#62 "Blue Shirt, Period." June 6, 2013

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New York City certainly has it's share of pests.
They say that the rat population in New York is 8 million, meaning one rat for every person who lives here. I like that idea and I will continue to spread that myth even though there seems to be a much smaller number of rats living here. But, like anyone who has grown up with cartoons on the mind, the idea that there is one rat for every person makes for a great cartoon idea. I like the idea that there is a "rat Tim" and a "rat Jeremy" and so on and on until every person has a rat doppelganger. Like in the movie, "Ratatouille" the rats are having their own lives and going about it in a parallel miniature New York right under our feet. Some of the rats wear glasses, some of them have funny haircuts and tattoos. Sometimes they get into KFC and run around for the camera crews that show it on the news.
Thankfully, we have never had any rats in the restaurant. We've had other things, but never rats, thank goodness. As long as I have worked there, we have had cats. The first one was old when I got there, and though he was very loved by the staff and the late-night patrons, he wasn't very good at his job. Namely, catching mice. Now, before I go on, I just want the light-hearted readers to know that mice are a part of living in a big city. They live outdoors, but like any warm blooded creature, they like being warm more than being cold, so if they get the opportunity to be inside, the are going to take that opportunity. Sometimes, this means that they will live inside a huge building complex with multiple underground entrances that houses over 100 apartments, multiple restaurants and other businesses. So when you are in a New York City restaurant, remember that there has been, or currently is, an active pest presence. So anyway, this cat was pretty old and didn't have the will to hunt anymore. I resented him for that and I would always tell him to do his job and get rid of these little dudes. Well, he never listened to me and soon he died.
We replaced him with a brother and sister duo by the names of Coco and Felix. Coco was the star, and Felix was the workman. Coco would come upstairs at 10 or 11 and lounge on the bar liked she owned the place, which she kind of did since she was a "child" of the actual owners. We would put out plates of ice and she would lick the ice and the people at the bar would go gaga over her. Felix would hang back in the basement until everyone was gone and then he would do the patrol. This was the case for years and years until the NYC Health Department started cracking down on all furry residents and started giving out grades. Before the grading system, it was just pass/fail. Now they grade you. It's a racket though, as it is just another way for the city to squeeze money out of it's business operators since you can essentially pay your way to an A. When this system was first put into place, you might remember, the restaurant got a "C." I talk about it a little more extensively in this post from a couple years ago. Well, the cats got kicked out and we ended up getting an "A," but then we had mice. And those mice were brave. They didn't care about business hours or waiting until everyone had left the place to start foraging for the occasional french fry. No, they came out all the time. It was crazy. For a year or so, we had a really big problem with the pests. That was, until we finally had Felix come back to live there again. Now we have our friendly little buddy back with us and are once again pest free. We even maintained our "A."
I guess I started talking about pests since this one has some sort of bug being gassed while an evil Wibblesmack looks on laughing. I realize that this image might not even be the focal point of this piece, but I feel sometimes with these sprawling drawings, I have to pick one thing to discuss, since finding symbolism in a piece like this is usually difficult at best. I think some of them have overall themes, but this is one of the pieces that is a bit more abstract. I realize that sometimes these can hit you over the head with the themes, but this one is more like lightly patting you on the shin. Or brushing up against your rat doppelganger's tail.

#58 "Magic Wanda" in color! May 15, 2013

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(small talk)
Well, it was an interesting summer. In New York, the weather was pretty mild and I only had to turn on my ancient air conditioning unit a handful of times. I don't know if it was a historically mild summer or if it just felt mellower than years past, you'll have to consult some sort of online almanac for that information. Tim and I had an art opening at Hifi bar again in July and the show is still up in the back room of the bar if you would like to go check it out (probably for a couple more weeks, so see it while you can). I opened up a couple Etsy shops, (the one in the link is not for T&J prints, that one can be found here) but I have only sold a couple of things.

(theoretical rant)
However, I thought the summer was successful overall and felt like I made some progress in my life. Sometimes it's hard to see if you have made progress or not in your life. Time, for the most part, seems to drag along and it's not until you turn around and reflect that it, all of a sudden, seems like the time sped by. The day to day grind of life seems to take so long, and then you look back on the summer, and it seems like not only was it a year ago, but it also seems like it went by in the blink of an eye. I guess when you think about the universe in the universal scale, it did go by in the blink of an eye, and actually, much faster than a blink. But we usually don't think of our lives on the universal scale, because it is too big to grasp. That sort of thinking can be depressing, since the conclusion is always that life is incredibly short and that in the universal scale of things, anything that we do, short of super novae, is not going to leave the slightest mark on the history of the universe. Or, you could look at it from the point of view of chaos theory, that believes in the Butterfly effect. This is the theory that states that even the flapping of a butterflies wings can have enormous consequences days or moths or light years later. If we were to believe in that theory, then every single thing we do is affecting not only the space directly surrounding our person, but is affecting the entire history of the universe henceforth. That is kind of interesting to think that even the breath we are taking in and out of our lungs, all day, every day, could have an effect on the future history of the universe. The sad part is that we will never be able to witness the effect that we had on the history of the universe because we presumably won't be around to witness the effects.

(conspiracy nonsense)
I was talking about that over the summer as well, but on a more celestial plane. I mean, it is depressing that we won't be able to experience the future, but the really sad part, I was saying, is that we'll never know all of the secrets that have been kept secret from us. Or all the knowledge that we will never know. These truths are slightly depressing. Take the universe, itself. We will never know how big it is, who or what made it, and what is on the outside of it. Scientists generally agree that the universe is finite and that it is expanding, but what is on the outside if the "outside" is not made up of "matter?" These questions were on my mind this summer. But also, on a smaller level, I was waxing that in my life time, we will never know who shot JFK or ever get any answers to the great conspiracy theories of our time. I guess on the one hand, it's more interesting to live in a world where all of the answers are not readily available, for if that was the case, everything would be boring because you would know the outcome of every event ever. It would be nice from a gambler's standpoint, because you would never lose on the ponies, but other than that, it would be boring. Also, I am willing to bet that even people in power don't really know all of the answers to all of the conspiracy theories. JFK, for instance; I doubt our current president knows or even cares about who shot JFK because he has so many pressing issues on his plate that he couldn't possibly care less about that 50 year old mystery. Now, when he first entered office, he strikes me as the kind of giddy person who's first questions were to unveil all the national secrets, but then almost immediately he had a country to run, so the excitement was probably short lived, if it happened at all. It's fun to think that when you die you could ask someone all the questions and get all the answers, but then you're dead, so what's the fun in that?

(final thoughts)
I guess you have to accept that you will never know the answers to all the questions, so the least you can do with your life is try to get the answers to as many questions that you possibly can. Then, when you die, your brain will be so heavy with knowledge that when you collapse from death and your head hits the pavement, the impact will tilt the Earth off of it's axis and create a domino effect in which the universe destroys itself, thus rendering the rest of universal history obsolete and no longer worth talking about.