The Möbius strip of irony.

Today I encountered something that blew my mind. It appears that irony has reached a breaking point. Everything that has been building up in hipster culture over the last few years has now, suddenly and violently, collided into a pinnacle of irony so mind-boggling that hipsters will be studying it for years, desperately yearning to glean the smallest bit of wisdom from it; to bow down, small and insignificant, in its ironic glory. To know in their heart of hearts that nothing in their most fertile dreams could ever match its irony, and yet to never stop dreaming... because hope, my friends, springs eternal.

Complexity can be found in the simplest of places, and genius is often the result of accidents. And as it turns out, the new milestone of irony was discovered just a few clicks away from the very page you are reading right now. Which is, in and of itself, ironic.


So take a deep breath, and prepare yourself. The most complex example of irony that ever there was and ever there will be...




Is this image from the Neighborhoodies® catalogue:






Don't just look at it: Study it. Absorb it.


Read the caption. The caption is very important.




The layers of irony in this image run so deep that it may be well beyond my own lifetime before they are fully understood. The irony loops back upon itself over and over again, twisting and repeating, creating a veritable Möbius strip of irony.



I will attempt to break it down for you as best I can, but you must forgive my blasphemously primitive analyzation of a puzzle so labyrinthine; for I am but a student, and I have much to learn. Students of God have spent lifetimes in pursuit of His true nature, only to die with many questions left unanswered. Such it shall be with The Neighborhoodies® Catalogue Image.

The guy in the photo has a hip ironic haircut, and is standing in the very ironic location of Central Park, with an ironic smirk on his face, wearing a hip ironic Neighborhoodies® t-shirt (size small), which says "die hipsters die," the most ironic thing a hipster could possibly choose to display on his t-shirt. It suggests that he himself is not hip, and yet he is being incredibly hip, although irony is kind of last year anyway, which makes him unhip, which is hip. Unless he's over irony and by embracing it he's just being retro, which is very hip, and also ironic, which might make it unhip, because irony is over, and irony has become ironic anyway! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

That in and of itself is irony the likes of which hipsterdom has never seen. But there's more. Let us expand outside the context of the photo, and consider its caption. The caption's tone is ironic, and even "baby blue Gothic" is ironic. It's all made even more ironic by the fact that it was written without a hint of irony. This is all accidental, and that strengthens the irony tenfold. Consider then that the entire concept of fucking "Neighborhoodies®" is founded in irony, and the unintentional irony therein runs deep as well (mass-marketing indie fashion statements, et al), and add to that I found this image through a Neighborhoodies® advertisement on MySpace, the biggest hipster convention on the internet, and a festering cesspool of irony.

What does this all mean? It means that irony is dead. We've reached the end. Everything has collided right here, and created a black hole of irony. And that's all kind of ironic.

It's times like this I want to go live in a cabin in Montana and grow vegetables using my own feces as manure.

Which would be so totally ironic.