Thank you for smoking

Angst and a cup of honey

Thirteen years ago I left Malaysia with the faint but burning aspiration that somehow, eventually, I would make a life in New York, and I see myself then imagining the city with the stupidity and adrenaline with which you can only imagine a place you have not yet lived in, yellow cabs and rats and people rushing to somewhere important to be, and I see myself wanting not merely to experience it but to be changed by it, to become one of those people hurrying somewhere, and I see myself now running through the 6 train uptown because I am late again and my phone is dying and I have not eaten and I think this is funny, this is what you wanted, you idiot, and I see the intervening years collapsing into each other, restaurants and jobs and people I loved and people I disappointed and the thousand private interactions by which a city stops being a fantasy and becomes the place where you buy toothpaste, where you cry, where you become lonely, where you transcend again, and then a year ago I quit my job and started Lekondo and suddenly New York swallowed me a second time, my life becoming merge conflicts and other kinds of conflict, receipts I forgot to expense, and the little electrical ache in my wrist that now accompanies almost every good idea, and Los Angeles for a startup accelerator before New York again and this constant oscillation between microscope and telescope, one hour convinced the future depends upon the placement of a button and the next trying to understand what any of this might mean fifty years from now, and I see myself not sleeping and then sleeping so long it feels as though my body has launched Bagration against Barbarossa, and I see friendships I have neglected and evenings I cannot get back and the guilt peculiar to choosing one thing so completely that every unlived life begins accumulating behind you, and I think of the saying peace to all those engaged in the struggle to fulfill their dreams and I understand the word struggle differently now because struggle used to sound heroic to me and now I know that most of it is as painful and embarrassing,when nobody is clapping and the thing is broken and you are tired and you have already sacrificed enough that quitting would hurt but continuing hurts too, and I have felt in all of this like an exposed nerve, like a dandelion already torn from its stem and being carried by gust while insisting that there is still such a thing as direction, and last month Lekondo crossed 100,000 users and I felt proud of course but also wounded, and I thought of the brothers karamazov, of the Tower of Babel not as the staircase by which man climbs from earth into heaven but to bring heaven down to earth, to manifest it real and therefore subject it to weather and bureaucracy and human values, and perhaps this is the cruelty of making anything at all, that the beautiful thing in your head is invulnerable only for as long as you refuse to build it, and here in this attempt is the monolith, which we put in New York during Fashion Week because we wanted to say something embarrassingly simple, that fashion belongs to everyone, although perhaps the object itself says it better because a monolith should be the perfect emblem of monoculture, one object, one authority, and yet we covered ours in mirrors so that it could possess no image except the city around it, so that every person passing it would interrupt its singularity, and I think of Kubrick’s monolith in 2001 space oddyssey, appearing at those thresholds where one order of intelligence gives way to another, opaque and absolute and apparently delivered from somewhere beyond us, and I like that with ours there is no revelation hidden inside it, no superior intelligence descending from the stars, only the miraculous fact of reflection; the enlightenment, if there is one, arriving when we recognize ourselves and one another on the surface, because we have spent the last twenty years behaving as though the digital world should instruct the physical one, the feed telling the street what to wear and the algorithm telling the mind what to desire, when perhaps the direction should be reversed, perhaps the street should instruct the screen, perhaps the physical world with all its friction and randomness should be allowed to leak upward into the digital one, and perhaps this is what I want Lekondo to become, not another monolith telling people what culture is but a platform in which culture debates what culture is, and I look at this mirrored thing and think perhaps this is what making anything is, taking some impossible image you have carried around for years and subjecting it to the indignity of reality, letting people touch it and misunderstand it and laugh at it and love it and alter it until it no longer belongs entirely to you, and maybe that is why I still believe so stupidly in art and science and all these collective beliefs we conspire to make real together, and I see the boy in Malaysia wanting New York and I see myself now exhausted in New York and I know enough now to regret some of what ambition has cost me but apparently not enough to stop, because tomorrow I will wake up and run through Union Square again and try once more to bring the thing down from heaven, and beneath all the theory and tenderness and hope there is, yes, still the petty mammalian pleasure of proving everyone who thought we could not do it completely fucking wrong.