Issue 16: King HOV

Dearest reader,

I trust this letter finds you as it leaves me, in good health. I’ve reached a stage of life in which I carry an inventory of certain scars of living while also holding on to a conviction that there remain a quite vast amount of things I’ve yet to—and am hungry to—discover still. I was a quietly ambitious kid—behind the awkward and on (frequent) occasion timid surface was a turbulent inner world of storms, conquest, passion, lust, and fury. While it has been tested at times, this inner flame is something I cherish dearly and hope to keep burning for as long as I’m able.

My first true idol in life was Jay-Z. An “oil kid” of perhaps 13 or 14, living under the purplish horizons of a company compound in Dhahran (aka “the colonial project”, in my own lexicon)—accessing the internet through dial-up connections of 128 kilobytes per second (on a good day)—receiving religious studies, without falter, each Thursday morning (a ritual which lasted for over a decade)—hiding CDs with parental advisory stickers within the darkest and most unreachable nooks of my bedroom, to be taken out exclusively when the house was empty—all of this, I speculate, primed me quite well to fall immediately for the gospel of this modern-day messiah.

When I decided that I would take the risk of listening to explicit CDs at home—outside of its empty hours—I would sneak a small Walkman into my dad’s bathroom (“the boys' bathroom”), put on headphones, and listen to the disk, frequently top-to-bottom, while pretending to be occupied by bathroom activities of the more typical sort. The fact that I had to plan out these excursions in advance and complete them without notice added an element of focus and excitement to the entire experience. It put me in a heightened state of reception to absorb the cocktail of vices and virtues transferred from the polycarbonate disc into the deepest wedges of my brain.

By the time Collision Course came out, I was already an established Linkin Park fan. My cousins, who introduced me to the band, tended to have “cool parents” who permitted them to, for example, watch the Live in Texas show on DVD front-to-back on Wednesday nights while eating dal and rice, drinking tea, and munching tea-biscuits1. Such an experience was such a vast departure from my own planet that, during the narrow slices of getting to experience these events, I may as well have been hovering in a dream.

While in high school, I remember setting for myself a certain goal: by the age of 26, I will have an album and “be successful” as a music producer and recording artist. I chose 26 for no reason other than that Mr. Carter was at this age when he released Reasonable Doubt. I now sit, three years after this deadline has passed, reflecting upon the goal. In case of any ambiguity around the specifics here—there stand at least nine digits of success between myself and Mr. HOV. And thus, in my last investor call, I faced the unfortunate task of having to explain to my backers that I’m more of a “late bloomer”. I explained to them, while pushing some air with my hands and showing them an assortment of graphs and numbers, that after the current bear cycle everything would be back to normal and I’d begin hitting my numbers with much more ease. (They did not appear impressed.)

On the brighter (and less sardonic) side of things, I appear to have remained consistent with a few ambitions that were on my mind during my high school years. To provide some context, here’s a (raw, unedited) document I wrote at the age of 16 for a class in eleventh grade.

Before departing, I’ll leave you with the following quote from Seneca, which I read over the past week and found to resonate quite deep:

If you want to know why all this running away cannot help you, the answer is simply this: you are running away in your own company. You have to lay aside the load on your spirit. Until you do that, nowhere will satisfy you. […] Where you arrive does not matter so much as what person you are when you arrive there.

That’s all I got for today. I hope you have a magnificent weekend ahead of you.

Love,
Reef