Photograph by Adrián Cerón

Tecate: good for what ails ya!

Dear Hipster:

What will be the top recreational drugs for hipsters in 2021? I’m guessing booze and buds, but not necessarily in that order, and I could be wrong. Anything else that may be on the plate?

— Progressive Guru

You’re probably spot-on with your assessment. If 2021 is anything like the middle third of 2020, it’s going to be a year where a lot of people mark time indoors waiting for things to stop being generally lame and boring. Factors not within our control have conspired to give most of us hipsters a collective case of that “disease” I’m feeling too classy and demure to spell out right now, but you know the one, it’s the one where you don’t really care about anything anymore. Rhymes with “buckets.” And you know what the prescription for that particular disease is, don’t you? Yup. That’s right. Sitting around the backyard with one or two trusted friends watching the sun (or moon) crawl across the sky, drinking Tecate, smoking fat jbones, and trying to figure out which was objectively the best band of the 1990s; discounting personal preference and controlling for diminished life expectancies and cycles of breakup-reunion-breakup-replace singer-breakup-reunion-permanently disband-brief, ill-advised comeback-permanently disband but for real this time. It doesn’t actually cure the disease in question — nothing will — but, if 50,000,000 tipster hipster stoners can’t be wrong, it at least helps ameliorate the symptoms.

Dear Hipster:

I understand how it is very hipster to prioritize the accumulation of obscure pop cultural and trivial information over boring, useful, practical knowledge like how to balance a checkbook. However, is there a threshold at which quirky hipster knowledge becomes so obscure its essentially useless?

— Harry

Balancing a checkbook is an unpersuasive example, given the immediacy of contemporary banking services, but I totally see what you’re driving at. Is any information totally useless? I’ve been sitting on a piece of trivia about the McDonald’s sauce gun for years now, awaiting my opportunity prove some obscure point with it. Oh, you’ve never heard of the McDonald’s sauce gun? Allow me to enlighten you. Mickey D’s apparently utilizes a proprietary device to deliver Big Mac sauce from pre-packaged cardboard tubes. The dispenser resembles a stumpy version of a contractor’s caulking gun, and it permits exacting dispensation of Big Mac sauce so the untrained hands of plebian McDonald’s workers can’t diverge from the corporation’s secret recipes.

I love that I know about the existence of the sauce gun. Knowing about the sauce gun makes my life one tiny increment more complete. I remain convinced that, someday, perhaps years from now, the existence of the McDonald’s sauce gun will form the perfect metaphor at the time I need it most. Perhaps I will employ the sauce gun as a metaphor to triumph in a barroom argument about something inconsequential. Perhaps the sauce gun metaphor will be the only way I can console an otherwise heartbroken friend. Perhaps some reader of Ask a Hipster will come to me with a most vexing question that can only be answered by making reference to the sauce gun as some kind of abstract metaphor for the futility of human endeavor. Yes, I firmly believe that even this most trivial and useless piece of information will someday, somehow, prove important. If it ultimately proves a good use of my brain to store this informational turd for years to come, then surely no pop cultural reference is too obscure.