Deleted Scenes: Keep Your Hipsters Off My Milk Pt. 1

Between my wife and I, I do most of the grocery shopping. It’s not a problem for me; I’ve gotten to be relatively decent at it. You buy the food you want to eat and try to balance what you think you will eat over the next given period of time, then weigh that against how long the food you’re looking at will last before it goes bad and so forth, how much it costs versus how much you want it, whether you really need that sixth pint of ice cream, etc. And the fact that my wife is a vegetarian and gets grossed out at the thought of handling most meat products means if I want it, I’m buying. So I’m buying.

There’s one thing she’s really specific about, however, and that’s milk. She doesn’t want two percent, she doesn’t want skim or whole. And she’s got a brand. She wants Organic Valley one percent milk, and that’s all there is to it.

Save your rantings about how organic food is overpriced, or about how deregulation has rendered the classification all but meaningless, or about how I’m a liberal queer because I drink organic milk, because I don’t give a shit. It’s what my wife wants and I have no objection to the taste, so if she feels strongly about it and I don’t, I see no reason not to just go with her on the matter.

If you’re wondering why I’m telling you this, it’s because when I was at the grocery store last, I picked up the usual carton of Organic Valley one percent milk, checked out, got home, took it out of the bag, and was shocked and amazed to see what you can see in the image above: Hipsters! There were hipsters on my milk.

Please, keep your fucking hipsters off my milk.

I don’t usually get down with blanket hatred for an entire group of people (the rich aside), but if there’s one contingent that’s made my life a pain in the ass over the course of, oh, the last half-decade, it’s fucking hipsters. Fucking hipsters crowding up shows, fucking hipsters ruining my appreciation for irony, and now, fucking hipsters on my milk.

Just look at that. What are they, farming the open landscape of Williamsburg, Brooklyn? “I know, let’s put on our American Apparel v-necks and pose for a milk carton.” Man, when I’m eating my Cheerios, the last thing I want to look at is hipsters. Really? I can’t even enjoy milk anymore? Milk? Is nothing sacred?

And in all seriousness, what the hell is going on in that picture? Is that a mother and son, a mother and daughter, a father and daughter, a father and son? Have we become so afraid of defining gender that we have to grace a milk carton with sexless androgynes? Just because men and women are equal (in theory if not constitutional law or average take-home income) doesn’t mean they need to be the same. “Boys gots penises and girls gots vaginas”—remember?

We all know the only thing worse than hipsters are hipster parents, but whatever sex they are, what’s most important is this is all shit I don’t want to be thinking about at any point when I’m drinking milk, which I chiefly do in situations involving the aforementioned Cheerios, or some variety of peanut butter sandwich, or chocolate cookies, and so on. These are peaceful times in my day, not times when I want to be disturbed by some pseudo-pop-environmentalist marketing ploy. Everyone knows all hipsters are lactose intolerant anyway, and I’m pretty sure if you put one on a farm, the only thing they’d know how to grow is an ironic farmer’s tan, so what the hell?

Put a cow on my milk. Put a lost kid on my milk. Put a fun puzzle, or a list of milk-relevant puns, or two or three incredibly simple milk-involved recipes on my milk. Hell, even put some bullshit description of how drinking organic milk is going to save me from cancer, cure global warming and get us all laid on my milk. But really—I say this with all the sincerity I can possibly muster under such duress—keep your fucking hipsters (and their fucking hipster kids) off my milk.

Drinking orange juice,

JJ Koczan

jj@theaquarian.com