a cigar in the joint anymore! Well, blame the State for that.

After decades as a gloomy dungeon, the Cat has been transformed into a brightly lit amusement pit with too many flatscreen TV’s and way too much mismatched bric-a-brac. Note the odd assembly of replica sports trophies, toy cars, vintage etched glass, and Hollywood press photos. Huh? And, naturally, the wine card offering wine in “any flavor.” The Waldorf Astoria it isn’t. It seems perfect that I wore my Orlando’s Joint t-shirt, because while it’s stylish, it also doesn’t fit in.

Something else that’s changed: Rolling Rock, our college beer of choice. Ski (guy on the left) noted that you had to specifically order a “Latrobe, PA” Rolling Rock or you ran the risk of getting one of the new Anheuser Busch-brewed models — and trust us, you don’t want that. (I guess now they’ll have to switch their tagline from “Same as it ever was.” And now more than ever the Talking Heads song is a period piece.)

Closing thought. On the left is Rich, a mail carrier, and on the right is Joe, a mortician. In other words, these are the sort of “responsible authority figures” you find in these parts.

Guys like this remind me that given my druthers I’d be up in the woods right now in a pickup truck and with a cigar and an imminent poker game. And with a Latrobe Rolling Rock. Same as it ever was.

…of the cultural locus that is my home town of Galloway Township, New Jersey, whence I just returned:

Exhibit A, the wine listing from the Black Cat Inn, my old crowd’s favorite hangout and locally renowned “old man bar.” Look closely and you’ll see that next to various labels, such as Sutter Home and Kendall Jackson, they list the classes of wine available as “any flavor.”

You just can’t make these things up.

A tip of the wineglass to Paul Crist for pointing this out over lunch.

The “newshole” is the space in a newspaper that editorial fits into. There must be less and less at the LA Times, given the space devoted to corrections. (Please note, before you click that link:  Fix yourself a sandwich first. You’ll be reading for a while.)

In the 1980’s our extended group of college friends would go visit “The Cabin” for long weekends at a time. The Cabin, always discussed in hushed reverence or high ebullience or a strange combination of both, was a hunting lodge partially owned by my father and deep in the wilds of the Pine Barrens, far from a paved road or the strictures of civilization. It was a place removed from telephones, television, and all routine responsibility that wasn’t somehow connected with convening in the woods for three days (i.e., digging a new trash pit, cooking gritty chicken over an improvised grill perched too low over the sand, and drinking about one case of beer each). Even writing this post about it gives me a frisson of excitement.

Currently I’m reading “Drop City” by T.C. Boyle about a group of hippies in 1970 who drop out in California and form a commune, and then drop further out, into Alaska.

A moment while I reflect on how much I’ve always despised the hippie mystique. Granted, it wasn’t my generation, but the veneration of drug-addled layabouts is decidedly contra to my own convictions. The world has things that need to be done. Sure, we would go have a Cabin Weekend for three days as a release mechanism, but we returned. Already some of us were business owners; on the final Cabin Weekend, some of us were parents with babies in tow.

What has been truly eye-opening about “>Drop City — in addition to Boyle’s mellifluous prose and riveting storyline and characters — is how little thought any of us ever gave to disaster. Looking back 20 years later, I now think that we were courting potential disaster every weekend. My friends and I were upright citizens of the woods, so we never had anything to fear from each other except mishap. But we had an open-door policy: Anyone who showed up was invited in. Deep in the woods, that sort of thinking doesn’t always serve you well.

Down the path and past the runoff across the cranberry bog was a large open flat space deep with white sand. Occasionally groups would show up there while we happened to be on the other side of the water at the Cabin. One time the group that arrived were the Hell’s Angels. Were they the true California Hell’s Angels? If not, they were certainly close kin. We could hear them and they could hear us. At the Cabin, everyone grew worried. We were outnumbered, and it would be nothing for this group to overtake us if they wanted. I’ll never forget the look in my the eyes of my then-girlfriend (now wife) when I picked up a sixpack of Old Milwaukee and headed for the door with my best friend Ski in tow. “Where are you going?” she said. “To say hello and welcome them to the neighborhood,” I said and walked out. Because really, what choice did we have?

At the Cabin, it transpired that one could greet a motorcycle gang with a six-pack, sit by the fire briefly and chat, make nice, and leave untroubled. Things don’t work out this way in “Drop City.” The power of fiction is in making you reflect on your life in a new way. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing while reading this book: looking back on Cabin Weekends as a time when we were consistently very very lucky.

Worry not, I’m still alive. I’ve just been crushed by the weight of the calendar. I knew it was coming, and considered posting the famous can of soup that shows you’re going to be absent from your blog, but then figured no, instead I’d go into deep silence like a submarine.

But now I’m resurfacing.

So, what has demanded even more of my time than before?

• End of semester at USC. Which in my case meant reading something like 1600 pages of script in less than a week. What was truly amazing was that, even after all that marathon reading, one of my students’ plays had me laughing all the way through. (And that was a good thing.)
• Directly related: planning for next semester. New course descriptions, paperwork, errata. New syllabi still to be written.
• Finishing the first draft of my new full-length play, “Safehouse,” to meet a deadline. Is it any good? I don’t know — but you can find out right along with me in late January when Moving Arts gives it a reading at the Hudson Theatre in Hollywood. More to come on that. And now I can return to my other play, “Duck Blind,” which I had thought all along would be the one I’d finish and submit.
• Traveling to New Jersey (where I am now). Why? Well, to visit 81-year-old mom, but also to replenish the stock of ShopRite Iced Tea Mix, which my family and I have been quaffing all our lives. We had run out! More about this potent elixir another time, but let me note this: Its mystic powers are so protected and exclusive that one cannot even find a photo of it on the web to post here! Someone who could navigate the trade byways to export it directly to the west coast could retire like a pasha. It is so cherished that in 1994 Joe Stafford stuffed something like 126 cannisters of it into his hearse and drove it across the country to us. In return, we let him stay with us for a month. Rent free!
• And, of course, wrapping up all sorts of things so that I could actually take this trip. That meant compacting two weeks’ scheduled work into one.
• Plus, let’s not forget, the ongoing new-car saga, which took me to the LA Auto Show, where I actually got to see the phantasmagoric Mustang that Lisa emailed me about.
• There’ve also been the usual recent things: working on my book, leading my workshops, writing for clients, reading funny books, daily ablutions, and so forth.

But now I’m back. Not physically. But virtually. And I have something to say in the next post about the book I’m reading.

I am adding this helpful photographic identification of that thing we identify as a hypocrite because, as Matthew says, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” What we have here is someone who this week is being lauded as a wise sage, a welcome realist now returned to save us.

Except we should remember him differently: as the person perhaps more responsible than any other for having gotten us into a war against those who did not attack us. How did he do that? It began six years ago by his personally orchestrating the theft of an election. That’s where it all started.

Realist? Sage? No. Hypocrite and fraud.

That he is pictured standing before an icon that some of us think is meant to represent high ideals is just a further affront.

My niece Lisa thinks this tricked-out special edition car should be my new Mustang. Other uncles might be too proud to accept such a fine gift for Christmas, but knowing what a significant role I played in Lisa’s formative years, how could I turn her down? (Although this means I guess I have to get her something, too. Maybe a Mustang calendar.)

Meanwhile, Ed the car broker tells me that I can indeed have the car I want — if I order it specially built from the factory. When possible, I like to get what I want, so I’m going to do that. And I’ll park it next to the tricked-out gift from Lisa. And she can ride in either one whenever she comes to visit and kicks in for gas.

Finally, Doug, who still hasn’t read his reading list or commented on it (even though dozens of complete strangers have downloaded it and are now having far more fulfilling cocktail chatter as a result), is inspired by the vision of this man who built a one-third, perfectly running Porsche — to display in his dining room. Click here for the video.

A tip of the hat to Timothy Noah at Slate for catching this very bad writing at the New York Times. I don’t think the Times is the be-all and end-all; I also don’t think any writer is immune from this sort of glib error. But it’s important to put people on notice; we all write to be read (or seen), and if we don’t expect criticism we don’t deserve accolades, and we shouldn’t be writing. Assumptions need to be grounded, and as Noah points out, the comparison here in no way holds up.

Here’s something they haven’t covered on Jericho: How to power small appliances with tomato soup.

All right, so in answer to several questions, it’s a 2007 Mustang convertible that I’m shopping for. It would look like the one above, except not red. (Probably either black or Vista Blue Metallic.) I love red. So why not get red? Because my current Mustang convertible, which looks much like the one above, is red. (And oddly enough, given what they say about red muscle cars, I’ve never gotten one speeding ticket in it.) I think that if you’re going to spend the money to buy a new car, you at least want everyone to see that you’ve bought a new car. A new car of the same make and model and color that has a slight change in body style and maybe an additional stripe isn’t likely to make quite the statement — and like it or not, we all know those statements mean something. Especially in LA.

The person I’m most making a statement to is me, so it’s really for me that I’m changing colors. And a few other things. I actually considered changing cars (this will be my third Mustang convertible in a row), but then I looked at other convertibles and drove the new Mustang, and my heart was set.

Problem is, I am set on some features that seem incompatible. Or so they tell me.

The top photo here is the red leather interior for a Mustang convertible. The bottom photo is for a two-tone red-and-black leather interior for a Shelby Mustang convertible. I’m trying to get a non-Shelby Mustang, but still with that two-tone interior, either red and black if I get a black exterior, or dove (a bluish white) and black if I get the blue exterior. Wish me luck with that.

The big change is I’m requesting GPS with Bluetooth. There are two reasons for this. The first is, all my many apparent gifts aside, I am directionally challenged. I know downtown Los Angeles very well. Eighteen years of going to obscure areas in the dead of night will do that. Put me on the West side, or anywhere in the “West Valley” (with place names like “Tarzana,” “North Hills,” and so forth, places I’m not sure I’ve even been to) and I’m lost. Increasingly, I’ve been finding myself in such places or trying to find my way from Santa Monica on the west side to either downtown or Burbank (where both my office and my house are), and desperate to find some mystic route that no one else on our clogged lanes has somehow discovered. I’m tired of looking to find a place to pull over and consulting my Thomas Guide. Plus, I’m looking forward to having Mr. T tell me how to get places.

The other reason is that increasingly I’m on my cellphone while driving. California passed a no-hands law that takes effect July 1, 2008. By “no-hands,” that doesn’t mean they want you to drive with no hands — although I certainly see a lot of that, from people reading magazines behind the wheel to ubiquitous young office workers applying eyeliner on the 405. No, that means your cellphone must be “no hands.” The fine is only $20, but that’s not the point. The point is that with Bluetooth my car will be connected to my smartphone and I won’t have to fiddle with it while driving.

Although I’m buying the car through my car broker Ed, I’ve spent some time (too much time) on Ford’s website and at local dealers looking at models. Ford hasn’t made this easy. For one thing, some of these options seem needlessly exclusionary (get the frimmistat and you can’t have the frammistat; if I don’t want, say, a sport racing stripe, why does the system automatically replace the leather seats with cloth?). For another, as Ed says, there are about 2500 options. After deciding on a couple of packages I would be happy with, I tried to convey these to Ed over the phone but after going through the various permutations of options we finally agreed it would be easier for me to email it. He said he’s going through this with two other clients right now. Ed is one of the smartest guys I know — he’s the only person I’ve met who passed my “Name the original Three Stooges test” — and he said Ford just has too many options and they aren’t making it easy to buy their cars.

(Note to Ford: Perhaps you should simplify your offerings and sell more cars. Take a page from Mr. Jobs, who upon his return scrapped about 16 competing Macintosh Performa systems and created the easy-to-buy iMac.)

So I’ve sent the options to Ed, and he’s got until Monday to find this car for me. After which I’ll be back East for a week, and then he’s got until January 7th. (The sooner the better.)

In the meantime, all this time and effort spent on car shopping and debating decals and stickers that add or subtract $500 here or there has increased my eagerness to be driving this new car, and also my awareness that simultaneously 2.8 billion people on this planet subsist on less than two dollars a day. Somehow or other every day almost everyone I know is living that contradiction.