by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The thing about my time in South Korea as an expat is, for one brief shining moment I was a somebody. I felt like I lived up to my “potential” because I was not only DJing at the best expat bar in Seoul, I was — at one point — the publisher of the only English language magazine in the city.
The events that left me emotionally kneecapped all happened in the course of a less than a year from late 2006 to early 2007, though there was an extended epilogue that would finally see everything come crashing down in February 2008.
I’m really leaning into my very, very romanticized memories of my time as an expat to flesh out a six novel project that is meant to be something of an allegory about the Trumplandia Era.
The thing that is growing more and more alarming is, of course, the fact that I’m no longer young. My looming 50th birthday is causing me no end of existential angst. Now that I finally have both ambition and motivation I’m kind of stuck with one clear path as to how to pull myself out of oblivion — stick the landing when it comes to writing my first novel.
But even then, even under the best of circumstances, it could very well be in my mid-50s before I actually see any sort of improvement in my lot. And, as I keep saying, if I get what I want, I don’t get what I want. I could write a successful breakout first novel and I’ll be so old that I won’t be able to date 24 year olds and become a smug “bi-costal” Twitter liberal who looks down on the Poors of middle America from first class on my way to LA or NYC.
I suppose some of all of this is coming from how I’m finally transitioning from the wilfully delusional stage of working on this novel to the point where I kind of have to sit up straight and take things a lot more seriously. Publishing is an industry and me being delusional just isn’t going to cut it in the world of the cold hard metrics of actually getting a novel traditionally published.
Anyway.
The point is — I still have a lingering desire to return to Asia for at least one visit before I drop dead. It’s not going to be anything like I remember and, in fact, it might just be really boring. A lot of the reason why I think about Seoul so much says more about my dissipated youth than it does what actually happened in Seoul.
Ugh.
