Honest Evaluation of Drawing Skills

Reviewing another old drawing that I don't believe I ever put in a sklog. 

I drew it while standing under the ominous statue in DC of Ulysses S Grant on horseback facing somewhere that I don't exactly remember because I for some reason thought it faced the Capitol, but looking closely at the picture or even looking rather lazily at the picture one can quickly ascry the Capitol behind the statue, so the statue faces out from the Capitol as if guarding the Capitol from some threat emerging from the Lincoln Memorial, maybe protesters. 

That joke rings so familiar in my mind that I believe that I may actually have done something about the statue drawing  before and included that joke.  How very sad. 

This picture represents, I believe, the acme of my career as a journalistic cartoonist, not because I ever got paid for it but in that I flatter myself that it looks like something that might have gone into a newspaper as part of a think piece about Washington or big government or statues in general. I drew it the last time I went to DC which was about 2002, it was raining and they weren't allowing anyone in the White House and there were cops everywhere guarding everything. 

I had recently turned 35 and had therefore passed the first qualifying hurdle on the path to the Presidency, and I was experiencing continual improvement in my drawing skills, and I had already begun planning my own biographical museum, to be built on the mall on the site of the current American History museum. It was a heady time, and one can see the hopeful euphoria in the intense effort I put into drawing a statue I didn't like while standing in the rain in a city I had never much cared for (except for the museums and its contribution to the TV series "Veep").  Now the original sits on display in the museum I have set up in our basement, a far cry from the magnificent many-storied edifice I once envisioned, which would have had fountains and delis and gift shops and naked statues and my actual body laminated like the body worlds exhibit and an animatronic of myself delivering a withering criticism of American Culture.  Yet I visit it often, sadly, silently weeping into my whiskey, enduring the picture's rebuke for allowing my popularity levels to plummet and my drawing skills to wither and regress. Now I often wonder if I will ever be President, and these days this is the best I can do for Grant and his damn horse:

Amateurish, I know, horrible computerized cartoon, completely lacking the gravity of the original. But hey, look what the horse can do now!