Chapter 4 — Cinematic moments
It’s Autumn 2015, and I’m watching my buddy’s horse run in an unsanctioned winner-takes-all race on a farm outside Oaxaca City. The horses thunder down the quarter mile of red dirt track towards the finish line. A few dozen spectators watch from their pickup trucks, beers in hand. The sun bakes down. ‘This is like a movie,’ I think. I’m not sure who the main character is, or what happens at the end, but it’s a moment. I had many such moments in Mexico. Witnessing a shooting in a bar, haggling with vendors at the weekly market that brought half the state to my little backwater town, riding through the mangroves, past a crocodile farm to an isolated surf beach. Drugs. Dances. Day of the Dead. Every day, s…
Chapter 4 — Cinematic moments
It’s Autumn 2015, and I’m watching my buddy’s horse run in an unsanctioned winner-takes-all race on a farm outside Oaxaca City. The horses thunder down the quarter mile of red dirt track towards the finish line. A few dozen spectators watch from their pickup trucks, beers in hand. The sun bakes down. ‘This is like a movie,’ I think. I’m not sure who the main character is, or what happens at the end, but it’s a moment. I had many such moments in Mexico. Witnessing a shooting in a bar, haggling with vendors at the weekly market that brought half the state to my little backwater town, riding through the mangroves, past a crocodile farm to an isolated surf beach. Drugs. Dances. Day of the Dead. Every day, something wild. Almost every experience in my three years living in Oaxaca was worthy of writing about. Writers must fill their tank with inspiration (as well as tequila and salsa picante). It’s a feeling - that kernel of an idea stored in the vault of your mind. I collected years worth of material from my travels through Latin America. In Oaxaca, I had the best job of my life. I was teaching English to university students. While I wasn’t very successful in getting them to say much other than ‘teeeeaaacher...’ and ‘may I go bathroom?’, there were many advantages to the job: 👌Creative freedom in lesson planning. 👌Several free hours a day to write my blog. 👌Copious amounts of tacos. The university staff comprised a host of pompous Mexican professors teaching nutrition, nursing, and municipal planning; the students were naive rural kids who were more likely to have studied Pokemon than Potemkin. Still, lessons were fun, and I tried not to be pretentious, even insisting the class called me Phil instead of ‘teeeaaacherrrr’ (which took away 50% of their vocabulary). Some of my teaching colleagues were authors and bloggers too. We had A LOT of free time. We jotted down many observations about life in the town, our travels, and our work. My blog, Tall Travels, softened a little. It became a site for cultural commentary as well as travel stories. I was processing life, crunching the data, and refining the output. And later, the seeds of those cinematic moments grew into the stories of my first book. The next year, I moved to Spain and called myself a writer for the first time. That was when the real work started. #unphiltered