Skip to main content

Ricky's Hat

Ricky made a decision to let go of his hats. Used to cover a progressive hair loss, he has left the world of things on your head to painfully rejoin the living. It’s like giving up on the Easter Bunny, only funny.

I met Ricky many years ago while working in a tire shop. As a close friend and my semi-adopted son, I've squirmed a little as I watched him struggle with his lack of hair. The hat thing didn’t work for me; I felt he was covering up, and saw it as a external weakness he didn’t need to cultivate.

Using the universal principle that everything that bothers me about others is something in myself that I’m putting a hat on, let’s explore:

I am not against covering up and protecting. Covering up the things in my head has always seemed like good common sense – it’s a big cold world out there and I’ve always believed that if the bastards really knew what was going on inside me I’d get rubbed out. It has never occurred to me to wear a hat though.

But the outside, physical thing seems to be the place I've drawn a line; for some reason it freaks me out – I think I’m externalizing the internal, or projecting onto the non-personal.

I’ve had a goal that some time in my life I would become like a physical holograph – a virtually shaped pile of all one kind of meat -- in how I appear to others. As conceived in my head, others would see me from any angle as consistent and unchanging. No one would have to guess – I would be, as I appeared to be. “What would Mike do?” would be a quaint expression others used as part of a drinking game– an upside down joke on my John Wayne solidness.

This hasn’t played out as I’ve hoped, so far – but it’s happening much faster on the outside than the inside.

If I say a thing I become responsible for it. The more clearly I speak, the more the weight of reason can be applied to my failings. If you disagree with what I write, you can point to where I’m weak and force me to expend energy and strength in  hard work and uncomfortable reflection. The more I’m open, the easier it is to scrape the juicy good parts of me out for cookouts.

I had coffee with Ricky and another friend, Kim, at Starbucks last week. Without his hat, Ricky looked grimly determined, but uncomfortable. Since I still saw some hair around the edges, and because I’m a man of extremes when it doesn’t apply to me, I made some suggestions to Ricky for further action:

“Get one of those fancy handheld razors and shave everything off,” I told him, “Then wax it and grow a big bushy beard.”

Ricky and Kim stared at me, continued to talk to one another, and then agreed on a more gradual approach that wouldn’t scare as many people. I disagreed with this, but was probably just talking to myself at that point.

Comments

Ricky Nigro said…
And now, I have had my 15 minutes....

Popular posts from this blog

Explain nothing, except your self

Explain nothing, except your self. I feel like the last of a tribe struggling to keep my identity a secret from the mob, one step ahead at best, reduced to hiding in bushes from the monsters waiting to snag and devour me. Sort of a delicacy and a poison – a non-specific drug that exudes memes instead of hormones and physical highs – subconscious, primitive analog get-off-ness apparently responsible for some weird competitive advantage consolidating over geological time out of our mixed genus ancestors, or maybe Texans. At the same time, I feel like spasmed dots from gods own printer cartridge ejaculated onto the canvas of a great emptiness, the thought of which is expressed in the three-dimensional representation of the position I’m braced into while doing the splatting -- all hologram like but only juicier and used -- like an in and out burger wrapper chewed on by a trashcan opossum. Or better, a goat in a pickup heading for a quinceanera debating Schrödinger with the

Free Willy

“…Some say it's just a part of it We've got to fulfill the book.” B. Marley Before I completely run away from the point, the subject of this essay is free will, or, more accurately, the illusion of free will. It will be interesting to see if free will even comes up laterally over the next few hundred words now that I’ve set it up as a specific goal.  The imp of the perverse makes it a sure thing that I won’t – but that surety might also double back and force  me to stay on point. There are no dogs to pick  in this fight and it’s not a fight,  and if I’m right, none of this is anything but documentation for a litigious god that will never see it. Like quantum mechanics, life is about either time or place, never both, and how we choose to pretty up our choices is neither the point, or even a choice – it’s after the fact punctuation we use to justify and make sense of our ontological messiness.  (Science has proven that we decide things with our body before the brain