Monday 13 August 2012

Ironic Hipster Barfight

On Friday night a friend of mine turned 29. In very appropriate mid-to-late-twenties-Toronto-art-graduate-style, we went to a bar at Dundas and Ossington, for a fine selection of bourbon, wheat beer, and ciders.



We went to The Red Light, drank, and were merry...until about 20,000 people showed up and it became oppressively hot, and arguably a death trap with no exits in case of fire.

Faba-lous.
So we migrated, rather merrily, to Get Well next door. (Noted for having several wheat beers on tap, AND having free retro arcade games) Hipstergasm!

I Googled "ironic hipstergasm" and this came up...make of that what you will.
Now, I would like to set the tone for you, of what is undoubtedly anyone's nightmare...a hipster bar fight.

The venue:

Note the dim sum house dragon and phoenix on the wall...chilling!
The drugs of choice:



Craft brews! Terrifying!
And the mind-rotting video games!:

May not appear as shown.

My friend and I are killing an entire planet's worth of centipedes. I am become death...or at least drunk, or something... when the unthinkable happens...


Carl drops his beer.


It turns out, that tilted arcade game booths are not ideal for beverage placement. The result was half a pint of wheat beer falling to its death amid chunks of glass. This would have been tragic enough, but there was worse to come...some of his wheat beer...brace yourselves... splashed on to the leg of a hipster's black skinny jeans.


The horror...the horror...

I turn to see a finely coiffed hipster sporting a perfect day's worth of stubble, a plaid shirt, and the slightly dampened aforementioned skinny jeans.


Carl, in a completely genuine tone, says "Oh no, I'm sorry!" The hipster says nothing. White-knuckled grip on his bottle of Mill St. Organic Lager, he stares, unblinking, into Carl's face for a full minute. Carl shifts uncomfortably. I shift uncomfortably. Hipster does not break his stare.

The beeps of Pac Man fill the silence.

Carl and I look to each other, then back to the unbroken stare of the raging hipster.

"That's really inconvenient." the hipster spits out.

Carl, in a somewhat less genuine tone responds: "Yes, I just lost my beer. That's pretty inconvenient..."

The hipster maintains his stare...his eyes bulge slightly.

"My jeans are worth a lot more than your beer." He manages to get out.


The uncomfortable silence, accompanied by Pac Man's "OM NOM NOM" resumes...I debate making a comment about how jeans probably SHOULD cost more than a $5 pint...but the angry hipster's 140lb frame makes me reconsider...or maybe I was drunk.


The stare continued. Carl and I looked to each other, confused... Do I, do we punch now? Carl turned back to the bottomless pit of rage that had once been a 20-nothing hipster. "Should I give you laundry money or something?"

The pit does not reply. I suggest to Carl that we migrate over to the Space Invaders machine, and leave the Centipede and Pac Man machines to the maelstrom of ironic discontent behind us.



The night went on as if we had never met the angry hipster with slightly moistened skinny jeans... after a few minutes I could no longer pick him out of the crowd of plaid shirted and skinny jean'd hipsters. He had become like any other hipster in a trendy bar at Dundas and Ossington, dissatisfied with his lot in life but placated by moderately priced craft beers, and lulled into passivity by the familiar safety of a veneer of 1980s retro.


I myself am caught up in the vicious circle of hipster violence, as I blog to you RIGHT NOW in a passive aggressive post that I hope the angry hipster will link to off Twitter or Tumblr.


...


Hey Man,  
I'm sorry about your skinny jeans, but seriously, you need to relax and focus on something more important... 
Like how are we going to survive the debt-load of the baby boomers, and a health care system that is being pushed to the breaking point as the generations above and below us get type 2 diabetes...? Or global warming? That's a scary one... 
Or maybe just focus on how you can buy a fixi-bike and make people think you had one before it was cool...that will eat up a lot of excess energy too.

Ironic fist bumps 4EVAR,
Claire

Capt. Fantastic, Dolly...why can't we all just get along?


2 comments:

  1. I don't understand the title. Was the hipster himself ironic or is the irony that the title implies there was combat when all there really was was an apology?

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's all about tone and context y'all.

    ReplyDelete