Once you get out to Lakeside, it’s more rolling coal in your F-250

DJ:

(1) The ’90s bite also, but I’m thinking there was the rise of “alternative” culture, which has hipsterish strains. The ’70s were cool, but maybe I’m biased from knowing my parents met in a ’70s hotel lounge bar. I still remember the family station wagon, 8-tracks, and my first 45: Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.”

(2) Would a Williamsburg or Mission District hipster feel at home in North Park or vice-versa?

(3) Do any hipsters in San Diego exist north of the 8 or east of the 15?

(4) Why does the Reader have poor online engagement in the comments section?

(1) To the degree that this isn’t a question, I can provide no answers. However, your use of a scare-quoted “alternative” reveals a deep and abiding sympathy for the hipster origins of all that is “alternative,” whatever that means. Nowadays, the phrase serves as little more than a blanket sobriquet for having a tattoo and listening to 91X. Pretty mainstream shit, really. The irony lies, of course, in labelling the most mainstream thing imaginable as alternative, when, at least in this sense, alternative literally (not figuratively) means “not mainstream.” It’s a lot like what the comedian Ed Byrne said about standing under a sign that says “NO SMOKING,” when you are.

(2) Yes.

(3) Of course. Sure, once you get out to Lakeside, it’s more rolling coal in your F-250, less pedaling your fixie to the farmers’ market; but, as David Attenborough might say upon revealing a red, microscopic algal bloom beneath the permanent snow of Mt. Rainier, “There is a surprising amount of life here”; or, more succinctly, “Life, uh, finds a way.”

(4) Online comments once were huge. Now, people mostly comment among Facebook friends (rather than from the neutral-ish ground of the original source), from within the safe confines of the so-called “bubble,” a pre-fabricated echo-chamber where your own viewpoints confirm your personal rightness despite a wealth of evidence that you hold only one among a plenitude of opinions. While almost everyone agrees that’s a bad thing, it turns out that, like greasy food that clogs your heart, people rather prefer the safety of the like-minded world and thus eschew lively discussion. Those of us hipsters who still like a good old-fashioned debate look for it in person; but, by all means, comment away here. Nothing would make me happier.