A More Distant Perspective

I'm Back...But Politics Isn't

“You live in Costa Rica, but you haven’t left the U.S.

This year’s month of May was coming to an end. The “Dry” season in this region of Costa Rica had a firm grip on life. There hadn’t been a drop of rain in nearly half a year and we were eagerly awaiting the first clouds that would signal the coming of the “Green” season. It’s hard to imagine that the place we live is simultaneously a desert, a jungle, and a glorious beach-lined bay on the Pacific Ocean. But, that’s exactly what it is.

It was around five o’clock in the morning and I was feverishly typing away on one of my Distant Perspective posts. I was likely imploring you to pay attention to some inescapable fact about a politician or government agency that was being over-looked by the “media”. Perhaps I was telling you how some issue was going to play out, long before the “media” woke up to the facts. Whatever it was, I felt it was important enough to get out of bed and finish the post, so I could send it to you in time to read with your morning coffee. My Monday, Wednesday, Friday publishing schedule was turning my column into a job, rather than the fun dissertations for the hell of it that I had planned to write.

That’s when the defining moment came. Carmen (my wonderful, insightful and direct-speaking wife) listened quietly as I read aloud the passage I had been working on. Rather than offer her thoughts about my carefully crafted prose, she simply said, “You live in Costa Rica, but you haven’t left the U.S.”

She was as right as the tiny rain cloud that was trying to make it’s presence known in our blue sky. After a few years of life in Costa Rica, the writing of my commentary had drawn my mind back to The United States. I was ravenously watching CNN, sometimes even Fox. I was scouring the online editions of legitimate newspapers and magazines. I was scavenging internet repositories of true knowledge (There are some, yes). I was hitting those publishing deadlines with the split-second timing I had used in my life as a network television journalist. I was back on the job.

A few days later, after digesting Carmen’s sage observation, I penned the last couple of commentaries that told you I was bowing out, but that maybe I would be back someday. I published my last column on May 31 of this year. My body was already here in Costa Rica, and I finally packed up my brain and brought it down, too.

I didn’t stop writing, though. In fact, the opposite is true. Being a writer is exactly how I had always planned to spend my retirement. During my working career, I was always too busy shooting, writing and editing documentary scripts and news stories to be able to write for fun. For decades, I told myself that I would write novels and whatever else I felt like writing when I retired. The five books I have for sale on Amazon, along with the 79 Distant Perspective columns I wrote (This one makes it an even 80), make it clear that I have lived up to that goal.

Although I haven’t published anything since that last day of May, the writing persists. I have continued to wear the keys shiny on my overworked MacBook (Of course it’s a Mac!)

[WARNING!: Now, you are going to experience what is called a “Time Shift” in the vernacular of the visual industries. More commonly, it is known as a “Flashback”.]

Last December, as I released the most recent of my books, I got thinking that my little beach town was filled with lots of musicians and artists and other creative people. I can’t be the only writer here, I thought to myself. On a whim, looking for like-minded devotees to the written word, I published a notice on a Facebook chat for folks who live in my area. I’m starting a group for writers to gather and talk about writing, I posted. A flurry of responses told me that I might be on to something.

Our first meeting consisted of Carmen, myself, and Mike, another writer I already knew. But, from that seed, the group grew to four, then five, then six, and sometimes as many as ten people.

[Time Shift back to today.]

We are within sight of the one-year milestone for the Tamarindo Writers’ Group, and it is going strong. We have documentarians, journalists, poets, bloggers, novelists, Hollywood film makers, illustrators, even a ballerina within our membership. We now have our own Facebook page.

It’s working. Members of The Tamarindo Writers’ Group are currently working on proposals for movies and television streaming series. Mike, thanks to the urging of the group, has dusted off a novel he began writing years ago, and has begun pouring fresh words into it. New books are being written. New blogs posts are being generated all the time. We are preparing to perform public readings of some of our works. We are inspiring each other to continue to write and create. I have even been inspired to try my hand at poetry, which is a very distant perspective from the reality-based work of my life.

So, when Mike and I got together at the beach a few days ago, he urged me to resurrect Distant Perspective. It was a thought that had begun percolating in my head a few weeks earlier, and Mike’s nudge was all I needed to make it happen.

So, Distant Perspective is back, but it will not be the same. The time away has taken my thoughts to an even more distant perspective than I had before. My observations are going to be more centered on what it is to be a human on this wonderful planet of ours. I am more likely to write from a stream of consciousness than from a stream of news coverage. Just exactly what that means is something we will explore together.

That’s not to say that the new, more Distant Perspective will be filled with fluffy words as airy as the clouds. I intend for my writings to be worth the time you invest in reading them. I will certainly delve into modern life and the issues surrounding it from time to time. But I will also share random little stories, some of my budding poetry, or anything else that urges me to write.

What I will not do, is delve into U.S. politics any longer. After this and the next paragraph, I will be finished with the topic. I really only have one more thing to say about it: Character is the most important quality a leader can have. Character is the only thing they have. Their “ideas” or “plans” or statements about “What I will do on Day One” are all vapid words of no value that will be forgotten the second you cast your vote. The only thing the elected person will carry forward into the job is their character. I personally watched six presidents do their job from the perspective of The White House Press Corps, which is as close as you can get without being a part of the president’s staff. Every day changes every thing and the best laid plans always change. But the character of the leader stays the same.

To that end, NO Felony Convict who is awaiting sentencing on 34 felony counts, AND is also awaiting trial on dozens more criminal counts that include numerous charges as serious as “Obstruction of Justice”, AND has been found guilty of sexual assault, business fraud and an endless string of other fraudulent activities, is a person of strong moral character. This is a person whose moral character is as bankrupt as the uncountable companies he has run into the ground in his nefarious career as a con man. Character matters. If you can’t see that on your own, my words won’t help you. The subject is closed.

Exactly what my Distant Perspective will deliver to your inbox on a more random basis, well, I can’t say for sure. We will just make it up as we go along and figure it out together.