Art
Gloria and I went to eat at Macaroni Grill last night.You're probably familiar with the Macaroni Grill shtick by now. They have butcher paper over the tablecloths, and you can color while you wait for a staff member to begin screaming a libretto for someone's birthday or anniversary or recent death or whatever. When I was single, I used to have grand delusions of impressing my date through the sheer brilliance of my coloring.
No shit. I really did believe that. I had a big “L” on my forehead, too. In permanent marker.
So I would spend the entire pre-meal time working feverishly on a drawing, just so I could grandly announce "Look! It's Napoleon's march on Moscow, complete with a line representing casualty totals!" That worked about as well as you might expect, which is to say not at all.
Gloria can actually draw, though, and quite well, so she usually doodles out something while we wait. She drew a stone wall that looked like the entrance to a tunnel in a Roadrunner cartoon, and I told her so, so she added a road and a roadrunner.
Then, for some reason, I saw a clock, a big clock, above it all. It just belonged there, and I saw it very specifically in my head. "It needs a clock," I said, so Gloria drew in a clock, but it was a small clock, and it was inset into the tunnel entrance.
“It’s too small,” I said. “And it doesn’t go there. It needs to be floating above the tunnel.”
"Oh, like Dali," she said.
"No, it doesn't need to be melted. It's just a big clock, but it's not fixed to anything." She draws another clock, above the tunnel this time, but it's the wrong size, and it's offset.
"There," she says. "How's that?"
"It's ruined," I said. She swats me with her free hand. "There are two clocks, both the wrong size, and they're both in the wrong place."
"That is ridiculous," she said.
"It lacks pathos," I said. She hits me again.
"Pathos isn't an imaginary word," I say. "I'm just using the standard definition."
"A drawing of a roadrunner, a tunnel, and a clock can't have pathos," she said.
"It does if you draw it right," I said. Swatted. Again.
We did not take the ruined drawing home.
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