Tonight I saw a cat wearing a hat. When I say cat, I mean a dude, a guy, a bro, a bad hombre. I don’t actually know that he was bad. I have half a sneaking suspicion that he wasn’t at all. That isn’t the point. He was some guy wearing one of the crispest hats I’ve ever seen. This thing looked like it came right off the rack and that it had come straight off the truck and straight off the factory floor- each step, this hat was just running through the process, skipping customs, we’re talking Presidential levels of access to fast travel. We’re talking Skyrim fast travel, without the loading screens. Like Anthony Bourdain with a box of shrimp.
Okay, so I’m not entirely sure Anthony Bourdain would make it through customs with a box of shrimp.
In any case, this hat was fresh the way you hope your pizza will be every time you go to Little Ceasars and slap down a fiver (plus two bucks, because fuck you, pizzaflation is real suckers). But his hat wasn’t like Little Ceasars pizza, because it actually was that fresh, and didn’t immediately fill me with shame and regret after wearing it. Or seeing him wear it. I didn’t jack this dude and wear his hat, despite how fresh it was.
The only reason any of this stuck out to me was because the rest of his outfit was the exact opposite of his hat. He was rocking a blue jumpsuit and I have a sneaking suspicion that the fucking thing was made of velvet or some other whackadoo shit like that. At least it used to be blue. I don’t know what you’d call that color now. I googled it and google just said ‘Fuck I don’t know bro, nasty bluish-brown’. When you stump Google you know you’re off the rails. This kid also had a filthy wife beater on.
I couldn’t help but wonder, what set of circumstances creates such a creature who can be at once so obsessively dedicated to his hat-wear and so totally ambivalent to the rest of his attire? I feel genuine concern about it. I wanted to take him over to the Laundromat and flip him some quarters but I’m half certain if I had offered it would have ended with me getting shanked prison-style in the parking lot of Little Ceasars. I mean, obviously with that ridiculous analogy I used early this happened at Little Ceasars. For one thing, nobody is busy thinking about their god-awful pizza when they aren’t eating it, and for two that is the only kind of place where you’d see somebody like this. Even the Hood Mart, as previously mentioned by yours truly, has a different class of negligent vagabond. And the entire neighborhood may soon lose all these sorts of colorful characters, as half of the run-down gut bombers along Watt have been torn down and rebuilt and the rest are in some various stage of remodel or reconstruction. They’re upscaling the fuck out of us. I’m witnessing gentrification.
I won’t miss the cockroach and piss stained AM/PM. And if I was stupid enough to eat at Taco Bell, I’m sure I could find a thing or two to complain about in their old building too. But I’ll miss Fresh Fuckin’ Hat Guy. That dude is a god damn original. That dude doesn’t go to Starbucks and make jokes about pumpkin spiced latte and talk about having a Case of the Mondays. That dude pays meticulous attention to his hat, even if it means wading through what I assume must have been a literal river of shit to do so. He argues about the freshness of his Little Ceasars pizza and suspects the old fragile death-bag working the register has some nefarious intent when it comes to his food.
He might make people uncomfortable, but at least he isn’t fucking boring, and he certainly isn’t sterile.
Are they cleaning up the hood? Shit, I doubt it. But there certainly has been a questionable level of facelifting going on. Is that inherently bad? I don’t know. I’m not here to provide depth or insight.
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