Jim Morrison's birthday was recently. As per usual, the hipsters who have gradually seeped into my facebook over the years have filled my home page with happy birthday wishes, statements of "Oh I miss you" and "you were the best". Etc. etc.

This bothers me for a plethora of reasons.

You did not know Jim Morrison personally. You are literally close to half a century to late for that. Thusly, who are you to say what kind of guy he was? For all we know, he was a massive plagiaristic prick.

Similarly, there is some excellent evidence (not to mention a shocking lack of evidence to the contrary) showing that Jim Morrison isn't dead, and there's a decent chance he faked his death to get away from - and get this - hipsters who pretended to know him.

Don't post pictures of yourselves or your buddies in Paris at Morrison's grave. Yes, it is cool that you went to Paris. It's neat that you found a grave with his name on it. Unfortunately, you look stupid, as, provided he is dead, it's pretty common knowledge that he's buried elsewhere in an unmarked hole.

I think I'm more just rankled about hipsters in general. In the case of the majority of the ones I know, I can't help but cringe and think "Gee, you're like 25 now. Shouldn't you have outgrown this?".

It's like when you see a guy in his mid 30s trying to maintain the goth look that worked for him ten years ago. It's nothing more than a vile stagnation of personal development, an attempt to seem all different and cool. When you are young, it works because everyone around you is also acting like a putz and doing essentially the same thing in different ways. When you are older, I feel like you are supposed to realize that yes, everyone is fundamentally different and cool in their own ways, and that the whole hipster/emo/goth "lifestyle" is a pretty ridiculous, forced, and immature way of representing that difference.

Quite honestly, I am finding myself more and more irritated by those who try and show how non-conformist they are. If it's not being done in a fashion that ironically conforms to what everyone around them is doing, then usually it's done in a fashion that represents you as incredibly ignorant.

Take my friend "Bob", for instance. Bob is female, for the record, though it's pretty irrelevant to this story. Bob comes from a nice, upper-class background. Bob is also an "no-government anarchist", and on her last visit to DC, I noticed she was wearing a Chairman Mao pin.

I asked about this, implying slightly that she should be clever enough to see the horrible satire of an "anarchist" wearing a Mao pin, and was told that she liked Mao because he built China up from nothing, into a modern state.

Now, ignoring all the other stuff that's not maybe quite right with that statement, there are two obvious things that anyone remotely familiar with this topic should be able to point out:

1. Mao initially set China back by at least a decade, as well as starving a huge chunk of his population to death during the "Great Leap Forward". It turns out peasants are wayyy better a tricking idiot Chairmen than they are at becoming factory workers. At least until they starve to death, in which case they become equally bad at both. And then you get to the Cultural Revolution (same idea as the Great Leap Forward - wheras the great leap was all about melting down tools and other essentials to make the world think China was an industrial state, the cultural revolution was all about destroying anything culturally significant in order to.. well... I'm really not sure what the point here was. It's been theorized - quite seriously and by a surprising amount of people who were involved - that Mao had his feelings hurt a bit and had to purge something to feel better), where even more people get to die and long, poorly written sentences begin to show up. In fact, many authors (Matthew White being the most entertaining that comes to mind) have asked the question - did Mao kill so many of his people because he was comic book villain mean, or because he was just a horrifically incompetent leader that hung around for a tragically long time?

2. A "no-government anarchist" is in theory espousing no government, or at least that's what my assumption would be - Bob (yes, we're getting back to the OP and Bob now) doesn't seem too clear on what exactly anarchism is beyond there being "anarchy" all over the place. Really, to hear her tell it, anarchy is some type of condiment that makes everything better and can indeed be spread all over anything - kinda like cheese.

Bah, now I am thinking of cheese, and I've lost my train of thought in the rambling and self-indulgent writing. Something about hipsters being stupid, I think. Anyway, Bob's a hypocrite who eats out of dumpsters "because jobs are for conformists", and while I can no longer connect that with Jim Morrison and The History of Failed State Capitalism, it seems like there really should be a good story or something in there.

I have a flu and thus have trouble gathering my thoughts. I'm also out of drugs. Which sucks. And because my girlfriend is "out" doing whatever horrors "girlfriend stuff" consists of, I do not have access to a phone, and thusly a cab, drugs, food, and so forth. Tis a shame.

I find myself wanting to write more, but know these writings will ramble to the extent of positing as to why the Seleucid empire fell apart (always an edge-of-your-seat line of thought), down to how someone with a basic knowledge of chemistry (un)lucky enough to get sent back a couple thousand years could probably build a much cooler and more successful religious institution that anything that phony from Nazareth and his minions cooked up, or perhaps delve into the oddity of language. But regardless of the topic, it would all be a frightful mess (just like this post). So let's leave it there.