Color in Dreams

I dreamt the other night that all my ceremonial whites were stained by color bleeding from the washer, but it wasn’t my ceremonial whites, it was my regular clothes that were stained different colors and patterns, and I had to bleach all my clothes to get them white again. That could mean anything from feeling like I’ve lost that “ceremonial white” attitude, to dealing with the institutional mourning of my medicine family.

In that same sequence of dreams, there was also one where I took all the color stickers off a Rubik’s cube and polished it so that it would be more cool and unique for the girls, only to realize that I could no longer solve the cube with no colors to guide me. The base cube was, of course, black… and useless without color, which I had previously removed from my whites.

I’m getting mixed messages here, unconscious.

The River

This is my advice to foreigners:   

 call it simply—the river;

 never say old muddy

 or even Missouri,

 and except when it is necessary   

 ignore the fact that it moves.   

 

It is the river, a singular,

 stationary figure of division.

Do not allow the pre-Socratic   

to enter your mind except

when thinking of clear water trout   

streams in north central Wyoming.   

The river is a variety of land,   

a kind of dark sea or great bay,   

sea of greater ocean.

At times I find it good discipline   

to think of it as a tree

rooted in the delta,

a snake on its topmost western branch.   

These hills are not containers;   

they give no vantage but that   

looking out is an act of transit.   

We are not confused,

we do not lose our place.

~ Michael Anania

Nine of Art; Six of Heart

erodes the line between being and place becomes the place of being time and so the house turns in the snow is why a ghost always has the architecture of a storm The architect tore down room after room until the sound stopped. A ghost is one among the ages at the edge of a cliff empty sails on the bay even when a ship or the house moves off in fog asks you out loud to let the stranger in ~ Cole Swensen

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. 

For in the end, it is not the things we did that we regret, but the things we left undone, the words left unspoken, the dreams left unfulfilled."

         ~ Toshikazu Kawaguchi

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. 

I feel like there have been a lot of maybes in this little update, but maybe this is what evolution is?  The kids grow; we grow; things change; we do the best we can to keep up and keep going... keep searching for our voice and place in this world. 

Finis; Initium

 The fight with the facebook bots continues, so my last post link didn't get much traffic, and with all the court stresses and distractions, I didn't have the energy to find a tricky alternative. In the initial post, two of my photos were flagged, and I knew a review would take a while before the post would go back up, so I just created another post and deleted the first one. The second post with the same photos had only one flagged photo, and I was pretty tired at that point, so I asked for a review and was about to call it a night when the flagged photo came back reinstated, like in minutes. It was as if the AI bot simply zoomed in to investigate and found all the bits successfully blurred.

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?

No. That's a pretty resounding and confident no. I have been haggling with facebook about my work for the better part of a decade. I think if they recommended me to someone interested in photography or fine art nudes, things would look quite differently for me and mine. I simply do not believe that facebook would ever be like, "hey, check out this guy's work with his amazing partner and beautiful family that we have religiously taken down, then put back up a few days later." I don't see that happening. Not just that, but I refuse to pay facebook's absurd prices to boost my posts, because the thought that they want my posts in other people's feeds is absurd, even if I pay for it.

Ok, so apparently I needed to rant about facebook again, and I will passively fight with them by making a post of what I have always referred to as pretty boring things, but these pretty boring things are pretty significant, on a trip that was beyond significant. At this point you should probably go read the last post if facebook didn't let you before. 

I'll wait...

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.

In my initial conversation with them, they seemed very willing to help, confessing that they had no idea what I was talking about, like they have never actually settled a debt in the probate process before. They very quickly disappeared on the conversation, though, as have most people in this ridiculous process. Looking back into the emails, they also disappeared on the initial settling process because the person I was interacting with went on vacation, so I actually sent the paperwork in on my deadline, without their officially accepting my offer.

The courtroom on this August morning, which shared the significance of my partner's dad and grandma's birthdays, was packed with just myself and a lawyer. The clerk actually thought I was a lawyer because of how I was dressed. I honestly feel like a stuffy lawyer after representing myself for so long. I handed the judge a packet with all the information regarding the settled debt, the email conversations, an account payment history ending in an adjustment that resulted in zero, and a letter from the company explaining that the debt was settled. The judge seemed confused and said that "this looks like the debt was settled." Yeah. He asked me, under oath, if the paperwork was real. .....Yeah.

He then went on to congratulate me on satisfying all the deficiencies. He told me that most cases that he sees with lawyers don't get through all of that in the time I did. I just candidly pointed out that this has been three and a half years of my life, and I flew in from Omaha to be here, so I was pretty focused on getting this finished. There was a chuckle. I had a similar response when he asked me if I knew what comes next? I had been so focused on this that I hadn't had the time or energy to see past it.

Motion granted.

It's over; just like that.

I spent the rest of the day finishing up estate business in the desert, then had dinner alone at the pub I helped open, manically going from tears to laughing and back again... until I found myself at Mephistopheles' house having a beer and talking about loosing our fathers..... still wearing my lawyer suit.

The next day I had an eye appointment in the town where I went to high school, and immediately started heading for home (Nebraska) in Sancho, the Ford I would've never purchased, but is one of the few lingering remnants of my dad. This was the fourth time I drove the distance between SoCal and Omaha in about five weeks, and this time I did not take the quickest, or the most efficient route. I took 66, and explored as many abandoned spots that I could while still keeping good time home, which is hard because the southwest presents an abandoned gas station or hotel at about every other offramp, forget about what you might find heading down any one of those dirt roads.

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.

I cut north at Oklahoma City, the furthest east I've ever gone on 66/40 (aside from being my father's child passenger, heading back to Amish, Indiana), and managed to make it home in under three days, to my missed little family and new life... and new equipment, which will be another post. Everything going on since will be another post as well. A part of my brain has opened up, and everything is on the very edge of what it has supposed to have been. Life has been pretty rough since 2020, and that has nothing to do with the pandemic.