Extra Care With Strangers

So I went out to a pub called the King William (King Billy for short) tonight with Ken and some British people. We sat down, they with their drinks, I with my sober attention to my budget. And we proceeded to talk.

At some point Jurassic Park came up, which lead to arguing about chaos theory. Ken asserted that Malcolm's idea that something was bound to go wrong with the park, and so no one should have tried to build it, was a false representation of chaos theory. "If people thought that, then why would they ever try anything?" he exclaimed.

Movie convo quickly brought up a relic from my childhood - Flight of the Navigator. "OH MY GOSH!" I exclaimed.

This attracted the attention of the people in the booth next to us, a group of men in their twenty somethings. They started asking if we wanted a "burger and fries" and made sure to make their a's really nasal, their r's very pronounced. We ignored them.

I went to the bathroom later in the night. One of them came in while I was drying my hands. He asked me if I knew The Hairdressers. I said no - I thought they were a band or something. Then he told me to get my fucking hair cut.

In a few minutes when we were both back at our tables he came over and started telling me about the hairdressers down the street. Luckily Ken intervened and made jovial conversation with him and the people in the next booth. They pretty much left us alone, though they kept referring to Ken as a "Josie." Then they left.

When we finally got up to go I couldn't find my hat - the brown and white knit one that was my older brother's when he was a kid, the one that I found during Thanksgiving Break sophomore year of Kenyon and started wearing because I needed the confidence. I'm going to go back to the King Billy and I'll ask if they've found anything, but it's most likely somewhere on the streets. I can't help thinking, though, that it was somehow those people that took it. I can't remember when I took it off - I can't see any other reason to take it off than in the bar.

And I know it's just a thing, and that I shouldn't attach any value to it, and this was bound to happen as I have a tendency to lose hats. But I do miss it, I did come back to my room and hope that I had just forgotten to wear it that night, I did hope it was sitting on top of a pile of junk somewhere or in my jacket pocket. Such is the way of things. But this is the first major thing I've really lost in England.

"Do not put your faith
In a cape and a hood.
They will not protect you
The way that they should..."