Performance-Enhanced Cap Curve

A confession: I’m a user. Been using for years. Since high school, actually, the summer after grade nine, in 1997. I even let my friends use it.

I bought the “Perfect Curve” from a Lids store in Manhattan, for something like five, or maybe 10, American dollars, back when American dollars were actually worth something. Truthfully, I don’t remember how much it cost. It didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now. After using it once, leaving my hat it in it overnight, I was hooked. On the Amtrak back home to Toronto with my brother, my gloriously curved cap on my head, I overheard a kid a few seats up from me, looking back in my direction, tell his – presumably – brother, “Wow, look at that guy’s hat. The curve is perfect.” The irony wasn’t lost on me.

Today, almost 15 years later, we live in a different world. Kids no longer curve their caps. They leave the stickers on, too, something I’ll never understand. Even more disturbing: The “Perfect Curve” is no longer available at Lids, as far as I can tell. Hell, it isn’t even available at perfectcurve.com. When did we lose our way?

As society crumbles around me, I’ve doubled-down on my cap-curving ways. When I walk by a young man, or a group of young men, wearing flat-brimmed hats, who are clearly going down the wrong path in life, I say, as I pass them, “Curve your hat.” And I keep walking. I don’t look back. I’ve done my part. I’ve sent my message. Kids are our future.

This all may be trivial to you, but not to me. I’m one of those people who’s always wearing a hat. That’s been the case for as long as I can remember. When my older brother, three years my senior, told me that in high school, one wasn’t required to take off his hat, I thought he was lying; playing some kind of sick joke on me, as older brothers are wont to do. I didn’t believe him until my first fateful day of grade nine. I was one of those jackasses who took his yearbook photo wearing a hat. Today, I’m lucky enough to work in a newsroom where I wear my hat all day. I even wear it in meetings. (I’m pretty sure my colleagues think I’m insane, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay.) I’m wearing my hat right now. And I’m still using. The night after I bought my new blue Blue Jays hat, I put my Perfect Curve to good use. Twelve hours is all it takes for a perfect curve to last a lifetime.

Curve your cap. It is God’s will.