From F. W. Murnau’s <em>Nosferatu</em>

A really obscure vampire...

Dear Hipster:

If a vampire ate too many hipsters, would it suffer any ill effects?

— Chad

If vampires were anything like normal humans, which they might well be if they existed, then they would have to watch what they eat. A vampire who eats only people who subsist on fast food burgers and diet cokes will get hardened vampire arteries, or at least suffer the carcinogenic effects of sucking blood sweetened with aspartame. One might think a vampire would prefer the blood of hipsters; perhaps it has its own terroir that hints at organic produce and fair trade coffee. If you are what you eat, then to a vampire, a hipster would be the supernatural equivalent of a grass-fed cow, or, more accurately, a highly specialized kind of bear that hunts only grass-fed cows.

Vampires and hipsters have more in common than you might think. Both tend towards nocturnal lifestyles, although hipsters do so by choice (all the bars are open after dark), not because they will burst into flames at the slightest touch of the sun’s rays. Many hipsters wear a lot of black, lending them an incidental “children of the darkness” vibe. Liquid diets prevail in all cases: vampires prefer human blood, while many hipsters sustain themselves almost exclusively on kombucha, craft beer, and the occasional glass of alcoholic craft kombucha.

Popular media portrayals tend to show vampires as pretty suave characters in comparison to the other classes of movie monsters, at least if brooding and wearing crushed velvet counts as suave. Your werewolves are more or less hairy chested party animals that lose it in time with the lunar cycle. Maybe they are supposed to be some kind of metaphor for horny teenagers or drug addicts who can’t control themselves. Zombies and mummies shamble around, exhibiting little interest in anything save the flesh of the living. For what are they metaphors, consumerism run amok? But vampires...vampires are hip. They’re always doing cool stuff, like giving impromptu organ concertos; hypnotizing attractive, innocent people who just blew in from somewhere much less cosmopolitan; and bemoaning the mundanity of mortal life with the kind of “over it” attitude one can cop to only after living through 200+ years of pop culture, most of it bad. Perhaps vampires have been eating hipsters all along.

Dear Hipster:

Is coleslaw or potato salad the most hipster side dish of socially distant summer get togethers in the park?

— At My Cookout

Definitely potato salad. Don’t get me wrong, I love a tangy ‘slaw with a hotdog or some ‘cue on a sunny summer day, but the infinite variability of potato salad fosters so much more creativity. Add some cheese, bacon, pickled duck eggs — the sky’s the limit. No matter what you do with coleslaw, it’s still a bunch of soggy, shredded veggies. Everybody wants to be the kind of person who shows up with a batch of cool potato salad at a party, and then all the guests are standing around saying, “Oh, you know, I don’t normally eat potato salad, but this is something I really like!” At the same time, they’re all taking a bit of coleslaw to be be polite, but secretly they’re bitter because the juice from the ‘slaw is sogging up the burger bun, and occupying valuable real estate that might otherwise have gone to more potato salad.