A Good Month
It’s just after four in the morning. Night. I’m the only living person in this unwieldy office complex, apart from the black shadow that drifts across the bare walls and makes me question my sanity. Empty Red Bull cans scattered around me. Fast-food wrappers. Magazines. My eyes stay fixed on the monitor. I’m not going home tonight.
A month ago I moved this operation into Betahaus and turned what used to be a hobby into an actual job. With set hours and meetings and brainstorming sessions. Or, in our case, stumbling through the door in the afternoon still wired on whatever was left in our systems, flinging coffee around the courtyard, staring at the office plant until it becomes a weapon. But whether you believe it or not, these past few weeks have meant something to me and the rest of the team that I can barely process. The weight of it keeps me up.
Most of the new people following this have no idea who’s actually behind it. My face, my past, what I’ve lived through. Sometimes I think that’s a shame, but mostly it makes sense. The real intimate stuff doesn’t make it into these dispatches anymore. The people who know me from way back know I’m basically chaos in human form. The attention span of a mayfly with a grudge. So any semblance of professionalism from me almost qualifies as a miracle.
And yet I’m surprisingly good at the job. Calendars, spreadsheets, meetings with people who matter and some who don’t. Writing my way through whatever the week throws at me. Sections, themes, reliability. Ideas I steal from the next table over at lunch, some tiny Asian restaurant, sometimes Sudanese. The machinery runs.
But nothing goes exactly as planned. There was a Wednesday where we drank wine and beer straight through the night, ate our way through every vegan spot we could find, and watched some terrible Australian film about women with too much of everything. Woke up the next afternoon three-deep in a bed in Wrangelkiez with hangovers thick as fog, then had to evacuate because of a bomb they found nearby. Work was impossible. I wanted coffee and sun and whatever painkillers I could find.
It’s always risky to try and monetize the thing you love. Financially, sure, but also in your head. I only believe we’ll actually pull this off because I love what we do and I trust the people doing it with me. We’re friends. That counts for something—the arguments and the faith and all the stupid talk in between.
The month taught me how fast everything moves. The idea never sits still. You learn something every day when you’re not busy throwing things at each other or just messing around. It’s like a real-world role-playing game where you don’t know what happens next—chances and failures, decisions you’ll have to live with.
So I’m changing too. Trying new things, bringing old stuff back. We’ll probably move again soon, to some broken-down artist commune a few blocks over. This is Kreuzberg, after all—it has to be. The world domination thing keeps looking closer. Not that I trust any of this will actually work, but at least the exhaustion feels purposeful, and the chaos feels like mine.