WHAT’S SO FUNNY:Man lives in pod

I don’t often voluntarily exile myself from Laguna, but I’m going to have to be your New York correspondent for a few weeks.

I’m here in Manhattan because some people are making a low-budget independent film out of a book and screenplay I wrote some years ago.

It’s a longtime dream come true, with a few of the little dings that appear in your dreams when they become reality.

For instance, in Indie-land, low budget means just that. I remember clearly that in my original dream I didn’t have to pay for my room.

Also on the down side, I’m separated from Patti Jo, Katie and our spaniel, Booker.

Patti Jo drove me to the airport when I left. Booker looked at me mournfully from the back seat. He doesn’t even like it when one of us goes to the store. For him, this trip’s going to be a five-week slap in the face.

As I write this, I’m in a “single” in an economical Manhattan hotel called The Pod. I understood the name once I saw my room; it’s tiny. The hotel interior is done in a nice kind of Japanese-influenced techno style. I’m going to move into an apartment in a few days, but for now the bathroom’s down the hall.

This has taken some getting used to. On day one, I left my shampoo in the shower, which meant that on day two I had no shampoo. On day three I stepped out of the shower to find that I’d forgotten to bring the towels from my room. That was a wet walk.

But New York is lovely at the moment. The only jarring incident so far occurred on the ride into Manhattan from JFK. My cabbie was a young and erratic driver who, while turning a corner, very nearly hit a pedestrian in a business suit. The pedestrian shot the heel of his hand out to hit the cabbie in retaliation but wasn’t fast enough and stiff-armed my window instead, right in my face. Being an out-of-towner, I flinched.

All in all, though, people here are no more angry or bizarre than they are in, say, Los Angeles. A few of them snarl or launch into tirades, but you expect a little of that in any city. In fact, I’ve noticed a few tourists staring at me on the street, assuming I’m one of the colorful natives. It’s because I’m talking to myself again.

I’ve been walking around speaking as different characters from the film script, trying to fix lines I used to think were good. So I have an excuse to do it. In my spare time I’m scouting to see if New York offers any features we could use in Laguna. But what strikes me so far is that aside from the architecture and the subway, we already have a lot of the things they have here. We have our own theaters. We have our own galleries. And every summer we have our own 8 million people.