by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m drunk. I’ve had too much 100 proof whiskey and it’s only because of some food I’ve recently had that I’m cognizant enough to write anything worth reading. I find myself thinking about what happened to me in South Korea and I think the key issue is I waiting too long to leave the first time.
Here’s what happened, as I remember it. Now, remember, Annie Shapiro is dead, so I can talk about these things without being too much of an asshole.
But, as I remember it, what happened is the nadir of my time in South Korea was the summer of 2007 when Annie Shapiro brought back ROKon Magazine behind my back in secret. It was REALLY GOOD and I was devastated and what she was able to pull off. She finally proved that she, did, in fact, love the magazine more than I did.
In hindsight, I think, everyone involved in the ROKon Magazine tragedy would have been better off if I had left South Korea for home at some point in the spring of 2007. If I had spend most of 2007 just kind of chilling out back in America then I could have worked out a lot of internal mental problems. As it was, I was living on fumes. (I managed to almost get hit by a van in the process, but lulz, that’s a different story.)
In hindsight, if I hadn’t wallowed in Seoul about how emotionally kneecapped by the failure of my version of ROKon Magazine in the spring of 2007, I could have gone home and maybe moved on to New York City or something. But….I was scared. I was scared to go home to failure so I stayed in South Korea, thinking maybe I could salvage my life there and spend the rest of my life being a well known expat in Seoul.
Then all hell broke loose when ROKon Magazine came back (in secret!) without me.
And, so, here I am, 15 or so years later approaching my 50th birthday realizing only just now that I’m just too old to ever do all the fun things in NYC that I wanted to do in my 30s. Even I get what I want, I don’t get what I want. Even if I manage to sell a break out hit novel — I can’t change how fucking old I will be when it happens.
That is very depressing on a number of levels for a number of reasons. Life is finite and I can’t go back in time. I have to process that there is such a thing as waiting too long. It’s extremely painful.
And, yet, I live to be creative for creative sake and I suppose it’s at least possible that I might, if nothing else, squeeze out a bit of fun at some point in my 50s. But that’s an extremely iffy proposition.
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