On Desire

Also, I'm opening a store in Los Angeles

Before I get into the ramble, I am opening a Club Vintage in Los Angeles. It’s a city that I have a very complicated relationship with, but when I was spending the majority of my time here, I wasn’t really working. That made me feel insane. Opening a store is the definition of working. I just caulked all of the tiny holes in a piece of Ikea furniture and unpacked 300 garments. It’s at Platform, an outdoor mall of sorts, so there are other things to do too, like eat pizza or drink-eat Boba. If you’re reading this from your device in LA, I’ll see you soon.

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How do we conjure desire rather than just wait for it to be dumped on us one day like a bucket of cold water? I’m a desire addict; I chase what feels good - like a somewhat heedless agreement to open a store in LA - often regardless of the long-term implications. This applies to shopping, duh, and also my relationships with people, money, work and Doritos. As I get older, less self-involved, I am starting to twist the telescope, looking further down the field and with my habitual desires in direct focus, they’re a bit shaky, the patterns. But we’re always hard on ourselves.

I’m plodding my way through this book, “Deleuze and Desire : Analysis of The Logic of Sense” by Piotrek Świątkowski, and disentangling the sense of the individual from that of the general public’s (“Society”). I learned a new word for it actually: ontogenesis, the development of an individual organism or anatomical or behavioral feature from the earliest stage to maturity.

In the book, there’s a lot of meditation on external structures and how - the way we respond to them - is what makes us who we are. Obvious but also, I think, often underestimated as a driving factor in our realized (or unrealized) identities. How does this relate to Doritos?? you ask. Now I want you to think about Barbie and culture and how we’re all continuously, unconsciously processing ideas about how we’re supposed to behave, internalizing the edicts of culture that promote beauty as white thinness and success as holidays in Hydra and millions in the bank. It’s all a little thin, no? Eating Doritos and doing what seems fun in the moment is my small rebellion. It’s also why I can’t have a real job and took the path of entrepreneurship. Which, by the way, is so much fucking work. But I decide who and what reaps the benefits.

What do you do with your time when no one is watching you? And even when you’re alone, are you thinking about how this quiet scenario will be interpreted by others later? Are you taking a photo with your phone because you want to remember or because you want to show other people? And what of your desires? Are they yours because of what you’ve cobbled together via the experience of being alive, and how affected are they by what your parents and friends and teachers and the TV has told you your whole life?