An Excerpt from Can't You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer's Memoir and a Tale of a Lost Surfer's Paradise by Allan Weisbecker

Clay has been here at Big Turkeys, Costa Rica for many years, longer than almost any of the local expats, as he himself will tell you, whether you want to hear it or not. For Clay, how long an expat has been here is a major issue. The longer you’ve been here, the cooler you are; a one-upmanship device. Gives you all sorts of privileges and a priori dispensations, especially in the surf lineup – who gets first choice of waves and so forth. (Clay has a convoluted mathematical formula meant to define how long an expat has actually been here. It’s based not only on your original arrival date, but on the number of times you’ve been back to the States [or wherever] during your expat residence, and how long you stayed away before your return. Too many Stateside trips or too long a stay during one of those trips and you’re back to square one – you’re a new guy all over again, meaning you lose your privileges and a priori dispensations. If there’s any doubt in a one-to-one confrontation over this issue, the tiebreaker is this: If you don’t have a return ticket to the States and the other guy does, you get the nod. If you both have return tickets, you get the nod if your ticket originates here and the other guy’s originates Stateside. All else being equal in the tiebreaker, an ad hoc panel is formed to judge who tears it up better in the surf. The panel usually consists of one – Clay himself. With predictable tiebreaker results, when Clay is one of the disputees, which he invariably is.