TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: MY WINTER HAT

★★★★★

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing my winter hat.

I got a new hat! I will do my best to describe it as accurately as possible here but if you’d like to truly experience it, I invite you to see it in person. You can schedule an appointment by calling me at (617) 379–2576.

First of all, I’m not trying to brag about my hat. I’m not one of those people who puts their life on the internet to show everyone else how great it is. But honestly, you don’t have a hat as good as mine. I’m sorry, but you don’t. Picture the best hat you’ve ever seen, and now picture mine next to it looking way better.

When I place my hat upon my head, I immediately transform from a balding man to a man who potentially might have a full head of hair under his hat if you don’t already know the truth! It’s amazing what a thin layer of knit yarn can do to a man.

I found the hat in the trunk of my car and I have literally no idea how it got there. Was it magic? Well, I don’t believe in magic, but I’ve been wrong before, like the time I thought celery was a fruit. It turned out I was thinking of carrots. The point is, if magic put that hat in my car, then it happened for a reason and I’m not going to try and step in the way of fate. That’s why whenever I’m wearing the hat and someone asks me a question, I always answer yes, even if it’s not a yes or no question. I want to be the path of least resistance and see where my hat takes me.

So far it’s taken me to a pond, a backyard a few blocks away, and a different backyard that looked pretty much the same. I think the hat may be testing me out, to see if I am truly willing to accept it. I feel that I have proven myself to the hat and I am anxiously waiting to see what it asks of me. Hopefully it doesn’t ask me to do anything I’m uncomfortable with.

Not only is my hat possibly magic — although probably not — but it’s quite simply beautiful. I took some photos of it to share with you but I haven’t picked them up from the developer yet. Let me describe the hat. Now please close your eyes and imagine the following:

Because of my age, my visions has gotten worse over the years. So I don’t know if the color of my hat is the result of ocular degeneration, or if it actually occupies some in-between space in the visual spectrum that has resulted in a brand new color man has never witnessed before. The color is kind of red but kind of pink but also at the same time it’s not even close to either of those. It’s impossible to describe. Can you picture that in your head?

The shape is basically similar to a human head, but without a chin or ears or a face. So basically just the top portion of the head. It’s larger though, so it is able to fit on the outside, rather than the inside. I’ve already got a skull on the inside so any hat would be redundant in there.

There are no fancy tassels or accoutrements to my hat. It doesn’t bother with those. What it does have, is a single stripe circling around the entire perimeter. Not only is the stripe stylish, but it reflects the circular nature of existence, showing both a nod toward fashion and toward the inevitable bleakness of everything. Few hats do that.

People seem to love my hat. One man loved it so much he stole it, but in his attempt to escape he was fatally hit by a bus. Was this a random accident, or had the hat taken the man’s life because he was not deserving enough to wear it? I couldn’t wear my hat for a long time after that until one day when it was really cold out and I just needed a hat regardless of who had died in it.

In an effort to learn more about the hat, I ran it through a series of rigorous scientific tests. First, I looked at it under a microscope. As near as I could tell, it just looked like a zoomed in picture of thread. Then I looked at it from really far away with a pair of binoculars, and it basically looked like it did when I was just holding it.

Next I took it to my hospital and asked them to put it through an x-ray machine and an MRI. It turns out hospitals will do this if you over them a pretty substantial amount of cash on the spot. It was a waste of money though, because these tests resulted in nothing out of the ordinary for a hat.

I haven’t learned yet what makes my hat so special. The truth is I may never know, but I’m okay with that. My experiences with the hat are what matter most, not the how or why. You can open your eyes now.

BEST FEATURE: It smells like the best flowers ever, mixed with cotton candy.
WORST FEATURE: Roughly half a dozen people have died wearing it.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a fork.