Four in the Morning, One Month In
It’s just past four. Night. I’m the only breathing person in this building, unless you count the black shape that keeps drifting across the bare walls—which I’ve decided, for the sake of my sanity, not to count. Around me: empty Red Bull cans, the ruins of something that was once fast food, a stack of magazines going soft at the corners. The monitor is the only light. I’m not going home tonight. There’s still too much to do.
A little over a month ago, Wenke and I moved this whole operation into the Betahaus—Berlin’s sprawling coworking space in Kreuzberg—and turned what had been a hobby into something that required a calendar. Fixed hours. Meetings. Brainstorming sessions, or what passes for them when you stumble through the door at two in the afternoon still carrying whatever was in your bloodstream from the night before, start coffee wars in the courtyard, and stare at the walls until the office plant Billy starts to look like a projectile. We kept expecting someone to notice we had no idea what we were doing. Nobody did.
Most of the new readers don’t know who’s actually behind this. The faces, the history, the disasters. Which is probably fine—the days when this was purely confessional are mostly gone—but anyone who knew us from before knows that Wenke and I are, at our core, chaos with a wi-fi connection. The attention span of a very distracted insect. The fact that we meet deadlines at all is genuinely close to miraculous.
And yet. We do the job, and we do it surprisingly well. Keep the spreadsheets, make the connections, write our way through whatever territory presents itself that week. The ideas are stolen shamelessly from overheard conversations at the lunch place down the street—the Asian place, or the Sudanese one—and repurposed with enough confidence that they become ours. This is, I think, how culture works. Or at least how we work.
Not everything goes according to plan. Sometimes we spend an entire Wednesday drinking wine and beer, eating through the vegan section of somewhere expensive, watching terrible Australian films about women with improbable proportions. Then wake up the next afternoon, three of us in a giant bed somewhere in Wrangelkiez, heads full of gravel—only to get evacuated from the building because someone found a forgotten World War II bomb nearby. Which does happen in Berlin with a frequency that should probably alarm people more than it does. You can’t plan for it. You can only accept it and find the nearest coffee.
There’s a real risk in making your passion pay the rent. Financially, obviously. But also in some harder-to-name way—the risk that you’ll slowly stop loving the thing you love because it now has to behave. I don’t think that’s happened yet. I think we manage because we actually like what we make, and because we know each other well enough to fight seriously and still show up the next morning. Friendship held together by argument and trust and an enormous quantity of genuinely stupid conversation.
The lesson of the first month, if there is one, is velocity. How fast everything moves when you actually commit. The idea doesn’t pause—it keeps opening into new rooms you hadn’t seen, pulling you through doorways while you’re still trying to understand the last one. When we’re not throwing chewing gum at each other across the office, that is.
Next month we’re probably moving again—into some sprawling, slightly unhinged artist commune a few streets over. Still Kreuzberg, because it has to be Kreuzberg. The neighborhood runs on the same fuel we do, more or less, and the reliably poor quality of whatever’s being sold in Görlitzer Park nearby is at least a stable constant in an otherwise unpredictable life.
So: one month in the hard world of betting everything on a single hand. I’m grateful for it. Grateful for everyone who believes in whatever this is, who sends stories and criticism and the occasional piece of genuine praise. The thing ahead is still mostly unknown. That feels like the right condition for it. World domination has never been this close to actually meaning something.