robotnik2004 | Those Wacky Non-Mormons, OR, A Fixie of Hipsters

Early this morning, a pack of clean-cut kids swarmed through our neighborhood and put up big American flags in front of every house on the street. I guess it's a Labor Day thing? I've got no problem with the flag but you don't need a PhD in U.S. history to know that the relationship between the U.S. flag and the international labor movement has had its ups and downs.

What's the collective noun for these roving bands of clean-cut youngsters, anyway? An emigration of Mormons? Whatever you call them, they're a regular feature of our new neighborhood. It actually reminds me of my childhood a little: kids playing up and down the street from dawn to dusk, knocking on the door after dinner to ask if the Ukelele can come out to play. We have lots of kids in our neighborhood at home, but you book your playdates three weeks in advance, and nobody goes nowhere without a car seat, helmet, and three chaperones. Don't these Utah kids know the wild spaces of childhood have been paved over, we're all paranoid helicopter parents now? Maybe they don't read the New York Review of Books. Or maybe it's just that they have such a surplus here, it's not so crucial to look after them.

In Ontario, our new Mazda I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-A-Minivan felt like a big car. Here, it's the smallest thing on the road. We've become darkly fascinated with the as yet unseen driver of a bright yellow Humvee who has a child in the Ukelele's daycare. Almost everyday it blazes past us on the way to school, using the two-way left turn only lane as its own personal detour. Then when we get to campus, it's always taking up two of the drop-off spaces in front of the daycare. And inside the parked Humvee, a little chihuahua with a pearl collar is yipping and yapping its head off. The chihuahua makes it. Way to be obnoxious in all the most stereotypical ways, Humvee lady! Big evil car, rude driving and parking, neurotic yappy dog straight out of rich obnoxious lady central casting... Fifty bucks says you cackle, wear fur, blow smoke in people's faces, and are two Dalmatian puppies away from the coat of your dreams.

Lest you think this is all going to be snarky comments about Those Wacky Mormons^TM: so far we're actually more amused, by and large, by our interactions with Salt Lake City's non-Mormon population. They always find a way to signal, within five minutes of striking up a conversation, that they're not LDS. At first we couldn't figure out why everybody we met insisted on mentioning how they like to have a glass of wine with dinner or grill with a beer in their hand. It's sort of like how potheads feel each other out: "Hey man, are you cool?" "Like, cool how?" "Oookaaay..." "He was asking if you get high." You also see a lot of tattoos here--butterfly, tribal, hula girl, it all says the same thing: I'm not one of Them!

It took me a while to put my finger on what was different about SLC's alterna-hipster scene. They all seem so cheerful, so well adjusted and sure of their place in the world. But consider: your New York or California hipster has no real hope of shocking anyone anymore. He or she hasn't had anybody serious to rebel against since Spiro Agnew. So unless you're willing to actually kill yourself with excess, there's little to be done but spiral off into parody or recursive self-loathing. But the SLC hipster, or hippie, or punk, or whatever, has an honest to Moroni theocracy to rebel against! It's like living in a White Wolf setting, or NBC's Kings. It centers them, gives them purpose, identity, definition. Plus it sets the bar for rebellion so low--coffee?--they can fight the power and still be in great shape for mountain biking and hacky sack.

P.S. Turns out the clean cut kids were a boy scout troop. We found this out when they returned to present us with the bill for our flag.