"I have decided to hang it up," Hatt said. "It's been a great run, but even a hat gets tired, eventually. I want to just kick back and be a regular hat now." It wasn't so much the travel as the people, he went on. "If there's anything I've learned in my brush with fame and occasional misfortune, it is that a lot of people who call themselves your friends can't be trusted to stand by you, or stand up for you. It gets a bit old, being thrown under the bus so often. It stops being fun."
There was the Louisiana Incident, which causes Cosmo to shudder even today. "Lowell was all set to send me down there, where I would be taken to New Orleans, the French Quarter, all that. Then the person who promised all that suddenly defriended Lowell, the man who adopted and raised me, for no reason he was ever able to determine. I got pulled back just in time. That was scary!"
Cosmo said he had learned not to depend on anyone except Lowell and a handful of close friends. "Even there you can go wrong," he said. "People Lowell thinks are good friends sometimes turn out not to be."
Hatt said he has stopped playing Frontierville, and will be closing down his e-mail and his Facebook site.
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| Cosmo Hatt, in happier times. |
"I apologize to all my friends on Facebook, but this has to be done. The Hat albums on Lowell's site will remain, although they may be edited to reflect current realities," Hatt said.
"Goodbye," he added.
This will be the final entry in travelsofthehat.
