Whether

Wow, what a glorious day it was here in the City of Angles (not a typo). I walked to the dayjob under a sky so blue that it felt like I had only just discovered what blue was, and everywhere the trees were that perfect tree-ish green, and the little flowers were whatever colors the little flowers were, and the smog was only a distant haze burning my eyes all day long. It's the sort of day when you are happy to be taking a nice long walk, happy for the perfect degree of coolness in the air, happy that Thanksgiving is just a week away, happy to be living in a place like L.A., downright happy just to be alive.

And then I waited endlessly at an intersection for a traffic light to change, gave up, walked to the next light and waited endlessly for that one; a driver nearly mowed me down because she was looking the other way as she approached an intersection I was crossing; my shoelaces just wouldn't stay tied; and I tripped on a bump in the sidewalk, sending me galumphing forward ungracefully. The nice mood instilled in me by the nice weather, it was just as quickly gone.

They are fragile things, these moments of beauty. The weather itself is, obviously, mutable--just ask anyone anywhere along the gulf coast. But beauty itself is just as transitory (I once met a Hollywood actress, beautiful in her day, whose face betrayed all the ravages not of time itself, but of trying to defeat time). Photographs yellow and curl, books flake or burn, paint fades, marble chips, mountains crumble, the oceans dry up and eventually the universe contracts. Will Shakespeare be forgotten, five hundred years from now? More to the point: will I ever stop caring that I can't keep my shoelaces tied?

The older I get, the more I appreciate sand painting. I remember my days as a stage actor, and the fact that the best performance I ever gave was for an audience of maybe 100 people, only a few of whom probably remember it, and that no record of that performance exists in any form whatsoever. Now I'm moving into the film world, where a performance does not disappear the moment it is complete, but even so, this city is awash with film preservation organizations fighting against the inevitable aging of the old nitrates used in film. Is a DVD really as durable as they tell us?

My friend the Buddhist would surely say this: the moment of beauty I enjoyed this morning was exactly what it was, a moment of beauty, entirely sufficient unto itself. The moment of annoyance when I tripped on the sidewalk was what it was, entirely sufficient unto itself. Be here now, live the moment, and don't forget to breathe. Treat everything I do as if it were a sand painting, and don't get caught up in believing it will ever be more than that.

Yep, that's what he would say all right. And I would smile and nod and know that I am far more likely to let the moment of annoyance linger, to forget the taste of beauty in the air, to daydream of the lasting appeal of the screenplays I write. Knowing all the while that my Buddhist friend is right, but still trapped into being a product of a certain time, a certain place, a certain way of life that has never been about Now except in the sense of I Want This Now!

Just another go-get-'em day here in the U.S. of A.