You went to Canada for Garth. Your digital courtship brief, but consuming. After hours of searching underground blogs for the perfect venue for your first in-person meet, you found, and now sit in, the hippest bar in all of Canada, while pretending it’s the Ace Hotel. You’re on a love seat in an empty corner, enjoying your trademark root beer float. Just the thought of Garth sets the butterflies in your stomach aflutter. As you sip your delicious frozen subtlety you wonder what will happen when he does walk through that door, where will you go, what will you end up doing? That’s when you see the man enter the room. And from a distance, he seems about the right height and about the right build to be Garth. As he makes his way through the crowd of pure hipness you can now tell that he has what, if he were a woman, would be called a bob haircut (do they call them bob’s in Canada?). He’s probably early 30s, but has a 7th grade heavy-metal-kid mustache. He’s wearing a gigantic LA Kings jersey, below-the-knee cut off jean shorts (complete with Goody comb planted in back pocket) and blindingly white hi tops, Ponys you think.

Thankfully as he moves into the light you can confirm that he does not match the mall-quality photos you have seen of Garth. But it does put a fright in you. Like what if Garth isn’t who you think he is? What if he’s just a guy who found pictures online of the hottest guy he could. He searched for hours and days, and by far the hottest photos of the hottest guy, on the entire internet, from .com to .edu, even on the heavily censored Chinese version of the internet, were the ones he sent you. So what if fake Garth hides behind the thick walls of fake internet photos until the day you finally meet in-person and then he looks nothing like his photos. What if Garth is not hot? The opposite of hot? It’s just too painful to think about, so you scan the crowd to find not Garth again and you do, and he seems as if he is lost and out of place, as if he shouldn’t be here, but should in fact be at the Canadian version of Buffalo Wild Wings (which might be an actual Buffalo Wild Wings because their wings are so tasty it would make sense for them to be an international brand). And this Canadian version of Buffalo Wild Wings would of course be located in the Canadian version of West Covina.

But clearly he is not, he is here in this Canadian version of the Ace Hotel, and it seems as if he is searching for someone, someone in particular. And he looks in your direction and your heart stops. And you are like, No way. No fucking way, please God do not be imposter Garth, but your respiration returns to normal as his gaze glimpses, grazes and goes on without recognition. Don’t get yourself wrong, you are sure he is a very nice person and it might be quite enjoyable to share a frozen treat with him, but he is not the type of guy you want to think about getting naked with. Not the type of guy you’d like to imagine touching in the places he might want you to touch him, those places that are currently, and thankfully, well covered by jean shorts. Not the type of person you’d consider doing sex with.

You notice some of the hipster patrons stare at him as well. They lean close in to their friends to talk shit. Like, what’s up with Papa Roach over there. But before they can even make the Pa sound of Papa Roach, they stop. At first you wonder why, but then you can almost see the thoughts birthing in their little hipster heads. They’re wondering, “is it possible that his style might actually be based in irony, seeped in it, drenched in it, saturated in it in fact?” They’re wondering if maybe LA Kings jersey guy’s execution of white trash style is so replete with irony, sated with it if you will, that it has raised the bar and is putting everyone else’s weak attempts to shame? Is he not to be mocked, but to be emulated? And what if he is not only, not an actually white trash Canadian version of an inland empire native, nor just a super hip guy taking it to a new level, but what if, in reality he is Banksy? What then? Well, then of course his attire would not be lame, it would be awesome. Maybe these Canadian versions of Ace Hotel hipsters had not gone far enough, had stopped well shy of the ironic limit in fact. Damnit they think, why were we so unimaginative? It’s insanity, cause now it seems there are no rules. Hipster minds are being blown and nothing makes sense. This carefully constructed, exclusive and well-defined hipster universe is crumbling down around them and on top of them with the force and urgency of a Shinedown guitar solo. Who are we really? they wonder.

So the hipsters look around attempting to see themselves through the eyes of the possibly coolest-person-ever. They check out their own clothes and hair, their tight jeans, their scarves. They’re like “holy shit it’s hot in here, and I have on a scarf and a beanie and a sweater and a scarf and a jacket and a third scarf? That Kings jersey with all those little holes in the fabric, might allow for a nice breeze to reach my skin. I bet it’s silky smooth too, unlike the wool from this vintage cardigan on the other hand, which is not. It’s neither cashmere nor merino, and it’s a bit itchy. In fact, it’s super fucking uncomfortable. Why would I have not worn a shirt under this?”

You see one gentleman with a handlebar mustache sitting atop a unicycle, step down, lean the unicycle against a table and slowly walk away, as if it was not his unicycle, as if in fact he didn’t even know how to ride a unicycle. You see a woman slowly remove a corncob pipe from her mouth and hide it in her purse, the purse that happens to be made out of an authentic southwestern Native American horse blanket, and looking at it she realizes that it may be as equally unacceptable as her pipe, so she proceeds to push it under her chair.

Although the level of tragedy from the loss of hipster identity here is just north of a school shooting, it’s possible there is a bit of post-traumatic growth to be had. A bit of a silver lining if you may. Agreed of course that it’s scary, there is no minimizing that, it’s terrifying to be riding this fixie bike sans hipster-rules-training-wheels, but might there not be a glimpse of freedom beyond this wreckage? Of opportunity? Yes I think there is. And this tiny glimpsable seed we have just agreed upon, starts to grow, and it grows and grows until it is a sapling of liberty and then it grows some more, and now it’s a big ass freedom tree, in full red, white and blue bloom. And of course we should be free, this is America after all, I mean Canada (they aren’t a dictatorship up there, or under some kind of sharia law are they?), and we invented freedom. With the hipster handbrake off, the things that were previously off limits that are now on the table…well it’s just mind-boggling…and the hipsters think, does this mean I don’t have to wear suspenders anymore? That I don’t have to be vegan. I can eat KFC? I don’t have to listen to every single Ezra Klein Show episode nor read all those novel length Atlantic articles (cause there’s like a million of those)? I can like Emily in Paris? I don’t have to let Pitchfork reviews, penned with the infinite wisdom that only a 22-year-old kid who was bullied all through adolescence can pen, decide my musical preference? I can drive a Cyber Truck? Well maybe that’s going too far, but a Kia Soul? I can stop carrying around this fucking cosmetic cane?

And now, as if the perceived scorn of the hipster kid’s pitifully-lacking-in-irony-ironic-attire was not bad enough, it seems like he is not feeling the soundtrack either because as the new !!! song comes on, his head tilts just slightly. And everyone just knows he is like, “are you kidding me with this? Where are the guitars?” And then a guy in short-shorts, knee-high tube socks and a too small tank top heads over to the DJ booth. Maybe he’s feeling more confident because his hipster look is not all that terribly different from Kings jersey guy’s what was not, just moments ago, a hipster look, but that actually might now, be the hippest look. He asks the DJ loud enough for Kings jersey to hear “got any Daughtry?,” the trans DJ shakes their head, they do though give tank top an it’s-cool-nod and the indie-tronica fades out and Staind fades in, and up, up, up the volume goes. And with It‘s Been Awhile blaring, the crowd starts getting into it. They’re like, wow, being allowed to like Staind feels fucking awesome and they’re hoping the DJ has the entire Breaking the Cycle album, and some Nickelback or Trapt as well. Kings jersey is clearly feeling it. And the too tight tank top guy is like look at me, hey, over here, i‘m the one who got Staind put on.

And then you see Kings jersey pull a phone out of his jeans shorts and it happens to be a flip phone. And at first everyone is like fuck, our phones too? But of course they slowly slip the iPhones they were using to look up Three Doors Down reunion tour dates back in their pockets and now they remember how awesome flip phones really are. And then they start to pray, and although they pray individually, they hope the culmination of all the simultaneous individual prayers might have some kind of emergent property effect in which the total of the sum of the prayers is greater than the parts because they pray that in that one drawer in their bureau, the one with all the random stuff, the one with forty-seven different micro usb power cords, they pray when they get home it still houses one of their old Nokia Razrs. They’re like, how could I have totally forgot how fucking cool Razr phones are? With T9 text input and that slick anodized aluminum shell. Unforgivable.

And then the Kings jersey turns, and with an entire bar full of people he could lay his eyes on, he looks straight at you, with what you swear is recognition. And he walks your way. And your stomach explodes, as if your butterflies just shot an eight-ball of coke and washed it down with sherm (but not in the good way). And you are again saying No way. No fucking way. Is this an ersatz Garth after all? Please Lord no. And you knew that meeting him for the first time would be exciting, but not this kind of exciting. As he comes over he gives a hesitant wave and you urinate yourself a bit. And although it doesn’t absorb all of it, you are glad that today is one of the rare days you decided to wear underwear. And now you are looking around for cameras to see if you are on the Canadian version of Punk’d (they have MTV in Canada?), but you see none. And Kings jersey looks at you and you know he is going to introduce himself. You just know he is going to say hey, it‘s Garth. And then he is going to say, yeah, I know, I get that look a lot, but those pictures are kind of old (and not even me) but I don‘t have a camera on my phone, so… But, instead he says, “excuse me, do you happen to know where the Canadian version of West Covina is?” And hearing that you cum. Just a little, but you think it’s possible you have never felt more relieved in your entire life. Never more alive. You’re even enjoying the little bit of pee that has yet to dry between your legs. You might even be into water sports now. In fact, this feeling you have (not the pee feeling, we’re past that, leave it), it might be the best feeling you have ever had. And you’re like this is the feeling of happiness I dreamed of when meeting Garth for the first time, the real Garth. And Kings jersey continues — “and not just the Canadian version of West Covina, but specifically the Canadian version of Buffalo Wild Wings located in a strip mall in the Canadian version of West Covina?” And you are so happy you pull out your non-flip phone and thank God you never deleted that Mapquest app that came bundled with your old hotmail address so many years prior, and you give him turn-by-turn driving directions. You also give him your number in case he gets lost (the getting lost part is probable due to Mapquest’s directions being almost universally wrong because there are tons of new roads (possibly new cities) since the app was last updated).

As he thanks you and starts to leave, the crowd begins to realize Kings jersey is not in fact super hip, he is not Banksy, he is just your run-of-the-mill white trash dude headed to the Canadian version of Buffalo Wild Wings in a strip mall in the Canadian version of West Covina. The Staind song quickly fades out and the !!! song fades back in. And it’s the !!! song that was remixed by oOoOO and remastered by alvvays, the CSS cover that Brendan Yates guests on. And now everyone knows where they stand again. And friends look over at friends and say “phfhfhfhfhf, Canadian version of West Covina. So lame. Fucking Staind, stupid.” And the iPhones get unpocketed, the unicycles get remounted, the corncob pipes get pulled out of the Native American blanket purses and reinserted into mouths and the canes get taken back up. All thoughts of their next drink being a Zima or a shot of Jäger fade as they head back to the bar and put in their orders for the cocktail of the day, the one named after the B-side from the first Joy Division single. The cocktail is made with locally sourced organic tequila produced in oak barrels of limited quantity by a throuple out of Ottawa. It takes about 75 minutes for the mixologist to prepare this cold-pressed blood orange, chia seed milk, hand pulled tamarind and kale muddled piece of perfection, but it’s worth it. It’s so worth it. And the rules are back, and there is not a single question in their minds, this drink is hip as fuck, and so are we.

You order another root beer float from the soda jerk and bask in your relief and pray that when you really meet Garth, it can feel like this. And you really hope so, because now that you’ve had this feeling, you so want this feeling, you need this feeling, and you can’t fight this more-than-a-feeling feeling anymore, and in fact you forgot what you started fighting for and you’re thinking maybe it’s time to bring this ship to shore and throw away the oars. Forever.

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J. Scott Boyd spent fifteen years in the music industry, working with artists including No Doubt, Social Distortion, and Chris Cornell before becoming a licensed psychotherapist. He has worked in the Boulder County Jail, the Didi Hirsch Suicide Prevention Center, and the Exodus Psychiatric Facility. He has a private practice in Boulder, Colorado, where he focuses on addiction and trauma. His short fiction is forthcoming in J Journal. He is the author of the novels Black Forest and Bad Cop, Worse Cop.