Hippie vs. Hipster

We went to the Hawthorne Street fair today. To those of you unfamiliar with Portland, this is an area on the east side where old hippies went to raise their children, and now the children are sporting tats, piercings, pink pony tails, and purple hats.

The thing we noticed the most were the tattoos, and I still don’t get it. I know I’ve written about this before, but today I saw people nearly covered – both arms, legs, necks – everywhere that was showing and Lord only knows what was underneath their clothes.

I thought as I was looking at the parade of tattooed youth, “Doesn’t that hurt?” When I got home, I asked Google for the answer. “Artists create tattoos by injecting ink into a person's skin. To do this, they use an electrically powered tattoo machine that resembles (and sounds like) a dental drill. The machine moves a solid needle up and down to puncture the skin between 50 and 3,000 times per minute. The needle penetrates the skin by about a millimeter and deposits a drop of insoluble ink into the skin with each puncture.” (health.howstuffworks.com/skin-care/beauty/skin-and-lifestyle/tattoo.htm)

To me that sounds more painful than I had imagined. The thought of a dentist-sounding drill made me flinch, much else the pulsating needle.

I can understand the traditional “drunken sailor” doing this. Alcohol kills the pain, and they generally only got one tattoo. That probably sobered them up pretty quick. I can also understand gangsters, thugs, and gang members. They have something to prove to their peers.

What I can’t understand is people using them for a fashion statement – girls especially.

My friend said, “I must be getting old because I have absolutely no desire to get a tat.”

“You’re not old if you call them “tats,” I said.

“I feel pretty old. I remember when we first invented tie-dye, and look – it’s everywhere again.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” I said. “You know you’re getting older when the cool stuff skips a generation and comes back in style.”

Of course this generation looks nothing like we looked in our tie-dye shirts. We were thin, with long, straight, shiny, natural-colored hair. Today I saw the equivalent of tie-dye hair that looked like someone had taken a dull knife to it and then dried it with a blast furnace. There were whole chunks missing off of people’s heads, surrounded by ragged, shaggy, lifeless, crispy hair.

Where we were tanned, healthy, acne-free because we were into nature, hiking, eating healthy fruits and vegetables, and treating our bodies like they were our best friends, many of the people I saw today look liked they’d crawled out from under a rock, and their bodies were their worst enemies. Pierce it! Stab it with needles! Yank the hair out! Pour on harsh chemicals! Remove the color and replace it with clown color! Whack it! Put a big round orb in your earlobe and stretch it three inches! Pad the body with fat! Pierce that tongue so you can’t talk!

Well, I guess I’ve made my point. This generation may be young, but some of the stuff about them doesn’t seem very bright. Except their poor skin and hair, that is. I'd rather be a hippie than a hipster any day.