Another summer has come and gone, three and a half months that Verily imagines most Columbians put to worse use than their directionless days of buying into the capitalist apparatus at Havana Central, gulping down and firing off a few shots at the human flesh. As our Dives passed through these dives at the threshold of this new school year, he observed the usual signs of societal malaise: earnest young men in button-down striped shirts with fused vertebrae protruding through white fabric, ladies with skin-tones that could only have been tanned in the light of an iMac, and so on.
Verily wonders: how did they pass their fifteen weeks of self-direction? Envision: rows and rows of desks as distinctive as an engineer's economics exam, lattices of Bloomberg spreadsheets morphing from monitors into cages of metal bars, luminous days spent in sterile offices staring into the abyss of computer kiosks. And for what, asks Verily? So their children may do the same, reproducing in ever-multiplying litters until humanity covers the earth and all that is dear in the world withers away?
Scatological and eschatological forecasts aside, let Verily propound the following history. As much as it pains him to admit it, the Veritas family comes, as all families do, from the farm. This was not a paltry plot in the middle of Middlesex, mind you, but a baronial manor on which his progenitors indulged their Byronic manners. Alas, the enclosure movement was cruel to the V.s, and soon they'd descended to the ranks of the cultivators. V.'s own great-grandfather became as downwardly mobile as Simon Dedalus and as despondently dipsomaniacal as Sebastian Flyte. But from the ashes of penury there arose a phoenix, and into a bourgeois existence was born V.
Let V.V. be the first to say that the details of his life are quite inconsequential, but the trajectory of his family is of the utmost importance. If his parents had been poorer, he would have been some loathsome Horatio Alger story (not Ragged Dick); and if his parents had been richer, he would have been a hipster. It is this gentleman's conviction that true wealth consists not in making money, but in renouncing and disdaining it, and if he were so interested in attaining this chimera, he would be a factotum fetching coffee with the rest of the rabble.
Bearing this in mind, V.V. supposes now that a brief catalogue of his "alternative" summer break is in order. Our narrative begins in Portland, where V. observed hipsters in their native habitat, cordoned off on some side-street at a Northwest Brewfest, velocipedes waiting to whisk them away. From there he took a drive down the Five to visit his cousins, farmers in Humboldt County; rough winds failed to shake his darling buds of May, and he is happy to report that the grass is indeed greener in Northern California. He worked as a bagger at Best Buy, a beggar in Berlin, and a bugger in Chelsea. He was cured of an Oedipus complex in Vienna, the Spanish disease in France, and the French disease in Spain. He seduced Judith Nathan at Yankee Stadium and Benazir Bhutto in her Federally Administered Tribal Areas. He drank Wild Turkey with John Daly, and PBR with Jenna Bush. He got destroyed in New Orleans and built habitats for humanity in Williamsburg. He declared eminent domain on Tehran and read Lolita in Manhattanville.
Which brings us back to the ivory tower, from which yours truly surveys, beyond 125th Street, New York's Sudetenland while sucking and blowing mint-scented smoke from his hookah. As he envelops himself in wreaths of cumulus and nimbus, spraying towards Sprayregen, watching the freshmen scuttle like ants beneath him, he wonders: is humanity slouching towards hipsterity?
—Verily Veritas
