A "talentless, misguided d******d" attempts to make being "Welsh & desperate" seem "sexy" against the backdrop of a global pandemic.
The Main Character (Welsh, Virgo, ENTP, emo, 32, M) spends the 2010s living the decadent neo-colonialist lifestyle of an English-as-a-Foreign-Language teacher while pursuing grandiose delusions of becoming a generation-defining best-selling author.
Freelance gigs writing copy for a cryptocurrency news website & American real estate company fund his freedom from the modest chains of a job with 4 months holiday at a Korean uni to pursue the workshy millennial ideal of life as a digital nomad.
January 2020 is spent necking soju in Seoul, huffing balloons in Ho Chi Minh, touring temple complexes & Khmer Rouge torture sites in Cambodia, etc., as news spreads of a novel new virus.
A month in Wales becomes months and months and etc. of escalating and easing lockdowns, marathon video chats, Valleys bike rides & ticket-free train travel, socially-distanced booze & weed sessions, and legally-questionable house and shed visits with his Dad & the Boys, mental disequilibrium fuelling an obsession with writing something which matters: a book saying something about The World in the 2020s, to fulfil his dominant goal of becoming a best-profiting prophet, internally conflicted by the contradiction of self-publishing pseudo-revolutionary literature to enrich himself & establish himself to the word processor as Jack Kerouac was to the typewriter: the Welsh Irvine Welsh, the broke Bret Easton Ellis, the homebound Hunter S Thompson, penning Fear & Loathing in the Living Room: a Tao Lin-eclipsing autofictional Voice of His Generation.
hiraeth [n.] [Welsh] an intense sense of longing for your homeland.
HIRAETH. [alt] [ALL CAPS.] an existential moron's lockdown novel; Proust-like chronicling of life during a once-in-a-century viral outbreak - novel autofiction exploiting the millions dead from a novel virus to bring its author closer to enablement of his delusions than ever before.
