Article: My History

Santayana sleeps in a coffin underground. Hayek’s ghost walks wayward graveyards with neither rhyme nor  purpose, anchored to a reality that the world knows he shall never have. History informs the present, and the present informs the future; humans make the same mistakes they’ve convinced themselves never to make although they’ve tried to remember. The streets of Seoul were caked in makeup, sweat, angst, and the desire for a validation that never came, formed from the seeds of history, deep days of old, imperial ancestry. Beijing and Shanghai showed me rich businessmen in rich suits – rich street foods and exotic delicacies, a cultural heritage spanning 5000 years and hundreds of generations; colonization, wars, and thousands upon thousands of books that address issues but can never offer a complete picture. A Melbourne bathed in street art foretold the place that everyone who was anyone went to for an education – a past colored by colonization and convict-dumping, brought forward into a land now revered for exotically dangerous animals and one of the world’s grandest economies. History, history. I walk the hundred-year past of modern-day Kuala Lumpur daily by LRT and by car – a Jalan Yap Ah Loy that’s been [...]