I have a writing office about a half hour from my house that I’ve written about here: It’s a great old studio lot, with a great history, and wonderful framed pictures of stars so unknown today they might as well have been famous in ancient Greece. It’s still active, and several shows shoot there, like “True Blood”, but mainly it’s filled with writers and editors, and this feels right to me. You can just feel writing when you walk on the lot. (Procrastinating, too, but mostly writing.)

A writer friend told me about it when I was looking for a place, and I told another writer friend about it when he was looking, and so on. One of them pitched a show he wrote last week, the other is pitching today. And so it goes, the business of shows, of stories.

I met a handful of writers I know just walking around the first day, and I love to walk around old studios, especially ones like this that aren’t that busy anymore.

Walking around an old studio, to me, is like hikers seeing Yellowstone: I really feel perfectly at home in them. There’s nothing to see, really, on a lot that’s not that busy, that’s not what I mean in this case. I love seeing things made, and the hustle and bustle of lots and stages, but that’s not what appeals to me about old lots; it’s something else.

If you squint just a little on an old lot, and tilt your head at an old, empty end of a parking lot under a tree, and listen closely, you can almost hear the handbrake being pulled up on a Dusenberg as it lurches to a stop in front of an ornate building, and Clark Gable gets out with two laughing actresses.

The whole studio is just across Formosa Avenue in Hollywood, and just the other side of the street is a bar called The Formosa.

For those who don’t know, the name Formosa comes from Taiwan, the Chinese Republic, a country that might have, in quainter days, been called Free China, but certainly not today, when six dollar hammers and twelve dollar sneakers are so important to us we’ll all just look the other way and pretend we still have pride as our craftiest, amoral businessmen and most perfectly craven politicians on both sides rush to the mainland to kiss their hems with one hand while they slip them the odd missile secret or two with the other.

I used to think I was helping something by always checking the label of Disney t-shirts for the kids and silverware and bicycles for “Made in China” and not getting it — for getting the twenty dollar hammer instead, made somewhere else — but the products are so ubibiquitous, like sand in a sandstorm getting in everywhere, and I still check, but it’s getting pointless. The sneakers I’m wearing, from a famous American company, were made in China, and I got them the other day because I needed sneakers, and didn’t feel like taking an extra half hour in the store to track down the salesman to ask for a pair made in — where? — instead.

Really, where? Where would be better? Pakistan? Egypt? Mexico? Malaysia?

The exquisite irony is that most Americans eat Chinese food and are always looking for a great, new Chinese restaurant, and are always thinking, “Boy, Chinese food would be great tonight,” and the one thing I may be sure of is that this delicious cuisine, one of the best in the world, not only has no resemblance to anything people actually eat in China, but is run by families who have escaped or emigrated from there, and are the happiest, best capitalists we have.

So it goes.

I’m writing this today, though, because I was working late in the office late last night, and walked to the car past The Formosa (the bar, remember). It’s one of the oldest and most storied places in a city that has very few old and storied places left. The old joke with boarding houses along the East Coast of America used to be that they all had signs that said, “George Washington slept here.” The equivalent in Los Angeles would be bars with the sign “Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne drank here.”

But they did. And for good or ill, those folks cold really drink.

So I passed the Formosa on my way to the car last night and thought about going in, but as many mistakes as I may still make about drinking, walking in alone to a bar on a Tuesday night, last night, wasn’t one of them.

I have a good drinking story about The Formosa, and I was there for it, but it doesn’t involve me, and it’s not what you may think. I’ll tell you tomorrow.

REMEMBER: IF YOU WALKED OUT OF BED TODAY AND WENT TO A PLACE WHERE YOU HAD A NICE DAYDREAM, AND SHOOK YOUR HEAD AND WENT BACK TO WORK… AND DIDN’T STOP IN FOR A DRINK? FOLKS, THE GAME’S OVER, AND YOU’VE WON. (AT LEAST FOR THAT DAY.)