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