It’s become a practice of the present author in recent years to begin, towards the end of winter, a painstaking search for the new ballcap that will express his entire being. It’s also become a practice in recent years to parlay that search into web content so that the author might “remain” “employed.”

Two years ago, this pursuit yielded a Winston-Salem Spirits cap from 1994 with a weird red sun and melancholy eagle on it. Last year, I had the fortune of procuring a handsome Diablos Rojos cap from the actual team store at Parque Fray Nano in Mexico City. In each case, I have documented the relevant search for the benefit of posterity — even if posterity has failed to show any real interest in my work.

Recently, the author has renewed his dumb search. What follows is the third installment of same.

To wit:

Big Ten 10 Basketball Indiana Hoosiers Nutmeg nwt (Link)
Style: Snapback
Time Left: 17 days, 11 hours
Cost: US $19.99 (Buy It Now)

Essential to the task of becoming an adult is learning to abide life’s myriad, ridiculous contradictions. At an institutional level, the Big Ten Conference presents an excellent model for doing that exact thing. For years, it was composed of 10 actual universities. Since 1990, however, the membership has slowly increased to 14 schools. And yet, despite these mathematical realities, the conference’s constituents have remained unflinching in their commitment to the Big Ten moniker. Accordingly, wearing this cap is less a means by which to exhibit one’s support for a handful of midwestern flagship universities and more to acknowledge publicly the inherent absurdity of existence.

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California Neon Letters Hat Cap Unlined Blue (Link)
Style: Snapback
Time Left: 2 days, 5 hours
Cost: US $14.99 (Buy It Now)

Whatever the long German word is denoting “nightmare that becomes reality,” it was probably first uttered with a view towards describing California. Is it true that all Californians are conceived at key parties? Or that gonorrhea is the state flower? There’s no proof to the contrary in either case. Regardless, this cap featuring the word California in neon letters is not unlike the state itself: simultaneously dumb and beautiful and dumb.

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Red Ox Cafe Ham Lake Mn Vintage SnapBack (Link)
Style: Snapback
Time Left: 21 days, 9 hours
Cost: US $39.99 (Buy It Now or Best Offer)

The trucker-style cap represents a perverse exercise in discomfort, the only advantage of its design being that the mesh fabric which occupies the back half of the hat is capable of serving as a sort of plastic, impromptu cheese grater in the event that one has misplaced his or her actual one. As for this specimen, in particular, it serves an even greater function — namely, of announcing to the public that such a place as Ham Lake exists in the world. One has many questions about this lake of ham. All of them will remain unanswered.

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90s Neon White Windbreaker Fabric 1994 Lacrosse Cap (Link)
Style: Snapback
Time Left: N/A
Cost: US $18.00 (Buy It Now)

Here are three jokes of nearly some relevance to the item pictured above:

Q. Which president is a lacrosse player’s favorite?
A. Abroham Lincoln.

Q. What’s a lacrosse player’s favorite gastronomic delicacy?
A. Escarbrot.

Q. What’s a lacrosse player’s greatest fear?
A. Examining closely the ambiguities of his sexual identity.

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Word Perfect Hat Very Cool Retro Throwback Cap (Link)
Style: Snapback
Time Left: 23 days, 1 hour
Cost: US $27.99 (Buy It Now or Best Offer)

Among the many things you’ll encounter today which are both (a) surprising and (b) unimportant, one of them is that the Wikipedia entry for WordPerfect is written in the present tense. At some point in his youth, the present author, clad in a Hypercolor-brand t-shirt, definitely composed a book report on Tuck Everlasting with the aid of this particular word-processing software. That it still exists is a surprise. Then again, that any of us exist is also a surprise.