HATQUEST

I don’t have a GPS but I do have state-of-the-art millinery so to speak in the shape of hatquest (the extra-cranial positioning system). It looks very like a brain—worn on the outside of course. Other visual analogies might be: Marie-Antoinette’s wig (when her head was still attached to her body) though not so large and tall and white. Also Marge Simpson’s updo but not blue. Or an organic map. Yes, this one’s good. Imagine you spread out your map. Not your ordinary anonymous/sterile/impersonal map but a map of the exact streets you will travel, your precise route, with a little red star for your starting point, your home, your north star, your Alpha and Omega, and another for your destination, your excursion, your beta, your B. Then you put Peel-A-Way all over your map, or something that turns it into pulp. And you scoop all that up like a jelly, the bright veins of your route glistening through, and it somehow accumulates shape and you pile it on top of your head. The little red stars are like barrettes, cunningly positioned. It beats all odds. It’s also like an old-fashioned hairdryer in the beauty parlor, the kind you insert your head into. Also like a turban, printed of course. Also like those squidgy pipings of wet sand (themselves like renegade caulk from a wholewheat gun) which lugworms, compact under the compact sand, throw out. Anyway, rather than attending to a pleasant though authoritative voice, you insert your head into this pellucid wobbly confection, also strangely comforting. Like a warm diaper but I digress. There is so much brain on the outside that one might be forgiven for thinking that the space within is empty. But no. There is a driver within. The analogy might be streets are to Hatquest as car is to body and driver is to brain. Still, obviously the brain has limits, the very limits that drove the driver to the purchase of Hatquest to begin with. If true purchase can ever be had on such a glittering, slippery thing.