Peteskibreen's Blog

Racing man sits most mornings at the Metro in the Valley.I look for him when I make it through the Fortitude Valley Station Ticket gate. Sometimes I sketch him as I sip my coffee.  He sits in the same seat and he does the same thing – he fills out the Racing Form for his foray into hope and fantasy. His legs are masked in compression bandages, his trachea sliced by a tracheotomy probably for throat cancer, his neck and face and scalp patched with skin and scale from skin cancers and who knows what. This week when he was away one morning,  I sat in his seat to see what it was like to be there to see what he sees, at least to see what he looks at when he is not pushing his pencil stub along the Form Guide. Representing a person on my sketch pad and on my digital screen, and sitting where he sits still hasn’t let me into his soul. I don’t want to go there yet. I like my fantasy of him as an object to represent.