HipTipsFromTheHomeless

Goodbye and realizations

After ignoring and actively forgetting about HipTipsFromTheHomeless for a while — assuming that no one misses it in the least, no one gives its absence a second thought, and my non-Tumblrs have by now stopped checking it all together — I think I need to give a little eulogy.

I’m done. I’ve posted something like 100 posts on homeless people’s best and worst tips and tricks for hipsters, and I’m bored with it. And if I’m bored with it, then god only knows, you’re certainly bored with it. In fact, you’re probably only still reading this due to your excitement that you won’t have to scroll past my posts on your Tumblr feed anymore (that conjecture only applies to my whopping 16 Tumblr followers, who are mostly comprised of friends, family, and friends of family — and maybe a few who followed me back having promised to do so, and whose posts I found so annoying that I promptly unfollowed: sorry).

And there’s a bunch of Tumblr gibberish that anyone out there who reads this from the actual site hiptipsfromthehomeless.com will probably find boring and incomprehensible. Onward.

I’ve learned a few things keeping up this site, and none of them have to do with efficiently using my time. One is that the unifying theme of hipsterism is not denial of hipsterism or skinny jeans or pompousness — these are but evidence, symptoms. My emergent realization is that incongruence is the concept that binds hipster culture. Thus we have $100 Ray Bans on a head that hasn’t washed its hair in several days and wears tattered Goodwill vests. Thus we have the Sleigh Bells line: “six six six six six like the pentagon.” Thus we have cute blond girls with Wu Tang tattoos on their necks. Thus we have wealthy kids masquerading as destitute homeless people.

Incongruence can be funny. In fact, many of the panhandler signs I’ve posted rely on their incongruency for a glance, a laugh, and a buck. And in some ways, I’ve tried hard to turn their hipster-influenced sense of humor in to page views and unique visits, etc. But my main barrier to actual Tumblr success was a reliance on my own industry to create content. User-generated content is what all successful tumblrs have in common — that or torrential, surprising, double-take-worthy incongruence. And I don’t have the time to aggregate photos and thoughts and posts, while pouring out my own incongruent photos and thoughts, at the pace required to create a tableau of images and thoughts that have nothing to do with each other except their having nothing to do with each other.

So this is my last post. Almost makes me sad — not that I won’t have this outlet, but that I’m giving up on an idea. As an outlet, HipTips gave me a way to critique and comment on other people and their attempts at making a shitty life work for them. Commenting on culture and society is something that I love — and making fun of people is something I treasure — but this forum is played out. Makes me wish I’d chosen a less-specific, less-themed URL for this blog so I could write about something else. Oh well.

I do have some other projects I’m working on now, so don’t worry that I’ll be lost in an abyss of no-blog-to-upkeep. But I won’t tell you what they are here because those other projects don’t want to be associated with This Me. Never fear: I persist.

HipTipsFromTheHomeless says: “Goodbye.” I’ll see you somewhere else.