Home?

There is more hipster about me than I’m comfortable with. I remember when I was much younger, hearing the term for the first time, and asking innocently what was meant by it, how my acquaintance started to describe the general type but grew quiet as he realized that his general description generally described me. He recovered his voice and said something to the effect, “But they’d wear it,” the it being a certain hat currently resting upon my head, “not because they like it, but because it is different. They don’t really like it.”

I am, if I am a hipster, an honest hipster, and therefore, my acquaintance assured me, I cannot be one. The defining character was hypocrisy; these strange creatures sought out what was unpopular and pretended to love it. I sought out what I loved and discovered it to be unpopular in the most innocent sense of being uncommon. Where the hipster was a rebel against good tastes, I had no consistent set of tastes, as far as my peers could discern, good or bad.

It suits me just fine. The hipster tries to stand out and becomes indiscernible from the rest of his ilk. If at times I have stood out, it is only because I have not had the forethought (or ability) to fit in. It is by accident, then, that I ever fit a fad or a type, and that, never for very long. Even now, the term hipster has solidified into such a rock solid type that I doubt I would be mistaken for one today. It is not a category to which I even tangentially belong anymore.

That was fine when I was a teen. Now that I’m approaching my thirties, I feel a certain coldness in the air I’ve never known before, and a desire to come inside. However, I have found no home.