I’m sharing my new room in Hispanic Korea Town with a Demon that eats hats. I call him Horror Head.

A few weeks before I moved in I found him on the railroad tracks in Hawthorne. I’ve always loved railroad tracks, whether the landscape is rolling hills of grass, scatterd trees, deep forests, or cities traintracks cut through it like a rift. They even look like a stiched up scar. It’s a liminal zone, a boundary ungoverned by the rules of the surrounding zones. Things found there are weird, they’ve got power.

That’s where I found Horror Head, a styrofoam wig model covered inthis weird wrinkly brown skin, that tears off his face and sticks out like a mummy-skin blinder with peg teeth. His eyes and mouth have been gouged deep into his skull. I don’t know where he came from, or how many hands he passed through before finding me, but I knew when I found him I needed to take him home. That’s interesteing, you know?

When I picked him up I let a shiver run through my body. It looked posessed, and so for Chris’s benefit I acted like it was speaking through me. In an exorsist voice I spoke.
“At last! I have been awaken. Prepare yourself for the horror of a world without hat! Yesss, a hatless nightmare world is what my awakening ushers in. From now on, when your head grows cold you must use a hood to over it! Can your mind handle my horror!”

I thought I was just being weird, but soon after Horror Head came home with me hats actually started dissappearing. Three so far, but big ones, my cowboy hat, my top hat (non-collapsing kind), and Dylan’s cabby cap. Eileen says Horror Head has been appearing in her dreams. usually just as flashes. Maybe he really was speaking through me, or more likely, this is like in Ghostbusters where whoever awakens the destructor choses the form of their destruction. You all better get down on your hands and knees and blow me for chosing a world without hats. Imagine if some misanthrope like John Tesh found him, we’d all be food for his ravenous ego.

And for that reason I can’t just get rid of it. Then it will fall into the wrong hands. No, I must seal it. Plus, takening on the Horror head just seems more interesting than throwing out the Horror Head. I’m going to take it into the big Catholic Cathedral near my house and see if they can exorcise the demon that eats hats. I’ll let you know how that turns out. I almost did it today but there was a wedding going on, and I don’t think they’d appreciate my mission very much.

An old black man with hair like freshly shorn white wool sat beside me at the bus stop. He looked at my boots, then at me, then at my boots again, and in a voice as gravely as old washed-out country roads he said, “whoo, those are the boots of the resurrection Frankenstein!”

And I laughed so hard and heartily, the best I’d had all day. He smiled, revealing a single row of teeth purfled on both borders with blood, so the single row seemed to float midway through his mouth, and you couldn’t tell which end sunk it’s roots into his black gums and which had recently been snacking on freshly cut throat.

He curled his middle two fingers into his fist, so that only the frame of his hand shot out it’s thin fingers, and with pinkie and index he stabbed the page I was reading.

“Eyes,” he said, gesturing with his head to the page. “watch. these ideas splashed onto the page by some spasmodic head.”

Such poetic madness was respite on a day of mundane frustrations. Cast behind me was my dark immaterial form, the heavy emptiness of my debt, which dragged with me at every step. But when darkness projects back, light must be projecting forward, for nature obliterates nothing, only transforms it’s material. This is the strange revelation by which the heartiest, sincerest, levity arrises out of fatalism and headlong plunges into the mystery. The sun of LA beamed from my face. I can’t reconcile these loose ends, and I don’t feel I should. I was so very happy and creeped out.

“Can I be mad as you?” I asked, and that lambs wool head suck int close to my shoulder, and muttered incoherent incantations into the sounding board of my hollow chest.

My bus arrived.
And my next day was nearly perfect, rising in the morning from the intangled arms of a beautiful girl, by afternoon hard at work upon a giant robotic lobster, and into the wee hours of the morning laughing till I cried as we plotted out episodes of our sketch comedy show in the surreal atmosphere of sleep deprevation and paint fumes.