December 5, 2005
I got this from Meghan this morning: "I'm guessing you saw the AZ Republic plug on your
book yesterday, but in case you didn't, here's the link:"

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/
1204b2cowboy04.html

Finally finished the rough draft on the Ben Thompson gunfight today. I did three pieces of art yesterday, but don’t think I can use any of them. Need to dig deeper.

The good news is I’m still doing six drawings a day and that is improving my skills. Kathy walked by my opened sketchbook on Saturday night and said, "That’s the best drawing I've ever seen you do." I did the drawings in Vegas, eight of them in my room. After my marathon travel day on Thursday, George Laibe and I ate at one of his fave restaurants, Fuscia, upstairs at the Luxor (the pyramid hotel where the Palomino Hotel used to sit and where my mom and dad always stayed). George and I split a bottle of saki, so we were quite intelligent and solving all sorts of world problems by the time we left the hotel and hailed a cab. When we got in the cab, George was pontificating about the "True West enigma," and we were throwing around numbers in the back seat like a couple of Tyco tycoons: "Show me where the $225,000 is going and I’ll split out your coverage and costs and leverage it into something real and profitable." I kept looking at the cabbie wondering if he could even understand us (he looked east African), but he stared straight ahead like a sphinx. When we got out of the cab in the basement of the Riviera ($13 cash, I paid), the cabbie turned to me and smiled, "I hope you figure out the enigma," he said knowingly, in perfect English. I laughed. Everyone in every language understands money, or at least has an opinion about it, don’t they?

Anyway, I got back to my room, fried, but I hadn’t done my six drawings. I looked at my sketchbook and sighed. After 13 hours, three speeches, an airplane ride, wheels and deals and Pacific rim food, not to mention 36 ounces of primo saki, I sat in bed and whipped out six very loosey goosey sketches to keep my streak alive. I haven’t missed a day since November 12.

And by the way, those six drawings weren’t the ones Kathy praised, it was the drawings from Saturday, one right out the window of the plane, of Lake Mead from 30,000 feet, that she flipped over.

"An ass loaded with gold climbs to the top of the castle."
—Old Vaquero Saying