Hey! Nice Hat!

My wife is trying to keep me from turning to a life of crime.

That’s actually the end of a long and winding train of thought so let me back up a few cars and start over instead of just giving you the caboose, especially since I notice most trains don’t even have cabooses anymore and anyway the proper plural is cabeese.

My wife knitted me an octopus hat. It’s a really nice hat and fits me perfectly which is one of the advantages of being married to a knitter. She’s also knitted me several pairs of socks and before this she knitted me a hat with police boxes and Daleks on it, and before that she knitted me a fish hat so one of these things is not like the other two, but that’s okay because my interests range from the sea to the stars. When she knitted me the fish hat some of her friends asked, “Will he wear it?” which just goes to show that they don’t know me whereas she does, although I think even she was kind of surprised by how often I wore the fish hat and sometimes she’d say, “Okay, I’m glad you like it, but you can take it off now. It’s August.” But that’s another story.

As I was walking along in my octopus hat it occurred to me I was at a real disadvantage if I wanted to commit a crime. I wasn’t thinking of any specific nefarious acts, or even any non-specific ones, so I’m not sure how the idea popped into my head, but you know how these things go. An idea pops up and then it links up to a couple of other ideas and then they get moving and pick up some extras and my octopus hat might as well be a conductor’s cap because we’ve got a full load of freight and we’ll be hauling all night until we’ve pulled into the yards just on the edge of Poughkeepsie.

You see how these things go. The point is if I committed a crime and there were any witnesses their interview with the police would go like this:

“What did he look like?”

“Well, average height, average build, pretty much average all around.”

“Anything distinguishing?”

“He had an octopus hat.”

“That’s all we need!”

And that got me thinking how when I was a kid and riding in the backseat of my mother’s car and a guy on a motorcycle pulled up next to us. He had a big bushy beard and wore a leather vest and had tattoos on his arms. My friend Troy who was riding along with us said, “He looks like a bad guy.”

My mother said, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” which confused me because we weren’t talking about books and also how are you supposed to judge a book? Even if you’re not judging it by its cover you’re at least making a decision about whether or not you want to read it based on the title. It sounds nice in principle to withhold judgment about a book until you’ve finished it and I even once tried to live according to that but gave up when I realized I didn’t even have an Atari so reading the entire repair manual didn’t help me at all; besides I figured out by page two that the capacitor did it so that was not the big twist ending I think it was supposed to be.

Anyway I had this strange intuition that maybe this guy, even though he looked kind of scary, might not be a bad guy, or if he was he’d be a really dumb criminal because in those days he had enough distinguishing features that he’d be easy for the cops to find. Now of course the exact opposite is true.

“What did he look like?”

“He had a big, bushy beard, a leather vest, and tattoos up and down both arms.”

“So pretty much average all around.”

Since this train of thought is now running out of steam, or maybe coal which they use to fuel the fire, or maybe water which is what the fire turns into steam, or maybe we’re just pulling into the station, the big twist ending is that if I’m going to turn to a life of crime it’ll have to wait until at least August.

Bonus: The Fish Hat