Vapid Divertment
I'm not even thirty, and I have already been left behind by the great carousel of hipness.
(Is hipness a carousel? If so, what an excruciating ride that must be. Hundreds of painfully skinny young people in ironic t-shirts and expensively dirty hair, riding the zebras and lions while trying their best to look bored, stealing looks at the brass ring as it floats by-- brass rings, how quaint, they think, but nobody (else) actually wants it, do they? Do they? A carousel does suggest the proper frivolity to describe hipness, and the circular insularity of the carousel is as good a metaphor as any for the self-referential scene-making intrinsic in any hipster activity. (Some days I really miss grad school, where shit like this was taken dead seriously and I could get away with spinning horseshit and snoozing.))
I am not yet thirty and have been left behind by the great carousel of hipness. I mean, seriously. Low-cut jeans? When I see asscrack peeking out of a women's jeans, I don't think sexy thoughts but rather ardently hope the wearer of the jeans has remembered to wipe thoroughly. Her message of sensuality unleashed translates to me as a plea for personal hygiene.
The ten-minute trucker hat craze left me totally bewildered... I know lots of places where you can pick up a mesh hat and a quart of oil for $1.25, yet in Manhattan it may yet be chic to pay $225 for the thing. Ashton Kucher is going to have a lot to answer for, some day.
And yet I still know funny when I see it.
Via Boston blogger Bradley's Almanac and Fear of a Female Planet comes this gem: Hipster Bingo! Where I work, I would win at this game every day. Damn kids.
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Well, don't feel too bad. I
Well, don't feel too bad. I'm 34 as of last month, and I can't even see the carousel from where I am. My combat boots, bought at a suitable grungy army-navy surplus in the early nineties, gave up the ghost after ten years of loyal service. There is an army navy store five miles from my house. Yet I could nto bring myself to buy another pair.
My aunt told me that Eddie Bauer was going out of business. I was horrified, as I realized that 85% of my clothes are Eddie Bauer. They fit me, and they don't look bad, and they wear well. These are my criteria now. (It turns out that only a few mall stores were closing. Thank God.)
There is a purpose to twenty something hipsters. They are what they are, and they are trying to get laid. I am developing (have developed, -ed) a paunch, I am married, and I am more worried about getting my house painted than how cool my shoes are.
There is nothing sadder than a thirty something hipster, except maybe a forty-something hipster.