I’m so far past hip that I’ve had a hipster replacement. That’s a middle age joke. And once you have to explain a joke the joke no longer exists. It becomes a duty. Hipsters never explain. Hipster replacements learn to share. Aging hipsters end up like Comic Book Guy in the Simpsons. Over inflated and over the top. A paradigm of ridiculousness. A narrow mind exposed for its failure to engage the rest of the world with an honest gaze.

Actually, I don’t run into that many tragically cool hipsters as I did a few years back. You know, back when guys with hair started shaving their heads. The pioneers of that bald chic hair style had a certain badass cachet about them, almost like they were banditos sneering at the well coiffed: “Follicles? We don’ need no steenking FOLLICLES!” Then there was the whole rockabilly thing going on with guys in Elvis pompadors wearing starched blue jeans with the cuffs turned up and chains on their wallets attached to their belt loops.

I suppose that’s one of the definitions of the hipster dress code. There’s got to be an implicit defiance manifested in what they choose to wear. It can be subtle, it can be outrageous, but it is instantly recognizable as hip. Whenever I wear anything self consciously hip I just end up looking dopey. For instance, as a way to flout convention I’ll wear black socks with sandals. Believe it or not, it’s comfortable. But in the process I come off looking not so much defiant as like a middle aged man who doesn’t know any better than to wear black socks with sandals.

Clearly hipsters don’t have families, or if they do their kids are too young to comment on what mom and dad choose to wear. Nothing can eviscerate a sense of being cool faster than a teenage son or daughter laughing at their parents’ clothes. And you’d think that even parents with no pretense to hipness would be beyond the pale of mockery by teenage boys in baggy pants three times their rightful size, “shorts” that reach their socks. The only comfort to those of us who underwent hipster replacement is that one day, if there a just god, these kids will realize how totally nerdy they looked dressed like that.

This will happen about the time that all the scantily clad young women today start wearing tops they can tuck in their pants to avoid revealing nasty tatoos that seemed like such a good idea after their third vodka and Red Bull.

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