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The Better Half was out of town on business this week so I took my sketch book and my indomitable can-do attitude out to dinner. There's a local spot with good cocktails and an Indian bar bites menu that I hadn't been to in a while, so I plonked myself down, ordered a drink and some samosas, and got to work.
My current work revolves around stuff in my garden that I don't want and didn't put there. As I am generally against chemicals and pesticides on principle and I am generally against weeding out of laziness, this list is long. I'd spent the morning studying slug anatomy and I was keen to turn the common garden slug into a cartoonish larger-than-life villain.
So I was drawing away when a new bartender started her shift. She was put together, clean cut, upbeat, and above all, earnest. Genuinely excited about life and happy to be there, full of youthful exuberance. And I'm harping on this because because there's a lot of cynicism going around right now and it has been a long time since I've met someone who seems unaffected by it. Anyway, you meet someone with that kind of attitude and you want to protect it. And then she wanted to know what I was up to in my sketchbook.
I don't know what facial expression I make when I'm hard at work trying to figure out how to render oceans of mucus but it's the one I was wearing when she asked what I was drawing. Reader, I had to show her this:
She took it well, all things considered.
I bet she had never seen a close-up sketch of a slug in all its antennae- and eyestalk-waving glory. No mortification; you should definitely return, sketchbook in hand -- and perhaps with more sketches.