Step right up folks! Step right up and have all your hipster questions answered! Denim or Polyester? Hesse or Rilke? Pills or Coke? Mimosa or Bloodymary? Brian Wilson or, uh … ah yes, you there! You, right there with the lazy eye and the hairy upper lip! Go ahead son:

"Hi Aimee, I stumbled upon your website via memepool.com. A friend of mine mentioned that my moustache might qualify me to be a hipster. I haven't been to New York for about a year and a half, but she tells me that the moustache is quite popular now. I'm tempted to join the ranks of the hip, and I'm willing to start doing coke, so will my moustache cut it? I refuse to wear tight black jeans. Thanks for your advice, Branch"

Ahh, the moustache. Ahh yes, the coke. Heading into the sagging U.S. economy and with the populist cream soon to rise to a rolling curd, but not before the last remnants of excessive late 90s devil-be-damned wealth peters off into the enflamed nostrils of a New York City bathroom stall electroclash garbage party, I think you really might have your finger on the next hipster pulse. The moustache says something, Branch. I suggest you shave it immediately though and let it grow beginning today to follow the breaking wave. Fabled Polish union leader Lech Walesa shaved his even more fabled handlebar earlier this year, leaving the quivering upper lips of a generation yearning for another to take his place. But like I said, let it grow starting today, that way you can set the marker: As the moustache grows, so will your coke habit, assuming you can afford to buy. As your coke habit grows, you will make your way into the Williamsburg crowd, then maybe you can start an electroclash band consisting of you and a melted Korg that you traded for an eightball down at Luxx from some dude who told you it used to belong to Peaches. Then, when the moustache gets long enough to conceal your upper lip, allowing you to sneer less noticeably, you can get into a fight with your cokehead bruise-eyed electroclash girlfriend over whether Ian Curtis hung himself with barbed wire, and in a fit of rage she flings your vintage ceramic Camel ashtray at you, the one shaped like a Turkish palace, shattering it against your loft wall and punching a sizeable hole in the drywall you just put in a few days before. A sneer will knit your hairy lip like a caterpillar. Then you take off on your motorized scooter North on Bedford, but there's another transit strike and the snarled traffic piles up behind you. You gun the scooter for all it's worth, and you hear somebody yell "Pindeho," and the whiskers of your coke-frosted moustache are bundled with the petulant white ooze from your nose, the stuff you usually swallow, but tonight you aren't thinking about that. The headlines are screaming about the economy, the goddamned economy! Oh Jesus! And it's struggling slowly, ever more slowly, like a rabbit in the tightening hug of a python. Your scooter swings west on Seventh, top speed: 23 mph when you plow into the legs of a giant Dominican man, throwing him to the icy street over your back. But you hit the street harder because the Dominican stands up and breaks your cracker-ass jaw along with your nose, which turns your moustache a creamy pink color, like a candycane. He wipes himself off and walks away, but you stay until a picketing MTA employee calls the ambulance.

Despite the wired jaw, they let you keep the moustache. You get a bunch of flannel shirts from your mom for Christmas and your arraignment on possession charges falls on the third day of the New Year. Your moustache is still growing. You're one of those moustached guys in NA who always hangs around for an hour afterward smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. You get a job with the MTA and join the Union, and by the time the next Transit strike commences two years later, you're heading up the local chapter — involved in negotiations — your handlebar moustache is splashed across the screen of New York 1 and people start calling you Lech. And not to worry, by this time to Union's bargaining power has grown.