Friday, November 15, 2024
The River
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Nine of Art; Six of Heart
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
"Don't leave anything for later.
Later, the coffee gets cold.
Later, you lose interest.
Later, the day turns into night.
Later, people grow up.
Later, people grow old.
Later, life goes by.
Later, you regret not doing something...
When you had the chance.
Life is a fleeting dance, a delicate balance of moments that unfold before us, never to return in quite the same way again.
Regret is a bitter pill to swallow, a weight that bears down upon the soul with the burden of missed chances and unspoken words.
So, let us not leave anything for later. Let us seize the moments as they come, with hearts open and arms outstretched to embrace the possibilities that lie before us.
Saturday, October 19, 2024
Analysis Paralysis
I often feel like I’ve lost my voice, but I really never found my voice. I thought I did. In my thirties I yelled with that voice at whoever I thought could understand it, but I really alienated more souls than I helped, even though all I was doing was trying to help…in my own little version of philosophizing with a hammer, but with healing through creativity. I was confident in that philosophically creative excursion because everyone always said that one finds their voice in their thirties. The realization that little to no one was paying attention just made me yell louder because I thought that was it; now or never.
I struggled with that for over a decade, until I finally rested… much closer to never than now….. now… I feel like never would be a vast improvement to the lack of inspiration I feel. Right after I posted about probate being over and my roadtrip back to Nebraska… a month and a half ago… I wrote a post about a huge paradigm shift in my creative equipment, but quickly reverted it to draft because I felt stupid. I used to put so much importance on being loyal to Canon for over 30 years, and switching my creative flow over to Sony felt way more important than it actually is… especially when what I hope to do with it seems like a distant dream. I’m getting too old for dreams.
Hiding that post, and realizing that my voice should be focused on way more important things, kicked me back into creative apathy. What is the actual point? Maybe I’m still stuck in that Bufo existential crisis? Maybe this is what never feels like, and I have completely missed the opportunity of now? I just want to accomplish something significant, something my kids and grandkids can be proud of, but I am far from excited about it, and no one around me seems to be either. Maybe that’s just the energy of middle America?
I wanted to do a whole video in San Diego with “Maya” and I talking about quitting our lives and living on the road. I had the whole thing planned out with a voiceover talking about the magical and exotic land of… *camera opens to us sitting on camping chairs in grandma’s garage*… Chula Vista, California. That didn’t happen, like nothing really happened on the road like I planned it out. There wasn’t time to really do anything amongst the constant stimulation and movement.
I’m grateful to have learned to truly live in the moment with my family, without the constant need to capture and edit and post and maniacally check on likes and responses, but I also feel like we have almost been left with nothing to show for it, including this kind of lack of excitement to keep moving forward with any kind of passion. I’m still not sure if this feeling isn’t simply a kind of guilt that I missed that opportunity, or more importantly, didn’t have the courage and talent to truly capture it.
Living in the now with my family, and appreciating the now of my family, was kind of the nail in the now or never coffin. And I feel like enough dirt has been shoveled on said coffin that my nails are raw from scratching at the Edgar Allan Poe metaphor. That didn’t make any sense, though taphophobia beautifully describes how I’m feeling creatively.
What am I doing, going on and on about my own experience? How selfishly silly of me. The whole reason why we’re here is because of the girls and their desire to experience school, which we couldn’t do in the state of absurdly strict rules and regulations cleverly masked as liberal freedoms. The girls are absolutely thriving in school, thanks to my partner’s homeschooling preparation, though there were some pretty rough learning curve moments in the first couple weeks where the world may or may not have ended just about every night.
V is getting into futbol. Both the girls are learning piano. A cat adopted us, named St. Thomas of Tabasco… at least that’s what I call him. With school and my new boring job, the adventures are few, and the creative accomplishment fewer. I still don’t feel like there’s time for anything. Maybe that’s just what getting old feels like? Maybe everything will slow back down in ten years when the girls whirl off into their individual human experiences? Maybe there will always be something making us feel like we don’t really have enough time?
To quote the immortal Spiros, “You work, and then you die.” Work for me looks like writing this while sitting on the back of a FedEx bulk truck behind an Omaha Target, waiting for a pick-up window to open. Not nearly as romantic as living in an old movie theatre, but there is some poetic ring to the irony of this existence. Sadly, there are probably only three people on the planet who can truly appreciate that I work for Federal Express, and we bank at Wells Fargo.
That certainly makes me smile most days, which is all any of us can really wish for in this life. I really do plan on posting more than once every couple months. I really do. Creative accomplishment is in the doing, not the talking about doing, and when you have grown accustomed to the doing not being did, doing the doing is difficult… regardless of why we’re here… and regardless of what we’re doing.
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Finis; Initium
So with that unexpected win I made the post transfer over to IG, where I rarely get flagged for anything because my work is pretty blatantly non-sexual and non-offensive. When I checked my notifications in the morning, everything was fine. When I checked my notifications the morning after that, everything was gone, and there was a note on my account that my post was linked to an inappropriate site, this blog, and I was told that if things like that continued, facebook would no longer recommend me to people with similar interests. HAS ANYONE ON THE INTERWEB FOUND ME AND MY WORK BECAUSE FACEBOOK SUGGESTED ME?
On the morning of August 12th, I dressed up nice, drove an hour from our little mountain town, and walked into a Palm Springs courtroom that I had only attended on zoom for the last three and a half years, since my father's passing happened amidst the chaos of the glorified flu pandemic. The month before my final distribution date I was given a list of deficiencies for my case, not of which I was even remotely prepared for by county self help. I scrambled to get all the deficiencies satisfied in enough time for everything to be mailed and filed, except for one significant deficiency: a debt I settled for my father's estate back in 2001 that never got closed out by the company I settled with.
That last little road trip was a much needed exclamation point to the California paradigm, including. I got to see so many spots that I had always wanted to see, and the only thing missing was my beautiful little family. They had to be in Nebraska, though, because the girls started real school for the first time ever as I was heading back, and I was lucky enough to video chat with them as they were heading to drop off. So much has changed, and is so rapidly continuing to change that it is pretty hard to even stop to think about how I feel about anything at all anymore.
Sunday, August 11, 2024
While We Wait For Life, Life Passes
I feel like my life has been on pause for the last two and a half years. We have done so much as a family, and evolved so much as human beings striving to become the best possible versions of ourselves, but there is a part of my brain that is still staring down at my father’s body, stuck in the nightmarish void of everything that followed. The last couple years with my family have been all the highs and lows of a forever changing life, generally for the better, whether we liked it or not, but under the deep psychological shadow of this probate court process that may or may not come to an end in the morning, when I walk into a Palm Springs courthouse for the first time because of Covid and the convenient legal “zoom” process that was created as a byproduct. I don’t even know what to expect at this point, so I have taken on the philosophy that served me well when I was working in a high volume kitchen: Prepare for the worst; hope for the best. I have found that approach, everything becomes a pleasant surprise because rarely is anything as bad as the worst that you prepared for. I must admit, though, that this process has presented many a situation that I couldn’t have prepared for, because I didn’t know most of these scenarios existed, nor do most of them make any sense to me now, but I have jumped through all the hoops, I have danced like a good little monkey for this Dali-esque law system that angers me beyond reason, and not because I don’t understand it, but because it is an unnecessarily complex man-made absurdity that absolutely embodies everything I don’t like about this existence. Why didn’t I just get a lawyer? Why didn’t I just hire somebody else to handle all of this so I could mourn in peace… or at all? The money spent on that would’ve ended up saving us significantly in the end… in the maybe now. I do, however, significantly appreciate this experience, as with most others that seem miserable at the time. There is a part of me that has always appreciated getting dragged through the shit, just to feel the reward of making it through.
It is all these little letter people and word events that compile the stories of our lives… our lives that are given to us to be lived, not for us to give to someone else to write. Had I hired a lawyer, my story would be very different, with a little less of life experienced and known, as only one who has experienced can know. That has always been my preferred story; without experience, the work is reduced to fantasy, to pointless day-dreaming that exists to add excitement to an unenchanted life, prevalent in today’s paradigm of living in our phones and zooming in our court appearances.
I don’t need someone else’s imagination to distract me from my story, so here I am, staring at my father’s body in California, posting photos we took in Nebraska, to follow up a post from Nebraska with photos we took in California. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have the emotional freedom to finally look at grief? I have started reading again in Omaha, after getting stuck on a book about peptides for nine months that didn’t even quench my thirst for a deeper understanding of the Kambo process, but did help me understand peptides from a pharmaceutical application… so….. ok?
The Omaha library actually presented me with a few amazing books (most the books I read aren’t ones you would find in a library). The first one was probably the best broad overview of the history of philosophy I’ve ever read, A Brief History of Thought by Luc Ferry, and the latter is an in depth look at correctly naming our emotions by BrenĂ© Brown, in which I have already discovered that my lack of understanding grief could very well be because I have lived just about my entire life in grief because I never lived in a world that made any sense to me, so grief is a very complex byproduct of simply existing.
“You are not there to change things, to improve them, or to correct them; you are there to admire and accept things. It is somewhat in this spirit that Stoicism encourages us to reconcile ourselves to what is, to the present as it occurs, without hopes and regrets. Stoicism invites us to enjoy these moments of grace, and, to make them as numerous as possible, it suggests that we change ourselves rather than the order of things.” Pg. 46-7