Whenever you face a difficult decision or are called upon to figure out a complicated problem, you’re often advised to “put on your thinking cap.”
I don’t own such a cap.
At the drop of a hat, it now jumps to the top of my to-do list.
I realize, of course, that this is a metaphor (this realization coming even without the requisite headgear), but when I thought about it (again without the necessary chapeau), I realized that having something on my head might actually improve my cognitive abilities.
“Why should anyone be frightened by a hat?”
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
You might be wondering to yourself if I am currently wearing anything on my head as I write this.
Obviously not.
But don’t let that stop you from A) continuing to read this, and B) considering acquiring a thinking cap of your own. Were you to be wearing such a hat, you might even be getting more out of this.
Probably not, though. It would have to be a pretty big fucking hat for that to be the case.
A sombrero perhaps. Your thinking sombrero. Like they wear in ol’ Mexico. If memory serves, in old westerns, there were always a bunch of Mexicans wearing sombreros leaning against dilapidated buildings, sound asleep. For years, I wrote this off as laziness.
Perhaps they were all just lost in thought. Perhaps Mexico is a paradise for thinkers.
“I think, therefore I sleep, amigo.”
“Everywhere you hang your hat is home. Home is the bright cave under the hat.”
- Lance Morrow
Does a thinking cap have to be tied to your ethnicity?
Is it a thinking beret in France?
“I recommend the French beret, for it gives the impression of just the right soft toughness, a veritable wave of sophisticated brain matter. It is the kind of hat that inspires a person to grow into it, to become the person they never knew they could be. The space between the top of the head and the beginnings of hat is among the most intimate of areas: earlobe behinds, elbow insides, and anuses. One must pay heed to such spaces for they hold a potential not fully known (but generally agreed to be vast).”
-Meia Geddes, Love Letters to the World
A thinking ushanka in Russia?
Do Moroccan’s reach for their thinking fez?
What about cowboys? Is it a ten-gallon thinking cap?
Makes you wonder about graduates tossing their mortarboards into the air after they receive their degrees. Is this too a metaphor? As if announcing they’re done thinking?
Got you thinking there, didn’t I? (Perhaps wishing there was a certain something perched on top of your head?)
“You can put it on and say, “Hey you, person without a hat! I’ve got something you don’t!
"How did I get it? Probably by being worth more to society.”
- Alice LeGrow
Jews are renowned for their intellect… could it be the 24/7 thinking yarmulkes?
If that’s the case, why doesn’t it work for men who wear toupees?
What’s the difference between a German thinking pickelhaube and this story?
The pickelhaube has a point.
(A tip of the cap to you if you got that.)
“Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope.
And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.”
-E. B. White