What happens when someone thinks, feels, speaks, and understands how to communicate feeling to another human being? Tricky, right.
The great Tom Robbins once said, "If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws."
The world is full of metaphysical black hats who chase the white hats through imaginary western towns, into whiskey perfumed saloons, and out towards the sunset where they both ride onto infinity. We're tempted by black hats. We're tempted to think that we need to give something. That we need to fix their damn problems, or accommodate for the "people that they are"--those unchanging characters for whom we've sacrificed patiently because we thought everything really was a matter of patience. But learning through suffering gets old after a while. And so do black hats, Czech revolutionaries, and laughably intelligent people muttering, "heres to looking at you kid" in shady back alley bars.
White hats don't seem to exist in the real world. They're trapped under the letters of a Remington SL3 typewriter struggling to burst from pages sticking them to the inside of a book. And maybe thats why they're appealing. They're trapped. Their words are bound to the sentences, shackled by commas and periods, and given occasional free steps with an end dash to nowhere. Even though we read their words over and over, somehow they seem to defy impossibility and say something new. They think beyond themselves, to change. Or maybe it because they're not afraid to say something new. The sentences holding them back are just disguises. Somewhere in the stillness of those two-dimensional pages lives a dreaming, breathing, real human being. more real than any two-bit black hat slinking through the streets in search of tobacco fog and whiskey.
So, batman, what happens when you run into a living breathing white hat?
You put it on.
