The last New Yorker

I have decided. Being a native Manhattanite is like being a Hamptons fucking townie. There is no fucking prestige in being a Native New Yorker. I throw in the towel and admit that I am just good for nothing except being the last living person from the Jewish underclass. It is extinct. They should just give me a room in the New York Tenement Museum and let me live there like a living diorama and have little kids come on class trips to see me. "Look! Is that the Jewish person who grew up in a $400/month 4th-floor walkup on a street riddled with dogshit and concrete indent graf, where drug dealers loitered, which is now considered the Upper East Side?" "Yes...she's the very last one of her kind. She grew up drinking schav and electrocuting herself and now she's a fucking loser in a city overrun by Midwesterners who eat $10 chocolate from Mast Bros and dipshit lemming cocksucker Yuppies."

I have recently been reading diehipster.com and I enjoy it very much. However, despite being a native New Yorker who grew up in miserable poverty, I also 1) have one of the obnoxious (?) names the blogger regular uses in his fictional rants 2) went to art school (BFA) 3) used to play drums in Williamsburg experimental bands 4) used to pay $80 for a mullet haircut at a Japanese salon in SoHo 5) used to make craft-based art on the train 6) have, in the past, barista'ed so much I can do it in my fucking sleep.

But I'm a native fucking New Yorker who grew up in poverty and I am a different kind of person. While I was playing music in the experimental bands, I was always the only native New Yorker and the only one who would admit to liking Justin Timberlake or Jack Johnson.

In the name of scrupulous honesty, the way the writer of diehipster so violently talks about murdering hipsters and celebrates his working classness makes me actually think about the Midwestern and California transplants I know and kind of sympathize with them even though I do have my issues with their suffocating ubiquity. I have to say, I kind of have a very minor dark objectifying fetish for hipster guys from Wisconsin. Just Wisconsin, nowhere else. No guys are more twee and stylized and secretly misogynistic than guys from Wisconsin. I can really understand where all these kids are coming from. They're coming from strip mall places, places they think of as being hopelessly without culture. It's sad that American culture has become so hopelessly leached of its regional culture. So these kids want to create something that they never had, they're rebelling against what they grew up around. They grew up getting bullied by meatheads.

But I know native New Yorker kids from Bay Ridge, a whole gang of them. And they all went to art school and are creative. They also don't like the meatheads they grew up around, the homophobic and stupid idiots who are just like they were in the 70s in Saturday Night Fever, but with spikier hair. Yes, Brooklyn people are picturesque. It would be a shame if that culture was displaced by rooftop gardening cock-knockers. But how wonderful is that culture really? Sorry to say it.

I also grew up getting teased. By Black and Hispanic kids and by privileged White kids. The only group of people I fit in with was immigrant kids.

Yet the other thing I want to admit is that I resent immigrants in the same way diehipster resents transplant hipsters. I feel frustrated when I see signs in windows or job posting on Craigslist demanding that the job applicant be able to speak Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, or Russian for a retail job. In my opinion, that is wrong. Both hipsters AND diehipsters will hate me for saying that. In Sweden or the Netherlands if you don't speak the language, you don't get the job. You also have to have working papers for any job at all. In New York, foreign workers are working off the books on every tier of the economy. I know a Japanese hairstylist who works at a major agency who gets paid off the books. At least hipsters have to pay taxes. It bothers me when a Russian woman waddles in front of me on line at the grocery store, cutting in front of me (you would think she would know how to wait in a line, being from a former Communist country) and whips out her EBT card.

One diehipster fan wrote that he is a physically-built, blue-collar, former member of the military and harasses his now-hipster ex. Well, isn't that nice. The writer of diehipster also uses the term "feminising." Well, another thing I hate about New York City is the constant street harassment. Nobody wants to hear this either, but I get most of my street harassment from blue-collar men. Blue-collar men of all races, mostly Black and Latino, but some blue-collar White guys. Truckers, construction workers, delivery men, mechanics, the type of upstanding "unfeminized" wonderful authentic New Yorkers. Now, don't get me wrong. I think many hipster men are misogynistic too. But they don't harass women on the street in the same way. If they do, they are not real hipsters. It's like Russian men--they're often misogynistic, but they don't act it out in such a barbaric way. I have been harassed and assaulted in public spaces by blue-collar men since I was eight years old. And working with blue-collar women makes me want to rip my hair out. They are often stupid, with totally backward ideas about life and reality just like their male counterparts. Is that racist or classist? I don't think so but you can think what you want.

To be quite honest, I just don't like mean, stupid, abusive people who don't care about how their actions affect people. I don't like the strident white and Asian yuppies who have invaded Yorkville/the Upper East Side, I don't like 99.99% of the mixed lot of Manhattanites I grew up with, I don't like little old Asian women who dive under me to get the seat I am about to sit in on the train, I don't like Black women from the hood who call my friend a "dirty white bitch" for bringing her small leashed dog on the train to get to her vet visit at the ASPCA, I don't like juvenile barbaric street harassing blue-collar guys, I don't like perverted leering businessmen, I don't like white guys who date Asian girls, and many a time, I feel loathing for the hipster massive and any transplant who thinks being a New Yorker means eating brunch.