Nobody heard of Blake’s burden before this

Dear Hipster:

Is there anything about a person’s name that would preclude him or her from hipster status? Say, you wanted to be a professional wrestler, and you tried to bill yourself as King Tutu, with some kind of Egyption ballerina theme. I don’t think that would work. Or what about Usain Bolt. Obviously, that dude was going to be fast. Maybe this is kind of a stupid question, but hear me out on this one and give it some thought.

— Blake, PB

Here I strive, week in, week out, to come up with clever, illustrative examples that refer to just-obscure-enough pop cultural phenomena. And then this…

So, okay, Blake, I’ll bite.

Numerology says our names can be reduced to single digits and that they control our destinies, which is, of course, purest donkey dust (or, if you prefer, flummadiddle, malarkey, hogwash, or crapspackle). Still, what kind of hipster would have a name like, I don’t know, how about, “Blake”?

I imagine any hipster named Blake would have to have been born in Connecticut to a hedge-fund-managing father and a pool-boy-flirting mother. Despite his promising career in high-school lacrosse and early acceptance to Duke, he denied his parents’ wishes by going to Emerson College in Boston to major in music journalism and run a two-hour weekend program playing live indie-rock covers of arena-rock standards on the college’s vaunted radio station. After college, Blake wanted to head to L.A. to force his way into a music-writing career, but his father pulled some strings and got him an interview for a job writing copy in Rock Band video games.

A hundred percent over it after a few years, Blake packed his things and headed south, to the idyllic hamlet of Pacific Beach, where he now indulges his two favorite pastimes: accepting his Connecticut heritage by rooting against the Red Sox at various bars during the summer, and embracing his hipster soul by following bands that nobody’s ever heard of and penning occasional, remarkably insightful, often scathing, always cheeky album reviews.

Such would be Blake’s burden, a hipster trapped in a lacrosse player’s body.