Midnight Cowboy

"For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, 

and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”

-- Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist 

Midnight cowboy 6-8-13

"The lunar look skimmed scantly toe, breast, arm,

Then edged on slowly, slightly,
To shoulder, hand, face; till each austere form
Was blanched its whole length brightly.”

-- Thomas Hardy, "A Cathedral Facade at Midnight"

I scored another lucky jackpot at the thrift store -- a whole bunch of pose-able little action figure people, including:

1. a super-muscular wrestler with a really unattractive bowl haircut and weird embossed chest hair.
2. a bounty-hunter-ish dude with black gloves, cargo pants, a goatee, and handcuffs hooked on his belt.
3. a bridegroom in tux, bow tie and cummerbund, whose head is on a spring allowing it to recess, turtle-style, into his shoulders.
4. a paunchy gangster-y guy with a beer gut, a handful of papers and a black-stained pointer finger.
5. an orange wizard-y or maybe Zeus-ish guy with long, curly white hair and a white beard, wearing a purple toga and holding a handful of what might be thunderbolts? Or maybe protoplasm? 
6. and for today's face .... a li'l cowboy.

Except the cowboy's face isn't really there.
I mean, it's there in real life, but here it is rendered as just an empty, blank space.
Which forces the question ... if it's blank, is it still a face?

I am going to argue that yes, it is still a face, even if it is featureless.

I am going to argue that facial space without any features is still facial, and therefore still a face. Plus, the cowboy is wearing a hat, and his little ears stick out, which both imply a head, which implies that there has to be a face hidden there in the blankness somewhere, even if you can't actually see it.

For backup, I will rely on Dictionary.com, which defines a face as "the front part of the head, from the forehead to the chin."

So there.

Plus, it's my blog. So if I say it's a face, it's a face.

Feeling dazed and a little confused after yet another sleepless night, I feel a kind of kinship with this lonely li'l night wanderer, out there roaming around under the moonlight with only his shadow and the moon for company.

I can tell from his very blank expression and empty stare that he is a fellow insomniac who knows intimately the punishing, bone-deep fatigue and loneliness of long, wakeful nights, and who knows all too well how slow the night can go, and yet how quickly a morning is over.

I wish he could wander over to my house so we could talk about it.

If he could, I would give him fresh warm gingerbread.

I made some at 5 a.m. because I was still up.