Stephen Walker MacDougall

I sat in the west end the other day at that cafe that's on the corner of Byres Road. The over priced one with a silver moped with no engine in the window. Its only redeeming quality is that it's got a smoking area. I meant to publish this earlier but I forgot.

I ordered a cup of tea:-

I sat down outside as the girl said she would bring it out, in the time it took, I counted 57 people I did not know.

I lit a cigarette:-

Before I stubbed it out I counted 97 people I did not know.

For the next two hours I sat there, taking one break to go to the toilet and order another cup of tea:-

In that time I counted 2216 people I did not know.

I saw fourteen that I did. Of them, I spoke to 3.

I will try get a scanned copy of the notebook, which is just covered in metal asylum tally marks. What I found interesting about this experiment was that, truth be told, I have no idea if I counted some people more than once. The sad thing about this experiment wasn't that I did not know all of the people, or that the fourteen which I did, I only spoke to three. The sad thing is that everything about these people was taken from them as their names, personalities, histories were all represented as a singular identical mark.