At the opposite side of the Universe…the side where respectable carbon-based life forms are advised to avoid…sat a libations house frequented by a clientele of questionable repute. The euphemism “questionable repute” doesn’t accurately describe the vile character and despicable nature of the beings that patronized The Milky Way It Was (a pleasant name for an unpleasant hell-hole). This dark, smelly, armpit of a bar, sitting precariously along a deformed event horizon known as a star slum, had long been a haven for the misfits and scallywags of the cross-cosmos societies. The criminal element, the mental miscreants, the emotionally unleashed, the methane flatulent…all the dregs of the Universe…seemed to succumb to the gravitational pull of the same cosmic black watering hole.

In spite of its name, the space cantina offered a fully stocked bar that was not for the faint of heart. Drinking at such an establishment could turn mere children into adults and most adults into mere children. Their signature drink created chemical imbalances that would have made Steven Hawking talk smack about Neil deGrasse Tyson. It was the kind of bar where every patron needed to sit with its back to the wall and avoid eye contact with anything that had an eye (including the Helix Nebula and potatoes).

Then, the Hipsters showed up. The same irresistible, gravitational tug that sucked all the intergalactic reprobates to the event horizon, known as The Milky Way We Were, had altered through time and space. It started vacuuming up every cosmic creature that wore horn rim glasses, wool caps (even in the summer), skinny jeans, and had no understanding of the irony of thinking everything is ironic. The more self-absorbed members of interstellar culture took over the black hole hell-hole, en masse, and ruined the ambiance of a perfectly good den of iniquity.

Of course, once the Celestial Hipsters moved into the neighborhood, rents went up and tolerance of the criminally inclined went down. The mentally miniscule, the morally insolvent, the dark and disturbed – all that had once made The Milky Way We Were, the way it was – found themselves without a hang-out. Every bad guy from Alpha Centauri A to Icarus begrudgingly moved on, in search of another, collapsing in on itself, hole-in-the-wall, star slum to call home. The violent and deranged banded together, stomped their feet, and said, “It’s not fair!” But still, they all left like Hawking radiation pulses from the corona of a black hole.

Gentrification Developers tore down derelict star slums and began putting up overpriced Starbucks. Cosmos-ethnic dining, solar powered food trucks, and Biosphere-to-fork restaurants occupied every street corner.  High-dollar retail space (where liquor stores, featuring day-old wine, once stood) burgeoned with boutique stores selling second-hand clothing, and trend-of-the-week health care items such as thought conditioners and colon cleanses.

But, as the spacetime continuum marched on, the young Hipsters met other young hipsters, biology overtook cosmology, and new entities were created from the collision and interconnection of two bio-bodies. This new entity was classified as the sub-species “Hipster Family”. Eventually, it was reclassified and joined the more mature and inclusive “Family” species. This paradigm shift created a flight to the suburbs on Titan, one of Jupiter’s moons, which left the once decaying, but then gentrified, neighborhood to revert back to collapsing in on itself. The mass exodus to suburbia left the door open for another generation of miscreants, ner-do-wells, and bad guys to lay claim to the remnants of a once thriving star mass community. All going to prove, no matter where you are in the Universe, the more things change, the more they stay the same.