Now I know. It’s the incredible feeling of standing on a nine-foot piece of curved fiber glass, wind in your face and riding a foaming mass of water as it races to land. I mean, I guess that’s what they’re talking about, anyway, because my experience was slightly different.

I spent my time paddling. Did anyone ever tell you that’s mainly what surfing is about–paddling furiously against the current until your arms hang loosely off your shoulders like empty shirt sleeves? That and gulping seawater. Exhausted from paddling, you frantically try to position a slippery, unwieldy board to “catch” a giant wave, which if you’re lucky enough to do will toss you into the air nanoseconds after you hoist yourself into a lame-looking half-crouch. “Good Vibrations,” the Beach Boys thrumming in your head? Nope. “Wipe Out,” a la the Surfaris. Or in my case, the part in the movie where you think, “This is where I die.” And as another rolling wave crested into my face, pounding all breath out of me and replacing it with salt-water foam, I suddenly flashed on… my life.

Except, I flashed on this:

A year or two ago, during a casting session for a new television series that I was producing, I ran into a former high-school classmate. I had just stepped out to refill my coffee, and there she was–still ravishing, sitting with a dozen or so other actresses, ready to audition for me, my partner and our casting staff.

“Hey!” I shouted.

“Hey!” she shouted back.

We gave each other a little squeeze and a peck on the cheek. I remembered her as a beautiful girl, and here she was, in my office, a beautiful woman.

“How long has it been?” I asked. As I started to mentally calculate the intervening years, I felt her hand close tightly around my wrist.

“Do you have a sec?” she asked. I walked with her to the coffee machine as she whispered frantically. “See, I play 23, 24, OK?”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m 24. Twenty-five at the max.”

“But we were in the same high school class,” I said, still not getting it. She looked at me for a moment, eyes wide and fierce, like she was trying to drill meaning into my head.

“Oh,” I said, finally getting it. “Oh.”

“It’s just, you know, the business,” she said, with a little eye-roll and a shake of the head, as if to say, you know how shallow people can be, but what can you do?

“Should I pretend not to know you?”

“Oh God,” she said, “would you? That would be fantastic of you!”

I didn’t even have time to spin some filthy casting-couch fantasies. Here I was, shunted off into an undesirable demographic, too old even for people my own age. Which, for the record, is 36. Which, in politics, business and finance, might qualify as young, or youngish. But which, in the worlds of Hollywood and surfing, is distinctly over-the-hill.

And so it was, as I climbed exhausted and humiliated onto my board after my umpety-eleventh loss to Neptune, as I paddled once again against the unrelenting current with arms of overcooked fettuccine, so it was that I wondered what I must look like from the shore.

Was I (horrors) the pathetically unfit nonathlete battering himself against a force of nature that can pulverize rock into sand, sink impregnable ocean liners and swallow late-thirtyish guys like me for breakfast? Or did I look like a heroic romantic idealist, a guy who refused to let Time and Advancing Age hold him back from his mighty quest? Or might I, to those beach folks squinting into the Hawaiian sun, look like a young man, like a 24- or 25-year-old guy who half-trots along the beach path in his wet suit. Or did I look like a…

“Screw this,” I suddenly thought, interrupting myself. And I went back to the hotel and drank mai tais for the rest of the afternoon and read back issues of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, like a man at peace with his age. Because I don’t need to go on vacation to learn how to paddle against the current. I don’t need to fly five hours to Hawaii to gulp seawater and feel the sensation of fighting an impossible tide.

That, in a nutshell, is what Hollywood is all about: flailing, wiping out, beating against the waves, all for the illusion of a few moments of effortless, windswept gliding along the crest, all for the people on the beach to shield the sun from their eyes and point and say, “Look at that guy! What is he, about 20?”