The Once and Future Hipster

Apparently, the contemporary resurgence of the term 'hipster' has its origins in the late 1990s, which means that I was one of the original modern hipsters. I was so hip that I didn't even know I was hip, and if anyone had told me I was hip, I would have denied it. I never heard the term hipster back then, probably because I was so damn hip that I entirely rejected the notion of social taxonomy. I knew what I was, and I had no need to put a label on it.

I had all of the hipster trademarks. I was the ultimate trendless trend-setter. I had the iconic rock band t-shirts, the kind you can't get anymore, the ones from the first tour when nobody had even heard of them. I had the weatherbeaten work pants, the paint-spattered jeans, the ridiculously green wide-wale corduroys. I had a whole closet full of interesting hats and footwear to be worn in organically athematic combination. I was the only person anybody knew who had two chains on their wallet, deliberately mismatched and arranged to hang just so, declaring my ultimate hipness straight from the hip.

Every article of clothing I owned had a story attached to it. Everything I wore was an effortlessly cool expression of who I was. I did hip, interesting things with many different interesting people, and when I told those people about the hip things I did with the other people, they all thought that it was really hip and interesting. I listened to music by bands that were so new they hadn't even heard of themselves, I followed every detail of the local underground music scene, and I went to shows in shitty little dive bars that took great pains to maintain their status as shitty little dives. Everybody knew who I was, and when they saw me walk by they couldn't help but wonder what hip, interesting things I was on my way to do. 

And I did it all without even trying. That's the truth. All I was doing was being myself. It is also true that, deep down inside, I desperately wanted to be so damn hip. I relished my hipness. I craved that hip feeling, and sought after it like an addict. I never pretended to be something I wasn't, but I was always genuinely me in the most overt way I could manage. With the exception of a few good friends, I didn't really care what others thought of me, but I obsessed over what I thought of myself. Mine was a constant, silent struggle of coolly detached self-critique and reinvention, never satisfied with the current version, chasing that elusive event horizon of perfect, zen-like supreme hipness.

At some point in the last ten or twelve years, all of that changed. As happens to all of us eventually, I got mixed up in the real world and stuff happened, stuff that was more important than hipness, like learning to weld, falling in love, and earning money. For a long time, getting was more important than being: getting jobs, getting hurt, getting married, getting by. Hipness, by whatever unspoken name I had known it, no longer mattered.

A few days ago, I was in one of those really hip new-agey stores where they sell most of the unbelievably cool non-conformist stuff that true hipsters use to visually define their total irreverence to everything, and as I wandered among the handmade clothing, African drums, inscence, and obscure subculture memoribilia, I remembered back to the time when I was that young, interesting, totally unique guy who was so hip that he neither knew nor cared that someday he would be somebody like me. I looked at my worn, stained work pants that had no story to tell other than one of hard, strenuous work, at my blank cotton t-shirt that sent no message to the world other than that my only priority in shirt-selection that day had been to find one that comfortably clothed my upper body, and at the leather sandals that I wear when my steel-toed shitkickers are not required, and it struck me that I no longer care what I look like or how obvious it is to everyone that I am absolutely the most me I could possibly be. I realized, no more in words than I had defined it in the first place, that I was no longer hip, and had no desire to be.

But I was wrong.

Mrs. Benson caught my wistful smirk and asked what was behind it. I told her, less cohesively, more or less all of the preceding, and with her unerring knack for on-the-spot profundity, she told me not only that I had been an original hipster, but that I still am. All of that hipness that I wore on the outside back then is on the inside now. I am now so completely myself that I am no longer concerned with being me. I no longer crave that hipness, she told me, because now I have it, all of it, all of the time. Somehow, without trying, I have become the hipsterian ideal, a hipster so hip that hipness is no longer necessary. I am supremely hip.

And the best part is that I don't even care.