Dear Crowd Surfer Who Knocked My Hat Off My Head, Losing It Forever,

I suppose we haven’t been formerly introduced, for we only met but for the briefest of moments. That moment of course was when you landed on my neck at a Pearl Jam concert during the final night of the Lollapalooza music festival last weekend. Although our interaction only lasted an instant, the outcome may be felt a lifetime. Incase you don’t recall, it is because of you that I lost my favorite hat.

Maybe it was my fault; maybe I should have been facing opposite the stage just in case some little argument for pro-choice wanted to get up and crowd surf their way to a better seat. It’s not like people had been waiting for several hours in the 95 degree Chicago afternoon heat or anything.

Now I realize that your head immediately met the trampled grass with some force so allow me to refresh your memory as to the events that took place.

Pearl Jam had just begun to play a slow cover song, perhaps the least appropriate of their vast catalog for crowd surfing when I heard startled yells coming from behind me. I looked behind me to see your backwards hat paired with your stupid grin as the wave of the crowd pushed you closer and closer to where I was standing. When you got within reach, you were dragged into a rare gap in the audience and kneed in the spinal cord, sending you headfirst into the hardened ground. It was after you were shoved back to where you originated from did I realize that my head felt slightly exposed. Sure enough, my hat was nowhere to be found.

Now, this was no ordinary hat that I could just go out and replace. This was my delightful, fitted baseball cap that I have had for over 3 years. Its bill was perfectly beaten and broken in to fit its owner, much like the shoe of the following crowd surfer or a girl with a confidence issue. This hat had been in gutters, lit on fire, almost shit on by a pitbull, nearly destroyed in a car accident, and thrown in a puddle of dark liquid by an intoxicated Texan. It had gotten around.

You disappointed me, CSWKMHOMHLIF. If you had just harmlessly drifted around me, this negative meeting likely would not have occurred. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have joined in the bludgeoning of your kidneys so that while you were awake later that night pissing blood, you would’ve began to understand the inconvenience that you had caused to thousands of others. However, I almost certainly would not have taken out my aggression on the following stream of assholes making their way over the crowd.

I am speaking exclusively about the overweight topless man who kicked my friend in the head before falling on top of me just after our pleasurable little encounter. Remember that basketball scene in Along Came Polly? It was sort of like that. Except after the fat man had smeared all of his sweat on this kind, handsome, hatless fellow, he had his shoe swiftly removed and tossed back into the crowd. Once the roughly 250 pound man fell down at my feet, he was deeply concerned regarding the location of his left shoe. But instead of taking the time to explain that it was in fact your fault, CSWKMHOMHLIF, I simply pointed him in the opposite direction of his missing sneaker and sent him off on his merry, incorrect way.

I trust that you now understand the anguish you have caused and I’m sure you would gladly apologize given the opportunity. So yes, CSWKMHOMHLIF, I accept your apology.


Hoping your fibula punctures your Achilles tendon at some point in your meaningless life,

Jake Klocksien