Everything is a duck in a fedora

Dear Hipster: Is a waffle just a hipster pancake? — Anna

Dear Hipster: Isn’t a goose basically a hipster duck? — Francis

Hipster: Is rugby just hipster football? — Steve, City Heights

Dear Hipster: Are trains the hipster version of airplanes? — Bobby

Dear Hipster: Is Pickle Rick the grown-up hipster version of Larry, the anthropomorphic Christian cucumber from Veggie Tales? — Chad

You guys. Seriously. I can’t even.

Yet, I must, and so I have arranged these various inquiries from (roughly) least to most absurd. But there is something here, for the premise that “X is the hipster Y” contains a gooey nugget of universal truth, like the caramel core lurking within a pint of Ben and Jerry’s; or perhaps it’s an overlooked coda of pure wisdom, appended to your letters like the hidden tracks bands liked to stick onto the ends of their CDs in the ’90s.

To wit, the train took people coast to coast before it was cool, by which I mean terrifying, expensive, and shockingly inconvenient; and geese probably have those ridiculously long necks because they can’t grow ironic mustaches or wear fedoras. Pickle Rick is just Pickle Rick, and you either get it or you don’t.

Here, look at this picture of a duck in a fedora. You see that? I bet you think that’s pretty silly, don’t you? But I also bet you wish, at least a little bit, that you thought of it first, amiright? One part of you wants to say, “Silly-ass, tryhard hipster duck in a fedora, trying to be a goose”; and the other half of your mind is, like, “Man, that duck looks pretty cool in that fedora.”

The tension that you’re feeling right now, that’s the line where X becomes the hipster Y, and I don’t know if it gets any less blurry. Everything is a duck in a fedora when you look at it a certain way.