Russell, mate, it's just a hat. Get it together.

Someone needs to go over to Russell Crowe’s house and see if the big fella’s doing okay. A couple of days ago the star of Gladiator and Mumbly Unshaven Brooding 5 was in Madrid when he started sending out strange, disquieting missives on Twitter about a guy kicking a hat down the street.

#1 I just watched a man kick his hat down the street. Just after dawn. Seems a bad way to start the day. It was a nice hat, jaunty, white. — Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) March 28, 2015

“It was a nice hat, jaunty, white.” Clearly a reference to the opening line of Hemingway’s unpublished short story The Man Who Kicked The Hat, but otherwise unremarkable. But something about watching that man kick that hat stirred something in Russell. Something he had never felt before.

#2 He kicked it. Not stomps, wide,sweeping and confident kicks that sometimes set the hat hovering and drifting, others to roll & bounce. — Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) March 28, 2015

Enthralled by the spectacle, tormented by phantom emotions he could not name, Russell silently watched on as the man kicked his hat.

#3 He kicked it down the footpath, leaving the crowded bus stop behind him. He kicked it into the street. Then he bent and snatched it up. — Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) March 28, 2015

#4 He crossed the street with his jaunty white hat that now I noticed had a bland band , like something Frank Sinatra might wear by the pool — Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) March 28, 2015

Then the man and the hat were gone, leaving Russell alone. Truly alone.

#5 Then the hat kicking man disappeared from my view behind a garden fence . I pondered the mystery and the endless potential causes. — Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) March 28, 2015

Shaken as much by the violence of his response as by the event itself, Russell was moved to ponder, and his musings took on a heartbreaking gravity.

#6 What brings a man to kick his jaunty white fedora with a black band down a street in Madrid just after dawn? What brings a man to that? — Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) March 28, 2015

For the rest of his days, Russell will ask himself this question. It will come to him as he lies in his bed, in the moments between wake and sleep. “What kind of man?”, he will whisper to himself in the dark. But the dark will not reply.

#7 Then over the garden fence flipped the fedora, roughened, tumbled ,rejected and undignified into the garden. Discarded . — Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) March 28, 2015

And are we not all, in the end, like the white fedora? Who among us has not felt the sting of rejection, the quiet ache of loneliness? Who has not been cast aside, like the Spanish man’s hat? These are the thoughts that furrow the brow of Russell Ira Crowe, Academy Award-winning actor and frontman of iconic Australian rock band 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts.

#8 I didn’t see the man again, but I can still see the hat. pic.twitter.com/IVBM9ZNryp — Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) March 28, 2015

Finding that words were not enough, Russell took to his other love, avant-garde photography, to soothe the turbulence within him. The piece above, tentatively titled That Spanish Bloke’s Hat, is a true high point in his work.

This one is untitled. It does not need a name.

Seemingly unable to quiet the roiling turmoil inside him, Russell then turns his suspicions on to the hat itself, accusing it of some dark design.

#10 I won’t wear the hat. I have witnessed it’s degradation, I am superstitious. Perhaps the hat was somehow complicit in that man’s mood. — Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) March 28, 2015

The hat is not to blame, Russell. The hat is within you. Within all of us.

#11 I will dust it off and leave it in this suite. Come summer ,on a sweltering day, perhaps it will become some hatless persons lucky hat. — Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) March 28, 2015

All was silence. All was dark. All was hat.