Costa Rica Baby
Yuck. And I know better, being a bit of a massage connoisseur, not to book 90 minutes with a masseuse you aren't familiar with. If things go sideways, you can live with 60 minutes - most times it's just a lack of pressure or understanding of the body. But, ignoring all past experiences, with vacation brain firing away (meaning no brain activity detected) I found a random spot and booked a 90 minute one for a few hours later.
Nobody likes the word 'juicy', in most contexts. Like moist, for whatever reason, that's just not a word people rally around. But this woman who never kneaded a muscle with more strength than an 8 year old could muster was lathering me up with squirt (not a crowd favorite either) after squirt of 'oil', just running off of me. Ick, gross, and then her not massaging me but just rubbing me over and over. Ugh, the worst ever, and of course I should have just got up and left but I was like I'm here I might as well get a rub down since I'm already all involved - but tedious, little pleasure, and sort of gross. And she didn't speak a lick of English. Im in a surf town named Jaco.
But, Costa Rica...
In Costa Rica, a naturalist’s paradise. Woke up to the loudest cacophony of sound coming from the thick jungle in Southern Costa Rica - if ever a moment was ripe and true for the word ‘cacophony’, a morning in the jungle is it. A wall of sound, of all sorts including I guess a 'screaming monkey'. It died down after I’m not sure how long, and then pretty quiet all day. I’m wondering if the early evening feeding time will present another round. Judging from what I’m hearing right now at 5:24pm, Monday, possibly. Sounds of all sorts. Hundreds of competing birdsong, from the pretty, to the obnoxious, to the harmonic to the demonic.
Took a couple mile hike up a steep jungle path each morning and really made me think of that book I read back in Africa about Livingston and Stanley, and the frickin’ jungle they had to cross in modern day Tanzania. I kept looking at the size of the brush and undergrowth and imagining trying to get a convoy through, and I kept imagining wondering what was lurking just out of site ready to leap. Those guys were literally crazy to be doing shit like that. Animals, bandits, disease, the natives. It’s hot here, for sure, but in the shade not so bad - a little breeze there and here, a ceiling fan a blessing. I’m stationed on a bay (Golfito) about 4 hours south of Jaco. It’s pretty remote. A lot of people go to the northwest Pacific coast toward Nicaragua. I’m in the south, toward Panama. I was going to hop around a bunch, but after a day of chilling, I think I’m reducing my moving about plans pretty much to zero.
I'm in Costa Rica for 7 days, and then St Pete's checking in on my condo construction for 3 days. The condo was supposed to be done a year or so ago (so unprofessional- (tongue in cheek)), or so I was told when I signed up back in early 2021. While frustrating a bit out of principle and a guy who believes in timelines, in reality, it worked out better since last year was a shitshow of crisis after crisis to keep me busy. I'm more ready this year, and nothing changes the fact that I got in really early, like really early, and I'm probably sitting on a few large in appreciation before I step in the door of the top floor corner unit. That happens, and is happening in our projects too - the people in first get the best deal. Makes sense - more risk I suppose, and sales beget sales (not to get old-testament biblical on ya where Abraham begets Peter begets Sarah begets Amos begets Shrek....).
Anyways, back to Costa Rica. Landed in San Jose, rented a truck since I had a feeling I'd be off-roading, and drove 4+ hours south in this Central American country.
Forgive me, I wrote some of this two days ago and now I can't keep straight what I've already written about.
I chilled, but I had the wrong impression that one can just turn a switch off after 16 hour high stress workday for weeks if not months on end and be relaxed. And the forced 'screen free march' just made it worse. So by day two I got over myself and engaged with the work world a bit which relieved the pressure a bit.
On day two I checked with hotel manager about heading straight west to Drakes Bay and he looked at me like I was sure to fall off the end of the earth. Guess he doesn't get out much. So I took my pick up and within a few miles I was on a dirt road up and down the peaks of Costa Rica with small farms, rusted tin roof houses and like an apparition a young indian girl on horse fording a large stream.
An hour and half later, with a dusty truck, I end up in not quite a town, more an outpost, with some fishing, diving and boat shops. It was out there - this whole area is believed and reputed to be one of the most biological diverse areas of the world. I had no idea. It rains hard for 10 months out of the year.
I showed up around noon, to a dusty town and shops squeezed around a small inlet (think Phoenicia size but with dirt narrow roads, tight turns and an ocean on one side) and poked around for some snorkeling trips, which seemed to be mostly scheduled for the mornings. A little chit chat here and there and I had struck up a deal with a diver to find a boat and driver and off we went snorkeling at an island an hour out into the Pacific. Except he wanted to dive, not snorkel, but I wasn't so sure, so he threw both gear into the boat and off we went.
But not so fast - my boat guide had ordered up some gas, which means someone brings it by motorcycle from somewhere in large plastic gas containers, and just so happened that someone got confused and thought our gas was their gas and so we didn't have any gas, which resulted in a lot of high-intensity conversations in Spanish, small craft in shallow water navigation, and a crowd starting to gather as I'm on a small boat waiting for gas as a melodrama plays out - it matters because the 1 hour out island is 'off limits' after 3 and it was 1:30 and we had an hour out. So you can see the time crunch unfolding.
Anyway, it works itself out, we get our gas, and we head out. We got local pineapple and watermelon and a borrowed knife and eat well on the way out as our trusty driver beelines it to the island you can just barely discern at first, and then slowly comes focus. The guy I'm with wants me to dive, and because I didn't have to sit through a 3 hour class, I was half game, though I'm wary around water ever since I nearly drowned when I was 31 trying to swim across an Adirondacks lake and misjudged the cold and the distance, and only for some strength I summoned from somewhere did I find my way across that body of water blacking out and barely breathing. So that sort of unknowing panic can pop up anytime now when I'm in the water, and once it grips you, it can be quite deadly in and of itself.
So the diver guide threw a tank on me and said 'don't for get to breathe' and then we topped backwards off the boat into the water, into the Pacific Ocean, Nemo-like with it's colorful fish, turtles and even a half dozen sharks about 3 feet long. We were all alone out there and it was pretty glorious.
Headed back to the coast with the sun setting behind us and this very large group of dolphins - 40 or 50 - joining us for some of the way, surfacing and submerging in their arc'ed fluidity.
The humidity is taking its toll on all things paper, my passport included.
Directions from one of the road trips from Golfito to Drakes Bay. Parque Nacional Corcovado is the park with the insane bio diversity.
Really not necessary
This is exactly what I'm talking about, about shit that is completely unnecessary just appearing out of nowhere on any given day. Here's an asshole truck driver taking out 2 utility poles less than a mile from our offices, knocking us out of business for the 2nd straight day with no electric and no internet. Every week it seems like something ridiculous happens that is completely out of the blue, and unrelated to anything expected or ordinary.
This happens as I'm out of town, and we have serious work to do.
Ups and Downs
After suffering through a pretty turbulent 2023, I made it clear to my team that my singular goal was to enter 2024 with a sense stability, and to sustain that consistently through May. It wasn’t a terribly big goal, it didn’t seem like I was asking that much; I certainly believed it was possible. (love flexing the semicolon).
But clearly some God was offended by this quest, and set about to turn my life upside down - again, just like January 2023 - and turn my best laid plans into tiny pieces of confetti blowing in the wind. Just like that, plans disintegrated one by one into nothingness.
And, a lot of the things that needed tending to weren’t even related, so the odds of them all going off the rails in tandem was unlikely, but however unlikely, it happened. Like, it didn’t have to rain several times a week since September - that really takes all the fun out of it, and makes everyone’s work harder, and for some trades, difficult to do well. It was unexpected that I couldn't motivate, cajole, threaten, bully, sweet-talk, bribe a trusted large subcontractor to improve their performance, and had to mid-stream change horses - not fun, stress-free or cheap. I certainly didn’t see the need to restructure and rejigger the office staff, as two vital positions needed weeded, pruned and replanted.
I didn’t expect to sell 6 houses at the same time, either. That may seem like a good thing, which is, but adds a whole new layer of complexity into our day as we onboard and acclimate our new client-partners.
In the end, it’s just as I’ve said before. You gotta have endurance. And you always gotta have some gas in the tank because you just can’t go around driving on empty when you never know when you might need to accelerate through a pressing problem.
So the brain is a funny thing and you can either let it auto-pilot its own path, or you can attempt to tell it where to go, and how to get there. So I’m going to use the next 10 days of vacation to tell it where to go, at least in part by writing, deliberately, where I want it to go.
So I’m leaving for Costa Rica, a place I’m eager to check out. Then to St Pete’s. Will be gone for 11 days or so, so plenty of time to tame the brain. I know in the past, with a concerted effort, it takes a few days for the iphone itch to decline, and the habit of waking early and directing business and operations traffic can and should be put aside if I’m going to do this right, and even screen time on the computer even if it is writing, would be nice to keep to a fair duration.
I do believe why I’ve been ‘following my thoughts’ on the writing front, and I believe it has something to do with a book I just finished named Rings of Saturn, where the writer ambles on foot around northern England and writes about his thoughts, and his thoughts were weaving in and out of ancient England, recent past England, silkworms, castles, battles, tides, cliffs, aristocracy and a lot of completely other related but not really ideas and thoughts. And the structure of the book was similar, with minimal paragraph breaks, few thoughts inside quotations even when they belonged there, and a few other structural oddities that carried you away with him.
I’m doing the same thing now. Journaling. Just need to follow my thoughts into the reservoir of knowledge I have to explore the caves and canals of my meandering and restless brain.
A lot of times I will read a book about the place I’m traveling too, which always struck my son as odd - ‘you are going there, why are you reading about it?’ he say. I haven’t found anything on Costa Rica just yet and trying to decide on which of 2 books to bring - they are quite different, so the selection is important to the tenor and tone of the trip. At the same time, the library work at the Pinchot Estate continues, and there are a lot of travel and ecology books that seem to be centered down around Costa Rica. There doesn’t seem to be a canon of Costa Rica thought and literature to lean into, say like the richness of the African genre.
Well, it worked. Flood the zone with my brain power and accumulated experience and don't stop thinking until the answer appears. It's a distracting process, and probably not that healthy, but time after time when I focus, and I mean really focus, the path forward reveals itself.
This has always been true. The big difference now is that when I arrive at the answer, or decision, I know it's the right one to follow, whereas for the longest time I just had a general hunch. In terms of the my first-ever legal trial, one wrought and forged from principles and boundaries, the die is now cast.
The Writing life
It is interesting, though, thinking about why a tangled client issue is motivating me to write more than say selling $5m of new homes in 3 months to the coolest people around, or rebuilding my office team to a top notch level after a full year of re-jiggering, or raising a great kid, or the new land I’m looking at, or the hundred of other things I do weekly that actually pretty interesting. So, maybe if I continue to write, I’ll figure out why I continue to write about this, but at exact moment, I have no idea. Maybe the newness - the other stuff is sort of old hat. Maybe the mix of personal, business, legal strategy necessitated really sparks my brain. Maybe it’s just the education I’m getting - if I lived closer to a University I’m sure I’d be taking classes all the time. Maybe this is why people become lawyers, because it’s interesting.
Maybe it’s the competition between parties. Maybe it’s the desire to win - I’ve always been very competitive. Maybe it’s because it’s helping me define my boundaries and lines that don’t get crossed after spending 22 years of taking one for the team 15 times a day just to keep the show going, since the show must go on.
I mean, I could easily write many pages full of things I have gratitude for, people I enjoy working with, efforts I’m impressed by, intelligence I’m awed by. My days are filled with people doing great work - which, in one way, is exactly why being treated and spoken to like piece of dog shit on the sidewalk was and always will be a trigger - I know how hard everyone is working. You don’t get to be on my team without being a hard-working SOB who leaves it on the field most days.
I mean, I could also write about all the stupid shit that happens each day, usually a result of someone doing something brainless, or maybe it’s just a result of us moving quickly at all times, or maybe it’s a combination of both. That would be fun, and probably healthy for me to vocalize.
So basically, my writing material is endless. You could say it’s a flaw in my motivation that it’s this issue that gets the writing juices flowing when so much other stuff could and should. But I’m flawed, that’s not news to anyone. A bit of misfit. My thinking is non-linear. I see things others don’t and don’t see what other’s do. I have the rare ability to be operationally proficient and very creative - typically you sacrifice one for the other. These opposing operation and creative talents pull uncomfortably in different directions. Maybe when I’m older I’ll get out of the operations end of things and stay in the creative lane - though, let’s be honest, sounds a little boring, since all the fun is in the operations, where you win, lose, live, die by your decisions and ability to motivate.
It’s funny with writing, or acting, or anything involving stage-craft - it’s just a front. Like right now on the blog I’m flexing the super-confident, hyper-aggressive gladiator, but that’s not really who I am. That’s my writing facade for this space in time. I guess priming the pump to build the audacity and courage to go into this battle with victory in mind. If you think it, you are it.
One thing I’ve learned over the years - and believe me - I’ve learned more in my lifetime than any person should, most of it coming after the age 40 - one thing I’ve learned is how careful you have to be when you find a good tool - be it an assistant, employee, or in this case, lawyer. I remember my first personal assistant/advisor (tangent alert well, this advisor was good, and allowed me to accomplish and pursue many items on my to do list, and some of them weren’t that well thought out, and really weren’t that great of ideas.
So the lesson, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Attorneys. Having a good attorney is important, but having a good attorney who lacks the credibility to advise against an action is dangerous as is one that will chase every stick that is thrown just to show off. Restraint derives from confidence. No action can be more of sign of strength than in-action. One of my most trusted advisors is the lawyer that I use for getting advice on the ups and downs, ins and outs of dealing with my ex-wife and the co-parenting we do. We do a good job together, but it’s not perfect, and on several occasions I contemplated going back to court to have this or that addressed. He never said no, and I think he would have done what I asked if in the end I asked, but in the interim, he lent me his time to listen to my issues and dilemmas, think about them, and walk me through the realities of what I was asking and seeking, and the most likely outcomes. He did it dispassionately, he did it intelligently, and he did it with my best interests in mind.
And in the end, we never pursued any of my family law issues and concerns, since the courtroom is just not a great venue for getting what you want, compared to the costs - personal and financial - of the exercise. Even more so with family law, where you risk blowing up even an imperfect arrangement into something much worse.
