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.

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 Brené 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. 

That might explain why the little emotion I felt in discovering my father’s body was resentment because he left me here, before I even realized the shit he left for me to deal with?… with a sprinkle of envy because he got out of the matrix, and I’m silly enough to think I have more to do in this… thusness… when instead I should be sitting with the much needed reminder from Luc Ferry, reminiscing about Epictetus and Aurelius:

“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