Tannic Teeth

Writing and New Technologies (Writing Exercise Week 1)

A face without a name

I love people watching. Not in a creepy stalker-ish kind of way, but just to observe people as especially being in the city, surrounded by hundreds of other unfamiliar faces, one is granted some anonymity from the usual glaring faces that cause us judgement. I walk the city many times during the week; I see few familiar faces, the rest smear into the amorphous crowd like Perth station during peak hour. There is one man I see regularly. He always catches my eye. He wears the conventions of days of yore; in his hackneyed gait, his sullen face, the tatty leather jacket -of which I’m sure it’s his only one – and the characteristic Black Akubra that I’ve never seen him without. He looks oddly out of place amongst steel and concrete. He looks lost. He belongs in a dusty Western; on a horse riding into the red sunset. He looks lonely and sad. He looks like a cowboy that time forgot.

I really don’t know what he does; some people say he bets of the ponies, living from windfall to windfall. Others say he works as a sheerer in times when seasons demand. Others still say he is a millionaire, given up all the conventions of palatial superfluosity, to live a life free from overarching trust funds and hollow social obligations. Whatever he does do, must be interesting. It must spill fort around him, colouring his world in sepia tones. Bars probably ARE still saloons where dancing girls doubled as fine poker players and tripled as ‘something more’ but only when Bourbon flowed and pockets brimmed with cash. I wonder if he ever thinks he’s judged. If he ever thinks the anonymous faces gleaming back at him knows of his past? What he’s seen though those milky eyes? The loves lost, victories won, brethren he’s buried? His story? History.

Untold, for that it surely is.