Tag: LA

I Want To Go To NYC Sometime Soon In Honor Of My 50th Birthday

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m pretty much a starving artist at the moment so it definitely looks as though my upcoming 50 birthday is going to be extremely uneventful. It will come and go without any thing of note happening. I will note, however, that it was my 31st year, not my 30th that was Big for me — I went to South Korea the summer of my 31st birthday.

As such, I’m trying not to be too hard on myself for being a broke ass motherfucker. At some point this year, I’d like to take a quick trip up to New York City. What I really want to do, of course, is return to Seoul for about two weeks.

But that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

And, yet, I do hope to return to Seoul one last time before I drop dead. There are very few expats still in Seoul from my time there, so I could pretty much jump right in and stir up trouble in the expat community without anyone realizing who they were dealing with.

The question, of course, is when that visit might happen. At the moment — I just don’t know. And, really, the world is so big that I probably shouldn’t limit myself to just visiting Seoul. But I have a very strong personal attachment to Seoul.

Ideally, I would do a round robin of East Asia, starting in Tokyo, then flying over to South Korea then finally going down to Southeast Asia before flying back home. That’s the dream, at least.

But, of course, a lot is going to have to change for such things to happen. If I managed to write a breakout first novel then, yeah, I might be able to return to Asia. For the time being, though, just being able to visit New York City again for a weekend would be pretty cool.

There remains a part of me that is idly interested in visiting not New York City or Seoul, but LA. It would be a lot of fun to see if my hunch that I have a very LA personality would pan out the way I think. I think I’m probably be willfully delusional on that front, but I am, as the late Annie Shapiro said, “a delusional jerk with a good heart.”

So, lulz.

I do have a little bit of a hunch that Something Big is going to happen to me later in life. Of course, some of that is just me being my usual delusional self, but I do know my personality and skillset well enough to know that I might manage to pull off a third “hat trick” of some sort.

Only time will tell exactly what that hat trick might ultimately be.

V-Log: Dwelling On My Recent Trip To #NYC, While Eyeing A Trip To #LA

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I went to NYC recently and had a blast. In this V-log, I talk about what I did as well as my thoughts on maybe going to LA soon as well.

Mulling A Trip To Miami Beach Or L.A. & A Tech Problem Needing To Be Solved

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

My birthday is coming up and I am mulling different places I could go to “celebrate.” I think it’s possible I’ve come to the conclusion that what I want is a relaxing few days of sitting near a beach in my swimming trunks, watching hot chicks in string bikinis walk past. I was thinking about going to Austin for no other reason than I know someone who lives there, but after giving it some thought, I realize I probably would pretty bored. Austin, while great, is a little too much like Richmond for my tastes and I want somewhere hot, wet and exotic. L.A. is cool because it’s got great weather right now, but it’s so enormous that I don’t know how much fun it might be if I went there without someone to hang out with.

What I really want is to make new friends, eat Korean food and sing in a Korean singing room. But it seems as though that is nearly impossible. There’s just no way to meet strangers in a city without hookers getting involved. It’s a sad state of affairs when basic human interaction is so atomized that you can’t meet new people without people demanding money or something else from you.

So, as I keep suggesting, this a problem that if you could fix it with an app, you probably could make a lot of money. There is no single app that does what I want — help me make new friends. I want a location based app that if I was at a bar, I would see other people were using the app and, maybe, I could send them a video message as an ice breaker. As it stands, I’m going to fly into Miami not knowing anyone and simply sit on the beach and watch hot chicks walk by in bikinis. That’s if everything goes according to plan, and it may not.