Puzzlement

There's a fountain downtown (and by downtown, I mean the corner where our two village blocks converge) which was installed a few years back, to the delight of some and the consternation of others. I have nothing against the aesthetics of the thing, but the engineering bothers me. The water is supposed to fall in a continuous glassy sheet from the upper basin to the lower, but often it breaks into splattering waves that make an annoying cacophonous flutter.

Mostly, I'm irritated by the fact that Ive taken probably hundreds of photos of this fountain, and I can never get the shot quite right. There's distraction in the background, or it's overexposed, or the dramatic moving parts of the thing won't cooperate with the angle I'm trying to achieve. Or someone throws a penny into a perfect reflection, or someone bumps my arm. Or the wind blows. Hmph.

Art and life are both like that. I can have all the required elements. I can set up the shot just so. I can do everything right, and still, the end result comes out completely off kilter. There's just something missing. The pieces won't cooperate. Or maybe I'm actually looking at it all wrong. It's a puzzle, one that won't ever be solved unless I keep on trying. Once more, with feeling...