Canning in Beer Land!

Are you sure it's legal for me to drive here? I asked. “Yeah, you should be fine” he replied. We will call him Gen Z. Gen Z was easily my favorite. Was he the nicest? Nope. Was he the most handsome? Nope. Was he the best surfer? Maybe, he was pretty good too. Was he the smartest? Again, maybe. At least in some ways and at least in the ways that matter to me.

“Ok, Ill be back in a few then” and I took the keys to the station wagon and left. I didn't get very far down the road when I approached a road block. Apparently in Costa Rica they don't pull you over the way they do Stateside. They just set up road blocks and pull everyone over!

I steered the car to the side of the road and was approached by an officer. “No haba Espanol!” I told him. “That's fine” he said and after a few minutes, he handed me a ticket. (I found out later that it was legal for me to drive in Costa Rica but what wasn't legal was the vehicle's registration.)

I got back to the brewery and gave the ticket to Gen Z and he was pissed. I wasn't even sure what the ticket was for. That's when Gen Z told me it was an expired license plate and it was like, a hundred dollars American. Well, I had been there about a week. It definitely wasn't' my fault.

From my understanding, it was Gen Z's idea to start the brewery in Nicaragua. Immediately after graduating from college and right before he was to start a super boring career in finance or something equally depressing, he got mugged. And he got mugged bad. When he woke up in the hospital months later, he had to learn how to be a person all over again and this new person said fuck finance, I wanna surf and drink beers! (I cannot blame him at all for that.)

But even with all the surfing and the beers, Gen Z was still a pretty serious fella. He had very little empathy for others and virtually no sense of humor. He explained to me how after his accident, it was super important for him to keep a routine. And this was true. I witnessed it. He was very into fitness and he listened to Joe Rogan a lot. I could see that it helped him. (I hadn't ever heard Joe Rogans podcast or any podcast before meeting Gen Z, I don't think.)

I did really like Gen Z as a person and we had some really great conversations. He is very intelligent. I am a person who has been through a lot and he is a person who has been through a lot, so I felt like we had that strength in common. And we kinda did. But he made some mistakes. Some serious financial mistakes. The biggest was hiring the scammer importers. After that, he didn't have any money to pay me.

But I didn't know any of that. Instead, he did things I think were designed to make me just quit and go home. Like he kept “forgetting” to pay me. One time he told me he'd be right back with my pay and then I spotted him in a cab leaving town. (WTF?)

It was like, the more he fucked up, the more he took it out on me. And one other thing that's important to mention, we all lived together. So I was living and working in this environment of shittiness that I didn't cause, didn't fully understand and could do very little about.

I didn't find out about the money scam until after I had left central America and returned home. Friends that I had made in Nicaragua told me about it and when they did, all of a sudden the boys strange and shitty actions made perfect sense to me. (I learned many years ago, that when peoples actions don't make sense to me, it typically means that there's more going on that I don't know. Like the idea of Johari's Window. I used to just dismiss these times as being my fault, but I've learned through the years, that usually whatever it is has nothing to do with me.)

And that's where I lose respect for Gen Z. Like, he could have just sat down and we could have talked about everything and figured out a solution, but to do that he would have had to have admitted to me that he made a mistake and lost a bunch of money. And I guess people would rather just shit all over other people then admit they screwed up. Which is weak sauce