Yesterday, I woke up to go to a coworker’s apartment so we could carpool to a Saturday afternoon assignment. No big deal. No worries. Nothing out of the ordinary happened on the way there, sans the fact that I hit 75 mph on Los Angeles’ highway system.
Oh yeah, and I saw this scene in my driveway.
I might have been less taken off guard had I been in Ohio instead of the middle of a city with 6 million people in it (8 million or so in Los Angeles County), but even then, I lived in a suburban community bordered by farmlands. It still would have been kind of weird.
But the longer I live here, the more I realize unpredictable is the norm. Sense? What the hell does that word even mean?
That said, it’s more than welcome. Why does life always have to make sense? Why does a logical flow always need to exist? Does everything need a beginning and an end with something in between, no matter how brief?
Around here, days melt together with some sort of non-pattern that are seemingly only separated with identifiers we assign them. I’ve thought about it for a while, and life permitting (money and time), every day could be the same. That’s why, I’m sure, people with tons of money out here between acting gigs can so very quickly find themselves picking up bad habits — they become overwhelmed by the complacency of having nothing to do without a real day job, no real pattern that tomorrow is going to be different from today. If you had all the money in the world with a manager handling your day-to-day activities, if you forgot what day it was, how would you stave off such regular boredom? Me, I’d write. I’d figure out something to say and someone to whom it ought to be directed. Some people are a little weaker, and as I posted a few weeks back, if you don’t have a certain amount of grounding, Los Angeles will eat you alive without remorse.
Regardless, to me, this place makes no sense. Every day looking the same doesn’t make sense. Green grass with no rain doesn’t make sense. A high cost of living but all of the cheap restaurants around doesn’t make sense. Extreme unemployment for so many people with so much flourishing industry around here doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense, much less half the ridiculous laws you hear about here from smog checks without inspections (leaving many people driving around in half-functional Beetles from the 1960s) or a state billions of dollars in debt with the highest sales tax rate in the nation.
I can’t complain, though, as much as it all boggles me because it all has so little order to it that it always feels like a different adventure in a consecutive series. It feels like a sitcom with an unknown plot.
To segway into how the water around here seems to be getting to me, my high school class is having its fifth-year reunion coming up in two weeks. My senior prom date commented on the event’s Facebook page that she would be in another place and couldn’t make it, to which I “liked” her comment. Not that I don’t think it’s cool that she’s finding something of a track in life that makes her busy such that she cannot attend — that was one of the reasons I chose to randomly endorse her comment. As much as I made a few long-lasting friends in high school, I find that the further the separation I have from high school, the more I find that today is what defines me. Yesterday was just training for tomorrow. But to defy all philosophical reasoning, just because I could, I “liked” her comment simply because I could. It didn’t make sense, but why did it have to, I thought?
The “New York Minute” out east is some kind of staple of torture back there. Somewhere in the Midwest is the same sort of pressure of making sure all the trains run on time. Out West, though, it’s some kind of mash of order and organization with a pragmatic grip on life that if you’re not entertaining and being entertained, the returns returns on the quality of life diminish quickly. Things get done, and they get done well, but to someone trained on an East or Midwest schedule, this place can be nerve-racking in that it doesn’t make one iota of sense at times with regard to order or pacing.
But — and I’m learning this slowly, bracing through my own strain on why things don’t move faster — who really cares? Life would be so much more pleasurable if we took the moments as the come, savored the little things, took chances just to see what happened, and woke up each day with the idea that every day was its own gift.
I’m getting the impression that it’s best to let it make no sense initially and find sense somewhere in the midst of it, to leave preconceptions by the wayside. Either that or carry them and walk away from the show a little disappointed that it didn’t live up to where it was expected to be.
I really have no idea if anything I’ve written tonight makes sense. I really don’t care, either. It’s my blog; I can do that. But what I do know is that you can either live your life actively or passively (such is the case, as I just discovered, with a bunch of sentences in this post tonight — oops), with an excitement for what comes next or a disappointment that what just happened felt as logical as a plotline in a Pauly Shore movie. Sometimes it’s just best to walk into a situation with a smile and an open mind and just see what happens.
Things That Rhyme with 'Cars' 