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.