Ethos? Isn't that one of the Three Musketeers?

This is what you shall do.

It's a truly terrifying world out there, full of terrorists and murderers, rapists and snakes on planes. Hollywood and the national fear-mongering media would have us believe that we could be abducted, shot at, or buried in a Chilean mine for several months, literally at any moment.

Even while you're reading this, Hollywood plots against you.

So since you can't tell your local coffee barrista, bus-driver, professor, class-mate, or really anyone outside your immediate family and friends that you love them without them becoming concerned that they need to get a restraining order against you, (because seriously, they will. No one just says, “I Love You!” to their coffee barrista, no matter how much we may mean it because the coffee is just that good, unless they're having sex with the aforementioned barrista. Even then, it's probably too soon,) what you can do, is tell them how much you appreciate them for what they do.

Appreciation is Love's middle-child. It's not the oldest or the youngest, sandwiched between love and lust, so it's stereotypically undervalued. It's different, but we tell it that's what makes it special.

Appreciate as many people as you possibly can, on a daily basis. If you're honest and sincere about how much you appreciate them, you'll brighten up even their shittiest day, and the best part is, you won't come off as a creepy stalker, and you won't sound like a dirty hippie. That's important.

Read Kurt Vonnegut, and take his teachings about Humanism disguised as science-fiction to heart. We don't know what, if anything, exists beyond this mortal realm. That shouldn't matter. Be nice to your fellow man, not because you expect something for it, but because it's just what you should do.

Be respectful and kind to everyone, regardless of age, race, gender, sexual orientation, or personality, because chances are that you'll be glad you did. They'll probably wind up giving you a kidney. Either that, or they'll be your boss, and you'll end up dating their hot daughter.

Again...Hollywood is always thinking up new ways to get you.

If you set expectations for anything new that you may do, you go into that thing with a preconceived notion, a self-fulfilling prophecy. You limit yourself to only what you already know. Don't do that. It's stupid. Go with no expectations.

Don't carry around loose change with you all day just so that you can dump it, like a monetary bowel movement, into a penny jar at the end of the day. Sure, it's your money and you probably worked hard for it, but seriously, is that thirty-seven cents that important to your financial well-being? Would you be filing bankruptcy without it? Is that how you plan to pay for your child to go to college?

If so, you have many problems, and that thirty-seven cents isn't going to go very far towards fixing them.

Instead, unload your loose change in a positive way, by giving it to the next homeless person or tip jar you see. That way, you can spread the wealth and improve someone's quality of life.

Laugh scornfully when people use the words, “investment,” or, “monetary gain” when talking about an art form. Paying for art, or giving a monetary value to it, is like paying for a woman's love. That's called prostitution, and it's an ugly thing, disgusting to the soul. To turn beautiful art into a toothless, disease-ridden whore, crying into her beer and streaking her mascara, alone at the pool-hall on the bad side of town while John Prine plays on the juke-box...to do that is to die inside.

Scorn also the person who would hurt an animal, not out of necessity but out of sheer malice, or the person who, in seeing an animal hurt, does nothing. The same goes doubly if it's a child.

Question everything. That's the only way to make anything better.

Dawson Taylor Coffee Roasters = Hip.

          I-am-not-a-hipster. I-am-not-a-hipster. I-am-NOT-a-HIPSTER.  My morning mantra, repeated over-and-over again as I smoke a Marlboro Red 100 cigarette outside of Dawson Taylor's downtown location on the corner of 8^th St. and Bannock, sipping my large drip coffee with all the fixings. My brain is busy repeating it's mantra, struggling from the primordial ooze that it always is anytime before noon, leaving me free to people-watch. I observe the mix of street-urchin riff-raff, Hipster-Elite, business men and women, elderly, artists, writers, homeless denizens of Boise, all of them in need of a caffeine boost and a few minutes out of the winter's cold to get the day started on the right foot.

          If a place, rather than a person, can be considered truly Hip, I would say Dawson Taylor fits the description. But a place, a thing, can't really be Hip of it's own accord, can it?

          The coffee at Dawson Taylor's is good, but it's not that good.

          It's an inanimate, lifeless building, with no self-control over its own appearance from day-to-day, week-to-week, year after year. So people must make it Hip.

          Going by that logic, whatever it is that makes Dawson Taylor's Hip can be used as a definition for Hip, itself.

          I think that's called the Aristocratic Method? I don't know. I failed Philosophy.

          Dawson Taylor's is one of downtown Boise's most popular places to see and be scene. Key movers-and-shakers in Boise's local art and music scenes loiter, sometimes for hours, at Dawson's.

          It's enough to make me wonder if they even have homes to go home to.

          Maybe they just can't afford a coffee-pot. Could something as simple as a coffee-pot be beyond the means of the starving artist? Or are they just too plagued by creativity to make their own damn coffee?

Dawson Taylor's is also conveniently located. Seriously, I can't tell you how many times I've planned to meet up with friends downtown and heard, “So do you want to just meet up at Dawson's?”

          Even in the middle of the night, long after closing.

          It's because literally anybody who's anybody goes there, or will go there, drawn by some kind of Hip gravitation force. Hip, by it's very nature, must go to Hip. I don't remember who said that, exactly. I failed Physics too.

          Dawson Taylor's used to be fairly cheap, compared to some of the large coffee-franchises, like Starbucks, or Moxie Java. Their prices have steadily crept up over the past year or so to the point where now they're only slightly cheaper than their big-name competitors. In the good-old-days, you could get free refills on drip coffee all day long, until you were so jacked up on caffeine that smoking meth started to sound like an alternative way to go to sleep. Now, it's fifty-cents for a refill, and unless you know someone who works there, you only get one before you have to buy another cup.

          So what is Hip? Hip is something that's easily visible, easily accessible, and cheap, but not free.

          I think that's what Hip is. But then again, that could just be the coffee talking.