January 6th: The Day I ‘Stormed’ the Capitol

or how to play in the mud and like it

This past week so much of the discourse in news media circled around two sides of an argument of a not so distant memory, the anniversary of the former administrations attempt to overthrow an election. While one side seeks to remember the details of the past with video and audio based reality, the other looks to put a silky sheen over that same footage and call it by a different name. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. You could take that old phrase and turn it around to the root of what started all this mess … one man’s protestor is another man’s insurrectionist.

Interesting how after such a short period we can mold the recent past into a frame that best sets our needs today, or do we have the ability to look back and reevaluate our previously conceived notions? I’m an extremely political person but tend to avoid writing on the subject, as I know that mean, mad little voice that emanates in my foggy brain when the subject arises will no doubt grab the wheel and start driving. That’s not what I come here to do, and not what you come here to read … I think.

About six months before he who shall not be named said, “walk this way,” I was sitting in my living room, in the best shape of my life, and about to make a horrible decision. I turned on the news. It was July of 2020, another COVID surge was on the move, and I was moving into what I like to refer to as phase III of my personal pandemic experience (the real PPE). You could also call it a regression to phase I as it went depression, determination, depression. January of 2020 we sold nearly everything we owned and moved to Burbank, CA. We had no jobs, a handful of friends, and belly full of ambition. We were prospecting.

This may sound crazy to most, as it should. But this was the fourth time in our lives that my wife and I decided to lean in to our Gypsy spirit and seek out greener pastures. So, for us, it was just a new decade. Obviously, our timing was a little off.

All that aside, the political climate in the United States was reaching a fever pitch and as a native Southerner living in the land of my fellow liberals, I saw something on the not too distant horizon that really scared the shit out of me. So, on top of many other half baked ideas and late night debates with the Lady, we decided to blow it all up again less than a year later. If we were going to have to live on savings, and everything around us was falling apart, why not do it somewhere amazing?

We sold nearly everything we owned … again. Grabbed a storage facility for the things we couldn’t live without and started our journey as a houseless family of four on the western shores of Costa Rica. It was the craziest thing I had ever done. It also turned out to be the smartest.

We were bleeding our savings in the US. Every method of generating income that we had used in our collective past had been turned off. The world was on fire from the inside, and in the US we had a fox in the hen house. There’s a time in my life where I would have jumped head first into the fray to fight the good fight, but the faces of my children and their potential futures were all I could think about.

On the anniversary of the insurrection attempt on January 6th, I posted this photo of my kids.

We were somewhere near the base of the Rincón de la Vieja Volcano rolling around in the mud. The photo was taken 1/7/21, the day after the event. It was a scary moment for the country, and an amazing moment for us as a family. However, the guy behind the camera was a wreck.

Despite all the fun we were having, what I recall most about that entire trip was how much I was worried. It wasn’t just the recent events at the capitol, but a series of questions that bore down to the very core of me. What in the hell were we doing? Would we ever go back to our home country? How much longer could we continue to live like this before we started to run out of funds? Could this be a new home? What will normal look like and how different will it be from every other experience we’ve ever had? Do I really have to learn Spanish? Turns out the answer to that last one is yes. I really should.

However, here we are today. Time’s moved on. We’re back in the states, and what normal looked like before is not too different than what it looks like now. Kids are back in school. Bills come every month. The whack-a-doodle conspiracy theorists are still whack-a-doodle doo, but I don’t look at that time in Costa Rica in the same framing any longer.

That fear subsided, and now these photos have a beautiful silky sheen over them. I see what we were really doing while away. I understand the spontaneous decision in the moment that my wife and I made was an investment in the relationship we now have with our kids. My perspective on that time has changed upon reflection.

This doesn’t invalidate my emotional experience back then, but the evidence provides me with an opportunity to see now what I couldn’t see in the moment … smiles, genuine happiness. Financially it was a ludicrous decision, but the dividends on that investment are just now beginning to pay off.

I’m grateful for many things in my life, but most thankful for the ability to look back with some objectivity on my past and distinguish reality from self created fabrication. Given our current climate of cult like ideologues who have weaponized fiction as a means to line their pockets, this seems like an especially important skill. For the foreseeable future we will live in a world where some of us have decided to call the blatant evidence in front of our eyes, lies. Perhaps some reflection might change your mind.