The other day on my return flight I caught myself looking at my watch and thinking for a moment about the British Empire. (Actually, that was my second thought. My first thought was a variation on “Are we there yet?”)

What got me thinking was how freakin’ huge this watch is. As one online listing says, this “stunning, high quality men’s Fishbone watch is SERIOUSLY CHUNKY!” and has “a mega large round dial (case diamter approx 42mm wide / 12mm thick).”

This news bit, which ran in the LA Times, was sent in by my longtime friend Darrell, a fellow thespian and fisherman.

LOS ANGELES — A pedestrian died and at least two other people suffered apparent minor injuries Wednesday in a collision that occurred when a motorist ran a red light, police said.
The accident involving a black pickup truck and another vehicle occurred on westbound Santa Monica Boulevard at Cotner Avenue at 2:35 p.m., said Brian Ballton of the city fire department.
The pedestrian, a 40-year-old man, died at the scene.
Police said the accident was caused when a driver ran a red light and smashed into another vehicle, which spun out of control and hit the pedestrian.
The Department of Water and Power was called because live wires were down, police said.

The pedestrian who died was his friend and fishing buddy Brett. As Darrell says, “It was, apparently, a day in the life of Los Angeles.” Out for a walk one minute, dead the next, leaving behind a wife and small children.

This is a reminder that death lurks around the corner for all of us. Some of us get to see it coming; some of us don’t. But it’s always there.

Be grateful for what you’ve got while you’ve got it.

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.

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.

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.

Forthwith follows further evidence of the decline in testosterone among my gender.

Almost 100 years ago, Ernest Shackleton and his crew braved the Antarctic for two years almost completely without supplies once the pack ice closed in crushed their ship.

Today over on msnbc.com, reporter Miguel Llanos writes about his own voyage to the antarctic. He begins by complaining about his lost luggage, and about having to try on different cold-weather clothes. Men, read it here and weep.

Today is the 50th birthday of my good friend Doug Hackney.

I met Doug at the Inc. magazine conference in 2001. October of 2001. We were among the few who were “brave” enough to travel to a conference that soon after September 11th. Over a drink at the end of the conference we talked for an hour and a half not about business, but about life and the state of the world — and five years later we’re still having that conversation.

In thinking about what to get Doug, it occurred to me that Doug doesn’t need a damn thing. (Most of us don’t.) Visit his website at hackneys.com and you’ll see that he and his wife Stephanie are world travelers who actually want fewer things, not more. So I figured for his 50th I would just let him know how much I’ve enjoyed that conversation, and how much I admire his dedication to living his own life the way he wants, and helping people wherever and whenever he can. They call it “exploring the world and meeting its people.”

At the top, you see a photo of Doug from last year in the seat of a Kubota tractor clearing debris from the wreckage of people’s homes in Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Below are Doug, Steph, and a friend, after clearing wreckage for a grandmother and her two granddaughters.

Doug is good people. Happy 50th.

Dave Cockrum, co-creator of the new X-Men, died this morning from the effects of diabetes. (Here is the posting from his friend Clifford Meth.) Cockrum, with writer Len Wein, created the characters of Storm, Colossus and Nightcrawler, relaunching the moribund X-Men and building a new dynasty for Marvel Comics.

I knew Dave Cockrum. As a boy I would see him at comic conventions and interview him for fanzines. I remember during his stint on X-Men, which was initially bi-monthly, that he once told me that Marvel would like to make the book monthly but that he didn’t think he could make the deadlines. I remember thinking, “Uh oh” — and soon thereafter Marvel replaced Cockrum with John Byrne.

Cockrum also told me that Storm was his fantasy woman and that Nightcrawler was he himself. At the time, being raised in the household I was being raised in, it seemed incredible to me that this white man was fantasizing about this black woman. Fantasizing about being a teleporting obsidian elf with a tail and cloven feet didn’t faze me.

Several years later when I was in my late teens, I put on my own comic-book convention. Here was my thinking: my business partner and I were selling comic books every weekend at comics shows and making money doing that — how much harder could it be to run the convention, too, and make money not just at our table but from admission and renting tables to other dealers? Not hard at all, it turned out.

To guarantee attendance at the con, we needed a comics celebrity. I called Marvel Comics and asked for Dave Cockrum. He was no longer drawing X-Men — in fact, I can’t remember what he was drawing — but he agreed to do the show, and here’s what I agreed to pay him: the cost of a round-trip train from Manhattan to New Jersey (around ten bucks), and lunch. I promptly slapped Dave Cockrum’s names all over our flyers and ads, sold all the dealers’ tables in advance and for the first time in my life, I made money before walking out the door (with the admission fees still to come in). It was a great feeling.

About 150 fans showed up for the show, which we named Escape (bouncing off the name of the Creation Con, a name that made no sense whatsoever to me — weren’t comic books about escapism?). All day long, Dave sat at his table and patiently answered fans’ questions and sold original artwork and pencilled sketches. He was incredibly gracious. I sent out a hireling even younger than myself to buy Dave his preferred lunch: Burger King. Total investment in his attendance: $13.

At the end of the day, Dave had made about $3000. I was astonished. Even now I’m astonished. That’s $3000 in circa 1980 dollars. At the time it seemed like enough money to retire on. He asked me if we were going to do another Escape Con and told me he’d be glad to come back. I wanted to, but my partner told me in a very snippy tone, “You can do that if you want to, but I’m not.” Maybe I should have kept it going, but other things began to intrude, like college, and theatre, and an even greater focus on writing, so that by the mid-80’s when I was no longer selling comics and had stopped writing about them for The Comics Journal, comic books were becoming less important to me.

It’s difficult to explain just how much of a star Dave Cockrum and artists and writers like him were to me, or how important the relaunch of X-Men was. It’s sad to read of his death, and sadder still to read that he was stuck in a VA hospital for so long and with such financial problems until Marvel finally agreed to help out the artist who, perhaps more than any other, is responsible for the remarkable resurgence of their comics, both on the page and on the screen. Although for a long time they figured they didn’t owe him anything, they finally realized they owed him a lot. Just as I do.

According to Skeptic magazine’s Michael Shermer in today’s LA Times, you’re a racist too. And so am I. And so is he.

So does this finally answer a question posed by many (including me, in my play “Animals”): Given our animal nature, are we doomed to behave like animals?

I guess the answer would be yes.