How to Survive in a World Without Hats

“We are a sad people, without hats”
-from Mary Ruefle, “The Bunny Gives us a Lesson in Eternity”

Your first mistake was assuming there is only one kind of Hell: there are as many hells as there are islands, grains of sand, brands of mustard, or shades of gray. And each hell is worse than the last. The sole consolation of these hells is that there will always be a counterfactual more tortuous, more painful, more humiliating, more hopeless, more unceasing in its lack of mercies. And then you arrive in the world without hats. No bowlers, no panamas, no pillbox, no baseball caps, no Napoleonic tricorns, no fascinators, no sombreros. Visors are permitted, though: an epidemic’s worth, most emblazoned horribly with the logos of those investment banks and insurance providers who regularly sponsor mid-tier professional golf tournaments. If you wear a hat in public in the world without hats, you will be assessed a hefty fine. You may also have your hat forcibly removed by the Hat Police. This is all eerily reminiscent of the Russia of Peter the Great, who imposed a Beard Tax on the populace. Men who wore beards (and in the Russian Orthodox tradition there were quite a lot of those) would be forced to pay a levy, depending on their means. Peter wanted the country to become more Westernized and secular—and beyond that he was a controlling psychopath who tortured even members of his own family in horrid ways and staged exploitative dwarf weddings for the amusement of the Nobility, in addition to causing mass death in the course of conquering Sweden. Still, even Peter was not sadistic enough to consider banning hats. Your only chance for happiness in a world without hats is to wear an imaginary hat. There are underground stores that sell imaginary hats, and many of these are effectively invisible to the Hat Police, because people who ban hats have no imagination, so it’s a blind spot for them. You might say that an imaginary hat is no substitute for a real hat, just as imagination itself is no substitute for real-world experience. I say you are wrong: you simply haven’t developed your imagination sufficiently yet. An imaginary hat will not save you from the worst Hell imaginable, but it will make such an infernal journey more endurable. It will, at least, shield your head slightly from the heat. Someday, the Hat Police will be defeated for good. But until that day comes, imagine them trapped in ten-gallon stetsons that, through some fateful alchemy, have been permanently spot-welded to their skulls. Imagine walking by these headwear-haters—these fedora-forbidders, these beret-banners, these cap-olitionists—and doffing your derby to them, and wishing them a very pleasant good morning.