The Wing Hat

It's super fly...

If you’ve never met me in person (and I suppose a few people may have stumbled upon this Substack who don’t actually know me?) you might not know that I wear a hat with wings on it. Wings that I designed and made.

I wear this thing. Every. Single. Day.

Every time I leave the house.

Several years back when I got on the other side of all the scary-deathly health crap, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had had a wing hat previously that I wore around Burning Man and associated events and builds, but I’d put it away when I got sick. Seemed a little too…something.

When I got well enough to, you know, drive a car and function again, it felt like I had won the right to wear this fucking weird thing, and I had lost my former inhibitions about looking like a freak, so I just did it.

First few times it felt super weird.

Eventually it got so I felt naked if I left the house without it. If I forgot it, I’d actually turn the truck around, go home, and retrieve it.

It’s been since 2019 that I’ve worn various cowboy wing hats, and I have never once gotten a negative reaction from anyone, anywhere. Closest I ever came was leaving a grocery store on 2100 South, and some old dude with that “meth Santa” vibe asked if I was from Texas. Huh? Nope, sorry!

Do they wear winged cowboy hats in Texas?

Anyway.

As sick as I had been, when I decided that I was going to walk out of Mordor and at least TRY to fulfill my potential on this planet, I lost a lot of respect for cultural norms. I mean, I’ve always been ADHD/ASD and had much less to do with that shiz in any case, but it’s like something just fell flat inside me. Wing hat. Do it. It’s awesome.

And it is. I get more compliments on the hat than anything else. People LOVE it. I suppose there are people who think I’m a weirdo, but they just avoid me and I never have to talk to them, and I can’t tell you what an amazing plus that is. On the regular, I’ll be waiting in line at the grocery store and some random person tells me how awesome my hat is. I love it. It seems to consistently bring joy to others, which brings joy to me.

I also had to be educated about the hat, after I’d been wearing it for a while. It wasn’t until maybe 2022 or so before I went to a party and the host looked at me quizzically and asked “what’s with the Hermes hat?”

Hermes? Oh yeah, that Greek god dude. I had subconsciously known that he wore a hat with wings, but that wasn’t in my mind when I decided to do that for myself.

I looked him up. A trickster. God of travelers, commerce, communications, liars, thieves, gamblers, boundaries, doorways, and for some reason also gymnastics.

In short, he is god of liminality, the space between spaces—the undefinable.

Dude.

Well yeah. I’ve had an extremely liminal life and I continue to do so. Citizen of three nations, native of none? And that’s just the start of it for me. Pick a universal category with binaries, chances are I don’t fit into either.

Right after I made this discovery about Hermes, they painted his sigil on the giant smokestack out at Kennecott. WTF?! I laughed and laughed…

Anyway, if he’s keeping the assholes at bay, I’ll take it.