I made a big decision today. I reject hipsters. My budding hatred for them seems to be fueled more and more every day and I feel like sooner or later I'm going to snap.
My new job is at a restaurant in NE Minneapolis. It is, unfortunately, very hipster to the core. Not so much the clientèle, although the neighborhood it's in makes an encounter with at least five hipsters a night inevitable, but the whole organization from the top down is devastatingly hipster. From the ownership to the management to the rank and file employee, I'm surrounded by hipsters. This has been what's pushed me over the edge in recent days.
Hipsters: I get it. You bike everywhere. Great job. I recognize both the wellness and environmental benefits to riding that bike of yours everywhere. One of my oldest friends uses a bike as his primary transportation. I don't mind sharing the road with bicycles. I even have ridden to work occasionally myself in the past. But seriously. It's fucking winter now. Even if it is worth it to you to put on seventeen layers of clothes, a ridiculous mask/helmet combo and bike in the middle of a blizzard, just shut the fuck up about it. I don't care that you just rode an hour in the snow, or how "fun" it was to do it; as soon as you started the story about how you have two layers of long underwear on I tuned you out and wrote you off as an idiot with no regard for personal comfort. I can't trust people like that. Plus, I don't prattle on about how I drove to work and how warm it was in my car and how I got a sweet parking spot and how great it was, do I? No. Because that would be a fucking lame conversation to have.
And maybe it is that lack of trust that is the core of my new hipster hatred. The missing ingredient in the humanity of a hipster, the complete conscious rejection of any sort of mainstream sensibility, alienates me no matter how much else we have in common. I can't accept a worldview that places the hipster at the center and camoflages that selfishness by hiding behind unselfish words like "organic" and "fair-trade."
Here is a story that I think perfectly illustrates that selfishness. A group of seven or eight dirty young people came in to my bar around midnight. Looking like they just rolled out of bed at Catholic Charities, they all proceeded to ask for the cheapest variety of whatever their favorite drinks were and complained even then. Don't come in to a fine dining restaurant if you're going to complain about price. Minutes later, two of the hipsters at the bar started yelling at each other and one grabbed her bottle of beer and smashed it on the bar (after three or four whacks). They all ran out laughing. At most, this was annoying and made a good story the next day. When I told the story the next day to the largely hipster staff I found out that these people did that at no less than three bars that night and that they are honest to God hobos. Not real homeless hobos, just kids who train-jump. One is even a grad student at the U, which is like the total king hipster - going to school and still being able to live a life on the fucking rails or whatever. And fuck me for thinking that's totally bizarre. I found this out from a girl who exclaimed "Oh, I know those people, they're my friends. That was kind of an art piece."
Fuck you hipster. Smashing a bottle at my bar, spraying people with glass and then calling it art is retarded and disfunctional and illustrates not only the self-centered view these people have about themselves and their scene but the superiority complex they hold about it. The fact that this whole episode was played off as totally acceptable blows my mind, but not as much as the ensuing comments and general attitude that I was the wierd one for being upset about the whole thing.
I've decided to live my relatively normal, non-train-jumping life equally as loud and unapologetic as these people. Anytime I'm around these people I'm going to talk about shit like playing video games and going to a sports bar and all the shit I bought at Cub Foods instead of the co-op. I'll talk about my life growing up in the suburbs like it's the only way to live and tell every fraternity story I can think of just to piss these people off. Fuck them all.
