As any reader who’s been following for a while has undoubtedly noticed, I haven’t produced anything genuinely funny about hipsters for a long motherfucking time now, and I kind of want to set the record straight on this point. For new readers to the forum it’s all just as fresh as a daisy I suppose, and I still get a fair amount of mail about how annoying hipsters are and so forth, and don’t get me wrong, I still think hipsters are immeasurably fucking annoying. The thing is though, and I’m gunna be real honest with you, my venom for hipsters is all but spent. Sure, you say, we know, that’s why this site sucks ass now. But the point I’ve been trying to push ever since I started the Forum is that really, getting past all the hipsters, all the venom, all the seeming anger I’ve unleashed in the relentless pursuit of satiating this incredible chip on my shoulder, beyond all that stuff, to me, this site is about writing something entertaining. And I’ve said as much to hundreds of people in email replies and drunken barroom banter since last August when I launched this meandering, pleasantly surprising, endeavor.

Primarily the reason I can’t write much about hipsters anymore is that I don’t live among them, and haven’t for quite some time now. It’s funny, I used to think that old line about misery being an artist’s best friend was a bunch of hipster bullshit. But it’s not, it’s fucking true. Around the time that I started the Forum, I realized, through this anti-hipster writing in fact, that I couldn’t stand living in shit-bag Williamsburg anymore, that I absolutely couldn’t take another day of it. I had vivid fantasies of breaking peoples jaws, killing their stupid pets (except the dogs, I love dogs), stealing their goddamned scooters and throwing them in the East River, spitting hot Chai in their fucking faces. Oh! If I could only enumerate all the malicious schemes I had concocted for those bastards the NYPD would probably haul me in on suspicion, but you get the idea anyway. And that’s what fueled my fire for this site, for good or for bad. But then I took my own advice and moved away, up to the wonderful West Side - Morningside Heights to be exact - which, to be fair, has its own share of annoyances, but none so glaring as Williamsburg. And so I traded my coffee-soaked, bowel-gurgling, cigarette sucking mornings hocking luggies at the Verb Café for lap-swimming with senior citizens at the pool; I traded my Styrofoam Budweiser nights at the godawful Greenpoint Tavern surrounded by enough black-framed specs to put any 1955 college yearbook to shame for public radio and computer chess and speaking abstractedly to the cancer-stricken ghost of Ulysses Grant out by Riverside Park. And so, my life is different now - better by all practical measures - but then, practicality has never been the writer’s course. So I can assure you, you critical sonsofbitches, those who are still here anyway, that misery, at least by some stretch, is a writer’s best friend. But these days I’m banking on the hope that misery is only the naïve and lazy writer’s best friend, and that beyond all the seething and the prickly ephemera, there lies more best friends. But goddamn, you do have to admit, talking shit about hipsters is a good catch for a blog.

So from now on I suppose I’ll be writing about other shit instead of hipsters. I might even resort to the occasional quippy-hyper-linky-brain-nuggety-blather that most ‘opinionated’ bloggers spew. Okay, maybe not that. Though I had the novel idea a while back that I might actually try my hand at writing about something I’m fond of, rather than all the shit that pisses me off. It’s drastic, I know, and by the way, don’t take this as some kind of fucking ethical/spiritual awakening or anything. Also, I have a few pieces of writing coming out in print (yes, paper and ink) in the next few months, and I’ll get those linked up here, and in the mean time I intend to start writing something longer, something I can actually sell to some unwitting publishing house or other, so if you know any jackass agents or editors … well anyway, it’s all goddamned hunky-dorey on this end.