It’s a basic fact of life that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who look good in hats and those who should never, ever wear hats.

I am in that latter category.

Now, it’s partly not my fault. For reasons I still don’t understand, I have a malformed head (I mean physically malformed, so shut up). My hat size is around 7 7/8 but my head is longer and narrower than it should be and has an odd bump at the back. In fact, it’s fair to say my head resembles that of the alien in Alien more than that of a normal human being. (This may explain why my mother is short and I am tall; she’s not my real mother. I killed my real mother when I burst out of her chest. Something like that.) This makes it extremely difficult for me to buy hats (and, after that last aside about my mother, extremely difficult for me to visit the USA again). Any hat that’s large enough to fit me is either too wide for my head, or gets stretched and deformed to fit the length. I look a lot like those in-bedded reporters who donned K-Pots or Crye Precision Airframe  helmets to look like Special Operations Operators: i.e. an out of place poser in ill-fitting gear.

This has never stopped me from attempting to wear hats. When I was in high school I used to wear a bucket hat everywhere because I was a teenager and such things make sense when you’re a teenager. (Well, actually, such things don’t make sense, but you’re a teenager so such things are expected.) I also had an Indie Jones hat that, now that I think about it, was a bad idea in many ways. I used to have a Colorado Rockies baseball cap that fit but gave it away to a local baseball fan when I moved from Niigata. (I really wish I hadn’t done that.)

Oddly, the only hats I’ve ever looked reasonably good in, other than baseball caps, were cowboy hats and there aren’t many people who can say that.

Several hundred years ago, at the beginning of one of his mid-life crises, my father started a small photography business in Hayden, Colorado called Dwight’s Photography. He shot a few weddings and a some portraits and, on occasion, I would “help” out, although my assistance skills were questionable and ran the gamut from “pretty much useless” to “blatant saboteur.”

One year, though, he was hired to shoot the rodeo in Hayden during the Routt County Fair. I was brought along to carry stuff, but the rules required that everyone in and around the ring wear appropriate Western attire. This meant I needed cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. Unfortunately, this meant every person on the planet (Hayden being pretty much my world at the time) got to see me in the hat. Oddly, although there were comments, no abuse followed. (I did discover, however, that I was allergic to pretty much everything at the rodeo. Another post, that, involving swollen eyeballs.)

Now, the only hat I can find that fits is a woodland camo boonie cap that I wear during summer outings to nearby parks and Tokyo Disney Land (a whole series of posts resides there, too). It keeps the sun off my face and neck, but I’m embarrassed by the Mall Ninja “Hey, guys, check it out I’m totally an Operator” look to it, and it looks goofy with the brim down and floppy.

It looks better, though, when I fold up the sides like a cowboy hat. Not good, just better.