What Is Hip?

Well, this is:

You know who’s hip? The geeks, the joiners, the outcasts, the loners, the scholars, the poor benighted souls holed up in their basement banging away at their instrument while contemporaries drift through their daily amusements. The guys and girls with the slide rules and the soldering irons and the metronomes and the rickety chrome fold-up music stands. The ghastly dweebs with ink here and there on their hands and exacto knives in their drawer and pushpin holes in their subject material. They’ve got glasses like deep sea sub windows and pants hiked up like a flood’s coming. They’ve got collections of manuscripts or lp records or fruit crate labels or Beatles butcher covers but they haven’t got any furniture or a set of clothes that match.

And they’re busy all the time while their friends are out having the mindless fun we all covet but the hermit can’t participate in, because the fun stops the minute they show up.

Eventually, the geeks stand up facing the beautiful people, and let it out –the distilled essence of their efforts, the cream skimmed off the top of their monastic intellectual efforts. And the shiny happy people, the people that know how to dress, and to schmooze, and to look like more than they are, the ones that travel effortlessly through this life –they turn, and are transfixed, and say:

That is hip.