stuffhipstershate: Being the Least Fucked-Up One...

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Being the Least Fucked-Up One in the Relationship

Imagine, if you will, a hospital for Civil War soldiers, back in the glory days of American history — a long bench lined with bleeding soldiers surveying each other with studied glances and unsympathetic eyes. Said servicemen are gushing blood onto the tiled hospital floors, doing little to quell the bleeding, proudly displaying battered eyes and severed limbs.

Among them is one lone fighter nursing what appears to be merely a black eye. “Pussy,” the soldiers will think in unison, equating the lightly bruised man’s lack of injury to a complete and total absence of bravery and verve. “Where is his vigor?” they will wonder. “What did he do to prove his mettle and still come out so unscathed?” They will then press their filthy tourniquets deeper into their gaping wounds so as to outdo their neighbor in general loss of plasma.

This rather graphic tableau, my dear friends, is a metaphor for what we may call “The Battlefield of Hipster Love.” No one wants to the homeboy with the mere black eye, happily tripping home into the arms of his loving family. Nay, one is always striving to be the most scarred, the most handicapped, the most ripped, torn and bloodied of the fighters on that gore-soaked field, peopled with soldiers more apt to tote guitar cases than rifles.

That’s why the hipster relationships often begin with a swapping of war stories: “I was in love with a married woman for five years.” “I wrote a book of epic poetry about my best friend’s boyfriend who I kissed once at a warehouse party before he moved to Berlin.” “I’m impotent.”

Yes, in addition to the usual tenets of budding romance — holdin’ hands, makin’ out, gettin’ wildly drunk and peeing on cars — the hipster mating dance often includes what amounts to dick measuring in the realm of the less fair sex. And believe you me, the one with the biggest dick is, well, always that.

But much like the rules implicit in the zombie films of George A. Romero (to add yet another metaphor to this already laden melee), there is no escape once you have entered this realm of perpetual pissing contests, this Scar-Tissue Scene. One does not patch up one’s wounds and trundle home to heal. Nope. Once bitten, the hipster becomes infected, intent only to bite and infect yet another unwitting victim. The front line of walking dead and limbless wonders then becomes ever more crowded — peopled with gaping zombies plodding through the debris, searching for new flesh, which will inevitably wander into the fold, fresh from the wilds of Michigan, or bouncing hopefully off the L train from NYU. Mmm, if misery be the food of love, suffer on, lovelies.

(Photo)