6:21 p.m. Ok, so maybe I've not gotten the perk back as fast as I'd liked. Maybe this weekend was rougher on my corpuscles than I thought. I've been droopier all day than the poppies on my old faded sweatshirt. But now, just as the sun is beginning to set, I'm beginning to wake up.

The man on the far left in the photo (opposite) is the world-famous Wah Ming Chang. I have fallen in love. We're at a Mexican restaurant in the hills outside Carmel, and life is good. Books under contract are being researched under deadline and food will be consumed. Doggie bags filled. The sun is shining, as per the implicit California contract.

We'd all been on the road since before dawn. Little did we know at the time, but we wouldn't be rattling the keys in our own back doors until well past midnight. We thought we'd made good time. We thought there was plenty of time to take a spin through Carmel. We thought we'd pop onto Route 1 out of Carmel and pick up the 101 at San Louis Obisbo as a nice change of pace.

Ah, the thin veneer of humanity. How quickly it crackles and peels under pressure.

Wah Ming Chang very graciously allowed me to take a few photos of some of his many, many sculptures. Ever since he picked up a pencil and began drawing as a little boy, he's been an artist with an absolutely unerring eye for balance, emotion, perfection in proportion. He was a prodigy at 8 and he remains a prodigy at 80-something.

He has a knack for carving or drawing the expression that makes his inanimate clay burst into life. Human life. Do you know the lovable grin of the Pillsbury Dough Boy? Of course you do. Wah Chang created it.

It's so odd to meet someone who's had such a profound impact on so many little bits of the life we take for granted. Do you know the way the cell phone base flips out when you want to use it? It's a motion so ubiquitous it almost defines communication. Well, when Wah Chang developed the original Star Trek communicator, he created a hinged brass lid that easily flipped open in the actor's hand, and voila! Instant meme-ing.

Today one of the smoke detectors has started to tweet, which means its batteries are wearing down. It's a good emergency system: you must replace them or it won't stop chirping every half hour or so. The first time it happened, I thought we had a cricket loose somewhere in the house.

Some people reported buying earthquake warning alarms before this latest quake, but true to form, they didn't go off. Tonight after dinner I pushed all the soy sauce and hot chili oil bottles way way back into the interior of the cabinet. You never know.

When he was 21, Wah Chang was the youngest member of the Special Effects and Models Department at Walt Disney Studios, making a fabulous salary of $20 a week. It was while working on the Bambi models that he came back from summer vacation with what he thought was a bad case of the flu, but which was, in fact, polio.

When he answered the door on Saturday, he was using a walker. It had a big basket between the handle bars and the basket was filled with file folders and a cell phone. When it was time to go to the restaurant, he offered to drive.

When we got back from lunch, he opened some of the folders, and out tumbled the most amazing array of scanner art I have ever seen. Three-dimensional still life, his hands tossing eggs in the air -- images of glasses that were rainbowed with light. He can make magic from any substance.

It's good to live in California, and to have lunch in the bright sun in the middle of October. It's a privilege to work in the entertainment industry, in any capacity. It's great to be able to be your own boss, to work with your own hands, to create your own special universe.

But hear me now and believe me later: sometimes that's all you get. Sometimes other people take all the credit. Sometimes you drive in the fog and sometimes it's stop and go all the way home. Sometimes you get paid $20 a week.

So, you'd better enjoy what you do. You'd better fall in love with your own twenty-four hours. Pick the colors you like. Return the movie unwatched if it bores you. Slow down and don't give yourself a headache.

When Wah Chang was seven, he was quoted in a newspaper story:

"I just have to draw. If I see something beautiful, I want to put it down -- otherwise I become very sad."

Glue and anchor your favorite pottery. Do the work that you were born to do. Replace the batteries. And don't let yourself become sad.