Pillbox

There are few delusional nonsense phrases that have been stuck in my head for years. Often, when in endless endless meetings with blathering on about how "improving the process will improve the product", I will scribble them in black ink on my everpresent pad of graph paper so that it looks like I'm down with the ISO 9001 like white on rice. "I like cheese." "Paper cow." "Pillbox"

But at the new job, with no meetings to go to and no e-mail to read, my habit of scribbling angrily has been replaced with staring wistfully out my 9th floor window at the world outside.

Today is an unbelievably beautiful clear day. Looking down from the office, traffic is unusually not snarled on Wilshire Blvd. Beyond, I see the many three-storey apartment buildings of south Santa Monica interspersed with trees from all corners of the globe: airy eucalyptus, pine, dense ficus, and, of course, palm, plus dozens whose names I never learned, moving ever so slightly in the nearly still air. Planes take off from the runways of LAX and Santa Monica airports heading west out over the ocean. Ever further south, the long, camel-backed hills of the Palos Verdes peninsula slowly descending to the South Bay. In the sea are two enormous container ships, moving slowly back to China. And on the horizon, Catalina Island rising out of far away mists.

From the ninth floor, our city looks beautiful and sedate, not the tangle of traffic and humanity and aggression and noise that it looks like from the ground. From here, my love for the Southland can be unqualified, unexcepted.