Hipsters!
(This is part of a series of posts that I am doing in the run up to my first Sydney Fringe Festival show in September. It is called One Man Show and it is a split show performed with Andrew Barnett, in the run up we have another website to promo the show, check it out if you get a chance. Original Post)
People who know me know that I have one huge pet peeve right now, Hipsters! Now that word has quite a few meanings, there were 50s hipsters that were different from the 90s version, but the current version, the post millennial crop, just seem custom designed to annoy the crap out of me.
My theory is that Mother Earth did a stock take at the end of the last millennium and figured out there are far too many of us bald monkeys walking around and screwing up the planet. She didn’t get to 4 billion on the clock without being able to take corrective action every now and again and hipsters are her way of depopulating us from the inside. Just to start off, they seem to enjoy having bad hairstyles, a good way to stop being attractive to the opposite sex and future mate. Should they overcome that obstacle they have a fondness for uber tight jeans, an excellent way to keep the sperm count down and stop the next generation right there.
Have you ever been out walking around and you see a person wearing glasses that look like they were government issued in the 70s, but then on closer inspection found out that the glasses in question have no lenses? Hipsters wanna be! I personally don’t get that one. When I was 11 I found out I had to wear glasses, as I got older and earned some money, I tried to make the glasses I had to wear as invisible as possible. When I found out I couldn’t wear contacts (imagine trying to give medicine to a cat that doesn’t want it, that was me trying to get a contact into my eye) I went for the best science could deliver and got lasik eye surgery, “What’s that burning smell? Oh right it’s me!”. These kids don’t even need glasses, but they wear the frames, GAH!
Back in my day I was a fairly serious cyclist, I enjoyed as we went through the 80s and 90s, bike technology got better, first it was single speed free wheel, then 3 speed, then a 9 speed, then 18 speed, then full hyper glide 27 speed XTR, yay! Hipsters in their obsession with form over function have stripped it all back to either a single speed or a fixie! That is a bike with the gear fixed to the wheel, so that they can’t stop pedaling. This is how crazy it is getting, this is their logic. Because the wheel is fixed, they can just back pedal to brake, hence they don’t need a brake on the bike and they remove all brakes, WTF! I presented one hipster once with the real life situation, “OK so you are going down the road at 60 kph and a car unexpectantly pulls out in front of you, what are you going to do?”, “Eh, I’ll just pedal backwards”, was his response. “You’ll snap your legs off!”, was mine. I have to admit this was before I was in on Mother Earth’s plan, viewed through that prism it all makes sense again, right they don’t wear helmets because it’ll mess up their crappy hair do, so that when the worst happens and they crash, it will be immediate death rather than surviving on some life support system clogging up the world. Nice!
I like to think of myself as an optimist, I can’t fight the system, people are allowed to be idiots and wrong, how can I take advantage of it? Well single speeds and fixies are murder on the knee joints, most of them think that they’ll be 23 for ever, I’m waiting until they turn 30, provided they last that long, and find out they have the knees of a 90 year old due to Osteoarthritis, since it turned out that, yeah, gears were a good idea after all. I am going to set up the first joint replacement facility targeting hipsters. Also since they have the frames already, you know reading distance starts to go as you approach 40, here lets me get some lenses for you. Man I am going to clean up.
