Security monitor
I feel that I've finally returned to my roots with this week's graphic, at least I've returned to a major branch, back to the heady time of my mid-life crisis, when I was in the full bloom of hypochondriac health, energetic enough to feel relentless anxiety, worrying that I might end up as what I eventually ended up as. I had some sleepless nights let me tell you, pondering weighty questions that I now find completely uninteresting.
Back in the days when I would spend a lot of time furtively drawing strangers in public places, existing on as much adrenaline as I hope to ever experience, I would have refused to post a drawing this bad, or I would have felt compelled to apologize for the shaky pen strokes and lazy execution and unrecognizable shapes. I had some pride in those days, some standards, but I drew this picture merely to re-live the excitement of secrecy, to feel alive with the possibility that the strangers would notice me drawing them, the terrifying chance that they would approach me and ask to see the drawing, then go glassy eyed and overpolite with disappointment when they saw the pathetic little scrawl that I'd reduced them to. I had a few moments of this fantasy, then noticed the security camera monitor, displaying my hunched back and crouching shoulders, and the sketchbook in my lap, prominently displayed to the bald man, who seemed to have no interest and no recognition that I was drawing his group at all. Or maybe he could see the picture I was drawing and had already passed through all the stages of realization and disappointment already. I could barely continue the picture after seeing the monitor. I felt that I should have drawn the image of myself in it, and that I'd missed the only meaningful picture that I would get to draw today, and felt a slight glimmer of my old anxiety. A part of me hoped the restless anxiety and obsessive preoccupation will keep me up tonight, but the other parts of me will drag that part to sleep with the rest of us.
