Episode Seven

There are times when you just have to do it anyway. You've been advised against it, seen the looks that people throw at you, and had someone try to steal it just so they wouldn't have to look at it again. But I love that hat. When it's on the top of my head, the world seems right. Guess you'll just have to get over it.

The locomotive histrionics we see on television, when Jack left Isabel for that slut Vicky, or when Jesus was abducted by the cartel ( his apparent suicide and subsequent resurrection aside ) stand as a low-brow morality play in which our worst nightmares can be digested as a sweet and palatable cookie. Unfortunately, they give us no clue as to how to react when something truly nasty coalesces between us, in the real world. Sometimes it is hard to serve up a home-baked reaction and instead we run to the supermarket of human emotion and buy a processed retort. I've been there before, trying to think clearly when the adrenaline is flowing and the best you can come up with is, "Yeah? Well you're a....a..."
Oscar Wilde, I am not.

The best thing about that hat is the wide brim, perfect for pulling down over your eyes. It can hide the embarassment of verbal incontinence, and left in place it will convince everyone that you're deep in thought instead of retreating to a dream in which the cashier at that supermarket is smiling at you, suggesting you meet at the end of her shift so you can both run off to an island somewhere in the Pacific. You know the one. The one where that plane full of contraband went down; the crash that the pilot didn't survive. Or did he?