Ask The Bitter, Aging Hipster: Sucking on Ribs, and Just Sort of Sucking
The Bitter, Aging Hipster is nearing 40. He no longer enjoys the
lavish attentions of the music, film and energy drink industries. (He
actually thinks the energy drink industry has something to do with
magic, or voodoo, or some shit.) But despite his anger at the
unavoidable realization that he's no longer ad candy, the B,AH feels he
has wisdom to pass on to the next generation of vapid, trendy,
self-absorbed teens and twentysomethings who express their
individuality by firmly entrenching themselves within a uniform group
of like-minded kids who somehow still think they're all alone and
misunderstood in the big bad world. So, every week, he answers two
made-up questions about Living In The Mainstream While Still Pretending
To Be Original with warmth, understanding and love. Except without
those three things.
Dear B, AH,
I read a post on your blog a couple of weeks ago that quoted Anthony Bourdain talking about his love for pork. I won't ask you how you could possibly support a man who so vocally endorses an industry that tortures and discomforts animals for their entire lives before murdering them so others can eat them, because you're obviously one of their target market. I just want to know how you can live with yourself, eating and wearing animals every day. In this day and age, the mistreatment of food animals is established fact. So are the various health problems associated with consuming meat. Don't you feel bad about being a link in that chain, much less mentioning it in such a public forum?
Urthgurl88
Dear B, AH,
I read a post on your blog a couple of weeks ago that quoted Anthony Bourdain talking about his love for pork. I won't ask you how you could possibly support a man who so vocally endorses an industry that tortures and discomforts animals for their entire lives before murdering them so others can eat them, because you're obviously one of their target market. I just want to know how you can live with yourself, eating and wearing animals every day. In this day and age, the mistreatment of food animals is established fact. So are the various health problems associated with consuming meat. Don't you feel bad about being a link in that chain, much less mentioning it in such a public forum?
Urthgurl88
Dear Urthgurl88,
First of all, you're a liar. You said you wouldn't ask me how I could "support" Bourdain's love of pork, and then you did. Not the best way to enter into reasoned debate.
Secondly, I won't be drawn into the vegetarian/vegan debate at all in any case. I love animals, be they wild, domesticated, grilled, fried, whatever. I eat meat. I won't tell you how Inuits have eaten whales for thousands of years, or how Native Americans considered the hunt, the kill and the feast signs of respect for a larger spiritual order beyond their control if you promise not to tell me that chickens get panic attacks, or that trout have souls and respond favorably to mood lighting. I don't refrain from eating dolphins because they're cute and smart, I refrain from eating dolphins because they're hard to catch and it's illegal as hell and most of it would go bad before I could get to it and, most of all, because it's not a part of my cultural tradition. We're all creatures of habit, the habits of society as well as our own. One of my habits is chowing down on things formerly capable of independent movement. One of yours is arbitrarily assigning yourself an identity based on what the people you want to hang out with tell you, then writing strident letters trumpeting your imagined superiority to folks who don't feel the same way you do. It'll pass. Just don't forget to write me again when all the cool/malleable kids at your college are into that whole "going down on bitter, aging hipsters who don't happen to be professors" thing.
Dear B, AH,
You suck.
Goliath_Bedlam
Dear Goliath_Bedlam,
Actually, I don't suck. I do many things, to varying degrees of success, but I don't suck. One of the things I do is deduce. Like, for instance, I deduce that your allegations of me sucking are based in your own deeply rooted fears that you yourself might suck. And you do, Goliath_Bedlam, you do. How do I know? You didn't just choose a screen name that references The Mars Volta, a band that sort of sucks - you chose a screen name that references the band's fourth and most recent album, which means you didn't get into them until long after they ceased being even a marginally hip novelty. Suck! And you couldn't even reference a specific song or lyrical passage that resonated with you - you just cherrypicked the two biggest words in the album's title, which tells me that you don't even really appreciate, really absorb The Mars Volta's infinitely self-indulgent weirdness. Again: Suck! Obviously, you don't even really like them that much. Which would be cool, if you would just admit that it's The Mars Volta, and not the Bitter, Aging Hipster, that sucks. But that would endanger your own sense of cool. And everybody knows that the very definition of suckage is worrying about whether or not you're cool. Get it? I'd draw you a flow chart, but I have to go listen to some Shooter Jennings. Yeah, I know he sort of sucks. So what?
First of all, you're a liar. You said you wouldn't ask me how I could "support" Bourdain's love of pork, and then you did. Not the best way to enter into reasoned debate.
Secondly, I won't be drawn into the vegetarian/vegan debate at all in any case. I love animals, be they wild, domesticated, grilled, fried, whatever. I eat meat. I won't tell you how Inuits have eaten whales for thousands of years, or how Native Americans considered the hunt, the kill and the feast signs of respect for a larger spiritual order beyond their control if you promise not to tell me that chickens get panic attacks, or that trout have souls and respond favorably to mood lighting. I don't refrain from eating dolphins because they're cute and smart, I refrain from eating dolphins because they're hard to catch and it's illegal as hell and most of it would go bad before I could get to it and, most of all, because it's not a part of my cultural tradition. We're all creatures of habit, the habits of society as well as our own. One of my habits is chowing down on things formerly capable of independent movement. One of yours is arbitrarily assigning yourself an identity based on what the people you want to hang out with tell you, then writing strident letters trumpeting your imagined superiority to folks who don't feel the same way you do. It'll pass. Just don't forget to write me again when all the cool/malleable kids at your college are into that whole "going down on bitter, aging hipsters who don't happen to be professors" thing.
Dear B, AH,
You suck.
Goliath_Bedlam
Dear Goliath_Bedlam,
Actually, I don't suck. I do many things, to varying degrees of success, but I don't suck. One of the things I do is deduce. Like, for instance, I deduce that your allegations of me sucking are based in your own deeply rooted fears that you yourself might suck. And you do, Goliath_Bedlam, you do. How do I know? You didn't just choose a screen name that references The Mars Volta, a band that sort of sucks - you chose a screen name that references the band's fourth and most recent album, which means you didn't get into them until long after they ceased being even a marginally hip novelty. Suck! And you couldn't even reference a specific song or lyrical passage that resonated with you - you just cherrypicked the two biggest words in the album's title, which tells me that you don't even really appreciate, really absorb The Mars Volta's infinitely self-indulgent weirdness. Again: Suck! Obviously, you don't even really like them that much. Which would be cool, if you would just admit that it's The Mars Volta, and not the Bitter, Aging Hipster, that sucks. But that would endanger your own sense of cool. And everybody knows that the very definition of suckage is worrying about whether or not you're cool. Get it? I'd draw you a flow chart, but I have to go listen to some Shooter Jennings. Yeah, I know he sort of sucks. So what?
Leave a comment