I’ve never been a morning person. At least that’s what I think. Sometimes the mornings are so lovely, but hardly do they show. It’s usually labor, getting out of bed and trying to find the shower. I take my daily meds and hope today is better than yesterday without much sleep at all. Insomnia loves to be my friend.

He was my friend last night. I woke up at half past midnight with a brutal headache that surged from the nape of my neck to the width of my forehead, most likely from the heat. I stumbled into the kitchen half awake and took four Ibuprofen, but they didn’t help much. I was stuck in bed with my thoughts and a case of tinnitus, so I got out of bed again around two in the morning and played a video game while watching YouTube on my MacBook Pro.

I’ve been stuck on a personality on there who talks about nothing but music and culture. I watched a video of his in which he explained and commented on hipster culture. Not until then did I realize that I might’ve been a hipster in my earlier years when I was in my twenties. It’s difficult to tell. I never wore an ironic mustache except for one week, and people complimented me on it. But after one time in the mirror I decided, “Nah, it ain’t gonna work.” So I shaved it off. I also wore ironic clothing like shirts that didn’t fit me with ironic phrases on them. One was coffee brown and too small for me, with a rodent on the front. It said, “I’m not a gopher, I’m an otter.” People loved the shirt, and so did I. That was about as hipster as I got, looks-wise. I’m not sure what happened to that shirt. I probably threw it away after realizing I was being a hipster, wearing corduroy pants and sneakers. My hair was emo and floppy to an extent. I had a little stubble on my face. And I listened only to indie rock bands and indie hip-hop because I detested anything mainstream. That included movies. So I watched only independent films and avoided the major studio motion pictures for the most part. I remember still watching the Batman films, but that was about it.

He made a valid point in his video that yesterday’s hipsters are today’s wokesters, meaning the hipsters of the 2000s–with their curly mustaches, their cans of PBR in the pseudo dive bars, and their expensive coffee houses in what used to be poor neighborhoods like Williamsburg in Brooklyn–have transformed into the same losers, except now they cancel people on Twitter (or X). Those people are of course more revolting. They’re today’s hipsters. I can’t say I’m one of them. There’s nothing more lame than hanging out on social media all day and attacking people’s character. It doesn’t sit right with me, but it feels good to be sanctimonious all the time, doesn’t it? People could make a career out of ruining others if they wanted to, and if they were so lucky.

But let’s call it for what it is: hipsters are young people who grew up in affluence but pretend to be poor to be part of a cause. They want to be different from who they really are. It took me years to become myself. I guess I really hated who I was. Now I’m indifferent. I hate myself for other reasons than my persona. I wear whatever now, mostly plain shirts and shorts with mocassins. I was never able to grow a man-bun because I’d lost too much hair by the time they were in fashion. But I did envy those hipsters with the man-buns. They obviously had something I didn’t to go with their scraggly beards. I can grow a beard easily in just four days, but there’s too much gray for me to be an appealing hipster.

And I hardly go to shows, which the YouTube personality explained hipsters loved to do. In fact the last concert I went to was a little under ten years ago at the Wiltern to see Faith No More. I invited an ex-girlfriend who stood me up. So I was there all alone. I guess that’s a hipster move too: being alone at a concert. And Faith No More was sort of hipsterish. They were an old band with a cult following. And I remember seeing a fair amount of man-buns and bangs on women because that was a popular look among hipster women. I dated a few with those bangs. I didn’t realize until the video last night that most of the women I dated were actually hipsters. The bangs told it all.

Is being a hipster the worst thing? Of course not. Except if you’re a wokester who ruins people’s lives on social media. I was a pacifist hipster if I was a hipster at all. I just left people alone so they would leave me alone. It didn’t always work. Some people would harass me no matter what I tried to say to them.

I used to hang out in trendy bars in Hollywood: places like the Powerhouse, which acutally is a real dive bar across from the Hollywood/Highland shopping mall. It smelled like week-old beer, and they served overpriced PBR in a can. I drank it, but the trust fund hipsters took advantage of its divey ambiance. I used to play cricket in there, and I took a lot of dates there when I was in my twenties. That was just one hipster bar out of hundreds in Hollywood and Silverlake, and I went to so many that I lost count. I can’t even think of another hipster bar I used to frequent.

There was a hipster coffee shop called the Bourgeois Pig, which served coffee even more expensive than Starbucks. Inside it was dimly lit, with bookshelves and a billiards table. I would sit in there and write like other hipster douche bags. One of them even brought a typewriter to go with his mustache. I’m surprised they’d let him in there but also I wasn’t. And I was surprised he didn’t light up a pipe in there, but they didn’t allow smoking anyway. In fact you couldn’t smoke anywhere near the entrance, not a very hipster rule. You would think they would’ve allowed smoking in that establishment like they did in the forties when the first hipster appeared (or so the video claimed).

So do I miss years as a hipster? Why not? They were simpler times in a way. I miss going to those bars and coffee shops. But if I go there now, it just wouldn’t be the same.