The year in quotes: 2024

 

As is the ancient tradition of clerkmanifesto, on the final day of the year we gather together all of our notable bon mots of the year past and present them here. As I write clerkmanifesto throughout the year, if, by chance, I spill a sentence that strikes me that it might stand on its own as a concise piece of wit or wisdom, I take note of the post involved. Then, on this day, I look back at these posts and try to figure out what was the quote I was talking about and why I thought it notable. Once I've figured that out, I dust them off and, for good or ill, pass them along to you.

And so here they are! It's like a whole year of clerkmanifesto in tiny, delectable bites! But there are so many of them, you will soon be unbearably stuffed.

1.

Cats said:

"Let me just do two things, but do them well. 

And in doing them well, deserve nearly endless time off."

2.

"If you can tolerate critics even when you have several million of them, you might be a sociopath."

3.

"The machine never lies. However, it regularly hallucinates."

4. 

There's nothing wrong with minimalism but...

If it offers the invitation of unused space, it probably hasn't been done right.

5.

Only time can weather away the weakness.

And, in the end, everything is gone.

6.

Just because we know the future does not mean we can't live in the present!

7.

How does one answer a question that has many clashing answers?

With art!

8.

Justice for the rich and powerful and their interests in this country uses the very same system (as for the poor), with one essential difference- it ever goes by halves, and so by such means, can never arrive.

9.

"I am a font of wisdom. Not a font of wisdom in the sense of a fountain, rather more in the sense of a set of characters in a consistent size and style."

10.

Oh child, you are not here to trust the universe, you are here to trust yourself.

11.

"The only real leadership is the kind that no one can observe."

12.

The co-workers who almost never want your special help are the very ones you would be happy to give it to. And the co-workers who always call on your help don't deserve it.

13.

To say that each miracle comes at the cost of a hundred slowly and obstinately misunderstood requests would be churlish.

The Universe has always been hard of hearing.

14.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Internet, downvoting is just like upvoting, only more unjust.

15.

Do something for a man at the library, and one of his tasks is accomplished, teach a man to do something at the library, and he will return to have you teach it to him over and over again.

16.

The real secret of all new technology: For all the time it saves, it asks for twice as much in return.

17.

To see the shape of the light, we need the dark.

18.

The problem with being stupid is that though many people pay for their stupidity, very few of them understand that they are.

19.

What if everything is plain, a flat and tired window, that, only if we carefully look through, is full of wonders?

Plain

 

I have been working on a music video. I finished it last night, actually. It is, as ever, all AI, which, it turns out, means wildly different things to different people. I find the most inaccurate understandings of my AI induce rage in the general population. More general people experience a flicker of wonder encountering my AI, followed by a complete loss of memory, like people experiencing the flash of those memory adjusting pens in "Men in Black".

This small film, which surely I will show you after I get over my mostly uncharacteristic shyness (though it is on my YouTube channel already if you are eager enough), has no dazzling effects. There are no famous celebrities. Fantastical places are absent from every shot. And there are no majestic or anthropomorphic animals to be seen in any frame. 

It is a series of very plain, older women singing. They are standing in parking lots for the most part. They are generally over lit. And this was the hard part. Computer generated images are hostile to plainness. Because their mind is made out of the Internet, they default to beauty and ugliness. The uglier and the more beautiful the better. But plain?

Plain is hard.

The truth is, I don't believe in plainness very much either, but differently. I wonder if clerkmanifesto isn't about plainness the perfect opposite of the Internet. Instead of a world made of stunning surfaces, horrifying, glorious, amazing, beautiful, that bear no further scrutiny, aye, that must be scrutinized to see the plainness in them, perhaps clerkmanifesto quixotically postulates: What if everything is plain, a flat and tired window, that, only if we carefully look through, is full of wonders?

Bread and butter

 

I have recently resolved to occasionally share old clerkmanifesto posts from the past with you once again. This is not a punishment for your not sufficiently having studied my posts. No, mon ami, it is a reward for your years of service, reminding you of happy times in your past.

These posts from yesteryear are specifically not a best of, but rather a marker of time, always harkening back to a specific anniversary, exactly on the same date but in a different year. When a blog grows as massive as clerkmanifesto has, getting a fresh look at a randomly chosen post, places us more deeply in ourselves. And so in this spirit, I chose randomly to go back just to 2022. And there I found what I would describe as a bread and butter post. Library centered, this post is neither odd nor far afield. One might say it is kind of the spine upon which clerkmanifesto is built. Not flashy, not adventurous, not hilarious, nor daring, it is just a mildly amusing account of library life.

Whet your appetite, have I?

Well, you're already here, so you're used to this kind of thing.

Before we start I would like to note, and this will only make sense to you later, that this post slightly surprised and amused me in its accuracy, for we have but one tape measure at my library, and I think of us as having always had just one.

Measuring Tape

The branch manager of my library asked me if I could order him a 25 foot measuring tape. As I am in charge of supply ordering for our library branch, I said "Yes."

I looked on Amazon.

For less than eight dollars Amazon carried a 25 foot measuring tape that received an average of 4.8 stars.

That is an incredible deal! 

I would like to get measuring tapes for everyone! I would like to get a measuring tape for you, and you, and you, and you!

If only I could!

An aside:

I am in no way being remunerated by any measuring tape company or lobby.

All of this simply comes from my heart, or possibly from my sense of how much I think a tape measure should cost. Maybe more the second of these? Shouldn't it cost more like 12 dollars for a good quality 25 foot tape measure? I mean, is this a wildly good deal or do I have an inflated view of the value of tape measures?

So I ordered two tape measures for us at the library. This is one more than is strictly necessary. But I have found that for any tool at a library, a stapler, or scissors, or even a tape measure, one must have a minimum of two. There will always be one of them that is missing, and one that never is.

Back on horse

 

After a fair bit of build up I presented my Picasso video to a general shudder from the Internet. Well, actually, indifference dominated the reaction, but it was tinged with distaste. So naturally I needed a while to collect myself before starting on another music video of any kind. But to my surprise, a few days is all it took to launch back into action. I am only occasionally persevering, so whenever I spot it in myself I am both nonplussed and wonder if there is some kind of trick taking place. This surely can't be real live perseverance! That doesn't sound like me. What can I possibly be up to with all this...

resiliency?

I don't know. 

But I'll try to be impressed until I find out.

And there is also a kind of strange optimism in it. I who have expected the end of the world any second now for over 50 years, do not count myself as a "glass half full" regular. Come to think of it, once upon a time, briefly, the tagline of clerkmanifesto was:

"I'm a glass half full kind of guy, even though it's actually empty", which might do a better job of placing me on the optimism spectrum.

But whenever I start a new artistic project I do tend to carry into it a kind of unreasonable confidence. I was so sure my Picasso video was a profoundly affecting masterpiece when I was making it, although that assurance was salted with a slight inkling that it might all be a bit ridiculous. Now the tables have exactly turned on that Picasso video and I feel sure that it was ridiculous, but have this weird inkling I can't totally get rid of that it might have been brilliant. 

And yet, in the wake of that, here I am telling you about another music video project. My Picasso one is still a bit too fresh in my mind to feel that wild sense of genius as I make it, but this video employs many of the same tools and designs from the previous, albeit all strangely toned down, and better understood. So, in a sense, here I am simply making another one and all fairly sure it will be wonderful.

It won't be.

But oh,

What if it is?

Who is clerkmanifesto?

 

Tonight my darling wife and I were watching one of those delightful David Suchet Poirot shows. In the course of their Cornish Mystery they ran into an unpleasant doctor who wildly overrated his diagnosis, and Poirot said afterwards "A Doctor who lacks doubt is not a Doctor. He's an executioner."

I was impressed by this quote. 

I didn't just like it, I thought:

"Wait till I tell clerkmanifesto!"

In case you're wondering, you are clerkmanifesto!

What a strange thing. 

It doesn't seem like it would be strange, but I can never figure it out, so it comes up a lot here. I write clerkmanifesto. This is clerkmanifesto. Sometimes I sing about clerkmanifesto, or make mad fake advertising for clerkmanifesto. Clerkmanifesto is even my own private little piece of soul.

But you actually are clerkmanifesto.

Sometimes I read clerkmanifesto and then I am clerkmanifesto.

I guess if no one ever read clerkmanifesto it would still be clerkmanifesto. But only because it could be read at any moment. I think clerkmanifesto is like an invisible possibility. It has no body of its own. It needs a host.

Wow. That might be slightly creepy.

I didn't mean for it to go there. 

But clerkmanifesto goes where it wants to go, don't you?

And it's not like clerkmanifesto has possessed you. On the contrary, you have rather seized it. Taken it up by the scruff of the neck. Held it in front of your face to examine. You have all the power now. But I am not asking you to be kind. No, clerkmanifesto does not seek gentleness.

Clerkmanifesto just wants...

A Doctor.

Late night reckoning

 

You may have noticed a tendency here lately where it is late at night and I need to write my clerkmanifesto post before I can go to bed. And so I tell you all about it. 

On the face of it, this is an extremely uninteresting topic, but I have found that my most interesting topics and my least interesting topics have a way of sort of all evening out in the writing of it.

So waiting for a good idea makes no sense at all, and usually comes when I no longer have any need of it anyway, after I have written whatever and then crawled into bed, closed my eyes, and tried to sleep.

Ah, if only you could see those blog posts! 

Brilliant little things really, but then for you to see them, I'd have to write them. At which point they'd come out about as good as...

this.

What to my wondering eyes should appear?

 

Waiting to glimpse Santa and his reindeer streaking across the night sky out my windows, and feeling more of a wistful sadness about all the years of the obscurity of clerkmanifesto, as opposed to a more ferocious energy and confidence in its righteousness, I thought maybe now was the time to go back, as I have been occasionally doing, and bring out one of my brief essays from the years' past. 

So I thumbed back through the vast volumes of my blog to a handful of Christmas Day posts from some time ago.

But you will note that you do not see them here.

And you wonder: "Were they bad?"

No, dear friend, not so much.

All those years ago they were lovely, and funny in their quiet strange way. To me at least, and who knows, maybe to you too. But I understood that they were they were just the sort of thing I would write if I wrote a new one now.

So why not just write a new one now?

And I lifted my weary head, and winked at the stars.

Festivus

 

As I write this, today is Festivus. Festivus is a made-up holiday (but what isn't a made-up holiday at some point?) popularized on "Seinfeld" in the late 90's. Festivus is celebrated with an unadorned metal pole, a feast, feats of strength, commonplace events described as "Festivus Miracles", and, most importantly for my account today, the airing of grievances.

I have a lot of time off work this holiday season, both through intentional vacation days combined with the holidays. Indeed Festivus is the only day I am actually working at the library over a long string of days. And though I would love to have this day off as well, there is something appropriate about working on Festivus. One might say that two-thirds of everything my colleagues and I do at the library is "Airing our grievances". 

I wished one colleague a happy Festivus. He launched into a long complaint about how he doesn't really like Festivus because he could never stand "Seinfeld". Then he listed a long string of grievances about "Seinfeld".

You can't buy your way out of Capitalism, and you can't complain your way out of Festivus.

Or...

Festivus at the library?

Every day is Festivus at the library.

A short ride through Christmas

 

In the midst of this bit of the Christmas season, I have, by hook and crook, many days off of work. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow is the one day I work in the middle of nine days off. Maybe I should look on the bright side. I can't take any more cheese and champagne right now.

And so to tide us over for this day of the cessation of celebrations, I bring to you some Christmas rides from Clerkmanifestoland.

I have always loved Christmas and Amusement Parks, and consider them almost the same thing. Going through Christmastime is like a long, complicated amusement park ride. Just like on a ride, so many of the same things happen over and over; Black Friday, the Christmas Markets, the screening of "The Holiday", the arrival of Santa Claus. And we pass through the glowing lights and pretty stage sets of Christmas, oohing and ahhing in a land of make-believe. Only when it's over do we get out of our ride vehicles and return to regular life.

With all this in mind I have a little rendition of all this. Actually I have five or six different videos of this, but though this one alone neglects to even mention Christmas specifically, it's probably the best reflection of my whimsical thesis.

As ever, click through the picture:

Pablo Picasso (I'm not)

 

For possibly the first time in around 4,000 of these posts, I don't much want to say anything about what I have here. For whatever it is, working or not, it's all there as it is.

So

As ever, click through the picture:

The inverse of time spent

 

It seems clear that this week on clerkmanifesto we will be dealing entirely with a Picasso music video that the more I work on the farther it moves away.

So I am hoping you will love every minute of our journey!

It reminds me of that old math conundrum where to get anywhere you have to go halfway there, and as you ever go halfway there, you can never arrive.

But it's really about the friends we make along the way. 

Oddly enough, when I have twenty spare minutes (broken into seven different segments) at the front desk of my library, I am sometimes able to write two or three really good blog posts, but give me a few days off, packed with free time, and I find myself working tirelessly towards the very stars, and finishing... nothing.

The stars are farther than one might think.

Curiously enough this is the theme of my Pablo Picasso music video, sort of.

The theme is also that Pablo Picasso was a really really good painter. I have been looking at many of his paintings these days and, well, I mean...

Caravaggio really is the best painter that ever lived,

And Van Gogh is too, in a different way. His painting was a kind of magic.

But Picasso is,

It's

It's like both of them at the same time?

He's like both of them, except he's after the world was broken open.

I was just going to show you 30 Picasso paintings today, but that won't really do. I don't have the explanation for all that. But I am pretty sure this fox will be appearing in the upcoming video, and so I am hoping these pictures will do for today.

Picasso project

 

It's not impossible.

Having spent the long day with my darling wife, sheltered from the snow, drinking increasingly diluted pastis, and working endlessly on a new music video about Pablo Picasso, it is now late at night, and for the first time I am willing to admit:

This will not be finished tonight.

I make this concession to reality by saying to myself:

"I am only halfway done."

Which, though said seriously to myself, also makes me laugh.

I am not halfway done. I am maybe a fifth of the way done.

It's fun though.

If you were the sort of person who gets excited about what's coming up on clerkmanifesto I would tell you about some of the intriguing pieces I have of this video.

Oh, you are?

You are!

I feel all melty!

The song is all done. I think it's three minutes or so. The first verse goes:

If I could dance,

Just like the,

South of France,

Hat in hand, glass of wine,

It's not impossible,

Just look at Pablo Picasso,

Just look at Pablo Picasso,

Just like that,

Pablo Picasso.

Uh huh.

I also have an elderly Pablo Picasso in his studio singing the first verse and the second, though I guess it's more of a lip sync, but a very good one. I have Bob Dylan in a library lip syncing the second verse. And I have almost four Picasso paintings in motion, sort of coming together and coming apart.

There is a lot of neat stuff in there!

Yes, I am a tenth of the way through.

Potluck

 

The annual holiday potluck just took place at my library. I brought cheese.

Cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese.

Because my library's holiday potluck is truly a random potluck, it just so happened that everyone brought cheese this year.

Mine was the best cheese though; There was a Brie, a very aged cheddar in a thick green rind, Roquefort, stilton, gruyere, and a bourbon honey goat cheese. 

It was a lot of cheese!

Everyone else brought pre cut Monterey Jack and Colby slices, although one person brought a cream cheese and poured some kind of pepper jam on it.

I'm sure they were all fine.

I don't like to judge my co-workers...

Even if I am regularly compelled to.

But why all this about the holiday potluck? You wonder.

It has inspired me.

The over-abundance of dubious choices is so... American! So... Christmas! And so I have decided to create my own potluck of clerkmanifesto right here, today, in order to give clerkmanifesto a little of that holiday spirit. I am including below three random previous blogposts from this date in the past! It is a clerkmanifesto potluck!

You can read all three. You can pick little bits of each blogpost to read, or you can just find the most appealing looking blogpost and strictly gorge on that. Whatever you like! And whichever remains of the three blogposts that you don't want, or did not finish, do not worry! Just leave it as is, and I will come along later to wrap it in saran wrap and throw in the fridge for some undefined purpose in the future.

So join me now on this random journey through yesteryear!

2020:

Saint Minneapolis

After many years on the sidelines here at clerkmanifesto, refusing to take a stand on anything, or have an opinion of my own on any subject, I have decided enough is enough! I have built up some real carte blanche through my years of prudent moderation in this world famous blog. And while the rewards of all this fame and adulation cannot be understated, aren't they all a little hollow if I don't give back, if I don't wade in and take a stand for something important, if I don't spend a little of that cache?

Yes. 

Yes is the answer. 

In case you wondered.

So what happened, you ask?

I was reading about cities. And I came across something regarding twin cities; that is small cities that grew until they were crammed together and somewhat indistinguishable. Cities like Bridgeport and New Haven in Connecticut, or Dallas and Fort Worth in Texas, or, where I live, Minneapolis and St. Paul, in Minnesota. The book said that once in Hungary there were twin cities, that is, two cities so close that they grew together. These twin cities were called Buda and Pest.

I think you could guess what happened.

Budapest happened. The two cities became one. And in that moment I realized:

I don't like twin cities. I like cities.

I live in The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

I like our metro area, and think it's a nice place to live. I love living here with my wife. I love the Mississippi River running through the heart of it all. I idly hope all our sports teams win even though they generally don't. I support our excellent museum. I like our coffeehouses and bars (well, I used to when one could actually go to them and not... kill people). I enjoy our giant mall and our State Fair and our Frank Gehry building leaning over the river. I even love our secret, hidden Mannerist Fountain imported from Italy that they put away for the Winter.

But I hate our Twin Cities.

I think they should be one city. And we should call it:

Saint Minneapolis.

My new Budapest-like city will incorporate the inner ring suburbs, like Bloomington and Edina, West St. Paul and Roseville. And it will be only one city, large and vital and consistent enough to compete with the other notable, medium-big American Cities, like, I don't know, Denver or Seattle.

I'm just saying enough with the meaningless local competition and regionalism, with its multiple library systems and shitty police forces and uncoordinated bike and walking paths that dead end at city boundaries that are completely irrelevant!  

I don't like Minneapolis.

I don't like St. Paul.

But I am very fond of beautiful St. Minneapolis.

So brace yourself; no longer will I refer to St. Minneapolis as The Twin Cities. I will not say I live in St. Paul or Minneapolis. And if it confuses people my made up geography of St. Minneapolis, that's a risk I must bear. But my hope is that the purity of my vision will alter the landscape until, little by little, the people of this part of the state will come together and make that which is already true underneath, official.

This is my quest.

This is my star.

No matter how hopeless.

No matter how far.

St. Minneapolis.

 

 

 

2017:

Cut My Hair

A co-worker came into the back room of the library while I was working on the check in machine.

"Your hair's getting really long." He said.

We all know that different people are allowed to say different things, depending upon how we feel about them. He was marginally allowed to say this but he wasn't really winning any further allowance points.

"Should I cut it?" I asked. I'd been thinking about cutting it for a few months and hadn't gotten around to it.

"Sure."

So I took the scissors, grabbed all the hair on the right side, and cut it. Then I took all the hair on the left side, bunched it up, and cut it. I threw the hunks of hair in the garbage. It was looking a little silver in places.

"Better?" I asked.

He laughed. "Better." He said.

A little later someone else asked, peering at my hair "Is your hair in a ponytail?" 

This may have been due to my not really cutting the back of my hair during my earlier eight second haircut. But really, what business was it of theirs?

2015

The Bridge Metaphor

You have probably heard of the runner's high. I don't run, but sometimes when I am on my walk, and I am very late, I sort of trot along for awhile. The closest I come to a "high" doing that is when, for a few seconds, neither my feet nor my ankles hurt. Curiously, though, I do frequently experience a walker's high, or more specifically, a blogger's high. When I'm out walking a few miles and ice isn't blowing in my face, the fresh air stimulates me. I take joy in the world around me. I become attuned to the Universe. I start to think of really good blog ideas. Then I get really excited by these blog ideas. I simultaneously compose them in my mind and try to memorize them as I go. It's a wonderful, very creative, inspired feeling. And the more ideas I come up with the more new ideas come to me until they are delightedly and nerve-wrackingly piling up on me.

This is where we come to the rickety bridge analogy. This blogging high is like climbing a high, rickety bridge. It's slightly terrifying, very precarious, and absolutely lovely. But the bridge is wildly unsafe, and each new blog idea takes the bridge even further beyond its load bearing capacity. I can't stop the thrilling rush of new ideas, and usually around the fourth or fifth blog outline it all comes crashing down.

Here I am among the shattered remains of the rickety bridge. It's usually about eight hours later that I do my salvage work on that fallen bridge. Here, this looks familiar. I think it might be part of the railing. what was I thinking when my hand glided along it? Here's a piece of something about a letter to a publishing syndicate. I wonder what that one was about. Was there something about a cardinal? Rome? Sandwiches? Surely there is a piece of this detritus I can still make use of.

Ah yes, I remember. Here's a big piece of it now. It was that blog idea about the rickety bridge metaphor.

Cat lover

 

Evening fell on the library I work at. And with it, all my day shift colleagues were on their way out into the cold, dark night. One of them was disappointed that she needed to go shopping. I understood. At the end of a long day at work one usually just wants to get home. But this co-worker didn't just need food for herself. She needed to pick up cat food and bird seed.

Fortunately, I was there to help solve her problems:

"You could just feed your bird to your cat."

Cranky

Monday is a very long day for me working at the library. I work ten hours on Mondays, which is pretty challenging to begin with. Unfortunately today I also got to work and found myself CRANKY. So it was a double whammy. 

Everything was irritating. 

Nothing seemed to go my way. Everything bugged me. 

I was a mess.

Cranky cranky cranky cranky.

This went on for several hours.

I tried to take a lot of deep breaths.

I tried to delight in the little things.

"What little things?" You ask.

I don't know. They were too little to see!

Eventually, I decided that maybe I was simply hungry. All I had to eat was a nearly endless supply of spinach. So, trying to delight in the little things, I cooked a gigantic box of spinach. It was so much spinach I had to sort of feed the spinach into my skillet in stages as it cooked down. Finally, I got all the spinach into the skillet and when I finished cooking it I had several forkfuls of spinach!

Which is a lot for cooked spinach!

My co-workers made lots of Popeye jokes.

"You are going to be so strong after you eat that spinach!" They said.

Well, strong is better than cranky!

I ate all the spinach.

Was I still cranky?

I was still cranky.

But now I was strong enough to pretend I wasn't. 

Which is half the battle.

Shirts

I have collected quite a few more celebrity portraits over the last few days. I've just been sort of throwing them on the pile here in this post. Now I am running out of time before it goes live to the world and I can't add anymore pictures of (mostly) dead famous people. I think they're all here advertising my new shirt collection, but I could see my eventually venturing into a whole new fashion line. And while a fashion line for dead people probably isn't a great idea from a marketing standpoint, it would probably work about as well for me as anything else I might venture in that regard. 

Though I might like to build up to my most sophisticated imagery, I can't seem to stop clerkmanifesto from loading my newest images first, so the first ones are the most accomplished, and then we devolve more to the silk shirts ones, which are a bit messier, and seem almost like prototypes to me now.