#71 September 10, 2013

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"Garden of Eden"

As my loyal 8 readers know by now, the text in these blog posts really doesn't have much to do with the picture posted above.When I started writing this blog, it was more based on the pictures, but as the years wore on and I struggled with the meaning of the drawings and the meaning of the project in general, the text of the blog started looking inward at the restaurant that the drawings are made in. The space of the restaurant, and the inner workings became as important to the drawings as the drawings themselves. I mean, one could exist without the other, but without the restaurant, the drawings would never have come into form. In fact, these drawings represent a perfect storm of opportunity. The restaurant has gone through so many changes in name, ownership, and time, that if it hadn't been for the exact time and scenario that we were able to find ourselves at Cafe Loup, this blog would be about something completely different.
Which brings me to an awesome event that happened a week ago. We were having a normal Friday night at the restaurant, when a table of eight men of varying ages sat down at Table 8. They seemed to be just a normal table of eight, until they revealed who they really were. It turns out that one of the guys at the table was getting married, and this was his "bachelor party," even though his 12 year old nephew was in attendance and he was in his 60's. So, ok, they were having a tame bachelor party. Big deal, right? That sort of thing happens all the time at the Loup, so why was this party special? Well, the guy who was about to get married at one point tells Edie that his parents used to own the restaurant in the 1960's and that he hadn't been back to the restaurant since he was 11 years old! He had the idea to have the bachelor party at the same restaurant that his parents had owned 50 years prior.

Back then, the place was called "Garden of Eden" and it was a glorious downtown restaurant that seems like it thrived in the 1960's. It was then, as it is now, a family run establishment, serving delicious food and drink. The family goes by the name of Monasebian, although they spell it "Monas'bien" on the menu (as you can see in the picture above, depicting the front page of the menu). The Monasebians built the bar, and put a little pool with goldfish and plants in the middle of the dining room! The bar that they built is still that bar that is in the restaurant today. The pool, sadly, is no longer in the dining room. I am pretty sure that it was right in the middle, where Table 24a and 24B are today, and next time I am at the restaurant I am going to see if I can find some traces of the pool.

Mr. Monasebian in the dining room. 1965

The picture above shows Mr. Monasebian in the dining room. The column to his left is still there, although since the picture is so dark, it is hard for me to get my bearing on which direction we are looking. However, you can see the pool to his right, with flowers poking out next to him. 

When his son was in for dinner, they brought with them an old menu from the place and also a bunch of pictures from the dining room and kitchen. Those are the pictures I am showing you all here. We, as the staff, were so interested that we were all huddled around these guys looking at the pictures and menu while our sections sat patiently on a busy Friday night. Tomoyo even gave the guys a tour into the basement (so that she could photocopy the pictures and menu) and they said it was the same as they remembered. In fact, the picture of the kitchen looks incredibly similar.

In the kitchen of "Garden of Eden" 1965

The kitchen of today still has some of the same things in it, from 50 years ago. In this picture, you can see a metal structure hanging from the ceiling with metal hooks hung from it. That thing still hangs in the kitchen now. The shelf behind the head chef is still there and still in use today. You can see a server in the background under a stack of plates. We no longer keep plates there (we do keep pots and pans there), but it seems like that is where one would pick up food, which is the same as today. I admit, that when I first went into the kitchen at Cafe Loup, I was surprised by how small it was. I was then doubly surprised to see how much food could come out of such a small kitchen. But this being New York, you have to make it work with the space you have. Upon seeing this picture, I realized that they were working with the same size kitchen 50 years ago. Not only that, but it was set up the same way! So, these guys figured out how to make such a small space efficient, and it got handed down from owner to owner until today, where it is essentially the same setup now.

Some of the menu from "Garden of Eden" 1965

The menu was a real treat to look at. Not only for the things that they served, but for the prices! 

Prime Rib for $3.95! Coffee for $.35! 

I'm sure these prices were relatively high for the time, but this is New York! And this is Greenwich Village in it's prime (rib)! This was probably a place where you would dress up and take a special date or go with a group for family style dinners. You'd get some steak and some wine and have a grand old time. One of the great things on these menus, besides the food and prices, are the little sayings on the bottom: "Your Presence is a Compliment to Our Restaurant- Haste Ye Back!" That one is great, but the one on the next page, I think we should somehow incorporate into the current menu....

More menu from "Garden of Eden" 1965

"Dinner Without Wine is Like a Day Without Sunshine." 

Truer words have never been written. This whole page is incredible. When the guys showed us this page, it was literally like finding a treasure chest. From the warning that this new-fangled thing called curry is indeed very spicy to the "Shashlik" served on a flaming sword! This place must've been the best! I mean, you could get three lobster tails for $3.95, served with salad and a Baked Idaho potato! So amazing. 

It seems like they also had some special occasions. I don't know for sure, but the next picture looks like there was a buffet every once and a while. I know that at my grandparents place in the 1960's, they used to have a buffet every Sunday evening. It was that way until the 80's, as I remember having to dress up in a little mini suit and tie every Sunday night to dine at the buffet. It was quite an event! This picture certainly reminded me of that time, even down to the chefs tall hat. The only thing that's missing is the decorative Jell-o molds with lobsters in them.

The buffet at "Garden of Eden" 1965

Yes, it looks like the Monasebian's had quite a place. I don't know where this picture of the buffet table was taken, but I have a theory. It seems like the back wall of the restaurant, which would be where Tables 36-40 are now. Now, there is a large banquette there (and photos of Janis and Jimi), and I know that in the place that replaced "Garden of Eden" this was a live room where bands would play. This seems to be that back, and the wall behind the Monasebian's seems to be lined with marble, as you can see a slight reflection of a light fixture just about the chefs hat. I could be wrong, but no matter what, the place looks so 60's glamorous! 

View from the pool. "Garden of Eden" 1965

Finally, here is a picture from across the pool. It depicts Mr. Monasebian seated while his guests put on their furs and prepare to depart for the evening. The pool is in the foreground and you can almost see the goldfish swimming around in it. 

I am not sure when the Monasebian's sold the restaurant. The son, who was celebrating his bachelor party there two Fridays ago said that he hadn't been back to the restaurant in 50 years, so I am guessing they sold the place right round 1965, or so. Maybe not, maybe they kept it until the 70's, who knows. I don't know when it changed hands, as there is nothing about it on the internet that I can find. I even brought that point up a couple of posts ago, lamenting the fact that I didn't know what was in this space in the 1960's. "The Garden of Eden" must have been the first thing in the building, as the building itself was built in the 60's. What I find fascinating is that the place that I know of that replaced "The Garden of Eden" was called "The Bells of Hell." It's so poetic, and so New York. The owners of "The Bells of Hell" must have known the Monasebian's and known about the "Garden of Eden." They must have thought, "Well, we're not going to run a fancy dining room with live goldfish and flaming swords. We're going to run a honkey-tonk rock n' roll bar, so why not take the name in the exact opposite direction?" I think New York business owners of the past thought about that stuff more than they do today. I mean, Cafe Loup got it's name with the same sort of mind-frame, but that's a different story. I like to think that for the past 50 something years, the little space on 13th St. has been both Heavenly and Hellish, and now serves as a kind of space in between the two. A place with both qualities, and now it lives in the body of a wolf, an earth-bound creature that for centuries has been both feared and respected by all those who come in contact with it. A perfect middle ground between Heaven and Hell.

#63 "Highway 61, Retwisted." June 12, 2013

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You hear about haunted houses and buildings all the time in New York. There are even ghost tours that you can pay money to have people show you various spots in the city where there are tales of hauntings. Since this city is huge and it's history goes all the way back to the time before white people, you are guaranteed to be standing or working on the exact spot where someone or something was killed. Actually, if you think about it, every square inch of the earth is littered with the remains of something that was once alive, but that is a different, more complex story that I will get into at another time.
I have never seen anyone die in the restaurant, although I have seen people very close to dying and having to be taken out of the restaurant by the EMTs. It's always a scary thing to witness, but it's a thing that happens when you work in a place that is always open for the public to use. People die every day in all kinds of strange manners. Most of the time these people are not planning on dying that day, and so it's a surprise to them and the ones who are around them. Many years ago, I was working in the front of the restaurant and a young lady came in with her father and mother, which is a extremely common theme. But this night, things would end up being somewhat less than common. They had essentially just sat down at the table when I went over to get drink orders from them. As I approached, the young lady started screaming at me to call 9-11. Her father was having trouble breathing, and one look at him and I knew that, yes indeed, I should be calling 9-11. He looked awful; pale white skin with green undertones, an 1,000 yard stare in his eyes and barely breathing at all. It scared the crap out of me, so I took out my cell phone and dialed 9-11 for the first time in my life. I told the operator where we were and what was happening and to send an ambulance right away, and that was that; or so I thought. I went over to the manager to tell him that I had called and instead of being happy about it and saying that was a responsible thing to have done, he started screaming at me! He told me that I was under no circumstances to call 9-11, that it was his job to call 9-11. He said that he had already called when he overheard the young lady and my conversation and now he was yelling at me because the city was now probably sending over two ambulances. I know that sounds crazy, because it was. This manager from back then was crazy. He didn't like me very much and would use any excuse to yell at and berate me. I used to think all restaurant managers were insane and there was a special place in hell for them. No doubt I have talked about that at some point on this blog. I have since changed my tune a little bit, but now I have only upgraded it into the belief that restaurant managers are doomed to live out eternity managing restaurants in some strange purgatory-like restaurant that is always open.
So, anyway. One ambulance showed up and took the father away in a stretcher and out of the restaurant for the evening. I don't know if he died or not. He may have lived and is still a customer at the restaurant to this day. I did not know those people, so I wouldn't be able to remember them today. Since that surreal first time, I have seen the EMTs in the restaurant a handful of times. Every time I can remember, the person who needs them leaves the restaurant with full consciousness, thankfully. However, before the restaurant was in that location, there was a bar in it's place before it. Who knows how many people died there? And the fact that there are 100 apartments above the restaurant almost guarantees human death on that exact location at some point in time. All of this begs the question, where are all the ghosts?
I have closed that place up hundreds of times over the years and have never seen a ghost. How could this be possible? Yes, I have been a little freaked out on occasions very late at night when I am the only one in the whole place and there's no music and no sound. But even then, I am more freaked out about being robbed than about being scared by a ghost. Although now that I know restaurant managers are perpetually managing restaurants for eternity in the hereafter, I guess I should keep my guard up a little. After all, one our most evil managers died in mysterious circumstances about 5 years ago, so he may be haunting the establishment and I have merely not noticed. He's probably haunting a club though, now that I think of it. If I do end up seeing his ghost, I will certainly tell the NYC Ghost Tour people about it. This way we can diversify our clientele by adding occult members and finally get to the bottom of this haunted house thing. Because I really just want to know about the place across the street that I believe was built on an indian burial ground. But that, too, is a different story.

#59 "2-5-5-4-7-4-6" in Color!!! July 10, 2013

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Pick up your phone and call the number that is also the title of this piece. Area code +1 (212).
The phone will ring in a restaurant on 13th Street, in between 6th and 7th Avenues in New York City. Depending on the hour, someone might answer the phone, although if it's too early in the morning, it will ring for a very long time, or until you get bored of listening to the constant ringing of the phone in your earpiece/hands-free device. Yes, this is the phone number to the place where Tim and I work, and where we create these art pieces. We draw each of them at the restaurant and only at the restaurant. We don't color them there, since our only source of color is to use the natural colors in the food, such as beets, bitters, and blue #2, or to use the various crayons that we keep in the tea drawer for our younger guests who like to color on the table cloths (I have kept some of those masterworks and will post them here someday). I have contemplated coloring one or some or all of them at the restaurant with said hues, but I continue to bring them home and color them in on Photoshop instead. I like the way that the drawings change. They start off so randomly, so arbitrary, and usually so dirty. They have been lying around a restaurant, being used by servers, bartenders, busboys, and food runners to put in orders, jot down notes, reservations, and phone numbers. During that time, Tim and I are drawing on them, and then they get stuffed into a drawer to live with the rest of the triple dupe pads that have run out of order forms, but have unfinished T&J drawings on them. There, the dupe pads could live for a couple days up to a couple years. That's right, years. I think there are a couple drawings in there now that have been living in the drawer for multiple years. These drawings just won't be finished. I am sure as drawings they want to be finished, but neither Tim nor I can find the inspiration or content to finish them, and so they wait for motivation to find us, so that we can finish them. They must feel left out, because some of these drawings come together in the matter of a couple days. We'll start one of the drawings and it'll just fly through the "system" and be done before you know it, while it's comrades sit in the drawer waiting to be finished for years. Next time you come into the restaurant, ask us to see the unfinished drawings. It's pretty neat to see them in their original environment.
This drawing is not one of those fast ones. If I remember correctly, this one took quite a while to finish. The reason I know this is from the woman depicted on the left-hand side of the drawing holding the #2 sign with the massive growths on the other arm. This is one of my first sketches of a character from my children's book, Jenny Balloons. This is literally one of the first sketches of that character, who would eventually change significantly. In this drawing, she is definitely a woman, whereas in the book, she starts as a baby and only ages to about 16, I believe. However, I drew this drawing of the girl who actually inspired the whole story in the first place. The story goes like this: I was leaving the restaurant late one Sunday night sometime in 2011. I was having one of those nights where nothing was going right and I was annoyed with everything. I get down to the subway and there is a woman dressed head to toe in balloons. She looks like she wants someone to talk to, and I know it's going to be me. I am not in the mood to talk after a long, busy night behind the bar, so I avoid eye contact and walk to the other end of the platform. Well, don't you know, the train arrives and I get on the last car in the last door, and who do I see coming towards me? The girl in the balloon dress. She comes up to me and sits down right there on the floor of the subway and starts talking to me. I knew it! I end up talking with her the entire time back to Brooklyn. She turned out to be a really interesting person. I should have known that anyone dressed in a full gown made entirely out of balloons and adorned with a balloon hat would be interesting. It turns out her name is Katie Balloons and she is an incredibly talented balloon artist. She makes dresses, does sculpture, parties, all with balloons! She gave me a couple of balloons and we said our goodbyes, and I went home much happier than I had been before. The next day I woke up and immediately wrote the first draft of what would become "Jenny Balloons." I drew a rough draft of what the dress looked like that day, and then drew the one you see above later that week. I wouldn't start illustrating Jenny Balloons for another 8 months, as I was working on other books for Mibblio and we were originally going to go with a female illustrator for Jenny. Once I started illustrating that book, I was busy with it for the rest of the year, which is why 2012 is essentially a black hole of T&J drawings. I wouldn't get back to coloring this drawing for about a year and a half after it was originally drawn. By that time, I had spent so much time illustrating all those balloon dresses and outfits found in the children's book, that coloring this one was a breeze. It goes to show you that some things take time to be realized. And sometimes, the final product is worth the wait!
Is the phone still ringing?

#57 "Happy Hour at the Cafe Loup" May 8, 2013

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There are no real Cafe Loup patrons in this picture. There is one person who is based on a real person, but not a customer. The rest of these characters are from our collective imagination. However, when I posted this on Bookface on May 8, 2013, all of my Loup friends thought they had figured out who was who. I guess on the one hand, you could find similarities to a couple of our customers in some of these fellows, but they just happen to be at the bar. In fact, this one wasn't even located at the Loup until the very end, when I put in the coat room and the clock over there on the far left of the picture. Before that, it was just some random bar in Anytown, U.S.A, although with all those shot glasses littering the bar, it could be anywhere in the world. We always joke about Happy Hour, saying that it's always Happy Hour when someone inquires if we have any specials. I worked in Massachusetts for a long time and you aren't allowed to have happy hours there at all. You can't have happy hours, drink specials, or sell beer in gas stations or after 11 pm or on Sundays (actually, that one got changed) and last call at the bars is at 1am.  It's all from what they call the Blue Laws, which is a fancy name for antiquated Puritanical nonsense. There are Blue Laws in many states and countries that basically force businesses to stay closed on Sunday to observe the sabbath; Massachusetts dates back to the 17th century. You can imagine my surprise when I went to college in New York and found out the bars are open until 4am and you can buy beer pretty much anywhere. I was born in Massachusetts and I have a lot of family from that part of the world, but there are some things about that state that baffle me. I understand that you want to control the amount of alcohol people consume before they do something stupid. I even understand that people in bars at 4am are certainly up to no good. But, if there is one thing I've learned about people and drugs (and alcohol is one of those weirdly and widely accepted drugs), it's that if you want some, you can figure out a way to get it. I learned this in High School, when drinking was taboo, but very common. I learned from a early age that the cool kids went to places like The Field and had parties with beer! This story is as old as teenagers, I'm sure. These kids would find a way to get booze, any kind of booze,and 9 times out of 10 they would succeed. My buddies knew a guy named Basil who would sell them Milwaukee Best cases when they were 16. Kids would lift their parents bottles of booze (which I previously mentioned led to my never drinking of Johnnie Walker Red again). You could always get something if you really wanted it and were determined. It's like that old Chris Rock joke where he says that junkies are the most industrious Americans because they wake up in the gutter and they are high as a Georgia pine by the time they go to sleep.

 Drinking is such an ingrained part of the American Culture. The advertisements for booze come into our homes right through the television. Every magazine has ads for beer and wine and even hard liquor these days. On top of that, people are always discovering new ways to get a buzz. In my lifetime, dozens of new designer drugs have been invented for people to get high from. I know that these are very different from alcohol, but in some ways they are exactly the same. From these designer drugs, all the way down to the caffeine in your daily cup of coffee, drugs are a part of daily American life. You ingest  them in order to change your chemical composition in your brain to feel good and feel different from how you feel without ingesting these things. You take these things to feel happier. You take them at your own Happy Hour. By that logic, when I wake up in morning and have a cup of coffee, that's Happy Hour. When I get off work and have a beer, that's Happy Hour. I guess we were right in our assessment: it really is always Happy Hour at the Cafe Loup.

#56 "Frozen Pool Party" May 1, 2013

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There have been a lot of dishwashers at the restaurant since I started working there a million years ago. Some of them have been teenagers, some of them have been grown men. Most of them have been from Mexico, although a couple of them were white boys right out of high school. That didn't last that long, it may have been a summer job, but all of them left looking for something more; a promotion, a different position in the kitchen, or anything else besides being in Dish Land. Being a dishwasher in a restaurant is a brutal, thankless job. It's hot and wet and the dishes seem to never stop arriving from the dining room. On top of all of that, you are expected to mop the dining room, the kitchen and the bathrooms every day. You have to be the last ones there most nights, cleaning the kitchen, and a lot of the time, you have to be the first one in to clean the dining room. Sometimes you have to help in the preparation of food, doing the most mundane of chores; peeling carrots, dicing bread, peeling shrimp. Because of this challenging workload, and it is a challenging job, most people do not want to have anything to do with it. That, and it doesn't pay well. If you are working in a restaurant, being a dishwasher is the low end of the totem pole, and usually you want to work your way up through the ranks as fast as humanly possible. 

I started out as a dishwasher at my aunt and uncle's restaurant, called Bishop's Terrace. I worked the lunch shift when it wasn't that busy. I am thankful for that now, because the fast pace of dinner would have been a bit much for my childhood self to deal with. Having to load, and unload an industrial sized dishwasher under pressure can be not only difficult, but incredibly unnerving. You are dealing with scalding hot water and extremely hot dishes; the metal ones burn your hands and the ceramics slip and can shatter. And then there is the mess. The whole job revolves around taking something that is dirty and making it clean. Dealing with food waste is particularly disgusting. People forget this, and are mindless with their plates. They put butter everywhere, ketchup everywhere, and all of it ends up on the dishwashers hands. I rarely eat ketchup to this day because of this. 

I washed dishes a couple other times in my life. Mostly just to help out when there was a spot that needed to be filled, but it was never my only job. I would supplement it with waiting tables and working the counter at the fish market, for example. I can't imagine washing dishes 5 or 6 days a week as your only job. And yet, people do it. We have a guy named Carlos who started at the restaurant the same time I did, worked the dish pit for 7 years, and then took all his money that he made and moved back to Mexico. He bought a house, married a girl and had a baby. A couple months ago, he moved back and got a bunch of his old shifts back. I guess if you can save money, it doesn't matter how bad the job appears to be from the outside if you can deal with the day to day monotony of the thing. I have said it before on this blog that every job can be monotonous and awful if you have a bad attitude about the whole thing. After all, you don't want to be defined by your job, even though a lot of times, people actually will judge you by what you do. It's one of the reasons I stopped asking people what they do. They have to actively tell me what they do for work, but I have stopped asking. I have good friends that I have no idea what they do for work. In the end, it doesn't matter to me what you do if you are a interesting person to be around. 

The whole reason for this dishwashing rant is that one of the dish washers who work with Tim and I at the restaurant contributed to this edition of "Mind on Loup." The kid's name is Alex and his last day was actually just last night. Like Carlos, he is taking the money that he made here for the last couple years and is moving back home, where presumably the money will last way longer than it will here in New York. Alex has some talent as an artist, he would sometimes draw pictures on the white board in the kitchen and is always interested in the progress of these drawings. I don't remember which night he contributed to this one, but he wrote the "Graffitty" in the lefthand side. Then, he wrote "Mexico" on the right hand side, which got turned into a monster of some sort. In the colored-in version, you can't even make out the word as it has been completely integrated into the drawing. I don't know Alex's last name and I might never see him again, but I will always remember him through this picture. He is a good kid and I wish him luck in Mexico and wherever else his life might take him. I hope he continues to draw pictures and make art in some way. I also hope that he never washes another dish if he doesn't want to. Dishwashers are an integral part of every restaurant but they never get the respect.

#53 "All Hands" In Color! January 14, 2013

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Yelp is a great website and every once in a while when we are bored at work, we'll bring up the Yelp reviews of the restaurant and read all the bad reviews. The bad ones are way more entertaining than the good ones, so we try to figure out who these people are and who served them. It's a fun game and it passes the time, but fortunately we get mostly good reviews. However, there are some really passionate people out there who love the things they love and HATE the things they HATE and are more than happy to post them on Yelp. Take, for example, our friend Mison L. from Hawaii. She really hates the restaurant. 

So, here is her review in full for your cringeworthy enjoyment.

"I HATE this place. HATE! It was bad from start to end with rude, inattentive and snappy waiters to someone eating our leftovers and us not finding out until we opened the containers up the next day. 

This is food that is something that got whipped out of my OWN kitchen. Basic spices, BORING rice, PLAIN yams, and 3 unseasoned broccoli... we ordered the chicken breast and duckling entrees. The duck was covered in some sweet and sour glaze!! It was straight out of the kitchen of some Chinese restaurant!

The waiter was a dick. He's older with glasses and a silly face. He also behaved like he was on cocaine or speed. We had already ordered from someone else when he came by and dropped another pair of menus, which was just confusing because the other waiter acted like he was going to serve us. Then he rambled ON AND ON AND ON about what we had already heard from the first waiter until I cut him off and told him that we had already ordered. 

"You already ordered?" He asked with a SASSY ASS tone.

"Yes."

"What did you order?" He did this weird nod.

"WHO CARES? Go and ask your friend." 

And then he had the nerve to ask in the most condescending way, "are you okay?"

"Are YOU okay?" I snapped. Buffoon, just get our food. 

He did give us a complementary order of fries because the duck would take so long... I wish I had eaten more fries. 

That duck was plain Jane and the meal can overall be described as "hearty." Who wants HEARTY French food? It was something I expected out of Medival England. 

Oh yeah, we were never served again. I had to stand up for the check. We didn't even want to finish our food so we had it to go and this morning we learned that someone had eaten half of our leftover portions before packing them. WHAT A BUNCH OF LOSERS. 

I HATE this awful place."

-Mison L.

I copied and pasted straight from Yelp. You can read more of this person's reviews if you want but this one sums up all the bad ones pretty well. We all think we know who her waiter was but when she accuses us of eating her leftover, that's just the best part. First of all, we are fed quite well most days at the restaurant, and most of us have worked there for a very long time and have had everything on the menu many times. For us to eat leftovers when we could simply order anything we want is just crazy talk. However, if this person knew how much we all love this review at the restaurant, I think they would be even more angry about the place. We read this review every once and a while just for a laugh like you would tell a joke. In fact, when we're having a stressful night, Edie and I sometimes quote the first line, and we both know that it came from this review, and not out of a dark place in our souls. The icing on the cake of this review is the last part calling us losers. It is so fitting because we call ourselves and everyone who comes to the restaurant Loupsers, since that's the way the word "loup" is pronounced in french. So, this person somehow knew what we are, or we started calling everyone loupsers after this review. Who nows which came first, but I never thought I would love something this negative before. 

It just goes to show you that one persons hate is another one's love. 

#50 "A Question Isn't Answered" In Color! January 12, 2012

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I was working on one of these drawings on the computer and then all of a sudden my computer shut off. I was pretty scared that my whole computer had just up and died, but fortunately the power strip had merely had enough power for the moment and shut itself off. Fair enough, I guess, one must know one's limits. However, once I turned the computer back on and went back into the Shop, I found that I hadn't saved my work in over an hour, and all that coloring I had done within that hour was gone, like I had never done anything. Like I was sitting around staring at the walls for that past hour. I'm sure this has happened to everyone at some point who interacts with computers. I remember back in the collegiate days people were always losing entire papers somehow because they either didn't save them or their word processors were malfunctioning. Yes, word processors. Remember those? Me neither.
It's annoying to have to repeat the work that you have already done once through and found it to be completely satisfactory. When you have to do it all over again, you know that you won't be able to do it exactly like you had done it the first time. You think in your mind's eye that there is no way you can replicate the original, nor improve on it. I always feel that the second time around will definitely be inferior only because I am annoyed at having to do it over again, and because of that, I'll end up rushing, cutting corners so that I can get to the place where I was before everything was lost. Trying to catch up to the place where you were just one minute ago, but it took you the last hour to get there. The bright side of my situation is that the drawing was still there. I hadn't lost that. It was still in good shape and ready to be worked on. It's not like my apartment was washed away in some Mega Tsunami and everything was gone forever. But the thing about that happening is that you are left with nothing and are given a fresh start. You wouldn't be able to recreate that stuff anyway, so you move on to new projects and presumably a new apartment. You would certainly miss all that work that you had created, but you would also know that you would be able to make more things that will possibly be better. You already had all that practice with the things you had lost, so you gained the skills that you now own to move forward. I get nervous about that scenario sometimes since a lot of my work is on paper, and the stuff that isn't on paper is in this here computer that I'm typing on right now. If there was some sort of fire bombing situation in Brooklyn and all the paper in my apartment was incinerated, I would certainly be sad. Years of work up in smoke. This sort of thing used to happen to Tim and I with these drawings all the time. Not fires at the restaurant, but people throwing out the drawings. The reason is that all these drawings are done at work on the Triple Dupe Pads which, when emptied of their order slips, look virtually like garbage, the only distinguishing feature being a couple of strange doodles on them. We've lost dozens at this point I am sure. I can still remember some of them. We had one that was about halfway complete with the picture being an homage to the Final Four basketball tournament held every spring. That one had a basketball court, some mascots milling around, some people in the stands; it was really starting to gel and then someone threw it out. We were both bummed out about it, but it would've been a fool's errand to try and recreate the drawing. It would never happen. It's like when you used to lose a roll of film and you would remember the pictures you had taken, but will never be developed. The images, even if you tried to reshoot them, will somehow be different. The light may have changed, the people now put on forced smiles instead of the pure, in-the-moment smiles they had before. And so you move on, but you'll always remember those images. Over time, you might even remember them as better than they actually were, had you had realized them, developed the film and then stuck the pictures on your hard drive. They become romantic images that only you remember. Since no one else will ever see them, they become a part of only you, and you can describe them to people, but to them it will be like listening to someone describe a dream. Abstract, had to grasp, and in the end, unimportant. Fleeting.
I wrote this because I couldn't go back to coloring that drawing right away. I needed a break from the frustration of losing all that work. I am going to go back to it nowish, but I am going to start from the point that I lost all of the work and move in a different direction. I think that will be better than tackling it from the same angle. That will be too annoying and I will only think of what I had done instead of what's ahead of me. Maybe this time it will turn out better, and if not, at least I learned the same old lesson about saving your work.