It was a warm fall day in the downtown district near the Jongno subway station. The heat and humidity had eased somewhat, but it was sunny, and all the concrete and steel seemed to add another 10 degrees. I was at a coffee shop that advertised the best croissant in the city. I sat at a counter along a window with a cup of tea and a pain au chocolat. It was good but how was I to know if it was the best in the city? I looked out to the Cheongyecheon with its walking paths along the stream. It was 11:40 a.m., and groups of coworkers with lanyards around their necks walked to restaurants in office clothes — suits for the men and sheer skirts and nice blouses for the women. I drank my London Fog and wrote in my notebook while I waited to go to a source meeting at an Italian restaurant upstairs.

My Korean class has been going well. The Thai woman I usually sit next to props her phone up on her water bottle and livestreams herself on TikTok the entire class. She runs a heavy filter that makes her look 5 years younger. Her friends pop on throughout the class to see what she’s up to. I’ve been bringing MyChews and these Japanese mints that Jia likes to hand out to the class. The teacher asked me how much candy I have in my house.

After a lunch of polite conversation about tax issues in Korea, I stood next to the stream and spoke with a coworker who hasn’t been as fortunate as I have and is still struggling to find work. No one is naive enough to think a corporation cares about you, but you almost have to make yourself believe that if you get hired by the right company and pledge your life to it, it will take that into account before cruelly casting you aside. How else to trade your life for money?

We walked for a bit among the tourists and the office workers and talked about how it has been since our livelihoods were so callously eliminated. I said I heard the company recently announced it is rebuilding the international department that it destroyed in February.

“Don’t send that to me. I don’t want to get triggered.”

We parted ways on a depressing note. What else were we supposed to feel?

I went to the KOCIS center in the Seoul Shimbun building and worked on a couple of stories. There were other correspondents there from Mexico, France, Japan, and Taiwan with their heads down over their laptops. At least three different languages swirling around. I sat by the window. One of the nearby buildings was running a giant LED video ad for a robot vacuum. I looked over Gwanghwamun Square across the Seoul Finance Center to the main gate of Gyeongbokgung Palace, and behind it the turquoise roof of the Blue House, tucked into the feet of Bugak Mountain.

This has been a hard year in many ways, and in others it has worked out better than I could have predicted. The platitudes you grow up hearing tend to be true. Open door opens, another closes; everything happens for a reason; what doesn’t kill you…

After I filed my stories to my editor in Amsterdam, I walked back along the stream into the Jongno area with all of its colorful signage for meat restaurants and singing rooms and cafes. I met an old friend for dinner. We grilled pork and kimchi on a black stone heated from below by a gas burner. He drank soju and I drank an NA beer and we talked about the same topics I seemed to discuss with all my friends who are dads here. Where to raise our children? International school? College in the West or Korea?

I said part of me still hangs onto the idea that the U.S. is better at producing children who are true individuals, who are creative and free-thinking. “It’s the idea that there’s more freedom in America,” I said. “But I look around and if my daughter ends up conforming to this culture, is that so bad?”

“Exactly,” my friend said. “I was on the subway the other day, and I was looking around at all these people who are polite, clean, fashionable. Taught to respect their elders. Well-educated.”

“Right. I’d be pretty happy if my kid ends up like that.”

We went on discussing the world, comparing the cultures, as we walked back to Gwanghwamun, the light soft and good, the streets safe and vibrant, and I said, “I still feel lucky to live here.”

“‘Gah!’ Say ‘gah!’”

“Kah!”

“No, ‘gah!’”

“Kah!”

“No, ‘gah!’”

The teacher stood in front of a whiteboard with the Hangul letters ㄱ, ㅋ, and ㄲ written on it. She pointed up when she wanted us to pronounce the double letter ㄲ. Most of us weren’t getting the sound quite right.

I was in the multicultural center in Ilsan with about 20 other students. The local government offers the class for the spouses of Korean nationals. I learned a new word early on — 사회 통합 프로그램. Social integration program. My fellow students are from China, Russia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, England, Venezuela, and the U.S. I’m the only man.

I got lucky with this class in several ways. A spot opened up at the last minute, and I slotted in. The classroom is in the coworking space that the government built a couple of years ago, and it’s right around the corner from our apartment complex. Most of the students have to get on the bus or train or get dropped off. I have a three-minute bike ride. The classes are free.

For three hours on Monday and Wednesday, I’m in a room with a bunch of Korean guys’ wives. We are starting at the very beginning with the language. I know the reading stuff already, but I’ve never taken any formal classes, so it’s fine for me to start at zero to make sure my foundation is strong. Our teacher is great. Very lively. She gives us lots of homework.

The American woman who sat next to me is pregnant, and one of the first questions our teacher asked us was how many of us were also expecting. On the second day, we had to watch an hour-long video about domestic violence with English subtitles. I’m assuming the government knows the audience and wants to help these students in more ways than just language education. What happens in a family is not only a domestic problem, but a societal problem, the narrator tells us. We were asking each other why we needed to watch this.

Later, I looked up the program, and the government has specific policy objectives to help multicultural families adapt and settle in. The language classes are part of that broader effort. The government acknowledges the need to protect immigrant women and their children from domestic and sexual violence. The video makes more sense to me now. The government is trying to give us everything we need to build our lives here.

If there was ever a question about me being an immigrant versus a dilettante, an expat, then this class is the answer to that. I wonder what these women would say if I asked them to describe the difference in those terms.

I hope I can get good enough at Korean to ask these women if they ever thought of themselves as expatriates. I suspect we were all taking this class because we thought of our lives as being here, in Korea.

The class makes me think a lot about my ancestors who came to America from Russia, via Germany, not knowing English. By some accounts, several of them never really learned the language. They had to learn enough English to read and write to get their citizenship, but that took many of them several years. Not unlike my own Korean language journey. Some of my fellow students seem impressed that I can sound out the letters. If only they knew how long I’ve already lived in the country and still cannot speak. I’m not going to offer up that embarrassing fact.

This is my chance at redemption, and I think it might work. Some estimates say it takes more than 2,000 hours of consistent study to become proficient at Korean. So it’s not going to happen quickly. But I have immersion on my side.

Back when I first came to Korea, I did think of myself as an expat. I thought I was over here in Asia for a year or two to travel and get experiences that would make me a better writer. Then I would go back to the U.S., preferably in my home region of the Great Plains, and make my name.

Korea pulled me back a couple more times, and this one feels as permanent as anything in life can feel. That gives me the chance to fix this language problem and become a “good” foreigner who isn’t just some American trying to get by on English and smartphone apps.

It also would take pressure off of Nammin if I could develop, if not complete fluency, then at least some level of proficiency. And why should I think that I’m somehow different from the rest of this class? My fellow students, just like me, are there to learn the language so they can better support their spouses and their families. Nammin didn’t get to be an “expat” when we lived in the U.S. for 10 years. Why should I assume I get that status in Korea?

No, I’m going to keep learning. I’ll honor my immigrant ancestors by being the best possible foreigner I can be. Even if I can’t quite hear the difference yet between ㄱ and ㄲ.

“Kah!”

“No, ‘gah!’”

“Kah!”

“No, ‘gah!’ …”

We live in hell. RealFeel: 118F. Too hot to do anything outside.

So I’m staying in, studying Korean. Or at least I should be. Right now I’m taking a class twice a week with an online tutor on italki. Sangbin Lee has been excellent if you’re looking for someone to study with. He’s good at linguistics and explaining the intricacies and weirdness of the language.

He’s also patient, which I need because I either don't have the time — or don't make the time— to practice enough. I was doing pretty well for a while. Had a stretch there for a few weeks where I was getting my homework done on time and practicing my flashcards. Even the green Duolingo owl wasn’t mad at me. But the move wrecked all that. And for the past three or four sessions, Teacher Lee has had to exercise some Zen-level patience when he asks me whether I understand a basic concept I should have learned.

“Uhhhh … say that again?”

He just laughs.

Despite how dumb I feel when I try to read aloud or say anything resembling a sentence in Korean, it still feels better to attempt to learn the language than to not do anything about it at all. At least I’m trying. Is it more embarrassing to not be able to speak at all than to sound stupid? Is it better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt? I’m fine looking like a fool if it helps me feel more confident in the language.

For a while there, I could comfort myself about my illiteracy by saying, “no, I don’t speak Korean, but I’ve also written five books. That’s what I was doing in my free time when I should’ve been learning.”

I’m old now, so I get up early, and I have an established routine where I write in the mornings. The rest of the day it’s easier to fit in study time. Plus, I have a little teacher who is conversationally fluent in two languages and can help me practice my flashcards at night. It also helps her keep her English vocabulary sharp. And another, bigger, teacher who is great at not making her husband feel dumber than he already sounds.

And I actually kind of like doing things that make me feel and look dumb. It’s good for ego health. Or maybe ego death. Less harmful than psilocybin, at least. There was a period in my life when I felt like I only wanted to do the things I was good at, or at least serviceable at. But that’s a small way to live. Even if my brain has a lot of miles on it after 46 years, and it might not absorb new information as well as it once did, with some dedicated practice I know I can achieve some level of proficiency in Korean. I mean, I’m immersed in the language. I live in a part of the Seoul metropolitan area where I see very few foreigners. My in-laws don’t speak a lick of English. There’s no better time for me to learn another language.

I need to also start watching some Korean dramas and movies to help build my vocabulary. If you have any favorites I can stream on Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, or Apple TV, I’d love to hear them. I’ve also been listening to some great Korean bands lately. Check out Car, the garden, The Black Skirts, and Hyukoh if you’re so inclined.

Real feel 113 F today. Tomorrow the forecast says 118. We’re through the monsoon season. No long stretches of rain to cool us down. A good time to stay in and enjoy the aircon.

We spent the weekend working on the apartment and avoiding the heat by shopping. Jia takes a clay-making class at the Starfield Mall near Kintex every Saturday afternoon, and while she did that, we went to Daiso, Casamia, and No Brand to buy stuff for the house. We dropped Nammin off at One Mount to see her friends, and Jia cried in the car the whole way home. She missed her mom so much that the first thing she did when we got back to the apartment was draw a picture of her that said MAMAMAMA. We ordered Korean-Chinese, and Jia ate almost a whole bowl of jajangmyeon. Then we played Nintendo Switch Sports until we got too tired and switched to Mario Kart. She was asleep almost as soon as I finished the last page of a Dr. Seuss book.

On Sunday, we went to ACE Hardware, just down the street from us by Ilsan Station, for some lightbulbs and WD-40. The store is a curiosity. It has all these industrial-scale tools and products that people here would seldom buy for DIY home repairs or maintenance. They play Top 40 country music over the speakers, and you can even buy a full-size American flag. You see Koreans wandering around just looking at everything. I almost talked myself into buying a Weber gas grill but wisely did not.

Then it was off to E-Mart, which was busier than I’ve ever seen it. They remodeled the one near us with a whole new Wow! section intended to compete with Daiso. It has a ton of household supplies, with nothing over KRW 5,000. Jia got a little stuffed Shiba Inu that she named Bark Bark Love. She’s best friends with the kitten version, Meow Meow Love.

Somehow we completed the trifecta of shopping misery by returning to my absolute favorite place on earth, the blue-and-yellow hellstore, IKEA. We dropped Jia off at the kids’ play area, Småland, and went through the whole torturous maze again. I’ve been in this densely populated country long enough that I’m usually OK with crowds, but this was my second time there in a week, and it was absolutely jammed with people. Another cart loaded with flat-pack boxes of shoe benches and storage shelves. We didn’t even get meatballs.

But we did find one of the more exciting barbecue restaurants I’ve been to in a long time, tucked away in another pocket of our neighborhood that we would have found only because we moved here. The kind of place that has an earthenware charcoal grill on the end of the table. They cook the meat with mushrooms and shishito peppers. Great quality. Kind owners. They even let you bring your own wine. We’ll definitely be back.

I ended the day by building three pieces of furniture and only had to endure one thingamajig that didn’t fit and one missing piece. Good thing I had a few extra wooden dowel thingies left over from some past agony that I could retrofit.

What else? I filed my pieces on Scott McClanahan’s Fights! and Min Jin Lee’s American Hagwon. Very different books, but both good in their own way. Next up is Claire Hopple’s new one, and then I want to write about The Sun Also Rises turning 100 this year. I just reread it, making it my third time through—essentially once every decade. I love how books become completely different experiences as you change over time. After those two, I’m hoping to write a bigger piece on Malcolm Lowry and Under the Volcano, sort of like what I did with Thomas McGuane. Those projects take more time.

Oh, and if you’re a fan, the Popcast interview the New York Times did with Conor Oberst is worth a watch—or a listen. I’ve been listening to Oberst’s music and admiring his lyrics for more than 20 years. He’s had moments over the last few years when it looked like life was catching up with him. When you get to be his age—which is also my age—you know people who didn’t make it. It is a long life. You start to see how it could go either way. He seems pretty good in this interview.

Not long after I published yesterday’s piece, I was dive-bombed by another cicada. I had just sat down in my study to get back to work after taking Alfie for a walk. I heard a brrrrrrrraaaaap! and I let out a yelp and ducked the winged thing as it hit the wall. It buzzed around the room before hiding behind a picture frame resting on the bookshelf. I had to get Jia’s bug net to capture it and release it back into the urban forest to join the cacophonous chorus.

Every night after work I’ve been building some type of cabinet or shelving or otherwise storage solution. Working with IKEA-style furniture almost always puts me at the edge of a blind rage. I hate it very much. The stupid, bare-minimum directions. The cheap little doohickeys and the shoddy tools that almost always fail at even the slightest adversity. The laminated plywood that splinters and cracks if you apply too much pressure. The sound of splitting open the cardboard box to start work is the sound of a bad time.

This is a cliché, but Nammin has learned that a lap through the IKEA cafeteria before we start shopping is the best thing for the mood of her husband. Swedish meatballs then Allen wrenches is the proper sequence to ensure we stay married. I weirdly find something comforting about eating there, even if it’s cafeteria food. Lingonberry jam tastes better in Korea. Jia loves the chocolate cake and the blue and yellow swirl frozen yogurt.

After we moved, we sold Alfie’s giant dog crate to a guy on Karrot, which is essentially Korea’s Facebook Marketplace or eBay. It was sweet and bitter. In a land of lap dogs, we were happy to find anyone who had a use for that massive kennel and, even better, who would give us any money for it. But it’s also another development that signals we’re preparing for the dog’s eventual trip over the rainbow bridge, as we’ll explain it to Jia when the time comes.

That huge piece of plastic was an integral part of one of the most stressful and complicated ordeals of my life. Alfie’s too. (I wrote about him flying from Colorado to Korea and what it’s been like for him here.) Selling the crate felt like committing to staying here. For one, we wouldn’t be able to find another crate that size if we needed to ship him back to the U.S. Of course, we just moved into a new place, so that’s all sort of obvious. Still. Selling the kennel, and helping the guy from Karrot haul it to his car, had an air of finality to it. The guy said he goes to Europe and buys German Shepherds and ships them back here, where he trains them.

Alfie was probably not sad to see it go.

We moved into a new place on Monday. The movers came to our apartment, removed the large outer window in our living room, packed up our belongings, and loaded everything onto a lift that carried our furniture, clothes, and books down to a truck in the parking lot. Then they drove it all across the street, unloaded it, unpacked it, and put everything where they thought it should go. Even the food from the refrigerator. They used the closets and cabinets in our new apartment more intelligently than we would have. Korea does service as well as anyone.

It might have been the least stressful move I’ve ever made. We’re still right next to Nammin’s parents in Ilsan. There had been some talk about heading down to Busan after I got laid off and started my new job, which is fully remote, but we weren’t quite ready for a full-on cross-country move on top of all the other chaos we’ve gone through this year. It feels like the right decision. It was certainly easier than the move we made from Colorado to Korea.

Jia gets to finish preschool (유치원) with the same friends. We’re about as close to family as we can be, which has been a godsend. Nammin’s parents are the good kind of in-laws—they don’t make too many demands on our time. We don’t have to figure out where to find everything we need. It’s a first-floor place, so we have something of a yard for Alfie, and there’s enough room for both of us to work from home without being right on top of each other.

Plus, I love Seoul, and staying close to my friends feels important. There’s a strong community of writers and journalists here, and I keep meeting more of them. I can walk two minutes from my front door, hop on a comfortable limousine bus, and an hour later be in the center of one of my favorite cities.

Meanwhile, the new job is going well. I’m finding it genuinely interesting. I also have a couple of reviews and interviews in the works, centered on some excellent books, including American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee, Fights! by Scott McClanahan, and Change the Subject by Claire Hopple.

The soundtrack of summer is the buzz of cicadas—or maemi (매미), in Korean—and they’re at maximum volume right now. I took one to the eyeball when I was walking to the convenience store for beer to celebrate the move. They’re a menace, absolutely obnoxious, but I’ve grown to appreciate the texture they give the season.

Dan Leach’s latest novel, Junah at the End of the World, begins in September 1999, months before Y2K, in a small town in South Carolina. It follows 12-year-old Junah as he deals with his parents’ divorce, tries to fend off a school bully, pines after a crush who is oblivious to his feelings, and prepares for the world to end. Dan’s writing contains one of the rarest and best qualities in serious literature—it’s funny. I spoke to him via email over several months about his thoughts on humor, authors who inspire him, and writing about the places you know the best.

Bart Schaneman: This one isn’t directly about Junah—we’ll get to that—but I was just reading your collection of short stories, Dead Mediums, and I was curious about your relationship to Nebraska. That’s my home state, where I set a lot of my fiction and where most of my characters come from. Have you spent some time there?

Dan Leach: You’re a Nebraska guy, huh? That’s awesome. I don’t suppose you grew up in (or around) Kearney, did you? That’s where my wife is from, and that’s where we lived from 2014-2017, when her mother got a brain tumor and our life together got as dark/tough as it’d ever been. “Places Without Porches” from Dead Mediums is my attempt to get at how hellish those years were—Derena dying, the marriage floundering, and (as you know) the howling loneliness of that state. The Midwest can be a cold place for an exiled Southerner.

BS: I’m from a farm outside of Scottsbluff, on the western side. The Midwest can be a cold hell for people even from there. I get that. But the Carolina in Junah is definitely not that, and I get a real Thomas Wolfe-ian sense of romance about the region from your writing. What is it about the place we’re from that connects with us, emboldens us so much as writers?

DL: I know the Scottsbluff area. Beautiful country out there. And, yeah, cold. So cold. Between us, I wish I had responded better (read: less drunkenly) to the Midwest landscape. I think I made the coldness there emblematic, which is a silly thing to do even if it makes total sense when you’re doing it. And, yeah, the world of Junah is (geographically and spiritually) a fairly warm one as it corresponds to my little corner of South Carolina. I love your question about writing into our home geographies, and while I can’t speak for other writers, I know that, for me, it’s that Kierkegaardian thing about life being “lived forward” but “understood backwards.” Everyone, writer or not, lives “forward.” No escaping that. But writers are this weird creature that feel cheated by mere existence. It’s like we have to go “backward” and try to make sense of some strangeness in the people or the land or (most often) in ourselves. Do you think this is a choice for people like us, or is it more like a condition?

BS: More like a condition, I think. Even when I’m using characters as metaphors and obscuring the details of my life, I’m still always processing my past (and myself) through my fiction. Don’t seem to have a choice. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how where I’m from got me to where I am, which is on the other side of the world. I couldn’t really be much farther from where I was raised. Why is that? Hard not to think of it as some form of running away. Maybe what I went through growing up made me strong enough to live this independently. Or maybe it just made it easier for me to leave. Haven’t decided yet. Living like this certainly doesn’t help with understanding my own strangeness, probably only amplifies it, but getting a lot of distance between you and the place you want to write about can be good. Helps to see the place clearly. Do you believe in that idea—that it’s better to live apart from the setting in your book? That distance gives you perspective?

DL: I’d say attitude (toward somewhere) influences my work more than distance (from somewhere). For instance, I wrote “Places Without Porches” while I was still living in Nebraska. I didn’t need distance from that landscape so much, I needed a strong/interesting feeling that the place evoked. Same with the South Carolina stuff. Really, though, I need to be baffled by some aspect of a place, you know? That’s when I do my best work—when I don’t understand something, and I have no idea what I’d like to say about it. My shit comes out glib if I’m too certain.

Can I follow up on your concept of being a “runaway?” Because I get that, man. A home geography is like a middle-class parent—it makes you (in certain ways), but it also fucks you up (in other ways), and you move on from it (in both space and time) unsure how to feel about it. And I guess what I’d love to hear you talk about is how the actual running away (e.g. moving, not returning for holidays, setting down roots somewhere else) is related to your desire to return home in your work. I can’t speak on this directly because I live in South Carolina, more or less around the corner from where I grew up, and I’m still deeply baffled by it, and I really can’t stop writing about it. But what about you and the Midwest? What’s the living-writing connection there?

Also: speaking of having a strange relationship with the place you’re from, who are some writers that made that strangeness a bit more manageable? For me, it was Barry Hannah, who remains my north star, and whose Southern people/landscapes let me know I wasn’t crazy for thinking the South is crazy. I’d also say Padgett Powell (especially the Edisto books) and Michael Bible (especially Sophia).

BS: “My shit comes out glib if I’m too certain.” Man, that’s a good way to put it. I feel like we can be encouraged to be confident, to have “authority,” but leaving yourself open to discovery and surprise in the writing is so important. The old cliche: No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. That’s exactly why we’ll never be replaced by AI. AI doesn’t get surprised by anything.

My answer to your question about that “runaway” concept aligns with that as well. I’ve been trying to understand how the place I’m from made me who I am my whole life. Still not there, and it shifts as I age. For a long time, I wanted to write about my corner of western Nebraska because I understood the weather and plants and could name the scenery details. I thought understanding the landscape would give my writing authority. And it does if you’re a naturalist or an outdoorsman or a regionalist, or the kind of writer who needs those specifics to make your fictional reality come alive. But as I’ve matured, I’ve realized that the only element of a story I’m truly interested in is the characters. I think about how in photography pictures of people are always the most interesting. Which brings me back to the “runaway” thing. I realized a few years ago that I don’t need to live in Nebraska to tell the stories I want to tell, and once I understood that, it freed me up to live wherever I wanted. A good thing, too. Where I’m from has been hollowed out by factory farming and other economic factors beyond the control of the people there. Good jobs are hard to find. I am, however, very interested in writing about people who, like me, grew up with a strong sense of home but do not live there now, either by choice or by circumstance.

Which brings me to your question about the writers who have helped me. I’ve recently been reading a lot of Thomas McGuane, who made it much of his life’s work to write about displaced people. He has written extensively about those who moved to Montana from other parts of the country, and what they found there in that beautiful, harsh place away from home and their communities. What I love about him is that he does it all with a sense of humor, with an awareness of the importance of entertainment. So many of his stories have made me laugh. A rare quality in a writer. But one you have as well. What’s your relationship with humor in your writing? And how do you think a writer can successfully execute comedy in fiction? Or does talking about it ruin the fun?

DL: Barry Hannah was good friends with McGuane. Even still, except for The Bushwhacked Piano, I haven’t read much of Tom’s stuff. I should fix that, yeah? What book would you recommend to me?

Humor: let’s ruin the fun and try to figure something out. Because, as you said, it’s a rare quality. I know plenty of writers who amuse me (mainly through absurd characters and/or wacky premises), but it’s a short list of them who actually make me laugh. Sam Pink is one. You ever read Person or Rontel or White Ibis? Those are some funny books, man. Much of the humor comes from the voice, which has a kind of Bukowski-esque, no-filter, sad-lonely-gross-lovable riffing quality; but most of it comes from the situations Pink puts his people in. It’s everyday nonsense—an awkward interaction at a pizza shop; a kid’s birthday party you really didn’t want to attend; a conversation with a coworker about basically inane shit—and Pink’s trick is to not polish it, to just let reality be the awkward/illogical mess that it is. In addition to Pink, there’s only a couple of others. Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan is hilarious for completely different reasons, mainly because of how self-deprecating Sullivan is and how disproportionately intelligent/obsessive he gets about minutiae. Who else, though? Nobody, right? It’s that rare. In film/television, it’s a bit more common because of the visual aspect, and because of how directors like David Lynch or the Cohen bros can draw a comedic presence out of an actor/actress.

What’s a movie that gets you laughing? Mine (predictably) is The Big Lebowski. Infinite rewatch value. I also lose it over Sideways, especially the wallet scene.

BS: For McGuane, I haven’t read everything, but I really liked the novel Nobody’s Angel. He might even be better at the short story. The collection Cloudbursts has some stories with devastating moments, both comedically and tragically.

I love Sam Pink’s work as well. I’ve read White Ibis/Garbage Times, Person and a few others. Great. Entertaining. Authentic. He’s done something that’s so hard to pull off—he created a recognizable style.

As for Lebowski—there was a phase in college where my one group of guy friends seemed to only speak in Lebowski quotes. Just sit around and get fucked up and recite lines from that movie. Simpler times. A beautiful tradition. From Moses to Sandy Koufax ...

All right. This is getting long, so just one more question from me. What’s next for you? What’s the big project you’re either working on or trying to avoid?

DL: It’s been killer to talk with you. Hope we get a chance to meet one of these days. What’s next for me? A book called Married Sex, which I’ve been revising for the past six months. It’s similar to Junah at the End of the World only insofar as it uses fragmentation and attempts to generate a certain kind of intimacy with the reader. Otherwise, it’s pretty different. Different genre (memoir). Different voice (more adult). Different themes (see title). I love how the book’s turning out, and Image ran the opening chapter as a standalone essay, which is a good sign. I’m also writing a lot of poems these days. I have four young kids, and I homeschool them (in addition to teaching at a local college), so poems are easier to finish than anything longform.

On the plane for a work trip, 20 years since my first time I traveled to Japan. It had always been a dream of mine to work as a reporter in another country. A foreign correspondent job for a major American newspaper was the real goal. I’d never lucked into one of those. The closest I had gotten was editing jobs in Seoul, but I’ve always wanted to make my living on my writing and reporting alone. Not that editing isn’t a noble pursuit, it’s just that if I can have my way, I prefer to be responsible for only myself.

That’s what I have now. My new job is about as independent as I’ve ever been and still part of the staff. I assign myself stories. I write them while the rest of my company is asleep. I’m writing about the Asia-Pacific region, and I’m expected to cover tax policy conferences from Australia to Japan.

This is my old life converging with my new one. At the cannabis company MJBiz and the outdoor industry publication The OR Daily, I attended countless trade shows and even helped put on a few. I had thought the Washington Post job would mean I wouldn’t experience that world of business cards and lanyards again, but life is strange.

Strange enough that in my second week on the job, I was assigned to fly from Seoul to Tokyo to report on an International Fiscal Association conference. I knew once I got to the hotel and the meeting room, it would be familiar. Catered food. Over-airconditioned seminar rooms. Networking during coffee breaks. I could handle all of that. I was excited. I was going to Tokyo.

Tokyo. One of the world’s most fascinating cities, and until just recently the biggest. (Next year’s IFA is in the newest city to have that designation, Jakarta.) As an appreciator of most things Asian, I felt lucky to have a few hours each night to walk the streets of the land of sushi, ramen, and many other culinary high-watermarks. When we returned to Korea two years ago, getting to Tokyo was a top goal. Now it was happening via a work trip, and I’d be sending stories from the city.

Maybe it was true what some people had been telling me since the layoffs. One bad thing happens, one good thing happens.

But first I had to get there. I was flying a budget airline that only offered paid service, which I don’t support in principle. Flying has become terrible enough. They could at least give us water and pretzels. Incheon Airport has good food options, but I was telling myself to save my stomach for Japan.

Of course, I got really hungry 10 minutes before boarding time. Like shaky, low-blood-sugar hungry. The most effective choice was a milk tea and an egg salad sandwich at the Dunkin’ Donuts by my gate.

As soon as I got to my seat, I immediately regretted my decision.

There were only a few people around me eating food they’d brought with them. I was going to be the person who opened food that smelled weird on the plane. I had been against this development as it had become more prevalent over the last 20 years. I’d sat next to too many people with cheeseburgers that smelled like a fart. But no matter what, I wasn’t going to carry this sandwich with me in my satchel all the way over the East Sea. It’s not quite what people usually mean when they say, “That’s like taking sand to the beach,” but it’s a similar idea. I opened the packaging and didn’t think it smelled that bad, but I was determined to eat it quickly out of courtesy in case I was wrong. I was probably wrong.

Eating an egg salad sandwich too fast is also a bad idea. I was getting it on my hands and face, and dripping it on the tray. I had just one square of a napkin from Dunkin’, and when a bright yellow glob landed on the carpet in the aisle, all I could do was smear it into the blue carpet. I’d have to look at it for the rest of the flight. I wanted to die. I wanted to pull open the exit door and hop down the inflatable slide into oblivion, spinning, swan-diving, and barrel-rolling until I hit the surface of the Pacific Ocean at 150 miles per hour.

Then, because I have sinned so much in my life, there was some commotion in the seat directly ahead of me, and the Japanese woman needed help getting a bag from the overhead bin, so an attendant came over. As the attendant shifted bags around, she leaned farther and farther over me toward a dollop of chopped-up eggs, mustard, and mayonnaise on my tray. My hands were a mess. Nothing I could do to stop it. It made a neat transfer directly onto her dark apron. I tried to look away in shame, but there was nowhere to go.

As soon as the attendant left, I choked the rest down and went to the bathroom and washed my hands and face. I brought back a damp paper towel to try to wipe up the rest of the mess. I mostly just spread it around. I hated myself. I was a bad traveler. Never again egg salad sandwich on the plane to Tokyo. And damn the whole budget airline industry for reducing us to this.

But still. I was going to Japan. A country I loved. As soon as we made our descent, my spirits recovered. At Narita airport, I got through customs seamlessly. I was proud of how I had navigated the ticket machine, far quicker than the other tourists next to me, and was on my way to the platform when I tried to use my receipt instead of my ticket to get through the turnstile for the express train to Tokyo Station. No dice. Red X every time I fed it to the machine. I couldn’t get by. I asked the guard if the piece of paper in my hand was correct. “No!” he shouted.

Of course, once I looked at it more closely, there was obvious English below the Kanji or Katakana or Romaji reading “Credit Card Sales Slip” on the long paper I was trying to use. Why the Japanese need to give you three similar-looking pieces of paper for one train ticket, someone else can figure out. Traveling is fun.

On the train, I was about to be riding through the Japanese countryside on a nice, sunny spring afternoon for about an hour. I’d get to see so much. What better entertainment than to watch firsthand this country roll by my window? I was in Tokyo. I love trains because they can cut through the landscape, the towns, the villages. They go right through the center of a place. Does that sound like I’m trying too hard to be Paul Theroux? Probably. But trains are romantic. I’ve taken them through China, Mongolia, Russia, even California, and every time I’ve loved the ride.

Right before we took off, a young man, in his late 20s I would guess, sat next to me in the window seat. He wore dark gray New Balance sneakers, navy blue pants, and a black, long-sleeved shirt, his black medium-length hair parted in the middle, also in fashion in Korea.

Slam!

He shut the shade and leaned back to stare at his phone, checking social media and firing off texts. No window scenery for you, gaijin. The people in front of us had left their blinds open so I could see through a small section of their window. It was about 5:30, and the sun was just high enough that it wasn’t shining directly through the windows. The passengers across from me had their shades open, and I could see the houses with their tile roofs and the green rice fields. Then the sun fell and—

Slam!

Their blinds went down, and there we were on this express train coasting through Japan, the sun brilliant, the light perfect, golden hour, and everyone was on their phones with the blinds down. I hate the modern age.

And yet.

I couldn’t stand it. I tapped my seatmate on the shoulder and gestured to ask if we could raise the blinds a little. He agreed immediately, then offered to switch seats so I could look out the window. I took him up on that, and once I was in the window seat with the shade all the way back up, I typed into Google Translate, “Thank you. I haven’t been to Tokyo before. I wanted to see the countryside.”

He smiled and gave me the OK sign with his fingers. The modern age has its moments.

I watched the still water of irrigated rice fields reflecting the sky. White egrets stood on the edges of the paddies hunting frogs. The young man must have taken this train often, because even with my enthusiastic notebook scribbling and video taking, he never looked up from his phone, not at all curious about what I found so interesting.

I could see across wide rivers and how the roads looked and the power lines and everything that is built in a way that is suited to this landscape and looks different from anywhere else. What is it about seeing a place like this, from behind glass, while you’re moving rapidly across it, that is so pleasurable? Am I a child? Possibly, but I was happy.

From Tokyo Station, I took a taxi and passed by the Imperial Palace East Garden. I marveled at the scale of Tokyo, at how grand it all looked. My hotel was an imposing, sprawling behemoth that had been in a James Bond movie. Doormen, valets, and bellhops in an impressive, gleaming lobby.

From the room, I called Jia and showed her the rose garden I could see from my window, where I would later watch a woman in her bridal gown take wedding pictures.

I left the hotel as soon as possible. When you live in Korea and travel to Japan, it’s difficult not to compare the two. The architecture around me felt more striking, the city more imposing. Japan is less densely populated, and even highly urban Tokyo seems to have more open space. The people appear smaller, shorter, and more delicate-looking. The men, especially where I was staying, still wear their dark, salaryman suits and chunky black shoes. It feels like the era of Sony and Panasonic dominance in the 1980s and ‘90s was the country’s peak, and they’re still living in it. I don’t have more in-depth insights on the urban character here. I’m no city expert. I’ll leave that to and .

All I know is what I saw. I walked through a hopping Akasaka, past pachinko parlors and convenience stores, until I found a sushi restaurant with a well-lit bar where I could order a reasonably priced omakase meal and watch the chefs with their tall white hats work and yell their welcomes to incoming customers.

They sat me next to a guy wearing earbuds who took pictures of his food with a fancy camera. When my beer came, I lifted my glass to him and said cheers. He seemed flustered by that. The chef across from us finished preparing the man’s dish — a colorful array of sushi arranged beautifully on a board — and tried to hand it to him. I nudged him with my elbow. The man was too absorbed in his phone to recognize what was happening.

He didn’t say a word to me for the rest of the meal, even though we were both clearly solo travelers in this country. I was feeling pretty judgmental about his manners. I didn’t need someone to chat with, but not even paying attention to this environment beyond taking a few pictures seemed like a strong choice. I couldn’t imagine that the internet was more engaging than watching these masters work.

The first couple of rounds of my food came. Abalone. Seared Wagyu steak. Miso soup. All of it as good as any I have had anywhere. Then, as the man stood up to leave, he gave me a nice smile and said in a sincere, generous way, and with an accent I couldn’t place, “Enjoy.”

I instantly felt like a prick. Maybe he wasn’t comfortable speaking to me in English. Maybe he didn’t want to talk to an American. Maybe he was just shy.

When my fish came, I was reminded of the first time I ate sushi in Japan, and I had been completely out of my element. The pieces were big, draped over the rice, and I tried to cut them with my chopsticks.

That was about 20 years ago, when I was teaching in Jeonju, one of South Korea’s best food cities. We had a long weekend off for Lunar New Year, so I got a bus ticket to Busan and a Japan Rail Pass. I wanted to travel to Hiroshima by land and sea.

On the overnight bus, there were a few teachers in the back making noise; a couple of them I’d met at the foreigner bar but didn’t know them well. I planned to take the ferry from Busan to Fukuoka, then a train to Osaka, all in the span of three days. That was the only plan. No accommodation booked. No Lonely Planet. No smartphone. Not even any directions printed out from MapQuest.

During the five hours it took to get to the East Coast, I read John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Out the window, darkness and lights I couldn’t connect to any meaning. The scenery had no traction. It was midnight when I arrived at the station, and a guy from Iowa asked me to join their group that was going into the city. I declined. I wanted to make this trip on my own.

A taxi took me down to Haeundae beach, which was not the cosmopolitan scene it is today. The driver dropped me off by the Westin Chosun hotel. I went to the Family Mart for a bottle of wine and sat on the beach looking at the gray ocean, listening to the low surf break, thinking about when I had lived in Encinitas.

A man in an oversized olive green jacket approached me.

“Hello. Where from?” he asked. He was squat, wide, with a boxy haircut. One red eye was wide open, staring, while the other lazy eye hid behind a slit. Gaps between stained teeth. I told him I was from Nebraska.

“‘Braska? Where going?”

“Right here,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Come me,” he motioned back into the store. “Soju OK?”

“Fine with me,” I said. “Sure.”

He went to the cooler and bought a green glass bottle of Jinro soju and two paper cups. We stood in front of the store with the bottle and cups of the clear spirit. He handed me a business card that said he worked at an action sports store that sold military gear. He looked like he’d seen plenty of action.

“I no work long time,” the man said. “Short time. Before, I am military service. Then long time no work. Many soju. Many fight. Many, many fight. Now, some fight. Some soju.” I smiled and appreciated his attempt at speaking English. I knew only a handful of Korean words then.

He filled our cups. “Gombay,” he said. “One shot.” We took them down. The man hissed away the chemical afterburn. A cool wind blew in from the bay that carried a scent of saltwater and sea life. The night began to turn. We walked down to the footpath along the beach.

“A-maz-ing gra-ce how swe-et the sound,” he sang to the water. “You know song? Amazing grace? That me. Amazing grace. That me, my life.”

He looked at me with his one red eye and smiled.

“Are you cold?” I asked him. He wore only the thin jacket, a T-shirt, and lightweight pants. I was in a chore coat, a short-brimmed black field cap, and jeans.

“No. No cold,” he said, shaking his head.

We finished the bottle, and I offered to buy another, but Amazing Grace refused. He shook my hand, bowed, walked to his scooter, and drove off into the night.

The lights from the hotels to the south lit up the bay and shone against the mellow waves. I looked east, thinking about the ocean past Japan, past the Pacific to the people I knew who lived on the west coast of America, over the desert, to Colorado, to family back home, and the farmland. What were they doing? How were they?

I closed my eyes, hearing only the occasional laughter and clinking of glasses from the fish restaurants around the harbor, and farther, the cars down by the hotels. I brushed off the sand and went into the city toward an intersection with tall buildings—Western restaurant chains, pizza places, and pool halls. I carried my pack through the intersection to a side street and down a hill.

After a block, I looked down, and the skin of my hands had turned pink. My jeans were also a rosy color, along with the sidewalk, everything cast in a soft light. To my right, a woman in four-inch platform shoes, thin legs, a short skirt, a sleeveless shirt that pushed up her breasts, and caked-on makeup sat on a stool behind a floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window, backdropped in a bright pink hue. She sat up straighter as I passed. At the next window, another woman. And another. They looked like they were floating, suspended in air. After the third or fourth window, an ajumma popped out of the building and called me back. I was curious about the whole process, not just the most interesting part, but I kept walking.

It was about 3 a.m., and the only place open was McDonald’s. The clown is everywhere and he never sleeps. I went in for coffee, back when I still drank it. They weren’t serving breakfast until 5:30, so I took out my notebook and wrote a letter to my girlfriend in the U.S. I tried to describe everything I was seeing. When the signboards changed, I ordered breakfast that made me even more tired.

The sun rose over the East Sea. Down by the beach, it began to rain, and the city lights felt soft and muted. Everything took on a blurred feel, like I was drunk, but the soju had worn off hours ago. I could see a container ship out on the horizon that didn’t look like it was moving.

I walked until I came to a ledge over a patch of grass blocked from sight by a row of bushes. It was nice to be dry and listen to the rain and to feel the relief of the end of this part of the journey, now a few hours until I would take the boat to Japan. I rested my head on my backpack and fell asleep.

When I awoke, the rain had quit, and the sun was up, blurred and white under the coastal layer. I walked down to the hotels, found a taxi, and went to the harbor to catch the ferry. When it came time to depart, I was standing by the gate, looking for my boat, when another foreigner came over and started small talk. Tall and balding, with dark hair and pale skin, I could tell he was North American, and it didn’t take much talking to figure out he was Canadian. A couple of “ehs” and an “aboot.” We agreed to meet for a beer on the boat after we boarded.

The seats on the ship were arranged almost identically to the seats on the first airplane I took to Korea that November. Rows of three, five, and three. Once we shoved off, I found the Canadian with an open seat drinking a beer and talking to two young women in the seats in front of him. We made introductions — one was Texan, Hannah, brunette, the other Australian, Jess, blonde. I offered to make a beer run and came back with cold Kirins from a vending machine for everyone. We talked and drank through the boat ride. The women were going to Fukuoka for the weekend. We all got along well and after the boat pulled into the harbor, we took a taxi together to the area near their hotel.

We found a restaurant and ordered bowls of ramen and plates of salted fish. Back then, I didn’t know anything about food—not that I really do now, but slightly more—so I don’t have any words to describe the broth or the quality of the noodles. I liked it. I can say that. I also think the memory of the food has faded because I was more interested in my dining companions than what we were eating.

After we ate, the Canadian left to meet some friends. We checked into the girls’ hotel. They were staying in a big, expensive place with two beds.

“You can leave your bag here,” Jess said, smiling under a mess of long, curly hair.

We went out and found a sake bar. A little dark place. We took seats around a short bar in the back. Hannah ordered us cold sake and Sapporos. We were smiling, talking about Korea, the U.S., and Australia. After we finished the sake, we moved on, the conversation flowing now. Jess had printouts of maps from the internet of places they wanted to go.

Nighttime Fukuoka was neon signs, huge television screens embedded in tall buildings, and red lanterns hanging in the eaves and shining in the water of the rivers.

I had known for a long time that being caught up and carried away was one of my favorite things in life. I tried to remind myself to keep my head.

We found a bar with glass-door refrigerators full of bottled beer from all over the world. We drank other Japanese beers we hadn’t tried yet. By then, we were drunk and laughing.

“Ugh, I think that’s enough beer,” Jess said.

“I could go back to the hotel,” Hannah said.

Back at the hotel, we went up to the hot tub on the roof, and I felt so charged with this experience. The women had washed off their makeup. Their faces were pink, and sweat beaded around their hairlines. How pleased I was that this had worked out.

In the morning, I woke up with a headache and a strong desire to leave and to get to Hiroshima. To see what else my luck might bring. I went into the bathroom, put in my contacts, and brushed my teeth. The women stirred as I wrote my email address on a pad on the desk.

We made plans to meet back in Korea, hugged, and I never saw them again.

I walked out and down to the station and got on the bullet train. The Shinkansen was quiet and smooth. From the window, I caught images of tile roofs at the feet of mountains, flashes of rivers, blocks of fallow rice fields. Similar to Korea but with different edges, different lines. For a moment, I thought of America. How different it was. Across from me, a man played with his son on his lap, making the little boy laugh, and they were the absolute concept of happiness. That wasn’t me—I wasn’t happy—but they were, and watching them was good. I wondered if I would ever get to have that life.

I got off at Hiroshima and walked out into the city. Modern buildings. Clean, wide sidewalks and streets. People on bicycles. Healthy grass and green on the trees. I went toward the peace park. I saw women sweeping sidewalks, men in suits carrying briefcases, girls in expensive dresses, boys with long, dyed hair—going on in with lives. I thought about the planes that flew overhead and the shadows burned into the sidewalks. I thought about the bomb disintegrating everything.

What must it be like to live there now? To know that a plane could come from the other side of the world and do that to you and your family and your city? How to live in this city knowing what had happened here?

Before I went into the park, I went to the building where the pink staircase wound up the side of the empty metal frame dome—the building closest to the center of the bomb that still stood. A tree overshadowed it, branches growing up and around the structure. In the park, men and women rang a gold bell in the shape of a crane for peace. The sound carried out loud and resonant. In Hershey’s book, he talked about the grass, flowers, and plants that grew in the days and weeks after the bomb. Those there in the aftermath say they sprouted bold and green in verdant life, stimulated by the radiation.

On that rainy day, Hiroshima looked vital and alive. Modern buildings, state-of-the-art cars, fashionable people walking with umbrellas. Like any other modern Asian city. It was all amazing to me. I’d almost even forgotten the girls in Fukuoka. I spent four hours in the park, reading on a bench under a tree, listening to the peace bells ring.

I left the park for a sushi restaurant where I sat at a bar and the chefs hand-served me long strips of fish draped over balls of rice—salmon, tuna, yellowtail, eel, squid, octopus, sea bream. I tried to cut the large pieces of fish in two with my chopsticks. The guy next to me laughed and showed me how he fit the entire piece into his mouth.

Full, I went to a coffee shop to plan my next move and write a little more about the park. As I sat alone scribbling, a man in his mid-50s came and sat down across from me. He wore small, round glasses, each circle the size of a quarter. His hair had gone gray at the part in the middle, but the rest was black. He seemed calm and slow, and I thought maybe he had something to teach me.

“American?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

“I am from here. From Hiroshima.”

The man said he had learned English for business and had studied nuclear engineering in college.

“I am sorry about the bomb,” I said. I said it quietly. It seemed like such a meager, inadequate thing to say, but also the only thing to say.

“I study nuclear for forty years. I here for the bomb. My family die.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Maybe bomb…” the man looked at me like he wanted me to finish his sentence. “Maybe now no military. Maybe now no Japan war.”

There was nothing else to talk about then. My coffee had gone cold, and the conversation was awkward. When he found out I wanted to visit Miyajima, he helped me buy a ticket for a streetcar to the ferry. He waited with me until my streetcar came, not talking, just standing next to me. We shook hands, and he wished me good luck.

That night, after Miyajima and its tame, miniature deer, the Torii of Itsukushima shrine, and an English photographer as dinner companion, I got on the Shinkansen again, headed east.

Then it was Osaka at midnight. The buildings edged and striped in neon pink and green. The futuristic Japan I had seen on TV. A taxi took me down to Minami to find a place to have a drink. The lights of Amerikamura and Dotonbori flashed and blinked, and the people looked like shadows under the eaves of the sparkling buildings.

I wandered the district, searching for a good spot to sit alone. I walked past a little restaurant with two guys at the bar. They seemed relaxed and warm, but the place looked like it was going to close. I went down the block and, finding nothing else open, turned around and went back. When I walked in, the bartender made his hands into an X.

“No,” he said. “No!”

“Beer?” I asked.

The two guys at the bar said something to the bartender in Japanese and he conceded, motioning to me to sit down. I unshouldered my pack, set it down, and took a stool.

“What’s up, you fucking bitch?” one of the two guys said to me in English that sounded like it was learned from watching movies. He was about my age, in a light blue, collared shirt, with short black hair.

“No, no,” I said. “It’s ‘what’s up, you fucking bitch.’”

We laughed and I ordered a Kirin. The guy talking said his name was Hiro and his friend was Daiki. We clinked our glasses together. The bartender poured sochu on ice. The Japanese guys spoke pretty good English and what they didn’t know, they made up for with swearing. They asked me where I was staying.

“No place to stay,” I said.

“You want to find some fucking bitches?” Hiro asked.

We went down the narrow street. The neighborhood was quiet save for the sporadic passing of a delivery motorbike or a little car. The faint smell of exhaust. They took me down into a basement where an izakaya decorated like a log cabin served full tables of college-age kids. Hiro ordered beer for the table.

“I thought you were a bitch when you came in,” he said to me. “I thought, ‘Who’s this bitch. What’s this bitch want?’ Hey, let’s get some fucking bitches. Let’s get those bitches.

Hiro went over to the women at the table next to us and said I was the lead singer of a foreigner band in Japan. Monkey Magik, or something like that. The girls smiled but didn’t say anything. Hiro came back smiling.

“They don’t know fucking Monkey Magik. You know I am a wedding planner? You have a fucking girlfriend? Is she hot?”

“She’s back in the States.”

“You ever getting married? I can plan your whole fucking wedding. I can plan that fucking shit. No fucking problem.”

We switched to whiskey. The izakaya started to clear out. Daiki went home then it was just me and Hiro.

“Where are you going to fucking stay?”

“I don’t think I’m going to sleep anywhere,” I said. “I’m going to stay up and take the train back to Fukuoka in the morning. I’ll sleep on the boat back to Korea.”

“You’ll never fucking get there. You’ll fucking get lost. I’ll take you. The train starts at fucking six.”

“No. No. You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to. You come back and we’ll have your wedding in fucking Japan.”

We stayed up drinking until a half-hour before the first train, talking, cussing, letting the conversation carry us away. Hiro talked about his problems. His wife. Money. Japan. I listened and watched the people around me.

When it came time, Hiro led me to the subway and we rode it with all the early morning workers to the Shinkansen station. Hiro walked me as far as the gate. He might have gotten on the train and gone with me all the way to Fukuoka, but he had to work that day. I thanked him and went through the gate.

“Hey, you fucking bitch,” Hiro called after me. I stopped. “Nice to fucking meet you.”

I got on the Shinkansen and passed out. I was woken up by an angry salaryman who showed me his ticket, which I couldn’t read. I moved over and went back to sleep. I woke up in Fukuoka.

On the boat back to Busan, they were playing the new Superman movie on a projection screen. I stood next to a support structure and watched the movie as we traveled west. I hadn’t showered since the hotel in Fukuoka. My shoes smelled horrible. I threw them away when I got back to Korea.

“How was it?” the server asked, just as I had taken a big bite of raw eggplant. I was back in the Akasaka restaurant midway through the omakase course.

“You asked me at the wrong time,” I mumbled through a full mouth.

“I asked you at the best time,” she said, laughing.

They brought me dish after dish, and this time I knew enough to stuff the fish in my mouth whole. No matter what happens in my life, I am a hungry ghost. Always wanting more. More life, more happiness, more money, more travel, more sex, more love, more, more, more. I’m not enough for myself, so I want more from everything else.

Back at the hotel, I went up to the Sky Bar to have my Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation” moment. I was writing all of this in a notebook I’d gotten at a 7-11. Out the window was the Tokyo Skytree, Japan’s tallest building, lit up in purple, and I sipped on a glass of Chita whiskey on the rocks. I was thinking about how I’d done this before in Kowloon, gone up to the top of a hotel, so I could see the Hong Kong skyline. I knew the drink would be overpriced, that I’d pay for the view, but a vision of this stately city at night was worth it. What else would I rather spend my money on than a glass of Japanese whiskey and a night view of one of the world’s great cities? I spent the money to do it in China when I was on a visa run from Korea, and I had very little cash, so of course I would do it now. I was completely alone. Was there anything to be sad about? I missed my family and felt guilty for leaving Nammin alone to take care of everything, but I was here for work. To support my family. To keep us in Asia, where we felt safe.

It was the right mix of lonely and stimulated to text my friends. I sent pictures of unintentionally funny signs I had seen to Hong Kong, Bangkok, Seoul, Mexico City, New Orleans, Denver, Tonganoxie. A store in the hotel was called, simply, “Books & Drugs.” I was bragging about being in Tokyo, of course, but among those friends they could handle it. This is what we do now when we’re traveling by ourselves. We use our phones to text our friends instead of talking to strangers.

In my middle age, I can never sleep the first night in a hotel room, or anywhere anymore, really, and when the gym opened at 5 a.m. I was the first one in. The next two people brought tripods and filmed themselves the whole time. They were fine specimens. I probably ruined a lot of their otherwise Instagram-worthy shots by looking absolutely haggard in the background. It was a small gym.

I went back to my room and ordered the cheapest breakfast from room service, the only thing open around me at that hour, and paid something like $30 for three croissants, butter, jelly, and a pot of tea. The hotel still maintained enough tradition to deliver a newspaper to the room, so I read the Japan Times and the New York Times supplement. I had barely kept up with the news since I was laid off. The old job required me to be on top of the 24/7 breaking news cycle, and recently I had enjoyed not thinking about Trump all day, every day. Slowly reading print newspaper stories that had happened yesterday in a nice hotel room felt therapeutic.

The time came for me to work, so I put on my business casual attire, and just like I’ve done dozens of times before, I followed the signs through the hotel to the registration booth, got my badge, and hung the lanyard around my neck. I had arrived before the keynote speech, and people were networking, standing in front of round tables with cups of coffee and more croissants.

I marveled at my life. I had found myself doing this again, making introductions, shaking hands, handing out business cards, guessing at the faces of people I had added on LinkedIn the week before.

At MJBiz, we had a secret move where, if you got caught in a bad chat—say you were cornered by someone with halitosis who was aggressively pitching his business, what Phoebe Bridgers would call a “punisher”—you would pull on your earlobe until one of your coworkers would come save you, making an excuse that you were needed elsewhere. Fortunately, I didn’t need to break out the rescue signal. Everyone I spoke with was fine. The tax people wanted to talk about anything but taxes.

No one would have come to save me anyway.

I found a chair in one of the rows of the long tables and opened my laptop. Out the floor-to-ceiling windows was a 400-year-old garden with a koi pond, a tea house, and a red wooden bridge that led to a serene waterfall. As soon as the keynote began, the shades came down. Fitting for this trip.

I was new to this tax coverage, so I had to concentrate to follow along with the speaker, who rapidly deployed jargon, acronyms, and initialisms, all with a Japanese accent. Thank god for voice recorders and transcription software.

After the two keynote speeches, I went back to my room to write my story. The direction I had been given was to weave the two talks into one piece. As I wrote, I consulted the transcript on my iPad and drank the sencha tea from the hotel. I had always wished I could be one of those writers who could hole up in a hotel room for a week, or a weekend, to work on a novel. Why hadn’t I become one of those?

It had been a while since I covered a live event and wrote a story directly after it finished. I loved it. It made me feel connected to my younger reporter self when I wrote for newspapers. I was reminded that nothing makes me feel better, more satisfied with a day’s work, than to finish a complete story and file it with an editor. And to do that, then walk out of a hotel room and be in a Tokyo neighborhood. I know how much this sounds like bragging. But I was having a good time.

That night, I ate a bowl of ramen that I think might have gone over my head. I didn’t get it. It was either too delicate or refined for me, or I didn’t supplement the broth correctly on my own. Whatever it was, it was decidedly not transcendent. It might’ve just been a bad restaurant. More likely, it was user error. At least the Asahi was cold.

I didn’t want to end my night and go back to my lonesome room that way. Japanese whiskey might help. I went online and found a Reddit post of someone talking about a bar in Akasaka, and the pictures looked perfect. Dark. Lots of whiskey bottles on the wall.

I found the place and went down the steps into the small place. A couple of men in suits were at a table, and a white man sat with a Japanese woman at the bar. I went to take a stool, and a petite young woman appeared out of the shadows.

“How many drinks?” she said with a hostile face, staring somewhere under the bar.

“I’ll start with one,” I said.

“One thousand yen fee.”

“OK. Do you have a menu?”

“No.”

I looked around. There were some obvious bottles of American and Scottish whiskey, but I didn’t want those.

“Could you recommend a local whiskey?”

She stared at the ground. The couple next to me raised their voices, laughing at something together, and she hissed at them and said something sharp. I was considering asking for Nikka or even just Suntory when she produced a black cloth and held it taut over the bar in front of me. She wouldn’t look at me, and her face was still tight with anger. I’ve lived in Asia for seven years, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve felt this level of animosity. I probably had it coming. I couldn’t speak Japanese. I was there, in her country, expecting everything to be made available to me. Maybe it wasn’t any of that at all. Maybe I was totally wrong about her. I finally realized that she was supposed to clean my hands with that towel. I pulled back.

“I’m sorry. I can’t do this,” I said, meaning I didn’t want to make her do that.

She nodded and took her towel back. I went up and back onto the street. I was feeling like I’d had enough for one night. I could probably manage the hotel room. I passed a group of Europeans sitting at a bar that opened up to the street. Five stools, the Europeans took up three, and a woman with a hookah sat at the end. One perfect empty spot in the middle. I sat down, and the bartender came over. A tall woman. She wore a black shirt, and she had a wine opener threaded through a ring in the waistband of her pants. Her hair was straight and dyed a dark blonde. She told me she was from Serbia.

“I’m a big Jokic fan,” I said.

She seemed skeptical. “Yes, he’s funny,” she said. “He doesn’t care about being a celebrity. It’s just a job to him. He loves his horses. But he put his face on some gambling advertisements in Serbia, and a lot of people don’t like it.”

“He brought a championship to Denver,” I said. “I love him.”

“Have you seen him do his hobby? He looks bigger than the horse,” she said.

She changed the subject, asking me about Korea. She said she wanted to go to Jeju. She was a good bartender. She made me feel like she was interested in our conversation.

The Germans next to me were all lawyers and spending two weeks in Japan. I told them about my ancestors, how my grandparents had spoken German.

“My grandma sang German in the church choir,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sure a lot of Americans try to connect to their European heritage when they talk to you. “

Stephanie said she wanted to go to Yellowstone after watching the show with Kevin Costner. She said these days it has become a trend for Germans to go to America and come back and “want to ride.”

“Horses?” I asked.

“Yea. They all want to ride.”

The bartender brought us shots, and after we took them, she looked at me and said, “You know what that is.” It was plum wine. Maesil.

The Germans were drinking sake and beer, but ordered highballs after they asked me what I was drinking. I wanted to stay out with them, but I had to get up early enough to leave in the morning, and I didn’t want to be a turd pile when I got home for my family.

In my room, I watched part of a bad American movie on my laptop. I’ve always had this dumb rule where whenever I’m staying in hotels by myself, I’m allowed to watch the most mindless, childish entertainment. I once watched the Point Break remake in a Best Western. Usually I’ll just turn on cable and accept my fate, but the only thing that wasn’t in Japanese was an ‘80s John Hughes movie, and it was almost over. So I fired up Disney+ on my computer and watched a Marvel film where Harrison Ford turns into the Incredible Hulk, but this time he’s red. Kid stuff. I couldn’t make it halfway. When I tried to go to sleep, I could hear a steady thump, thump, thump like the people above me were having a dance party. This had happened the night before, and I hadn’t slept at all, so I called down to the front desk.

“Hello. Can you please check what’s going on in the room above mine? It sounds like an elephant stomping around up there.”

“An elephant, sir?”

“Yes.”

“OK. We will check.”

I turned up the white noise and was drifting off despite the thumping—I was exhausted from covering the conference and walking around trying to find the perfect bowl of noodles. The phone rang.

“Hello, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Hello. I check the room above you and there is no party and no loud music. No dancing. No elephant. I hear nothing.”

“OK, but I can still hear it while I’m talking to you.”

“Can I come inside your room and listen?”

“I’m in bed.”

“OK. Please call again if it’s too loud.”

Now I was awake again, so I watched the rest of the movie. Black Captain America convinced the red Hulk to calm down and saved the U.S. from a war with the Japanese. Making Japan the potential enemy was a weird decision when they had not been a relevant military threat in decades (see earlier reference to “the bomb”) and China was right there as the clear choice.

When the movie ended, I tried to sleep again, and I could still hear the noise. I started to think that maybe it was in my head. Maybe my blood pressure was up from the lack of sleep, too much caffeine, and just the general energy of being in the city. But no. The sound finally stopped, and I no longer felt crazy.

Since the beginning of February, when the Washington Post closed its Seoul hub and laid off more than 300 journalists across the company, I’ve been enjoying my “garden leave,” essentially getting a salary to freelance, travel and hang out with my family. My paid leave ended yesterday.

Last week, we took Jia to Legoland Korea for her 5th birthday. The park was well-maintained, and the rides were clean. Jia is the perfect age. She can ride almost everything. She cried the first time she rode the Ninjago rollercoaster. It was fast and spinny and there was an animatronic dragon that breathed fire. But we got her to give it another go, and the second time she screamed with joy. One fear conquered. Job done for the day.

We also used the time off to see friends in other places. We went down to Busan to visit B. and his family. They have a great life raising their daughter on Haeundae Beach. We often talk about joining their community down there. It would be a good place to live. We had met up with them and our friend C. in Thailand right after the layoffs. I wrote about that here. It’s nice to be around people you know from back home.

Over the past few months, the WaPo staff has had a string of farewell parties. They were fun, boozy, irreverent. Still, I felt a sense of loss. The foreign community has always been transient in places like this. I know that well. But this was a special group. Talented, driven journalists who were kind and interesting. I joined the team late as just some guy from the middle of nowhere with no prestigious career pedigree, and yet they always treated me with respect and camaraderie. We did good things together, and I’ll miss them.

I’ve been reminding myself that work is always a good antidote for despair.

To keep myself busy, I’ve written pieces for Business Insider and the Republic of Letters about the layoffs. Also in BI, I interviewed a fellow American about his life here and his plan to move his family back to Colorado. I sprayed some WD-40 on my cannabis journalism skills and wrote a feature about the Thailand marijuana market for Cultivated. When one of their editors had visa troubles, I subbed in on the editing desk at my old English-language newspaper, the Korea JoongAng Daily. I read as much fiction, and as little journalism, as possible — I’m two-thirds of the way through the second volume of Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” which is as great as everyone says. I got a good start on a novel set in Korea, hoping the momentum will carry over even with this new full-time gig.

About that: I start work today as Senior Reporter for Tax Notes Today International, a non-profit news organization based in D.C. that’s been around for more than 50 years. My coverage area will be the Asia-Pacific region. It seems like a great place to work. I can use the skills I developed as a business reporter and editor in Colorado, and I’ll have opportunities to travel around the region. I’m going to Tokyo in a couple of weeks to cover a conference.

A lot of you have reached out over the past months after the layoffs to offer perspective, support and advice. I’ve appreciated all of it. Life is strange. Perhaps this will all work out. I’m optimistic.

CHIANG MAI, Thailand — The idea of traveling the same month I lost my job didn’t quite fit with my Midwestern work ethic, but we’d booked this trip far in advance of the layoffs at the Washington Post. It was the middle of February, and I was in this chaotic Southeast Asian city trying to be nice to myself.

After 20 years of mediocre wages, I had climbed to the highest level of my profession, and for the past two years had worked the most stressful job of my career. Then, in one Zoom call, I watched all that taken away.

I was making an effort to enjoy the tea, food, and the warm weather. Trying not to drink too much, check my email, or keep telling myself I’d failed. The job leads and sympathy had poured in when I posted the news of the layoffs on social media, but I wasn’t about to keep doomscrolling LinkedIn from the lounge chair at the pool.

This was a beautiful place, so I was trying to stifle my foul mood. We’d gone through a lot over the past two years to relocate my family to Seoul and learn this job. But I was working on shifting my thinking — I had convinced this global news organization to pay for me to move to my wife’s home country, and they’d paid me good wages. My daughter had already learned so much. I was attempting to be grateful for the experience and make a plan to turn it into something better.

All once I grieved the future I might’ve had with this company, one glass of Thai tea at a time.

I hadn’t planned it this way, but I realized, just like so many other people who come to Southeast Asia after divorces or people die or job losses, I could let this place heal me, too, through the food and the culture.

The first couple of days, we did the normal Chiang Mai stuff. Saw elephants. Shopped for handicrafts at the local market. Ate as much and as often as we could.

Our hotel in Old Town had an open-air restaurant. I came down in the morning while the girls slept and drank tea from the coffee machine and wrote in my notebook. Underneath the motorbike and tuk tuk noise, I heard the patrons conversing in Chinese, French, English — other languages I didn’t recognize. Down the street were bike rental shops, massage parlors, weed dispensaries, smoothie stands, and a 7-Eleven where I saw a Western woman super-gluing her flip-flop back together. Above it all ran a tangled snarl of powerlines.

Despite the peace on offer everywhere, I was still angry about the job loss. Some of that was ego, but it was also justified — I had been so proud to work there. To come from my rural upbringing and my education at a state school, to work my way up to that newspaper that once meant so much to me and my profession, then to see it so badly damaged … just cause for seething.

The Washington Post has long stood as a symbol of truth and courage. Last fall, the company invited novelist and teacher George Saunders to speak to the staff about writing. Many of the tips and pieces of advice in his opening talk I had read elsewhere and in his excellent book on reading and writing, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. It got more interesting when he started taking questions.

One of the staff members asked him how he coped with the overall craziness of the general state of things. He said he read the Post, and when he did, he felt like there were like-minded people who still have “clarity of mind.”

“That’s incredibly reassuring to know that as crazy as things seem, that sanity still exists,” he said.

Saunders went on to tell the parable of the king and the poisoned well, where a wizard poisons a village’s water and makes everyone crazy, and said that the Post was the clean water that people needed to drink.

“You’re running a river of fresh water through a very confused country, and that’s holy work,” he said. What was happening to the TV networks was “terrifying” for people in the U.S., Saunders added, because “the source of clean water is going to get choked off, or it’s going to get contaminated by larger political bias.”

“So just don’t forget the value of the clean water,” he said. “That’s what’s keeping us alive.”

I was inspired by that talk. I believed him. I went to work thinking I was helping keep that water flowing. Until they shut off the pipeline to Seoul.

At least I had been spared some self-loathing by the way it happened. My whole team had been eliminated, so I couldn’t feel as though I’d been singled out. The axe swung for all of us, no matter our talent, skill, or dedication.

I’d gone traveling to get over things before. Relationships. Places I wanted to put behind me. A quick trip to a foreign country never solved anything, but it didn’t hurt. It helped to remind me that life was full of possibilities, even after everything, even at 45.

While I was eating my dragonfruit, I overheard a couple of older British men — tan, undercut hairstyles, loud T-shirts, you know the type if you’ve spent time in the region — talking about the travelers with the tone of permanent residents.

“They damage themselves back home, then they come here to get fixed,” one said.

Medical tourism. Spiritual traveling. We all cope in our own way.

For dinner, we met an old friend — a guy I’d known since we were about 12. We grew up two miles from one another in a part of Nebraska that has seen time pass it by. He was raised in a town of about 800 people. I was raised a couple of miles from that town. He had stories of life in the U.S. We discussed old friends. It was good to see someone you have known for 30 years on the other side of the world.

I told him that since the layoffs, several people back home had reached out to say, “This sucks for you, but don’t come back here right now.”

At the Saturday night market on Wua Lai Road, we found a food court where we sat on plastic stools and filled our plates with food we’d never tasted. Sausages and noodles and huge river prawns. One of us would get up, browse the stalls, and come back with food for everyone to share. Jia ate the same dish she had eaten at almost every meal — fried rice. It was a glorious meal of strange, delicious food and cold beer.

The masters in the United States don’t want a world like this. They don’t want a global culture where we can sit in a market with people from across the planet — Asia, Australia, the Americas, Europe, Africa — enjoying one another’s culture, languages swirling in the air, everyone united in their curiosity over spicy, interesting food.

After the market, Nammin did the good wife move and suggested that I stay out with my old friend. The tuk tuk bumped some unidentifiable club music, swerving into oncoming traffic, then the driver laughed and the brrraappp of the motor as it sped past temples and hotels, and the night air, full of exhaust, cooled our faces.

Anyone who has lived in Asia for any period of time has an opinion on Thailand. Either you love it for its first-class beaches, great food, and friendly, hospitable culture, or you look down your nose at the sex tourism and the white men of a certain age with their young local women. In all my travels during my seven years on the continent, I’d only briefly been to the Land of Smiles — one night in Bangkok (did not make a hard man humble, but I could see how it might) and a couple of blissful days on Koh Samet. I had avoided the country, not because I was squeamish about the ladyboys or the go-go dancers, but because everyone I knew went there and talked about it, so I had to go to other places.

The driver dropped us off at the North Gate Jazz Co-op, which was full of what looked like travelers and probably a few resident expats. We sat at the bar with our Leo beers. A guy about a decade older took a stool next to us. He was sweaty, with his slicked black hair.

“Y’all American?” he asked.

We told him we were.

“Whereabouts?”

We answered that.

“I’m from the middle of nowhere, too. Tennessee. Name’s Jamie. Y’all been here before?”

We said we were just passing through.

“Well, I had a helluva night last night. I was outside the bar, and I met a pretty local girl. Seemed nice. We started talkin’ and pretty soon were at a karaoke bar. She told me to buy a bottle. So I did. Then they brought in some girls. And then there were some other girls. They brought out the snacks. The fruit plate. Pretty soon, I was ready to go and tried to pay, but they said I should stay. Order more drinks. I kept telling ‘em I was ready to settle up. I paid one bill, then they brought another bill for 30,000 baht, and I said no. That’s a thousand dollars. Then they called the cops, and they showed me a video where I was apparently agreeing to pay that. I don’t know. They took me to the police station. Then they marched me to the ATM. Hell, I didn’t want to end up in a Thai jail.”

“Well, shit. Sorry about that,” my friend said. “At least you’re back at it. She must’ve been cute.”

“I thought she liked me,” he said.

Soon, he was replaced by another American, Kristen from South Carolina, who seemed a little lost. Then Jamie came back with another woman from the U.S. It seemed like they were sticking together. I wanted to know if they were getting more than the usual discrimination from the traveler set, given the current state of our home country and its foreign relations, but I didn’t have a chance to ask. The bar closed at midnight, and we were back on another ride through the city.

Some places feel claimed by other writers. Some experiences, too. Pamplona and the running of the bulls are obviously Hemingway’s. There’s a statue of him by the bullring that declares him a friend to the city. Hunter Thompson has Aspen. There used to be a shrine and offerings to him next to a tree on a Snowmass mountain ski run. Woody Creek Tavern still had pictures of him on the wall the last time I was there. Willa Cather has central Nebraska. Steinbeck has Monterey. When I was in the back of the tuk tuk riding through the Chiang Mai night, the music loud, the driver crazed and shouting unintelligible things, my old friend and I holding on, buzzed on Leo beer — I felt the ghost of Anthony Bourdain. This moment felt inescapably linked to his persona. He never lived here for any period of time that I know of, and I don’t think he ever made an effort to leave his mark on this place — it seemed he loved neighboring Vietnam best of all — but the Chiang Mai “No Reservations” episode was the best of him. Trying strange food — raw pig’s blood soaked in lemongrass that made even him blanch — drinking the local whiskey, nursing a hangover with the sweet and spicy Khao Soi soup in the morning … this was the perfect place for a man of his talents, who was so open to food and culture and experience.

I was proud of myself for only bringing him up once on this whole trip, when we were eating our own bowls of the coconut and chicken noodle soup. But I thought about him often. I thought about how what he believed in was exactly what the leaders in the U.S. are trying to kill, and how what we were doing was the best way to take direct action against these people who would close down borders and wall us off from each other.

I started traveling well before I had ever heard of Anthony Bourdain. By the time he came to prominence, I had been all over Asia. But I loved to watch him sit on these same short plastic stools, saying things on CNN like how we’re all going to be some shade of brown anyway, how we’re all going to be beautiful, coffee-colored people eventually. I felt the same way about the world, and to see someone so charming bring that perspective to mass media was thrilling. In its own way, his show was as political as any panel of talking heads on cable. We can’t escape politics because we can’t escape the world.

We’re not the kind of family that sends out Christmas cards. Not that I don’t like getting them. I do. I usually have the thought that these people are impressively well-organized and that I admire them. We could probably do it. Organizing the clan to coordinate outfits and take photos is feasible, but making a list and gathering addresses of everyone, then printing out the photos, stuffing them into envelopes and sending them — that’s beyond me.

So I’ll just write this to you here.

2025 felt like one of the busiest, fullest years of my life. Parenting in a foreign country. Watching Jia become bilingual. Getting to know Nammin’s friends and family better. We visited the U.S. in July for a family trip to celebrate my dad’s 75th birthday. Had some great days at Lake McConaughey.

We’re hoping to get back again next year— as long as we can all get in the country.

Workwise, it started with a promotion that I’ve found rewarding. Anyone paying attention knows there is no shortage of stories to cover, no matter what time it is anywhere in the world. We’ve done countless important pieces of serious journalism every single day, despite the challenges we’ve faced. Working as hard as ever.

I spend most of my time navigating the rapids of this endlessly intense news cycle, assigning coverage and editing, which means I don’t have much time to write at work. I’ve managed a few bylines here and there when we’ve been tapped out for reporters and needed someone to pick up a story. I did fit in one feature about American athletes who have kept their careers going by playing in Korean professional sports leagues.

There are some obvious parallels to my own life, and I was happy with how it turned out. I love getting out to report in the field when I can. I hope I’ll get to do more of that in the new year.

As most of you know, I also published a novel this year — a story about a particular time and place and industry that I feel captured that moment. Thanks to everyone here who bought a copy. (If you did, and you have the time, leaving a review on Amazon or GoodReads would be a big help.)

Here’s a nice review the novel got in Razorcake.

In a world where we all fight not to get sucked into our screens, a book can be a good antidote.

Of the ones I read this year, some of my favorites were:

• Nobody’s Angel, Thomas McGuane

• Junah at the End of the World, Dan Leach

• Farmer, Jim Harrison

• Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, Cho Nam-Joo

• Intermezzo, Sally Rooney

• Train Dreams, Denis Johnson

• Cursed Bunny, Bora Chung

• Manuscripts by friends, including Adam Gnade, Wendy Fox and Nate Perkins, that will come out next year. You’ll hear more from me about those.

Overall, we’re happy to be living in a safe country where we have friends and family around us. Who knows what the next year is going to bring. Hopefully, visits from family and friends. I keep sending along articles like this one and this one.

We make good tour guides, and I repeat — it’s never been a better time to visit South Korea.

Here’s to 2026,

Bart

I was flat on my back on the top of the world.

Above 13,000 feet and my quads were cramping. Not enough oxygen. The best way to fix it was to lie down in the trail and let the lactic acid flow away from the muscles.

I sucked a little water from my CamelBak and stared at the blank blue Colorado sky. When my legs finally allowed me to stand, I pushed myself up on my poles and began to walk again.

I crested the ridgeline to find Bo and S. scrambling down from the summit.

“Dark wall of death!” Bo said. “It’s not even 10 a.m. Let’s go!”

My vision was blurry, but I could see well enough to recognize the contours of a black cliff of clouds moving toward us.

“Sorry, I’m so slow,” I said. “I keep cramping up.”

“Here,” Lars said. “Let me hold your pack. Run up to the summit. I’ll wait.”

It was adrenaline, surely, but I ignored the pain in my legs and quickly scrambled over the last 30 yards of jagged rock, found the USGS metal sign marking the summit, and took a selfie. There was lightning in the valley below the black wall. I turned around and got back to Lars as fast as I could.

“Thanks, man,” I said. “I probably wouldn’t have summited if you hadn’t done that.”

“Could you carry more shit? Way too heavy,” he said, handing me back my pack. “We gotta get down.”

The temperature dropped and that dark cloud spat graupel, pellets of soft hail melting as they hit our faces. The rest of the group, Alfie included, had not waited for me to summit, and as we descended, we realized we had overshot the turnoff and were off the trail. For a minute, we couldn’t see the other group or the right way back.

But Lars and I had been through a lot together. We’d get through this.

~~~

I wouldn’t have come to Asia if it weren’t for Lars.

When I graduated from college, I had flirted with the idea of moving overseas to teach English, but instead had stayed in the U.S. and started my career as a journalist.

Despite a few good years in California, I still wanted to live in another country. We came back into each other’s lives sometime around 2005. We were in our mid-20s, both back home in our small Nebraska town, wanting to get away for a bunch of reasons, and Lars had lived for a year in Jeonju, the city with some of the best food in Korea. He couldn’t stop talking about it.

I teased him about starting every sentence with “In Korea …” but I was interested. We talked ourselves into buying the big ticket for the flight across the Pacific. We were still kids, really, but we wanted adventure. Both of us believing that a psychologically rich life was something to value.

More than 15 years later, after we’d both married Korean women and started our families, we were together again on the second-highest mountain in Colorado, trying to outrun a storm.

The night before the hike was the Fourth of July. We had cooked pasta and tried to get to sleep early in our Leadville vacation rental house. Wrongly, I had assumed the mountain town would be quieter than the cities of the Front Range, where the neighborhoods were riddled with the blasts of fireworks nightly for the past week or more. Leadville wasn’t any different. The boom of artillery shells echoed through the streets and into our bedrooms well past midnight.

Still, we were up and loaded into my old pickup before 5 a.m. I’d maybe slept an hour. Nammin seemed OK with staying behind to watch Jia and not embark on this sufferfest.

As soon as he sat down in shotgun, Lars started twisting the dials on the heater and turning the fan up. “This isn’t your truck,” I said. “I’m driving. Stop touching shit.” But I also didn’t really care. I’d known this guy since we were 4.

Sturgill Simpson sang about turtles as we drove through the cool forest. We had decided on the non-standard southwest route of Mount Massive because it was shorter, steeper, and less likely to have a conga line of fellow hikers. You also needed a high-clearance vehicle with four-wheel drive to access the trailhead.

We came to the exposed rock in the access road where we needed to choose the correct line or risk tearing off the truck’s back bumper. I knew Bo had driven many mountain roads like this and trusted him to get out and guide me. He directed me to crawl over the rock without causing any damage. The stock Chevy Silverado extended cab was plenty capable after I put it in 4-Low.

“Dude, that might be the most exciting part of the day,” Bo said as he hopped back in.

It was, until it wasn’t.

As expected, we were the only group at the trailhead. The first part of the hike was cold, through shadowy trees. The soft sun of dawn lit up the east bank of the valley. From the trail, we had views of the Sawatch Range and Mount Elbert, another mountain I had climbed with P.J. a few years prior. He was also on this hike, his usual positive, comedic self.

Lars had a torn meniscus but had still maintained his habit of running, now that he was living again in our hometown to make his fortune. He set a fast pace.

It was the second year of the pandemic, and I had not been getting out nearly as much as I should have been. I was a new dad and working from home, and my daily step count could have been much higher. I was exhausted and probably not well hydrated enough.

A lot of excuses, when what I mean is I could have been in better shape.

The group stayed together for the first few hours of the hike. Alfie chased the pika and marmots, as free and happy to roam that cold mountain in the middle of summer as any Northern breed could be.

The hike became steeper, more switchbacks, and we were trudging along, feeling the altitude and becoming more aware of the difficulty that awaited us as we climbed into thinner air, when we were overtaken by a young woman wearing baggy running shorts, trail runners, a T-shirt and a hydration vest.

We were all hauling backpacks with food and water, layers, hats, gloves, hiking poles. I had boots on and my DSLR camera. And here this woman was, almost running past us up the mountain. Bo recognized her as Courtney Daulwalter, one of the best ultrarunners in the world, winner of many 100-mile races. She lives in Leadville and trains by running around on these mountains. She left us behind on the trail like we were statues.

Maybe they were inspired by that moment, or it was just a natural separation by levels of fitness and athletic ability, but slowly Lars and P.J. and the rest of the group started putting distance between us.

That’s when my first cramps set in, my quads seizing up just as I went above treeline. I had to lie down on the trail and stretch out before I could keep going. I was in the pain cave that Courtney talks about, forcing myself forward one step at a time, first by counting to a hundred steps before resting, then fifty, then twenty, then ten.

Cramping, alone on the trail, knowing the group was going to be relaxing and enjoying themselves on the summit, I pushed on, nauseated, stumbling on burning legs. When I finally got to the ridgeline, I saw them coming back. That’s when Lars waited for me with my pack. I summited quickly and turned around, my body feeling the instant relief of moving down the mountain.

Through the graupel, I could clearly see the trail down the other side of the mountain, the standard route we had not taken. That would lead us to a trailhead that was miles down the road from the truck. But it would get us away from the lightning.

“We’ve gone too far,” Lars said. “We need to go up there.”

Lars turned and started back up, the direction my body did not want to go.

“Can you see the trail?” I yelled.

“I can see them,” he said. Through the spitting soft hail, I saw the rest of the group turning down a switchback and disappearing.

“We gotta get up there,” he said.

~~~

Lars grew up in town directly across the street from my grandparents, and I would go to his house to play when my grandmother was watching me. He had all the GI Joes, and I had all the He-Men, and I wonder if that had anything to do with how our personalities developed and differed. Probably not much.

Another friend described him once as “some kind of secret genius,” and I understood why she said that. He has a way of seeing and processing reality that is his own, that he developed over years of studying philosophy and all the experiences he had both in Asia and America.

One of my favorite Lars stories is from when we were in college. We had been close friends in high school and went to the same state university, but there we split and each went our own non-standard route.

When I saw him for the first time in months on the campus sidewalk, I stopped to talk to him.

“Yo, how’s it going?” I asked.

He just smiled.

“Where you living these days?”

A little wider smile.

“Are you still taking psychology classes?”

The same look.

I felt like an idiot asking questions, so I just laughed and went on my way. It was weeks until I saw him again.

“What was that about the last time I saw you?” I said.

“I was taking a vow of silence,” he said. “Wasn’t talking to anyone.”

But it didn’t matter. We’d gone in and out of each other’s lives at many different phases. We also assumed we’d see each other again.

~~~

I let out a combination grunt-yell, then pushed down on my poles and hauled myself up the trail to the turn off. I was fine once we were traveling downward again. We moved as quickly as possible to get to treeline. There was thunder around us, and the graupel stung our faces. The melting pellets made the rocks slippery. Lars’s knee buckled from his torn ligament but he carried on, probably regretting that he had waited for me and was no longer with the rest of the group.

The exhaustion was extreme. I hallucinated that I saw my truck up ahead. It was just a large boulder in the trees.

We finally made it back and the rest of them were in the camper shell eating sandwiches, including the dog, the rain falling on the pickup. I started it up and turned on the heater.

“Can we all take a moment to appreciate how amazing that day was?” P.J. said.

We got to do the rock crawl again on the way down. Fun but nothing compared to the excitement of a lightning storm at 14,000 feet.

Now Lars is back in the only place I know of that is truly home. If you see him, tell him I said hello. Maybe I’ll be back on the plains again one day and our lives will be peaceful and we can tell stories about each other just like this one.

Try to stay out of the pain cave.

We were sitting at a picnic table at the Crested Butte ski resort in Colorado, our snowboarding jackets, gloves and helmets warming in the sun, craft beer in hand after a morning of good runs. It was cold, but the sun was clear and strong.

A friendly older couple next to us said they lived in Gunnison, just down the highway, and shared one of their favorite tips for the area. “In the summer, when the wildflowers are blooming, split up your group,” the wife said. “One half hikes over the pass from Aspen, the other from where we’re sitting, and you swap car keys. You can meet up somewhere later in a town like Buena Vista.”

“That sounds amazing,” L. said.

The couple went back to skiing, and C. asked the table, “What’s the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to you?”

N. went first, talking about how he was out in Virginia one time on an internship to learn how to design golf courses. There was a three-wheeler there, and everyone was giving it a ride. Some big shots from the golf world were watching. N. had told the group how he grew up in the country and knew everything you could know about an ATV. When it was his turn, he hit a ditch and ate shit in front of everybody.

I hadn’t told my story before — it had only just happened that ski season. A few weeks ago, we were snowboarding at Keystone, sharing a hotel room with a couple of other friends in town from New Orleans. The inn was a classic place. Historic. Right on the mountain. Ski in, ski out. A working fireplace. Old ski boot brand posters on the wall. That Colorado lodge feel that you want.

We’d had decent snow that day. The wind hadn’t blown too much, and it didn’t ice over like it typically does at Keystone. It was nice to be staying the night up there rather than driving back to Denver.

Before our trip, I’d picked up some of those fancy edibles at the dispensary, the Coda Signatures. High-end, 10 milligram truffles that come in tiramisu, burnt caramel and Earl Grey flavors. (This was back when I was writing about weed full-time and liked to shop “for research.”) The mountain must have made us all brave, or the chocolate was just that good, because no one hesitated when I passed around the box.

We had a bottle of champagne while we got ready, then went downstairs for dinner. My edible wasn’t kicking in with my pan-seared trout, but N. said she could see herself from the ceiling, like she was watching us eat via CCTV. The old out-of-body point of view. Our friends, P. and B., were more regular consumers, and both seemed to be getting happier by the minute.

Edibles are such a dumb way to have fun. You never know what they’re going to do. A roll of the dice. Either a great night where you’re laughing, or you’re scared and hate yourself.

We had some ice cream for dessert, then went back to the room to get changed for the hot tub. Someone had brought a bottle of red wine, Austrian, I think, but there was no wine key. We searched our bags and the room. Couldn’t find one, so I called down to the front desk.

“We don’t loan those out,” the young woman said. “They tend to walk away. You can bring it down, and I’ll open it for you.”

I checked before I left — we had enough glasses, just needed the bottle opened. So I grabbed the blaufränkisch or whatever and went to the elevator — the dinging of the doors and floors sounding like carnival music. I felt like I was handling myself well enough, but you never know.

The elevator opened to three workers standing by the front desk. The leader, in her early 20s with large, dark-framed glasses, said, “Hello, how can I help you?”

“We just spoke on the phone. I’m hoping for the wine opener?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I’m ready. I used to work in fine dining. Give me that.”

I set the bottle on the counter, and she brandished the opener with a practiced flourish. “You have to face the label so the customer knows it’s correct,” she told her colleagues as she spun the bottle and smoothly popped out the small blade on the key to cut away the foil. “Then — ”

She lowered the wine bottle back to the counter and looked at me, the showmanship leaving her face.

“Sir, this is a twist-off.”

Ah, yes. I could see that now. So it was.

I asked, “Do you have any extra towels?”

JEJU ISLAND, South Korea — My family spent four days here last week to celebrate my wife, Nammin’s, birthday. I hadn’t visited in nearly 20 years, and it had been even longer for her, not since a high school trip. We stayed at a monstrous resort called Shinhwa World with three hotels, a casino, a shopping mall and an amusement park. The rooms were big and cheap, and nearly all the people we saw were either families with young children like us or foreign men here to gamble.

We picked up our Kia EV6, which I couldn’t tell was even running when I started it, and joined the legion of colorless electric vehicles zipping around the island. All of the rental cars we saw, including ours, were white.

A quick list of other symbols of this place: Pear-shaped hallabong oranges. Short, round-headed stone statues. Black pigs and small, furry horses. The extinct volcano, and the country’s tallest mountain, Hallasan.

The first evening, we were trying to enjoy the sunset from the garden at the 9.81 park when we were swarmed by dozens of teenagers looking for the best angle for their Instagram feed, backdropped by the ocean and the tall stalks of silver grass that peak in the autumn that Koreans call ok-sae.

Many of the places we visited, including our resort, catered to Chinese tourists. That’s one of the biggest changes for me since I last lived here — more than a decade ago, you would see groups of Chinese travelers in places like Angkor Wat, but not as many in Korea. Now they’re thick in tourist-heavy places like Myeongdong in Seoul and Gamcheon Culture Village in Busan. Despite some reports of folks forgetting their manners, like letting their kid drop a deuce in public at a national monument, it’s cool to see them traveling so much. I view it as a net positive to have people from one of the most populous countries on the planet exercising their curiosity about other cultures.

According to National Geographic (and me) Korea’s never been more popular for international travelers, and the won is still weak against the dollar. (Which is all to say — come visit!)

In the morning, we went to an orange grove — they’re all over the island — and picked our own gamgyul fresh from the trees. We carried around a sackful for a snack whenever needed. So did most everyone else we saw. Cut to a scene at the airport when a couple was dropping off their bags, and the man kept dropping his oranges, stumbling after the little globes rolling around underfoot by the luggage conveyors.

We took our citrus and hiked around Songaksan on one of the many dulle-gil, or walking course, routes. The island is known for its wind, and we were buffeted around the crater. Jia entertained herself as our king, a long blade of silver grass as her staff, leading us on the trek. We paused to admire a small herd of gaunt-looking horses that were eyeing the king’s staff for an afternoon snack.

We also saw a sign for “Dark Tourism, also known as black tourism.” The area was once used for Japanese military installations toward the end of WWII. As the Allies were closing in, they dug deep caves into the forest floor that they intended to use as trenches. The caves are fenced off, and, at first, I thought they were little horse corrals until I saw some more signage. You can peer down into the holes and imagine some twitchy little Japanese guys in there with bayonets waiting to jump out and stab you.

I had been reading Han Kang’s “We Do Not Part” in preparation for the trip, which I guess could be considered Dark Research. That book’s heavy, partially about the Jeju uprising of 1948-1949, when tens of thousands were killed (estimates vary.) I was thinking that if we had the time, we could make it to the 4.3 Peace Park to learn a little more about the uprising, but it was out of the way and possibly not the right type of excursion for a birthday celebration. Most likely dark to quite dark.

After the hike, at a kalguksu restaurant, where the maesaengi broth was a viscous green blend of marine algae, I commented that I wasn’t that into the texture. Nammin said, “This one is a little advanced,” and I died. She had killed me. As someone who, in his seventh year in Korea, prides himself on knowing a thing or two about the food here, I was pierced to my core. Too advanced for my white guy palate.

Get yourself a domestic partner who keeps you humble.

Back at the resort, the view from the infinity pool of the sun casting spotlights of gold light behind moving clouds was partially blocked by the water park facade.

The hotel had a handful of Jeju black pig restaurants that appeared popular, but we looked them up and they were overpriced. We drove to a spot with good reviews where we ate samgyeopsal and moaksal. Grilled over charcoal with the smoke pulled up through the meat by an exhaust fan, this is one of the best first bites in all of cuisine. Simple. Elemental. Perfect.

The next day, we went up the Eoseungsaengak trail in Hallasan National Park. Eoseungsaengak is hard to say even by Korean standards. Advanced vocabulary.

Difficult to pronounce, but an easy hike with views of the Hallasan peak. The real reward at the top was the sense of pride I got when my 4-year-old made it to the top of a mountain. Poor child. I’m going to be dragging her along with me on trails as long as I can get her to do it.

We timed our visit to the O’Sulloc tea fields poorly, arriving as several busloads of high school kids and visitors from the Middle Kingdom unloaded. The grounds were well-maintained and nicely laid out, with the manicured rows of tea bushes you would expect, and the matcha ice cream and cake were delicious. I bought some loose-leaf tea and we took the obligatory photos.

The sun was sinking into the horizon as we arrived at Hyeopjae beach. Jia is learning her letters but doesn’t exactly know how to spell. She’ll write something like HIHIBTRH in the sand and ask, “What’s it say?” I’ll sound it out, and she’ll nod like that’s what she meant to write. Exactly.

Since we got to Korea in the spring of 2024, we have traveled all over the country — Sokcho, Yangyang, Yeosu, Namhae, Busan several times, all over Gyeonggi-do and Gangwon-do, many Seoul explorations. We’ve caught ourselves up on how the country has changed. It’s time to start traveling more in the region. Jia can handle it — she loves airplanes — and there’s so much for her to learn from all these places around us. But first, she told us she wanted to stay at Sinhwa World for 10 months, which to her sounded like forever.

In the cab on the way home from Gimpo Airport — I love a small regional airport and a one-hour domestic flight — the taxi driver had the TV news on. Trump was in Gyeongju during the APEC summit, part of his Asia trip, and the coverage was about what he was going to eat for dinner that night. I couldn’t understand much, but they kept talking about Thousand Island dressing. The cab driver asked Nammin where I was from, and he said I must be proud to have my American president in Korea.

Taylor Hobson stepped over the rubble and went into the office. She sat in a swivel chair and watched security footage on the monitors, starting at midnight and fast-forwarding until she saw the truck with the bull bar smash through the wall. She leaned forward, the monitor light glowing in the dark room, and felt sick, forcing herself to breathe.

The black and white video made the robbery look fake —a Buster Keaton film, minus the vaudeville soundtrack. The truck reversed and two guys in black, hooded sweatshirts stepped through the wreckage. With their headlamps, masks, and backpacks, they moved with purpose, quickly finding what they were after. Each one grabbed a plastic tote full of trimmed marijuana and hauled it out of the frame.

Taylor rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and made herself sit up. She had expected this to happen at some point, but she wasn’t ready for it right now.

The robbers made at least three trips. One broke the glass of a display case and leaned in to snatch a dab rig. His partner, who was dragging one foot, grabbed him and pulled him toward the back. They went to the vault and stood in front of it for a minute, looking back and forth at each other, gesturing and arguing. They walked out and Taylor expected them to come back with a torch or a handtruck to haul it out, but nothing more happened on the video until a cop showed up with his flashlight, more than 30 minutes later.

Taylor played it back and watched it at 2x speed. She filmed it with her phone and posted it to the company Instagram account with a caption offering a $500 reward for information. She put the merchandise that was left in the vault, locked the office, and went out to the street.

She sat on her motorcycle and paused before she put on her helmet. Yellow police caution tape encircled the store. “Fuck,” she said under her breath. Pot shops couldn’t get insurance. The cops weren’t on their side. They’d have to make the money back on their own. Then she had an idea.

She had friends back home who still worked in the black market and were earning a lot more money than she was selling legal weed. No taxes or regulations in the illicit market. Her friends would love to sell the Colorado weed she was growing, and she had other cultivation operations she could borrow from. It was the best way to make up the money they’d lost. She’d just need to figure out a way to get the cannabis there without getting caught.

She started the bike, cranked the throttle, and shot away from the street—her thin frame wrapped over the bike. Hours before the skyline had glittered with fireworks, but now the Denver streets were tired, bleary-eyed, the energy of the city not awake, not quite asleep. Traffic wobbled around her. She weaved past cars at high speed. Rolled through the lights and stop signs. The early morning air peeled away her drowsiness.

At home Danielle was sitting crosslegged in bed scrolling through her feeds on her phone, looking for any news. Her black hair was up—sharp features drawn tight.

“Nice video,” she said. “Would be better if it wasn’t our shop.”

Taylor sat down and stared at the floor. “Understatement of the year. We lost so much money.”

“What did the cops say?”

“About what you’d expect. Nothing really. No help. I have an idea. It’s pretty crazy, but it might work.”

Taylor went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She was thinking this might be it. Only a year in and already failed at owning their own business before they had a chance to really get started. They weren’t the only pot shop who had gotten hit lately. Marijuana companies couldn’t use banks because weed was federally illegal and most convenience stores had stopped carrying much cash, so criminals figured the cannabis industry was a soft target. It had been happening all over the city.

By early morning, Taylor’s surveillance video post had received dozens of comments. The bulk of them were sympathetic, if not constructive. Most said some form of “That sucks,” or “People like this should be shot.” The direct messages had more utility. One, from a regular trimmer named Greg, said, “I’m pretty sure I know who that is. He used to work for you.” Taylor was at the kitchen island thumbing through her phone while she drank her coffee. She direct messaged Greg. “Call me immediately.”

He called and said one guy in the video might be named Kevin. He had worked for their business Sugar Magnolia on the seasonal harvest and trim crew until the weekend of the robbery, when he had stopped showing up for work. “I can’t see his face perfectly,” Greg said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s him. Wrecked his bike a couple of weeks ago. You can see him limping.”

“You sure this is the guy?”

“Pretty sure. He was living over on Colfax and Race. A bunch of dudes hang out there. Always talking right-wing bullshit. Wouldn’t shut up with their conspiracy theories.”

Taylor hung up and called Nick. He was working security and driving for Sugar Magnolia. She explained to him what had happened and what she wanted to do. “Should be pretty straightforward. Let’s get our weed back.”

“This kind of shit’s never straightforward.”

“I’ll give you 20 percent of the value of anything we recover. As a bonus.”

Taylor waited a beat for him to respond.

“All right. Come pick me up.”

You can buy it from the press here, which is the preferred way, or from Amazon here.

It was 2016, and my wife and I had moved from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, to Denver for a few reasons, one being that I had taken a job writing about the legal cannabis industry.

When the founding editor of Marijuana Business Daily had recruited me, he didn’t have to push too hard. He promised a gig with potential. Raises, promotions, bonuses. Unheard of in the media in the 2010s. Plus a chance to own a beat reporting on a fascinating new industry.

“It’s a good job,” he said.

In November of that year, I was sitting in a Lakewood conference room with a table full of pizza boxes and a small team of other journalists. Several were former Rocky Mountain News guys. Good, serious journalists. Happy warriors who had survived the death of that great newspaper.

We were working late to cover the election, writing as the results came in that California, Nevada, Massachusetts and Maine had legalized recreational marijuana. Four other states legalized medical marijuana. Millions of dollars would be pumped into this booming market. Huge for us. Years of material and even job security.

At the same time, we were all checking the presidential election results, far less certain what Trump winning would mean. One of the editors had brought a six-pack of Victory craft beer. We cracked those open, but they didn’t go down quite as easily as we had hoped.

We called around to sources to get their take on what the incoming president meant for our industry. The prevailing insight was that he had more pressing matters to keep him occupied.

That proved to be correct. The administration spent little political energy on the industry.

Boom times for us.

Nammin and I rented a warehouse loft apartment in Capitol Hill, aka hipster town. Our place, with exposed brick walls, a bookshelf with a rolling ladder and a wrought-iron spiral staircase up to the bed, was above an artisan sandwich restaurant and a high-end coffee shop.

We took advantage of being close in to the bars and restaurants. We felt like we deserved it after three years in rural Nebraska.

In the mornings, I would drive west to the suburbs past the largest American flag I’ve ever seen and learn how to write business-to-business journalism. “For the owners, not the stoners,” one editor liked to say.

I liked the job, but never loved the writing. I bucked against the constraints of the style. I chafed against having to write briefs every day.

It taught me a lot, including:

• Don’t be precious.

• Hack work can be noble work if you respect it and do it well. You’re part of a team.

• Business journalists love to use bullet points.

We funded the enterprise with marijuana trade shows in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and the big one every year in Las Vegas, a city that I had felt was not for me until I found the places I liked. The Golden Steer. Lotus of Siam. The Writer’s Block. The elusive $5 blackjack tables at Binion’s.

The company demanded that the reporters help with the trade show programming. We were tasked with moderating panels and interviewing business owners on stage. I’m not someone who naturally enjoys public speaking, but this was merely conducting journalism in front of a live audience.

“Come and see a real live journalist!” to borrow another editor’s phrase.

I would sit on a stage and ask a panel of business owners questions intended to elicit responses that the crowd could use to help them better understand the industry. So they could make more money selling legal pot.

It honed my ability to ask follow-up questions and to operate with a specific audience in mind. I also learned how to conduct Q&As at the end of the sessions, which meant thinking of the crowd first when yet another guy in a blazer and a graphic T-shirt began by launching into his unabridged biography.

“Excuse me. Do you have a question?”

I surprised myself by enjoying it. I liked the rush of relief when I successfully executed a panel. It was theater, just with a different script.

The last year I worked MJBizCon, I was asked to interview one of the industry’s buzziest names — the rapper Berner, who owned the hot brand in cannabis retail at the time, Cookies — for the keynote. He came on stage wearing an oversized T-shirt, baggy jeans and sneakers. He was from the streets; I was all business.

The crowd applauded and reacted to everything Berner said. I could see the appeal. He had actually done it. One of the few who came from the illicit market and built a legit, profitable business.

I always wore a suit to these things — that was part of the edict from our bosses. We were trying to “professionalize the industry.”

The true originals loved to make fun of us for it. One guy, when I was walking the trade show floor, said to me, “I bet you grow real good weed in those shoes.” He got a lot of laughs from his entourage.

At a happy hour event to celebrate “Women of Weed,” a woman wearing an Alice in Wonderland green felt hat and platform shoes looked at my tie and said, “You have to be the lamest person here.”

They were right. But that was the point. We weren’t trying to be stoners. Plenty of our staff were consumers outside of work. But this was the job. How we made our money. We were trying to be sober-minded, to give as good of information as we could, so everyone could be successful. What was more productive than to help people who were trying to go legit make smart business decisions?

I wouldn’t call the legal weed business a movement. It was more like a wave of capitalism washing over a culture, flooding it with money and venture capitalists and people who watched “Shark Tank.” (Sharks Damon John and “Mr. Wonderful” spoke at our conference.)

Everyone involved saw the opportunity. The first new market to open up at that scale in decades. Not since the tech boom had we seen so much money begging to be misused and poorly invested.

And the business cliches! Good lord. If I took a hit from a vape pen every time I heard “the ones who are going to make the real money are the ones selling the picks and shovels to the gold miners” or “don’t get high on your own supply” or “skate to where the puck is going” — a favorite among the Canadians — I wouldn’t have been able to tie my loafers.

Alongside the advice we filtered for the business owners, we tried to help people not make terrible investments. Not necessarily by warning them of anything, but by providing reliable information and data. We did not invest in any marijuana companies.

We didn’t write weed reviews. The alt-weekly newspapers across the U.S. had that covered. Marijuana ads filled the back half of more than a few of those publications across the country. We weren’t writing about the culture. We weren’t going to out High Times “High Times.”

We maintained the same strict ethical standards as any serious journalism publication, no matter how much people wanted to give us free pot. And that was always on offer.

Maybe if you were at an industry party and people were passing joints, you would have a toke out of politeness, to keep the social setting from getting awkward. But we were relying on the integrity we had as journalists to coalesce an entire market.

The industry parties in Las Vegas were enormous. Private lounges in casinos with free booze and live bands. Outdoor spaces in the industrial part of town with live art. Awards parties where people dressed well and acted nice. A lot of them were extremely high and could handle milligram counts that would have a non-user hiding in the closet.

On a reporting trip, I went to an event hosted by an extraction company in Portland, where they had an ice block with tunnels in it like a vodka luge, except it was a dab rig with face-meltingly potent shatter smoke in the chamber. I spent the weekend driving around to the outdoor grows in the area and talking to the growers, thinking my 17-year-old self would have been laughing his ass off if he knew this was where his career would take him.

At a networking event in Denver, an edibles company had a gumball machine full of “fast-acting” infused chocolate-covered coffee beans. I sent a picture to a friend and he responded with, “Eat a handful! See what happens!”

The editors made me the cultivation beat reporter. It worked because I grew up on a farm in Nebraska. Industrial-grown corn and sugar beets had little to do with growing high-THC plants in carefully dialed-in hydroponic greenhouses, but at least I understood the difference between pesticides and herbicides.

Part of the reason I liked the job was the people I met along the way. So many manic pixie stoners — girls and boys. Others who had been locked up for growing and selling weed who figured the best way to say fuck you to the system was to legally make bank off the plant. People with ruthless American ambition who came to this way of life honestly. Some emerged from mythic places like the deep woods of the Emerald Triangle. They were trying to do it on the right side of the law, only to find that the honest game was so rigged that they had been better off hiding their grows in the forest.

The cast of business owners, consultants, attorneys, growers, scientists, dispensary owners and all the other sources I spoke to was fascinating. They were united by this moment when the law shifted away from prohibition, and we could host a convention in Las Vegas, despite the gaming commission not allowing cannabis consumption in the casinos, and have at its peak more than 30,000 people in attendance.

The laws were changing all the time. Some people were making good money. Others were burning out. We were trying to figure out — why was this guy successful and this one was going bankrupt?

For as long as weed has been around, people have made marijuana their identity. I had that phase, too, when the best way my undeveloped adolescent brain could think of to rebel against my perfectly fine and good family was to wear Adidas Hemp Gazelles to ag class.

The influencers floating around the events and on social media took that much further. They got the free weed, posted their strain reviews and unboxing videos, and grew their follower counts.

I was happy for them. No one wanted to see me on Instagram giving notes on how the terpenes tasted in the latest flower release from Native Roots.

Not everyone was there because they loved the plant. A lot of people just saw the money. But you had to have at least some level of courage to stake your fortune, livelihood and reputation on this unproven industry. Or you were just an unabashed capitalist.

The owners of MJBiz were the smart ones. They identified a clear need in a burgeoning market and provided a service better than anyone else. In 2022, they sold the business to EmeraldX for $120 million. On their way out, they gave their employees generous loyalty bonuses.

Soon after, most of us started heading for the door. No good to be the last one holding the roach. The industry had already gone through a rapid cycle of consolidation and oversaturation. Prices were tanking for growers. Regulations made turning a profit difficult. There was talk of farmer suicides. A select group had made their bag then gotten out. It was time to go.

Underneath it all, I suspected I could get a good book out of this gig. That instinct was confirmed when I was querying literary agents about the Korea novel I’ve been working on for many years, and my author bio said I was living in Colorado reporting on the cannabis industry.

An agent responded, saying, “I don’t think I can sell this Korea book, but you should write a novel about the legal weed industry.”

So that’s what I set out to do. When I had a draft finished, I sent the agent a manuscript, and she responded that she was retiring and not taking on any new clients. She said she would still take a look because she had set me on this path, but ultimately, it was clear she was not willing to postpone her retirement for me.

I had learned this lesson before, but I guess I needed to hear it twice. Traditional publishing is too much like trying to win at a slot machine in one of the casinos where we had been gathering all these cannabis entrepreneurs.

I love working with the indie press Trident. The books I’m writing help support a great bookstore and a publisher who has become a good friend. I write the way I want to. For all its flaws, The Pot Job is an authentic piece of literature and the vision of one person, not a conglomerate.

It should also be reiterated that the book is fiction. I’ve included some things I learned about life, but the reality of the book is invented. I’ve never owned or worked at a marijuana dispensary. It’s not about trade-show life.

But I lived in Denver, and I wrote about this business every day for more than seven years. Hundreds of articles. I was also once a young man who came back to the United States after living in Asia for a while.

This book is about all of that, and some other things, too.

You can buy it from the press here, which is the preferred way, or from Amazon here.

You can buy it from the press here, which is the preferred way, or from Amazon here.

The artist Houlart, who is a dedicated Trident Press reader, had this to say about reading the book:

”I’m yet to read a book by Bart Schaneman I haven’t loved or a publication by Trident Press which hasn’t been something delightfully authentic, and this is no exception. I mean, it doesn’t hurt that I’m a sucker for a book that are love songs to the rural. Sure, The Pot Job set in Denver, focusing on a quickly growing Marijuana Dispensary, but there’s a deep reverence for the wide flat cornlands and country towns. In this way, Schaneman is writing what he knows best, continuing the motifs he established in “The Silence Is The Noise” and “The Green and The Gold”.

While the meta focus of the story is the booming legal weed business in Colorado, this is merely a background for an exploration of the way that we form and destroy relationships, about how hard things are and can be. It’s not moaning about this though, rather it gives purpose and necessity to this, and helps us to see the value of all those little moments of coming together and falling apart.

It’s a beautiful novel on the whole, with a delightful pace and a great cast of characters."

Best paired with a tall glass of cold sour beer, a few hits from a vape pen and an edible.”

Downstairs, Henry was sitting at the work table writing. He heard Danielle come home, but was feeling too locked in to get up and talk. He wanted to imagine what Danielle and Taylor felt when they came to the city. He wrote:

Drive into this city from the east and the north. Two seekers in a car looking for the dark peaks. Young creatures with no form. Into this city on land more plains than mountains. More midwest than west. Into the middle of the neighborhoods where decades ago the jazz horns blew all night, and now the dance music sparks in the wires overhead. Seeking. Seeking to walk these streets canopied by trees, past mansions of history lost to time and never to be told, graveyards now haunted parks, the sidewalks paved over bones. To leave behind all that sad open land, the lonesome landscape, for even more isolation among the crowds who come anew with the same rented trucks and the same dreams. Rural refugees washing up on the shores after crossing an ocean of grass.

They gaze at the two peaks, mountains that ages before the car and the town and the city, before these white people, guided tribes home. It’ll be years before these two know the names the white people gave them and they’ll never know their first names. Only that they’re west of the city and rising above the ridgeline they won’t see unless they stand on rooftops or climb trees. They’ve forgotten how to climb trees. And where is all the water? Where are the lakes? The rivers? One flat stream trickles through the city in a foreboding toxic run no one braves unboated.

Hope from the bars and the first jobs and the first friends. Each choice, each yes, closes off all others behind and splinters into a cracked web of paths ahead.

So much freedom. So little money.

At least the city feels welcoming. The skies are iridescent blue in the afternoon, the sun there for the taking. If only the stars would shine their lights, too, then they might know the way back home. But the two of them made a vow to each other. They’re never going home, no matter what happens. Home is now the journey, and the trip goes on until it’s over. So keep going until the city devours them.

“The Pot Job” is available here and here for preorder now. It officially goes on sale Sept. 16.

I’m always comparing the weather here to back home, chafing against the muggy air. Korea just posted its warmest summer on record, beating last year’s, which was the hottest ever. It was an oppressively humid season — two-showers-a-day kind of weather. Too hot to walk to the train station, so I bought a motorbike.

We’re getting through it. The humidity is still thick today, but the temperatures are starting to ease. Cooler mornings. A few fewer showers.

We’re moving into one of the best times of year here. We’ve earned it.

This life of challenges is a good one. Science even backs that up, with new research saying that alongside happiness and meaning there’s a third metric, “a psychologically rich life, marked by novel experiences, perspective-shifting insights and complexity, but also more discomfort and challenges than a happy life or a meaningful life.”

That checks out. Discomfort and complexity are how you earn those insights.

I chose a path that diverted from some movie version of happiness a long time ago. And who could even pursue happiness in 2025 with what’s happening on this planet? Am I happy? What does that even mean? I’m busy. Challenged. I have a full life. That’s enough.

I’ve been reading Jim Harrison’s “Farmer” after brought it up on Substack. I shipped over a handful of Harrison’s novels to read, and they’re the perfect antidote to my overly urban surroundings. They torture me some — I’m haunted by the idea of living in the American West again, and dream of rural life.

But living in the country is not for the weak, of course. Read Adam Gnade’s live blog of his rural Kansas life if you want to know more. What I’d really love is a way to split my time between the social support of the good national healthcare and high-quality education of Korea and the country summers in the American West. Still working on that.

~~~

The other big news that I’ve mentioned before is that I have a novel officially coming out on Sept. 16. Preorders are up here now on the Trident Press website. Here’s another link for those of you living abroad who can get Amazon to ship to you. People ask where they can order, so I get the biggest cut. The press’s website is the best place, but I don’t care where you buy it. I can’t exactly say I’m anti-Amazon when I work for a company owned by Jeff Bezos. If you have a moral quandary with Amazon, one way to offset it is to leave a rating and a review there or on Goodreads, which helps people find my work.

This self-promotion is my least-favorite part of writing. Thanks for bearing with me. Publishing a novel comes with a lot of anxiety — you can’t control how people are going to react to it. If you write something honest, then some people won't like it. No accounting for taste and all that. I rarely like the same books as other people, so why would I expect them to enjoy a book just because someone they know wrote it? Our reading life is our own personal journey. It’s out of my control.

Even though there is a lot of anxiety, in my experience, publishing a book shows you that there are people in your life who want you to succeed and are willing to go online and spend a little of their money to prove it. They might hate the book. They might not even read it. A recently published study said only 16 percent of Americans 15 and over read for pleasure every day, down 40% from 2003. In the age of the smartphone, making novels is like making horse-drawn carriages when people are already driving Model Ts. But still, people buy your books, and they show you that they believe in you, and that’s enough to keep going. We’re all looking for ways to spend even a little less time online. Books are a great way to do that.

If you’ve read this far, and if you’ve bought my novel, thank you. It means a lot to me.

(This is part 2 in a series of interviews I’m doing with writers that I want to share with you all. Read part 1 here.)

Hillary Leftwich is one of the bravest writers I know. Absolutely not afraid of taking on difficult subject matter. I learned that when I interviewed her about her memoir Aura in 2023. Now she’s back with “Saint Dymphna’s Playbook,” a book that weaves together hybrid verse, poetry and lyrical essay about sexual assault, violence, the male gaze, suicide, loss, trauma — big themes, heavy material. And she handles it all with the deft touch of someone who can turn anything into art, even our darkest, worst moments. The book was published by Limit Zero Publications in April.

What’s new with you since we last spoke (aside from this book?) How’s life in Colorado and the U.S. at the moment?

Well, you probably know about a lot of what’s happening in the U.S. now. Collectively, I think the creative communities are trying to rally together and support one another as much as we can through readings, gatherings, and just showing up for one another.

Aside from the book, it’s really all about the book. I just got back from my book tour in NYC and Philly and playing catch up on work and emails here.

Looking for more opportunities in NYC so I can selfishly have an excuse to return.

Writers are often told that if it’s hard to write or talk about then that’s what we should confront. You’ve certainly explored a lot of tough material here. Can you talk about the difficulty of writing about these traumatic moments in your life?

I don’t necessarily agree with that statement and try to avoid any “advice” writers are given because we all function differently and come from a vastly different background. I don’t believe in confrontation, either, not in the sense that we are familiar with and how that looks, at least. The difficulty in writing about vulnerable moments isn’t in the writing itself, it’s allowing the reclamation of the moments and having control over them. This can look like choosing a specific form of writing to be able to do so, like the hermit crab essay, which I teach a lot on within workshops where people want to learn how to write into trauma and vulnerabilities. It isn’t so much about confrontation in our writing, it’s more of a focus on reclamation of taking back the ownership and power and writing from within that space.

This idea of “handing the reader a gift of vulnerability” — what do you mean by that?

A gift of vulnerability means I want the reader to know that despite being survivors and how we endured, how we are so strong—the typical phrases, it’s more about the gift to feel vulnerable and sit with that. How it’s okay not to be strong and be scared and know life isn’t always about starting nonprofits based on our experiences or starting social media profiles. All of those are fine, of course, but the reality is most of us are just struggling day to day, and this can look like taking a moment and recognizing how small and scared we can be.

As a relatively new father to a young girl, many of the themes of this book are terrifying to contemplate, and I’m sorry for all the things that happened to you. Should I have any hope that it’s getting better at all for women?

I feel you, Bart, and I think starting with recognizing and asking for advice is the first step in things getting better. Men need to do better. Our administration isn’t getting any better, so we fight and scream and take being called crazy or too much. So, men: be our voices. We need your help. You know as well as I do that the U.S. was built on slavery and patriarchy. In order for the corporate nationalists to continue to be in control they have to keep the narrative alive that everyone but straight, white men are the problem in this country. So, it starts small—calling your senator, paying attention to news (not doom scrolling, that never helps). Voting locally. The next four years will determine what the course of this country will have to do to unravel itself from the damage already done in these past seven months and the next 3 years and 5 months. Whatever that looks like. But with Planned Parenthood being almost completely stripped of its ability to help women and the communities that need it, with women dying from lack of medical care, and with trends like Trad Wives and White Christian Nationalism coming into play, it’s going to be a really hard battle. Nothing will ever change overnight, and nothing involving human rights has ever taken little effort and lack of commitment. We know this from our history.

When I interviewed you in 2023 about your memoir Aura, you said you wrote that book for your son. Did you have a particular audience in mind for this book?

This book is dedicated to women and the LGBTQ+ communities specifically. But also, it’s for men. So they can experience what we go through.

You’re normally a fiction writer, correct? How did this project come together with these fragments and essays and poems?

I think people associate me with fiction because of my first collection, but really, I started and have my roots in CNF (creative nonfiction)—essays and prose poems specifically. This project was a pandemic project originally. I was writing with my good friend and writer, Shoshana Surek, and holding each other accountable. None of my books have ever been intentional (people hate me for saying this, but it’s the truth), and so it really was just a series of prose poems and essays that came together naturally. But to be real about how hard writing and publishing is, I worked on the hermit crab essay, “No Likelihood of Conviction,” for over two years, and the book itself had gone through two publishers that eventually didn’t work out, so four years later, here it is!

Was there anything surprising you found about working in this form?

Most people are unsure or scared of working in “experimental” forms or structures, but for someone like me, who stays away from rules and traditionalism, I find it really freeing. Without constrictions you can find yourself being able to explore and experiment with so much in form and writing.

I miss the Colorado literary scene and all the great people in it. How’s that going? Anything exciting happening?

There are always amazing events happening at literary/community strongholds like East Window in Boulder and Matter Books downtown as well as Counterpath in Denver. These are the places writers should be going to if they want a sense of community and connectedness. Community can be overused when talking about the writing world, but what other word are we supposed to use? It’s about bringing people together to support and connect. Let’s not get hung up on a word and focus on doing the work. It always comes down to the work, and these places are doing it.

Could you recommend any books you’ve read recently that you’ve enjoyed?

Always.

• Hannah Sward: Strip: A Memoir. One of my favorite books I’ve read in a long time.

• Chris Campanioni: north by north/west (West Virginia University Press, 2025)

  VHS (CLASH Books, 2025)

• Joan Kwon Glass: Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms

• Chris LaTray: Becoming Little Shell

• Faylita Hicks: A Map of My Want

What are you working on now/next?

I’m working on a book about sex and a narrator exploring what this means, both in the sex industry and their own life. How on one hand, it’s a business, and on the other hand, it’s a means to experience humanity.