I read an article the other day that said if happiness from the beginning of our lives to the end was shaped like a letter of the alphabet it would be a U. We hit the bottom of the U at about 46 years old, then we start to get happier again as we get older. I’m turning 45 in about a month. I’m almost to the nadir of that curve.

But I don’t quite feel that way.

At this age, you learn to do the things you’re good at and what brings you satisfaction and joy. Friends are harder to have time for, though you miss them and are glad when they write to you, and you especially love them for visiting. You still talk to the people whom you know respect you and stay in touch with those you respect. That’s one of the reasons I love this newsletter — it gives us a way to keep up communications.

I’ve stripped my life down to the essentials — family and work. Age has taught me the value of time; that it’s not limitless. There are only so many instances we’ll be able to do certain things. So we learn to only spend it the way we want to.

People my age blow up their lives because they don’t want to continue doing what they’ve been doing anymore. It might be an oversimplification, but I like what I’m doing right now.

Was moving back to Asia my way of coping with midlife? My version of buying a convertible? Having an affair? It might’ve been if we hadn’t done it for our family.

It’s not like I’m out every night at the clubs in Gangnam, or trying to recreate my life when I lived in Itaewon a dozen years ago. I work in Seoul, but I haven’t been in a bar past 10 p.m. since the last time I was in Colorado.

What is even the point of living in a city like this if you’re not out enjoying it every night? Because we live in an interesting place that’s teaching my daughter so much more than we ever could on our own.

We’ve been here almost 11 months, and the time has rushed by like a river, or like, I don’t know, some other way of saying that I’m astonished by how quickly this has gone. The worst of the winter is over, and it’s getting warmer, though we’re still in the bad-air-quality season, waking up checking the AQI every day. That’ll pass soon enough, too.

At Month 11, if I were to judge the difficulty of this move I would give it five stars. We’ve made hard moves before — in 2021, we changed towns, started new jobs, and bought a new house when Jia was only a few months old. That was challenging, but not quite on the level of moving to a foreign country with a small child to start a job at a big company with high standards.

Then to see what has happened at that company. Everyone that follows the media or pays attention to the news knows that things here have been … Well. The Trump administration has altered most of our lives in some way. It’s up to us how we let it affect us. I’m always trying to adhere to some version of stoic philosophy and think about what I can control — quality of work, dedication to craft, being here for my family. Working for a global news organization in a foreign country was always a dream of mine, and I get to do it in a country that I know, in a way that makes sense for me and my family. I’m grateful for all of that.

If I had to write a title for this chapter in my life, it wouldn’t be Midlife or Life as a Foreigner or Journalist in a Foreign Country — it would simply be Fatherhood. That’s the lens I look at everything through. What kind of father am I? And what kind of father do I want to be? Those are the biggest questions I’m trying to answer.

When I look back at how I was raised and my own father as an example, what I choose to focus on is how committed he is to his family. For one, he was home nearly all the time, which is probably the most important thing a parent can do. Whenever I’m away from my daughter and don’t get to see her, especially when time feels like it’s rushing away from me faster every minute, I feel like the day is missing something important.

My father has always had a strong desire for my siblings and me to be successful people. On the farm, I learned from him many skills that aren’t necessarily directly applicable to my life right now but in a broader way have always been relevant. He taught me how to work. He taught me how to use my hands, how to use tools, how to fix things — good training for any type of job. And he kept us safe. As kids, we made it through many years of working in an extremely dangerous line of work without major injury. Parenting is hard enough, but to have to do it with your children using heavy equipment is another level I can’t imagine.

He also always knew what was going on in the world. He read the newspaper every day and watched the nightly news. That might be partly why I ended up in journalism. Not because he ever suggested it as a career path, but because my family grew up valuing journalism and a shared, common body of facts.

The most important thing I know about my dad is what I want my daughter to know about me — that I loved her, and that I wanted the best for her. The word “legacy” has been co-opted by influencers and self-help grindset goons, but it’s hard not to think about once you have a child. I want her to be proud of who her father was and want her to feel like she had a good life, like we gave her enough opportunity to succeed. Who I am, the relationships that I have, the work that I’ve done, what I’ve helped to do, and how I’ve helped people — that’s my legacy. I’m writing this all down so I’ll remember to act accordingly, and I’ll be ready when life starts moving up the other side of the U.

It seems like every guy with a BookTok or Instagram account about books has either read or is reading Lonesome Dove, and most of them are in agreement that it’s one of the best books that they’ve ever read. Writers I admire like Elisa Gabbert said it was one of her favorites of last year. Kevin Morby has cited it as an influence. Adam Gnade references it. A couple of weeks ago it was announced that someone had bought the rights to all of Larry McMurtry’s novels that include these characters, so expect a streaming series or movies or both.

A quick plot summary in case you’re still reading this and haven’t read the book: Two ex-Texas rangers form a ragtag band of cowhands and misfits that round up a cattle herd to drive from Texas to Montana because they’re bored, and because they’ve heard that Montana is beautiful, that the land there is not yet settled, and that if they can make it up there, they can start their own ranch. They take the word of one of their former Ranger buddies who is of questionable moral character and decide to go on this dangerous, long, and difficult journey to some land they’ve never been. All they’re going off of is a name and an idea: Montana.

All the attention is for good reason. The book is a great adventure, with an extensive cast of characters, almost on the scale of an epic Russian classic, but with cowboys. It depicts an important period in our history, one made more important because so much has been said about this brief span of time in America’s formative years. A time when the land was still open enough that people from Texas and other parts of the southern U.S., even the Midwest, could gather up a bunch of cattle, a lot of them roaming free and available if you had the horses. People did this for something like 30 years. Most of them had come over from Europe and left their families behind, never to see them again, never to see their homeland again. So they certainly had the genetic background for risk.

I find the resurgence in popularity of this book interesting, if not surprising. I’m not sure that McMurtry was ever considered to be one of our most respected literary writers, though his success is certainly a good indicator of the quality of the writing — at least in his ability as a storyteller. And it makes sense that Hollywood or whoever would want to capitalize on this moment and refresh the material. I vaguely remember as a kid the enjoyment my parents had watching the original mini-series. Seemed like it was an event when it came on TV, where we knew it was airing on a certain time every night, and we made sure that we were done with our work and made sure to watch it. Or at least we taped it, commercials and everything.

Next we might see James Michener’s Centennial get popular again. Those are the two big stories that I remember resonating with my family. Maybe because of the part in Lonesome Dove where they get to Ogallala, which is my family’s part of the world. I grew up not far to the west of there, in those great plains, that wide open country. I liked when Clara (my Grandma’s name) was trying to get Gus and Call to stay there, saying there’s plenty of unsettled country just north of here. You don’t have to go all the way to Montana.

At that time, the Nebraska plains had not been settled. A lot of Oglala Lakota still fought for their land, and Red Cloud and Crazy Horse had not been tricked and killed by the white man yet. The men could have just stayed there, but it would have made for a shorter book.

I saw some people online complaining that aside from some benevolent Crow toward the end of the novel, most of the indigenous people in the story are violent, brutal murderers. Blue Duck is almost cartoonishly terrifying with his rage and anger and viciousness. But I find his response to the destruction of his people to simply be someone who knows he’s at war, and his actions are in line with what we’ve seen in wars forever. He steals children, rapes women, and kills settlers and destroys their property — he does everything he possibly can to defend his tribe and to slow the eradication of his people. That murderous reaction to genocide tracks with me.

The other part that’s interesting to me about the book is how it breaks so many rules that contemporary editors and agents try to enforce today. The story takes almost 100 pages before the action starts and the cattle drive really begins. Today’s agents or editors would say let’s get to the action sooner. “Where’s the conflict?” I guarantee the publishing industry wouldn’t let an unknown writer publish this book at 850 pages.

The simple lesson to take from the success of this book is that people want characters that they can care about and understand, even if some of the characters are horrible. In my opinion, Jake Spoon is the most deplorable character in this long book for his general apathy toward not just the fate of Lorena and his fellow man, but for the way he takes no responsibility for himself. McMurtry takes the time to get inside the mind of Spoon enough that you might even have sympathy for the feeble decisions he makes.

In a way, this book is The Lord of the Rings for cowboys, or at least The Hobbit. Similar to War and Peace, it reads more like a genre novel than like literary fiction. It’s not trying to be clever with its style. There’s almost no description of anything for the sake of description. No info dumps. No long passages describing the weather or the plains or what the light looks like coming across the prairie. Yet there’s still a strong sense of atmosphere and the environment. The weather is a main character, but it’s always told through the reactions of the characters, or through the eyes of someone, for example, who’s waking up in the morning and looking out across the prairie, or one with the dust in his eyes from riding at the back of the herd.

So much of contemporary writing is done in close third person point of view, and there are all kinds of arbitrary craft rules around limiting POV and limiting what we can know about a character. But to me that just limits the reader’s experience. Same with the theory of the iceberg. I still love Hemingway, but did he write any books that were more exciting and pleasurable to read than Lonesome Dove? I’m not sure. Life is short, so I don’t know if I’ll start a re-read any time soon, but I’m looking forward to taking to the cattle trail with McMurtry again at some point. It really is one of the great American novels.

I’ve been paying one of the true costs of living abroad lately. A close family member, a beloved uncle, passed away recently after nearly two decades of courageously fighting cancer, and I missed the funeral. We sent flowers and I sent a few text messages, but I wanted to do more. I wanted to be there. I wanted to be there for my aunt and her daughters, who growing up were as close to me as another set of siblings, and for my dad, who lost a brother but also lost his best friend, his farming partner, and the person he has known longest in his life.

I remember my grandpa used to talk about the only time he took a vacation to Hawaii, how someone he knew back home had died, and how he couldn’t make it back for the funeral. It still bothered him many years later, and if the topic of Hawaii ever came up it was the only thing he’d mention. Nothing about luaus on Waikiki or Pearl Harbor, just that he wished he’d been back home to be there for friends and family.

I watched the funeral service via livestream on Facebook and it felt strange, almost like the perspective you have when you dream about your own funeral, observing from the rafters as you listen to what people say about you, looking at who showed up, if the church was full or empty. The church was full for my uncle. My family was there, and my uncle’s friends who I used to play poker with — I was there when we started that card game when he got sick — and I just kept thinking I should have been there. I’ll probably always carry guilt for what I’ve missed while I’m over here, even though this has been a good move for us, and it’s turning out to be better in some ways than we could have expected.

I often think about what I’m missing by not being in America, and how I’m not there to witness or experience things firsthand. But then I also think about all the writers I love, and how so many of them wrote well about places that were far from home. Graham Greene. Malcolm Lowry. George Orwell. The list is long. And there’s also the writers who lived in other countries and found it a good way to see their homeland, to step outside of it so they could view it from a different vantage point. Which is all to say there’s no one perfect way to do any of this. What matters most is doing what’s best for your family and getting the work done. I think my uncle would have understood that.

I’m still working on my goal of learning the language here, and it has me thinking about a moment from about 10 years ago, when I was living in my hometown, and I took a picture of a car that had a back window sticker that read “Welcome to America, now speak English.”

I posted a photo of it on Facebook with a simple caption: Spotted on my way to work today.

It wasn’t long before the post had a comment underneath it that said, and I’m paraphrasing, “People who want to live here SHOULD speak the language.”

No surprise in 2014, when racism and anti-immigration were bubbling up, fueled by a hatred of Obama and liberalism. The part of this conversation that was hard to square, though, was that the person who started the argument in favor of the sticker, saying people should speak English here, was someone with my same last name. The problem I had with that wasn’t just because we simply disagreed, but because we had the same great-grandparents who came to this country as Volga Germans and never really learned how to speak English, despite living here their entire adult lives and having 13 children. They spoke German, their kids knew some German, and that side of my family was likely discriminated against until they finally looked and sounded the part. How could you adopt a mindset that would discriminate against your own ancestors who gave you the life you have?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot because I live in a foreign country and am not fluent in the native language. Also, no matter how well I speak the language here I will never “look the part.” I can read and write Korean and understand well enough to get around, but I’m not fluent, and unless I dedicate a significant amount of time, thousands of hours, to rigorous study, I will probably never be fully conversational. I spend most of what limited free time I have working on my writing — either putting words down or reading, studying books I admire. Unless they find another three or four hours in the day, truly mastering Korean is unlikely.

It should be said that there are some key differences between my life and my ancestors’. English is the global language — the language of business and the internet. Most signage here is in Korean and English, and the kids study it in school. That’s not to mention the utility of smartphones and translation apps, which makes it slightly less challenging.

But as long as I live here I’ll always feel like an immigrant who never really knows the language, and I understand firsthand what my ancestors felt. I know that strange feeling of seeing people all around who you can’t speak to, who you can’t ask for help, who you can’t tell a joke to, can’t argue with.

What I’m reading: Train Dreams by Denis Johnson blew me away. A short, compact book with a lot of power. It’s remarkable how Johnson could write Tree of Smoke, which was shaggy and wild and fantastic — a long novel with so many characters and plot lines — and also write such a beautiful, taut novella. Same, too, with The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. Another masterpiece of economy and tight storytelling. That’s also a great read for any writer, because Greene essentially gives away all his secrets for his writing process as he explains how the main character operates. I also picked up Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, which is popular in South Korea. It started scatological and deeply weird, and I’m into it. Oh, and I’m also reading Lonesome Dove, finally, for the first time. Considering how long this story has been around, and how popular the mini-series was when I was a kid, it’s funny to me how big this book has gotten on BookTok and with Instagram book influencers. I’m about 200 pages in and I agree with all the hype. It’s great. So many interesting characters and so well-plotted. Can’t wait until they get to Ogallala.

ILSAN, South Korea — January 1 is Alfie’s birthday, and I had the day off, so when Nammin said her family was going to the bathhouse to start the year clean, I decided to take the dog to the local mountain.

I believe in the Japanese concept of forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku, and hiking on the first day of the year was a way for us to begin 2025 fresh, too.

The trailhead to our local mountain, Gobongsan, is about four city blocks from our apartment.

We passed through a marsh of tall grass gone golden in the winter and went by a barefoot-walking course where in the warmer seasons older folks make laps, their feet and shins coated in red clay.

Several hikers told me how handsome Alfie is and asked me to pet him. I used to get a lot of stares when I first moved to this country, but now the dog gets all the attention. That’s better for me, and he doesn’t care at all.

We hiked a few kilometers up to an observatory that rimmed a communications tower. Along the way we passed several bunkers with dark green sandbags still there from the war.

This was the site of a fierce battle, and since 2009 there have been increased efforts to uncover the remains of the dead. They’ve found 35 bodies so far and built a rest area to comfort the spirits of the killed.

The fighting stopped in the Korean War more than 70 years ago, and there is little in modern Korean life to remind you that it ever happened. Aside from when North Korea makes the news, you drive past a military base, or you’re hanging out at a playground and see razor wire, it’s easy to forget that the war never officially ended.

From the top of the mountain, I tried to imagine what it looked like during the fighting — the smoke, the planes and helicopters and mortars. The sound of artillery, of machine guns, of grenades, men screaming. How much fear was in the air?

All I could hear were the crows, the sounds of hikers shuffling on the trail, and the dull traffic noise from the closest roads.

There are still bodies on the mountain and benches for the dead to rest.

We hiked back down and stopped at a takeout dumpling place where I got a container full of mandu for 5,000 won. I wasn’t sure anything would be open, but I could see the steam from this place a block away.

I called Nammin and she said Jia was having a blast at the jjimjilbang, and her family was planning on staying there for a while.

I figured I had missed the awkward timing of having to shower with the men in her family, so I said I’d come over.

I hit the hot and cold pools first. Bathing suits are not allowed in these places, and I was thinking about how a body shows the accumulation of a lifetime of decisions and habits, of work, of diet, of exercise, of posture.

To stand naked in public is the most revealing thing, but I’ve done this so many times I don’t mind anymore.

When I joined up with Nammin’s family, Jia was in the play area with the other kids, all adorable in the little yellow outfits they wear.

Nammin and I went into the hottest room, which is shaped like a large stone oven. Nearly every sauna I’ve visited has the same hourglass with pink sand in it, and each flip is another five minutes.

We turned it over, and I thought about the past year.

We had just returned from a two-week trip to America a day before the plane crash here. I worked that day, then it was New Year’s Eve, and we were right back into the flow of life.

As a joke, I had asked Nammin if she could give 2024 a rating out of 5 stars how she would rate it, and she said 4.5.

I was also thinking about a drive we took in Colorado with Jia and my niece, who asked us if we liked living in Korea, and Nammin answered, “It’s quite different.”

From the car, we could see across a vast distance to the Front Range mountains, snow-capped Long’s Peak the prominent feature.

Here those kinds of vistas to the horizon are much harder to come by.

There was a school shooting in Wisconsin while we were home, and I remembered how much easier it is to live in a country where I speak the language.

Quite different is a good way to put it.

I don’t really make resolutions, but one goal for 2025, aside from the writing goals I won’t bore you with, is to work on my Korean.

We’re going to be here for a while, and I want to engage with the people here as much as I can.

I want to feel the same way about this place as I do when I go home and can speak to everyone I want to.

It’ll be a tall order, but that’s my only goal for 2025.

Yeah, 2024 might be hard to beat.

Fall is the clear winner for the best season in this country. The days are warm and the mornings and nights are cool. The ginkgo and maple trees have been changing through the spectrum of autumn colors, and with no snow or much wind to clear away the leaves, they’ve stayed colorful for weeks. It’s great weather for walking and cafes and eating the orange persimmons that are in season.

Sometimes it can feel strange to spend your days working on stories about your home country then you close your laptop and go outside and you’re on the other side of the world. But that’s not something you can really feel when you’re peering at portals into American culture for hours each day. How do I feel about the election? I could say I don’t live there so it doesn’t really affect me, but that’s not really true. My job focuses heavily on politics and what happens in America, plus my family is there, and no matter where you live in the world there’s no way to completely get away from American culture. Not only can you not move to the other side of the world to escape yourself, you can’t do it to escape the United States, either. (As an aside: I commented on this very good essay by Aaron Lake Smith about American influence in Europe that he could do a Control + F and replace Korea for Sweden and the piece would still work.)

Last weekend we took Jia to a playground in a large park next to the DMZ, one of the most heavily militarized areas on the planet. People here don’t think of North Korea as a threat to their daily lives, and many of the places with abundant open space for camping, music festivals, and other cultural events are up north in Paju, where we were.

We set up a picnic site along with dozens of other families. Jia and I went up into a treehouse-like feature with a window looking over a military fence, and beyond that, the land of trash balloons and missile tests and dire humanitarian conditions. Aside from the razor wire, all we could see were trees and mountains and flocks of geese flying south. The geese sounded different from those back home, honking in Korean, I guess.

“That’s North Korea,” I told Jia, pointing, and the other dad in the treehouse copied me, saying to his son, in Korean, “Paba — Bukhan. Nors Koreea.” It sort of felt like he was mocking me, but I couldn’t tell for sure.

This isn’t anything new, but one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the idea that if you try making something for everyone you end up making it for no one. How just because someone doesn’t like something doesn’t mean it’s bad — it’s just not for them. And of course we all want people to love us, but most of us can’t even agree on the value of popular art — TV shows, music, books — and a lot of us think most things produced for mass audiences are generally bad. Dumbed down, shallow, unoriginal. Safe, tame, boring. Inauthentic. And I don’t want my own work to feel like that. Which means it might risk alienating certain people because it’s not to their taste. I’ve gotten used to saying other things aren’t for me — now I just need to allow for other people to say that about my own writing. I’m making one more pass on the novel about the cannabis industry. I’m really hoping this is the last one. It has to be. I need to move on.

What I’m reading:

My friends are making outstanding books right now:

• Adam Gnade’s novel “Your Friends Will Carry You Home” is out now. Here’s the blurb I wrote for it: “Your Friends Will Carry You Home shows us how to balance the dark parts of being human and making dumb mistakes with the strength of spending time among good friends acting silly and telling bad jokes. Read it and know what it’s like to travel through this messed up world with enough courage to laugh and smile and love the people around you, in spite of everything else.” -Bart Schaneman, author of The Pot Job (forthcoming)

My publisher, Nate Perkins and Trident Press in Boulder, has put out two very cool books recently.

• “What You Don’t Expect from Me” by Mat Guillan is a story about the dark side of suburban life in Argentina, a country I know very little about. I was surprised by how familiar so much of it felt. Nate translated it from his home in Mexico City. Guillan is a talented writer, and Nate’s translation reads beautifully.
• “Let’s Walk Together/Kuska Purikusun Runasiminchisrayku/Caminemos Juntos” by Elva Ambia Rebatta, is a trilingual book of stories and poems in Quechua, English, and Spanish. The poetry and stories feel like they’re spoken by some ancient mystic shaman.

What I’m watching:

• Like a lot of people in this country, Nammin and I were into the hit Korean Netflix show “Culinary Class Wars.” One hundred Korean chefs compete to win the prize of best chef in the country. As a competition show it’s entertaining enough, but it’s also teaching us a ton about Asian food — particularly high-end Chinese and Japanese food. The country has been obsessed with the show, and the restaurants where the chefs work are overrun, booked out through the end of the year, but we’re hoping to try some of them when things calm down a little.

What I’m listening to:

• Adam’s friends Porridge Radio put out a new record “Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There For Me” that has that frantic energy and wild creativity of youth. A good listen. And the world’s most prolific singer-songwriter Zach Bryan dropped singles the other day that have some beautiful moments. At this point, everyone has opinions on this guy — he’s basically Taylor Swift for a certain type of man — and I admire his output and like his influences. He still seems authentic, even after all of his success.

Last week was Nammin’s birthday. It was a big one, so we went on a road trip. We drove for about four hours before we stopped for lunch in Jeonju, the first South Korean city I lived in, nearly 20 years ago. If you would have told me then I would be back one day to eat lunch with my 3-year-old daughter I would have said, “Have another shot of soju.”

We ate bowls of my favorite soup — galguksu — at the place I loved when I was young and single and had so many big choices left to make. When I thought everything was still up to me to decide. I took a picture of the soup and sent it to a friend who had lived here then, and he asked if I was planning to put down two bowls like we used to. Back when we did a lot we don’t do anymore. Jia will never know that version of me, and I probably won’t ever again, either.

The tourists were wearing rented traditional robes in the old village. Something that didn’t happen when I lived there, back when Jeonju was only known for its food but wasn’t on the international K-pop/K-drama tour circuit.

Then farther south, over the admiral’s bridge and through the industrial complex, where the steel-making factories are painted in bright primary colors and signs proclaim how green the companies are. The campuses go on and on, with long streets of smoke stacks and careening trucks and mazes of twisted and intersecting pipelines.

We checked into a small hotel with a heated rooftop pool that no one else was using. We put Jia in a lifejacket, and let go of her in water too deep to touch. I wish I could describe the sound of joy that came from her when she understood she wouldn’t sink, that she could float in the water. She was scared but brave, and we stayed close to her as shrieked in delight and unbridled laughter. Pure happiness for both her and us — almost like watching her learn to walk. “Happy birthday, mama!” she said so many times during this trip.

As it got dark a full moon emerged over the bay, and white lights shone on the cable cars. A ferry boat lit up in rainbow colors passed below, and we could hear a violinist struggling to hit the notes. But we didn’t listen too closely to that — we had the best sound we’d ever hear floating in a lifejacket in front of us.

In the morning, we went to the town square to find the town’s special donuts. Is it true that every culture has some type of fried dough dusted with sugar? I can’t think of a cuisine that doesn’t have them, my Volga-German culture included. (If you know you know grebel.) Some of these Yeosu donuts were filled with yuzu cream — the other non-cream-filled ones weren’t too far from what my grandma used to make.

We skipped the line for the strawberry mochi and went to another smaller island where we took an elevator to the top of a lighthouse. In the observatory, Jia rode her kickboard scooter around in circles and said, “This is a nice place.” Out in the water we could see the shipping vessels lined up for the industrial complex and the colored dot patterns of shellfish and seaweed farms.

That evening we checked into the Ramada hotel. Jia was less nervous at the pool this time but just as joyful. “Happy birthday, mama!”

We woke up to overcast skies but still tried to visit a sheep farm that doubled as a petting zoo until we got rained out. To salvage the day, we drove to the German village in Namhae. For lunch, we ate schnitzel, spaetzle, and goulash and stopped at the bakery for fig and rye bread and pastries. My family is a different kind of German than this, but the food all seemed legit. And these types of places always taste a little better when you’re in East Asia.

We checked into the last lodging for the trip, a guest house with a view of the sea on three sides. We fell asleep with a lighting storm strobing the white curtains on the windows.

With a new day came clear skies. We drank tea and coffee on the deck and watched the fishermen checking their farms in their small boats. “Happy birthday, mama!” I thought about how I’d had so many birthdays without my own child to wish me happiness, and how grateful I was to have it now.

On the way out of town, we stopped at the German bakery again for soft pretzels, sauerkraut, mustard, and sausages before driving to the beach, where only a couple of other kids played in the surf. Jia let the small waves chase her into shore, and it was warm enough to swim in the sea in mid-October.

What I’m reading: I’ve been working through the books I brought with me that are on the New York Times’ list of 100 best books of the 21st Century. At least the ones I hadn’t read when that list came out. I knocked out Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” and Min Jin Lee’s “Pachinko.” Currently reading Denis Johnson’s “Tree of Smoke.”

What I’m listening to: I finally found a way into Billy Strings. The new record “Highway Prayers” is good bluegrass, country and folk. Christian Lee Hutson’s “Paradise Pop. 10” has a real Rilo Kiley/Elliott Smith feel, if less anguished. And “Two Star & The Dream Police” by Mk.gee might be too cool for me, but I’m trying.

SEOUL — There’s something nice about writing from a city that doesn’t take a country signifier in the dateline. There’s also something good about datelining a piece from a city you truly love.

I’ve driven plenty around the country by now, but this was my first time taking the Mohave deep into the belly of the metropolis. The Pace Museum in Hannam-dong is running an “in-conversation” exhibit that if you’ve been following my writing from the early days you expect I would brave the Seoul traffic to see.

I don’t work Fridays because I’m on the Sunday shift, so Nammin and I try to use the day to enjoy our free daycare and go on a date. This past Friday was one of those days.

Last week was Chuseok, when Korea celebrates the mid-autumn harvest over three days. We had several big meals with Nammin’s family. Plates of japchae, L.A. galbi, and bossam — a lot of food. I worked through the holiday to bank the vacation days for a trip home over Christmas, and it was good to be in the air-conditioning during the hottest Chuseok on record.

It was also a week of potential assassination attempts and exploding pagers in Lebanon; rooftop drinks with new friends and Jia surprising us with something new every day.

I was processing all of that as we drove the expressway along the Han River that plunged us into the center of the city. We turned off at the Yongsan Station exit for Itaewon, the international district that meant a lot to both of us at one time. This is where we met, and where we both spent plenty of weekend nights in the bars, restaurants, and clubs before we got married, moved to the U.S., and became parents. We truly were different people then.

We were different and this place was different. That was many years before the Halloween crowd crush that killed 159 people in the alley next to the Hamilton Hotel. When I met Nammin, Itaewon was shedding its reputation as a place where soldiers and other foreigners came to frequent streets they gave names like Hooker Hill and Homo Hill.

At the time, some of that still went on, but mostly it was fashionable Koreans out for nights at great clubs that played the perfect soundtracks for late, late nights. The food and bar scene was getting better all the time. We’d loved it enough that I rented a two-bedroom above a brewery and next to a well-known bakery. We could walk to everything we wanted to do.

Nostalgia is often unreliable, but I still believe that was a special time in a special place.

Neither of us had ever been down the main drag — Itaewon-ro — in a car that wasn’t driven by a taxi driver. I tried to watch the traffic with one eye and look for what had changed with the other. Places like Seoul Pub and Gold Bar were long gone, but Vatos Tacos and the Big Size shoe stores were still there.

We didn’t have time to walk the back alleys to check on all the places we liked to visit. I’m sure we’ll be back there again some time.

The art exhibit at the Pace was on the other side of the main strip, in the fancy part of Hannam with the branded retail stores — places like Commes des Garcons and Diesel and Supra. A white Ferrari sat parked in front of a Gucci store where an attendant in a suit stood guard.

The exhibit was six Mark Rothko paintings, all of them the floating blocks of color that made his legacy. The canvases are large and seem to move off the wall as you look at them.

I was stuck to the floor by a painting that I had seen before and had inspired a device in my apprentice novel The Green and the Gold. “Untitled (Green, White and Yellow on Yellow)” is a block of green on a yellow background, and it has always looked like Nebraska to me — a spring wheatfield growing next to the gold of cut-down corn stalks. The color scheme of John Deere tractors.

I had to talk myself out of taking a picture of the painting, despite the “no photography” sign.

If you buy a smartphone in Korea the camera settings are fixed by law to make a clicking sound when you take a picture. Too much perverted picture-taking on public transportation. My U.S.-issued camera doesn’t have that feature, so stealth photo-taking could have happened. But why? To prove to you that I actually saw it? Who would it be for? Sneaking a picture would have taken me out of the moment, and looking at it on my phone would have only cheapened the memory.

No, I stood there and I thought about Nebraska. I thought about who I was when I was obsessed with Rothko and trying to force my way into becoming a novelist. When I was too young to have anything to say. I thought about aging, as I often do these days, and how reconnecting with the things that mattered to you when you were younger has good and bad outcomes. The good: You remember that you were young once. The bad: You’re a long way from that age now.

I thought about Rothko’s singular vision for his art. The confidence it must take to create something simple, yet identifiable and powerful. How style is just that — finding the one small thing you do well, mastering it, and doing it over and over.

Pace’s website allows you to “inquire” about a painting if you’re interested in buying one. I looked up how much Rothko’s paintings sell for and one recently sold at Christie’s for more than $86 million.

The correspondence part of the exhibit was in another room with a handful of Lee Ufan’s paintings that are more vertical and splotchy and have their own movement. I did not find them as powerful, but I have never found another artist’s work more affecting than Rothko’s, so the comparison is unfair.

We went up the hill to have lunch, and as we were eating the new Bright Eyes record downloaded on my phone. I put it on during the drive back to Ilsan, and again I was confronting the work of an artist who spoke to me when I was young and trying to understand what kind of art I wanted to make — when I was trying to figure out how to talk about Nebraska and what it meant to be from there.

I’ve loved Conor Oberst’s music for so long that I’m always nervous to spin a fresh record. I’m worried that a new album will be a disappointment and taint my impression of what I used to love. I’m also afraid that I’ve changed and won’t be able to connect to the music in a way that I should because I’ve gotten older and don’t have the heart for new music that I once did.

This new album’s about a lot of that, too. Oberst talks about the time he has left, how he’ll be turning 45 soon, and in a way it’s comforting to hear that even someone as successful as he is can’t escape the angst of mid-life.

The other recurring theme I picked up in this album is that the body keeps the score. He mentions it at least twice. And that goes back to another idea, that, to use his words, “it all catches up to you once you get just a little too old.”

At this age, I’m starting to see this a lot, the way life sneaks up on you. Self-help gurus call these lagging indicators. The success you have might be because of some choice you made 10 years ago. The opposite is also true. You often hear the same wisdom from people in their later years — that getting old isn’t for the weak. I’m not there yet, but I can see it coming. It’s not dark yet but it’s getting there. The body’s keeping score, yes, and so is the mind, and all the choices you’ve made, whether you know it at the time, add up to putting you exactly in the place where you are now.

1.

BUSAN, South Korea — In the past month I’ve been to South Korea’s second city twice. The first trip was to see an old friend who is about to become a dad. For that journey, I took the KTX bullet train, which runs up to 200 miles an hour, and cuts from the northwest corner to the southeast edge of the peninsula in less than three hours. A good way to travel — quiet and clean and the scenery passes by in that peaceful, rolling way special to trains.

B. lives a short walk from Haeundae Beach, Korea’s busiest and most-famous stretch of sand. I met him and another old friend, S., posted up on the far end away from the flocks of parasols and the buoy-marked section of water that they were calling the Pee Zone. We spent the day swimming far from that zone — but only with a flotation device or we got whistled at — throwing the football, catching up, and sipping on canned highballs from the nearby convenience store.

It’s hard to overstate how good it is to have old pals in a foreign country. We’ve all known each other a long time and living in Asia has knitted us together. The brotherhood of life as foreigners. The conversation easily picked up familiar rhythms.

At the end of the afternoon, we walked the 10 minutes or so back to B.’s place to get cleaned up and I gave him his Dad present — a bottle of Wild Turkey that came in a boxed set with two nice glasses. Chuseok — Korean Thanksgiving — is coming up in September and the stores are full of gift sets like these. And for some reason E-Mart Traders has been stocking a bunch of American whiskey brands for good prices. That’s new from the last time I lived here. The point with the gift, and this visit, was to reassure him that he was going to be a great dad, that I’d survived these three past years as a father in my 40s and if I could do it, so could he.

We went back out and ate Korean barbecue and kept the drinks flowing at Thursday Party until it got late enough. I don’t have any truly useful advice to give about how to do a good job as a father. I’m sure I’ll hear what Jia thinks about how I did when I’m too old to do much about it. I mentioned that I was skeptical when a few people threw out the line that their relationship with their child was the greatest love of their life. I was especially dubious in those early, sleep-deprived months, when there was a lot of crying and we were on our own in the middle of a pandemic. Now I know they were right, but it took some time to get there.

In the morning, to change the oil, as B. has always put it, we hiked a forest path that ran parallel to the coast until we came to what we called the Mountain Gym. Set off from the path in a small clearing were bars for pullups and pushups, the bodyweight squat and press machines you see everywhere, a few plastic dumbbells, a share towel that we dared each other to smell, and a crude bench with some rusting weights on a barbell. These gyms are common, but you really only see older folks using them. One day we might no longer be doing pullups on the bars, but instead swinging our hips on the side-to-side machine and spinning the captain’s wheel like the other gray hairs around here. We tried to enjoy it.

The path we exercised next to led to a tourist train that skirted the ocean. The family who stumbled upon three, shirtless, sweating white guys were even more surprised when they asked for directions to the train and were answered in Korean. Between my two friends they have well over 30 years in-country and speak much better Korean than I do.

They’ve both found well-earning careers and seem to feel that living in Korea has been a good move. It’s not without its drawbacks, though. For one, we all deal with a general sense of guilt for not being closer to our aging parents, which is one of the true costs of living internationally. Even if we’re only a day’s journey away from anywhere and there are families on both sides to consider now.

We admired the views from the several lookouts on the way back to the place. Ever since I lived in California as a young man looking out the big water has been edifying. That’s probably because I grew up in a place that couldn’t be more landlocked. The closest ocean is about 1,000 miles from my hometown. I didn’t see the sea until I was 14. The water was calm and unusually clear that day. Like I always do when I’m moved by a view, I started wondering if we could live here.

I love to visit a country’s second city. You get a feel for the country that’s deeper than what the largest, most well-known city offers. Take Barcelona, or Los Angeles, or Beijing as examples. Busan has a character of its own that’s distinctly Korean but feels much different than Seoul. Less urban. Less self-serious. More coastal and laid-back.

On the main strip running perpendicular to the boardwalk, we found a place that served pizza, Texas barbecue, and Mexican food. The general rule is if a restaurant is doing all the things they are probably doing none of them well. But the barbacoa, pollo, and birria with consommé tacos tasted even better because of the setting. Add good street tacos to the list of things I never thought I’d be eating in Korea when I first came here in 2006, when there were so few Western food options you were lucky if you had a Subway sandwich shop in your town.

We spent another afternoon at the beach, the huge apartment towers giving everything a feel of opulence. They weren’t there the first time I came to this city on a visa run to Japan in 2007. On that trip, I had taken the overnight bus from Jeonju and I stayed up all night wandering around until the ferry left for Fukuoka in the morning then rode the Shinkansen — Japan’s version of the KTX — to Osaka. At the time, Haeundae was busy but not built up with shining glass skyscrapers. Now these 100-story LCT buildings gleam in the sun and are large even by Korean standards. Now you can get tacos and craft beer and shots of mescal and the area feels more like Korea’s Waikiki all the time.

This trip ended with a subpar meal of shellfish barbecue — why put shredded cheese on grilled clams? — and more old friends joining us. I knew B. couldn’t really know what it would be like when he saw his daughter for the first time. But I was happy that he was going through this new phase of life. We’re the type of people who like to experience life. We’ve traveled. We’ve lived in foreign countries. Why not have the ultimate experience of raising a child?

I left at noon the next day and about six hours later I was back in Ilsan, already missing the ocean.

2.

Two weeks later, Nammin, Jia, halmoni (Jia’s grandmother), and I loaded the Mohave with our beach gear and braved the roads at 6 a.m. to visit Nammin’s sister and her family, who moved to Busan three months ago. Our route mercifully took us around the east side of Seoul, avoiding the worst of the megalopolis’s traffic. We drove along the north bank of the Han River for a distance, a stretch with a dramatic vista — wide water and green mountains — before turning south.

Rest stops are a highlight of any car or bus trip here. The small malls often have a food court, coffee shops, a convenience store, a gas station and street-stall-style vendors selling roasted potatoes, tater tot corn dogs, and a bunch of other food that isn’t good for you but is great for a road trip. We hit one about halfway, near Chungju, picking up milk tea and red bean pastries, then cruised down the rest of the way to the coastal district of Ilgwang, arriving in less than five hours.

The remnants of a typhoon left the sky unsettled. Clouds drifted through and collided. The rain meant no beach that day. We instead went to a seafood kalguksu restaurant made famous for serving the noodle soup in 31-centimeter diameter bowls. The broth was clear and the shellfish tasted of clean ocean brine.

Nammin’s brother-in-law and nephew wanted to take surf lessons, so the next day we went one beach down to Songjeong, deemed the “birthplace of Korean surfing.” A hardcore international surfer might scoff at this: the conventional wisdom has long been there are no waves in Korea. I used to think that, too.

I’ve been proven wrong before. See also: The Rockaways. No one told me that you can take the A Train from Brooklyn to a decent, fun surf break before I lived in New York City. But you can, and I did, to my surprise.

So I figured I’d try. At Songjeong, the beach is separated into two areas, one for swimming and one for surfing that rapidly filled with groups taking lessons. But there were waves. Knee-high at a beach break. Don’t know where they came from. Japan to the east blocks any real swell. Nothing great, but still rideable.

I went to one of several surf shops — this one was called Surfholic (someone should count how many businesses and brands in Korea have “holic” as a suffix) — to rent a board, leash, and wetsuit for 30,000 Korean won ($22) for the day. The guys behind the counter, who had already perfected the chilled-out vibe of surfshop workers that’s universal across the globe, said I could just find the stack of boards down on the beach with the Surfholic logo on them and grab one. I suited up and picked up a 9-foot foamie on the honor system. The kind of thing that you can do in a society where people don’t commit petty theft.

I paddled out into the most crowded lineup I’ve ever experienced. A solid bunker of softtop boards and wetsuited Koreans. Most of the crowd was just floating in the whitewater. Many of them were so close to shore that they were standing next to their boards, bobbing in the shallow water as they waited for their surf instructor to give them a push. Only a few were actually competing for the waves.

The scene carried a high potential for a bad accident — people who not only weren’t familiar with the breakers, but weren’t sure how to get out of the way. I went out farther, and with each wave I went for I looked up and had nowhere to go.

Cutting that session short, I went back to the group and found B. had joined us, this time with his wife, who was carrying her pregnancy with strength and grace. She looked healthy, strong, and I felt good about what was happening with them. We went up the street for lunch at Ssup Burger. Korea has gotten adept at making scratch hamburgers and there are excellent examples all over the country. This was no exception, and with a great view of the ocean.

I hoped that the herd in the surf corral would thin out as the day went on, but nothing doing. B. and I threw the football again — this time with an onlooker who seemed to have never seen the pigskin fly. I tried to keep my spiral tight. We had baby gifts for the couple — little Tom’s shoes and Uniqlo onesies and it seemed like a lifetime ago that Jia was that small.

We had her at the peak of the pandemic in Lakewood, Colorado, in 2021, then moved to another town and another house and I started a new job and Nammin went back to work. Now Jia’s 3 and speaking Korean and we’re in South Korea and I have another new job. “It goes fast” is a platitude that everyone says about parenting and we had heard so many times, and there we were, saying it, too.

The afternoon wore on and I had all but given up on the crowd dispersing. Then, right at 6 p.m., the men in orange shirts started blowing their whistles at the people swimming, waving them into shore, and the guys at the surf shops ran down with their boards. The entire break, not just the pen, opened up to surfing and paddleboarders.

I know a golden-hour-free-for-all when I see one, so I paddled out again, this time far from the surf schoolers. In that moment I could have been anywhere. California on a poor wave day, the Rockaways on a slightly less bad day — anywhere with small waves and only a few surfers to share them with. My understanding is that the rules about who can do what and where end when the summer vacation period is over, kids go back to school, and the tourists go elsewhere. I can’t wait to find out if that’s true. I caught a couple of rides that failed to knock the long-accumulated rust all the way off.

The next day we went up to Jinha Beach in Ulsan, another area that’s trying to develop as a surf spot. That day we might as well have been at a lake. Once the fog burned off, Jia’s favorite part was playing in her uncle’s inflatable canoe on the calm water. Revelers roared past on jet skis and banana boats as a slight breeze pushed wind and kite surfers around. We walked down to the end of the swimming beach and found another bay where there were dozens of people laying on soft top surf boards, taking lessons even though the swell had disappeared. We started talking about the next time we could come back.

ILSAN, South Korea — We weren’t sure if we could do this move because of our dog. In fact, moving here with Alfie — who according to a genetic test is part Alaskan malamute, part Siberian husky and a smaller part border collie, with a few other breeds mixed in — was one of the most difficult parts in terms of logistics. Mostly because of how big he ended up getting.

When we adopted him from the humane society animal shelter in Nebraska eight years ago, he was just a little white puppy, about 3 months old, and we thought we were getting a husky. We got more malamute than Husky. Today he weighs about 90 pounds. Much larger than a typical purebred husky.

Because of his size we had to fly him in manifest cargo via Lufthansa similar to how a racehorse or other exotic animal is transported. If he was smaller we could have put him in the cargo hold of several other airlines and flown together. Instead, he flew to Germany, where he was checked out at the vet clinic Lufthansa operates at the Frankfurt airport, then he flew again. To arrange all of this, we hired a pet-shipping service, paid a lot of money for his flight, dog crate, and pre-approval vet appointments. “There’s Alfie the world traveler again,” the vet techs started staying because they saw him so often.

Despite our high level of anxiety, he made it safe and sound. It was a huge relief when he showed up in a white panel van in Ilsan, looking a little tired but otherwise happy to see us. Dogs are remarkably resilient animals, and I’ve learned that the most important thing for him is that he’s close to his owners.

This suburb of Seoul is considered to be one of the most dog-friendly areas in all of Korea. And there are a lot of dogs here, most of them small. Every morning first thing I walk Alfie a mile one way to a good-size, forested dog park where there are often a few bigger dogs, including several of Korea’s national dog, the Jindo. Alfie does his business, then we walk back among the cyclists, the runners, and people who are practicing a surprising, new-to-me trend of walking on dirt paths barefoot.

For his nighttime walk, there’s a pedestrian path and an open park-like area with benches where several dog owners gather most evenings with golden retrievers, black labs, a few huskies, and a smattering of small dogs, including the ever-present “It” dog — the Maltese-toy poodle mix. I’ve seen more Maltipoos in the last two months than I’ve seen in my entire life.

But even in this area where there seems to be some tolerance for dogs and their owners, it’s much different than living in the U.S. And it’s light years away from Colorado, where everyone seems to have a dog, and most people have several, including giant breeds like Great Danes and Saint Bernards.

Since we moved to Korea, Alfie has been getting the most walks of his life. More even than when he was a puppy and we lived in a loft apartment in downtown Denver. I’m averaging well over 10,000 steps a day, and so is Nammin, and we’re mostly walking him separately. All that time on the trail has gotten him a lot of exposure to the neighborhood.

Some people around here seem to really love him. Nammin said she’s overheard a few of the neighbor ladies saying, “There goes the handsome dog again.” And when we’re all out together with Jia in the stroller and it’s a full-on family outing the picture seems benign. Of course Alfie is a gentle, well-behaved boy. Look at the 3-year-old girl he’s walking with.

But when it’s just me, the tall-ish foreign white guy, I get different reactions. Alfie’s always on a leash, and he walks straight ahead. He doesn’t veer toward people. He’s not curious about other dogs. (Cats, though, he’d drag me into the street to chase.) So he’s not an active threat, at least in my opinion.

People of a certain age don’t see it like that. They go out of their way to move off the path to avoid walking past him. I’ve had older women step into the street, traffic or not. They’ve vocalized their disgust at seeing him. They say he scares them. I feel bad that he’s frightening the old ladies, but I don’t know what to say. He’s not interested in them at all.

There was one slight moment of comedy when an fairly stout looking middle-aged man was running down the path and overcorrected at the sight of my dog, tripped over a short wall, and somersaulted in the grass. I slowed down to check on him and he seemed fine. I would have liked to have known why he was so scared but the language barrier. We continued on.

The younger generations seem to love Alfie. Especially when we’re all together. They’ll come up to him and take his picture and ask to pet him. They seem genuinely interested in him just as the cuddly, happy dog he is. There’s something to be learned here about how we get more fearful with age.

Before we decided to move here we had a lot of discussions about what we would do with him. We talked through leaving him with friends who have a dog that Alfie loves; we discussed asking my parents to care for him on their farm; neither were ever really an option. He’s part of our family. I love having him here, even if I’m wearing out my hard-to-find-size-12 shoes at a rapid clip, and there’s about one interaction a day where someone acts like he’s going to eat them. He belongs with us.

PORTLAND, Oregon — I’m writing from the 6th floor of the Hyatt Regency, and the words aren’t coming that easily. I’m up very early as I always am now. From the window the sky is gloomy, dark, and cold. The forecast is for a 90% chance of rain, and it’s that way for days.

I’m here for a company-wide retreat. The corporation I work for brings everyone together once a year in a different city, and for some reason they chose in Portland in January. I look north over the Oregon Convention Center out on a gray city that meant a lot to me at one time in my life.

About 15 years ago some of my best friends got here first, and I joined them. We had an idea of a scene full of artists living in one place because it was where we all wanted to be. The rent was cheap enough. You could get by without a car. And the city felt alive with creativity and possibility.

Yes, it was depressing in the winter, most places are, and a lot of people had SAD lamps, but the writing and the books and music and the good beer were supposed to be enough to get us through. That was the idea I bought into. I wasn’t here long enough to tap too deeply into all of that — Asia called me back again before a year passed — but I can remember my days here vividly, with fondness, even if that city I knew then is gone.

Places never stay the same, do they? I returned about five years ago, on a reporting assignment to write about the cannabis industry in Oregon, and I tried to go back to some of my favorite bars, including Hal’s on Morrison, which I loved because it was a true working-class joint, complete with alcoholic regulars and a no-bullshit atmosphere. The type of bar you still see in Nebraska. That time, I walked right inside and it was like I entered a portal to a future I didn’t want — carefully crafted ambiance, white tablecloths, and candles on little tables. Fake. Pretentious. Completely ruined.

When I think of the word gentrification it’s not often that I think of poor white people being pushed out by richer white people. In places like Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where I lived after I lived in Portland (after another stint in Korea), the gentrification was more obviously racial. You could see it just by looking at the people. A historically Black neighborhood was being occupied by white hipsters. Here it was white-on-white displacement. More subtle. Just as sad. The tech money pushed out the artists, and the city I knew had disappeared. I went back to Denver thinking I wouldn’t ever have another reason to come back to Portland.

But here I am, looking out at this city and thinking about those Traveling Days again.

Yesterday, in the way that moments like this develop on work trips, I was sitting at lunch in a convention center room, eating catered food from a plate that turned into a buffet-like mess of mixed meals. When the SEO Guru (not a term I love, but I’m not naming anyone here) at my table said he was hoping to get over to Powell’s Bookstore, and I was looking at a solid block of session content that didn’t apply to me at all, I said we should go together right now.

We went back to the hotel where I ditched my laptop and my badge in my room, then took an Uber over the Burnside Bridge. I was glad to have escaped the conference to at least get a look around.

For many years people have held up Portland as an example of how “liberal politics have destroyed a city,” and from that characterization you expect to see tent encampments and people shooting up and defecating on every sidewalk. Antifa lighting fires in the street. This was a quick trip, but I didn’t see that. There were a few street folks outside of the bookstore that asked for a couple of bucks when I stopped to take a photo of the iconic sign. The street scene seemed like many other cities in America. Not great, but not the Zombie Apocalypse either.

We went in and I split for the Small Press wall, where two of Adam Gnade’s books, This is the End of Something But It’s Not the End of You and The Internet Newspaper, were faced out and displayed prominently. Here, Adam is the king of the independent press world, and he deserves the prominence. The attention is partially thanks to the great Kevin Sampsell, who is a champion of Adam’s writing, and indie writers in general, but it’s also because Adam puts in the work, and he’s getting better all the time. He writes books that strive to show what it’s like to be alive during our times. He’s my favorite writer, and I’m proud to call him a friend.

I also found books by Trident Press authors Noah Cicero, Nick Gregario, Claire Hopple, and Mason Parker, as well as a copy of my novella The Silence is the Noise. I pulled all of their books and faced them out so smart people would buy them. That idea came from Nicole Morning when I texted our writer’s group pictures of the books. “Guerilla Trident Display!” Adam had responded.

After that, we didn’t have a lot of time, so I went to the children’s book section and got Jia an Eric Carle boxed set with titles we didn’t already have.

Back in an Uber across the Willamette River, I told the SEO Guru about the time I lived here and worked at a restaurant that floated on pylons on the river. I had just arrived and wanted to work, and it was an easy way to make money and stay busy.

When we passed what’s now called the Moda Center, I told him about the day I found out Bob Dylan was in town after I showed up at work. I told my manager I had something I wanted to do, and he said, “Sure, get out of here. We can cover for you.” I hopped back on my bike and took off.

That was back when the arena was called the Rose Garden, and Robert Zimmerman was singing about looking for Alicia Keys in his Tom Waits voice. He was playing songs from Modern Times, including “Spirit on the Water,” which has the sneering line:

You think I’m over the hill

You think I’m past my prime

Let me see what you got

I remembered all that freedom to do anything. Live anywhere. Spend my time going wherever I wanted. Traveling Days, indeed.

Back at the hotel, we went to our separate floors, and I didn’t talk to the SEO Guru again on the trip. I knew I’d see him on a Teams call in a few weeks.

That night it was the ’80s party at Revolution Hall, an old school that had been converted into a concert venue with several bars. It was only a few blocks from my old apartment on Morrison, and I stood on the rooftop in the freezing drizzle and looked for some building that I might remember, some way to reconnect myself to my past and this city. But the only way I knew I was looking in the right direction was by checking the way the blue cone faced on my Google Maps location dot.

It almost felt like I was in a dream where people were telling me that I was in a place that I should remember but nothing looked familiar.

There was a cover band and face painting and a photo booth. I wore a Care Bears T-shirt that said, “Careful, I’m Grumpy” with Love-a-Lot Bear trying to console Grumpy Bear on it. People were dressed up like Hulk Hogan and Madonna and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One group was dressed up as the actual Care Bears.

Not drinking at a work conference might be the toughest test of my sobriety. There’s a lot of exhausting networking and hanging out with co-workers you don’t know that well. People see this as time away from family to do what they want. No kids to take care of in the morning. No spouse to monitor your drinking. Booze on the company dime. Some don’t handle it that well.

That all makes it tempting to fall in with the fun crowd and see where the night ends up. I’ve never been very good at moderation, and I love the feeling of getting swept up in a crowd and drinks and even better if it’s a mix of people you would never find yourself around in your other life. It’s almost like you’re traveling to a new place with people you don’t really know, on a strange trip. Why not keep yourself open to the possibilities?

Why not? Because in actuality it’s not that kind of trip at all, and getting carried away mixing work and pleasure is a bad look. For clarity, I’m not some kind of careerist, overly ambitious shithead trying to keep my image and reputation spotless. I’m just trying not to mess up.

The pledge I made when I decided to become a dad was to always be there for Jia, either home or traveling, whether it’s on the phone or in the morning, or any time at all. I want her to know that I won’t be drunk or in any way unavailable at any time. It has to be a choice I make for her every minute. It has to be a choice to live in reality. To remember everything. To feel everything. I owe her at least that.

At the risk of sounding like a soft-minded company stooge, I did come away from the conference inspired in one specific way, and it came from an unlikely source.

Let me backup a little bit. I don’t have a core, guiding philosophy I follow, but I believe in the Stoic principle that we don’t control everything that happens in our lives, we control how we react to what happens in our lives. And even though a lot of what we were doing on this trip was absurd and self-congratulatory in a comical way, one presentation in particular resonated with me.

It was a talk themed around the idea that the culture of the company should be based on a “growth mindset.” I know, I know — what is this? A LinkedIn post? But hear me out. I’m sure this is a buzzy term in the business world that gets thrown around a lot, but the speaker’s message got at something I’ve been thinking about in my career as a writer and someone who considers himself a creative person. A part of the talk was about how we shouldn’t be afraid to fail, to fail quickly, and to move on. That we should try to build things that may not be perfect but are still good. That we should move fast and not over-think it.

That idea is what I need to remember when I want to hold on to something like a novel manuscript and not let anyone read it because I’m afraid of what people will say.

One more idea around this: When I got back home, I was reading the journalism newsletter that James Durston puts out, and he helped articulate what I was thinking and feeling about the creative process that was spurred by that talk. Durston wrote:

Do not wait. Do not plan for perfection. Those circumstances are idyllic and rare, perhaps impossible. There will always be an excuse, a distraction, another thing. Make the first mark, and make it badly. Envision the imperfect, loosely structured ugliness of the first attempt, and aim for its heart. Creation is a process not an end. The result isn’t up to you. Quality is for others to debate. You must simply make. Produce. Allow your being to show itself. Be true. Be busy. Success and failure do not exist. Only process. Only production. Make, produce and create like one day you will die.

Some other stuff happened on that trip that I probably shouldn’t write about because I work for a publicly traded company, and I need health insurance. Not that someone from the SEC is going to read this, but still.

I also want to write a novel called The Trade Show because these conferences are deeply weird experiences that at once leave me feeling drained and at the same time hopeful about people. Most of us wouldn’t meet or know each other in non-work lives. We’re thrust into these situations, and it’s somehow uplifting that we all help each other through these strange events by being kind and human. I’d like to put that in a novel, and I’ll save the stories I can’t tell here for that.

As I look out on this city that I loved once, I’m thinking about how when I was younger so much of my writing was connected to hope, to promise, to the future, to how I thought in my 20s that putting the words down was enough, would be enough, to get me where I wanted to go. So much of my motivation and my creativity came from that thinking.

And now, 20 years later, I’m in a hotel room, alone, putting these words down knowing that the writing I’ve done these two decades has gotten me here, and only here. Is it far enough?

No. I have the feeling I’ll go the rest of my life and never feel like I’ve gotten where I wanted to go. Is that a blessing for a writer? To never feel satisfied? To always feel like you’re striving to arrive? Who’s to say that getting a novel published by a major imprint would be the dream I really want? What if the reviews are bad? Or it doesn’t sell?

Would getting what I want, only to find it wasn’t what I wanted at all, be worse?

I’m having all these thoughts and I don’t even have the excuse of hotel-room anxiety from a hangover.

One thing that did happen recently that made me feel good about my career was getting interviewed by the travel writer

Rolf Potts

. Rolf’s a legend in the travel-writing world, and last year he included an excerpt from this essay about reverse culture shock that I wrote for The Week in his book The Vagabond’s Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel. He sent me some questions about writing that I enjoyed answering.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

How did you get started traveling?

I’ve always been a reader, and when I started reading novels about real people going to far away places, I wanted to live that way as well. Much like you, Rolf, my life as a traveler truly began when I first taught English in South Korea, where I ended up living for five years. That opened up the entire continent of Asia to me, and I saw as much of it as I could while I was there. My wife is from the Seoul area, so we still get back there fairly often, and I try to fit in a trip to another country when I can. We were on Phu Quoc, in Vietnam, for example, for a week last year as part of our trip to Korea.

You can read the rest here.