An Open Letter to the Hip

I wish I weren't so afraid of drawing attention to the fact that most of you all look like complete and utter freaks, because I'd really like to take your picture. I want to take a picture of your stupid big gramma glasses and your tight gray jeans and your stupid acrylic stripey sweater that looks like something even Value Village would rather throw away than sell, and your stupid man-bag purse thing made out of real vintage 80s denim (also in shit condition) and your stupid fixie bike and your stuuuuuuupid fucking haircut, WHY did you do it like that? You are a hair farmer, that's what you are, farming like ten different trends on the same plot of head. Unbefuckinglievable.

But the thing is, as stupid as you clearly look to me, I would never wish you to know it. It looks like far too much fun, running around in the nerdiest and most beat-up things you could find, with a smug and self-satisfied smirk on your face, reading books written by people you've never heard of so you can impress people you've never met. I too was young once, although we did it a little differently. I shaved my head and wore army shirts and wrap skirts to war protests, but never mind that, it was a different era.

I want to take your picture, because I can't imagine that anyone I told about you, without having seen you, wouldn't just assume I was exaggerating about just how stupid you look. But they can't know, unless they've been to Berlin in the last year, what absolute crap you guys are passing off as fashion. I mean it's one thing to look like shit but quite another to smirk at people who actually want to look as if they're putting themselves together in the morning.

But I think the main reason I want to take your picture is so I can compare it to a yearbook from 1979 and see if you don't look exactly as shit as nerds did then, and then I want to psychoanalyze you from afar, I want to watch and observe you, in order to assess the pathology that goes into openly embracing a look that was sported by the fringe, the oppressed, the forgotten periphery. I want to figure out why some of you who are clearly not nerds, work very hard to look like nerds. Does it have to do with solidarity? Is it like a white person dressing like a slave, in order to show comradeship with his disenfranchised fellow man? Do you not feel like a phony, for not even being a proper nerd? Can you even operate a computer? Can you hear me? Hello?

Well, fake nerds, next time you see me out with my camera, you'd better pose, because I am going to exploit your nonsense to the rest of the world. One pair of gramma glasses at a time.