Riding the Thermals

Note: This one is from the archives, with the dust blown off and a bit of tinkering, first posted a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away — just one among many that won’t make the book, but lives here to see the light one more time.

It was nice while it lasted back on the home planet, where lush green meadows were sprinkled with wild purple irises standing tall above a blue mist of Forget-Me-Nots. The air came off the bay cool and crisp, filtering through the trees with the intoxicating scent of pine and bay. A brief taste of a better world ... but all too soon it was time to crawl back through the wormhole across the vast Central Valley, then up and over the Grapevine before sinking into the aptly-named LA Basin and the Doomed City of the Future where, as usual, it was hot, smoggy, crowded, and dirty.

Hell-Lay indeed.

Those who know me understand that I often use surfing metaphors to describe the life of a Hollywood freelancer: waiting for a wave (being unemployed), catching a wave (getting a job), and – one of these days, inshallah – riding a wave big enough to carry me all the way onto the warm sunny beach of retirement. Translation: a hit multi-camera sitcom that will run for eight or nine years.

That might not happen, but hope dies last in this bleak urban desert, where I keep my fingers crossed each and every day.*

I’m not actually a surfer, mind you. Although I did my share of body surfing down along the Mexican coast back in the day, and had a wobbly blast on borrowed longboards in Santa Cruz a couple of times while in school, I never found the time to fully plumb the surfing experience. I really do regret that, but looking back over the years, there are many things I’d rather have done differently. I suppose anybody who lives long enough will end up dragging their own elephant train of regrets behind them, but chewing the wish-I’d-done-that bone does no good. Hey, at least I got a taste of surfing, which was great: managing to catch and briefly harness the immense power of even a small ocean wave is a uniquely heady sensation, and something you never forget.

Thus the metaphors.

Staring out at those rolling green hills back home, I watched big black turkey vultures rise into the air every morning, carving lazy circles through the powder blue sky in their search for carrion: dead skunks, raccoons, and the stiff, bloated carcasses of deer lying by the side of the road. Animals often cross the path of cars up here in chance encounters the creatures always lose … but their loss is the vulture’s gain in Mother Nature’s bloody and ruthlessly efficient recycling system. Like it or not, life and death are joined at the hip, each walking in the shadow of the other as the great wheel keeps rolling along.

Those big birds are fascinating to watch, gliding effortlessly through the air on six-foot wingspans with little apparent effort. They’ve learned to catch the warm currents of rising air — thermals — as invisible elevators into the sky. When a thermal peters out or the bird decides the altitude is right, it banks to one side and sails off, hunting the ripe scent of rotting flesh hundreds of feet below. By riding the thermals, they’re in effect surfing the wind.

So here’s another metaphor to describe the freelance Hollywood life: riding the thermals of gainful employment until each job plays out, then gliding on in search of another. But even the best metaphors only go so far, and I can live without eating roadkill — unless, of course, consuming rotting carrion is the metaphorical equivalent of working another cheap-ass cable-rate show for the Disney Corporation.

In many ways, that’s exactly what it is. Still, beggars can’t always be choosers in Hollywood, which means sometimes we just have to take what we can get and hope for a better gig next time.

Onward, into the smog.

* Yeah … that didn’t happen. Almost, but not quite, and so it goes.