The Time I Ruined Everything Forever

If by everything, I mean a mural design contest.  And if by forever, I mean probably actually forever.

My apartment building has a "dog park" on the 5th floor of its parking garage.  I put "dog park" in scare quotes not because I think I'm using a novel or unfamiliar term, but because it is a dog park in name only.  Far from being an ample, grassy outdoor space where doggies can frolic, it is merely a piss-soaked strip of astroturf where people take their dogs to pee when it's raining.

Within a few months of its completion, the giant canine outhouse already had to be ripped up and sanitized once from all the urine.   I assume they installed some sort of drainage system before they re-opened it.  In the city of Nashville, though, you can't really christen a place without putting up a proper mural, because if you can't geo-tag it and get the likes, does it even exist?  Thus, earlier this summer, the leasing office sent out a barrage of emails announcing a mural design contest.  The winner would have the chance to help paint their design on the concrete wall behind the dog park.

So you're saying we can design and execute a mural...on the inside of a parking garage, where only residents and dogs peeing and/or humping other dogs will see it...AND we don't get paid?  Hold my beer while I sketch somethin' up right quick!

The stipulations were that the mural needed to fit a space 50' wide and 13' high, and should be family friendly and related to pets and Music City.  Look no further, I got this:

Guitar-shaped fire hydrants and cats taking a selfie IN the mural?  Can you EVEN?

I squandered about an hour of my life sketching and inking this masterpiece and proudly turned it in to the office.  The contest deadline approached and they sent out several increasingly frantic emails beseeching people to enter the contest.  They promised to post the entries to social media and let residents vote for their favorite.

The deadline came and went over a month ago and there has been crickets.  First I assumed maybe they were just so overwhelmed by how amazing my design was that they were rendered speechless and declared it the winner, no contest.  Obviously.

Now that I look back at it, though, I think I maybe the dog shitting and making eye contact, front and center, was a little too much.  I could have softened the impact by moving him a little away from the foreground.  But that's totally fine if they thought that!  I'm open to criticism!  You think Leonardo DiCaprio didn't ask for a little feedback before he finished painting the Sistine Chapel?  The genitals on all the nudes were way bigger and more distracting before his assistant spoke up.  That's just the nature of the industry!

Without any follow-up communication about the contest, I can only assume that I was the only person who submitted a design.  Not surprisingly, the people in the office were clearly too mortified to put my design on their social media, so they are going to pretend like the contest never existed.  If I was just a little bit more of an asshole, I would go to the office in person and ask about the status of my entry, just to witness the verbal gymnastics it would require to tactfully explain to me what I have known all along, which is that my design was a completely unacceptable dumpster fire that made a mockery of the contest itself.

Am I disappointed?  Hardly!  My takeaway from all this is that if I just keep tapping my bottomless reservoir of poor taste and throwing my creative efforts behind things I am marginally or not at all qualified to do, it will eventually pay off.  This just wasn't my time.

*Duh, I know it wasn't Leonardo of the DiCaprio or Da Vinci variety.  Everyone knows it was Donatello.