Gambling on the universe

 

Sometimes I suppose even the smartest people can say the most ridiculous things. Look at me!

Oh, no, I'm not saying I'm smart or that I say ridiculous things. I've written a daily blog since 2013 so I am generally just saying "look at me" and this seemed like a nice opportunity.

But I guess I'm sort of smart? Aren't I? And, er, with a great many of my thoughts on the official record, I may have said a couple of ridiculous things over the years? 

I mean take a look at the post on November 15, 2026. I'm sure there's gotta be something ridiculous in there?

Hmm?

I don't know, it just seems like the odds are super high on that particular post, though I'll try to do some more editing to weed out what I can.

Einstein, who is famous for his sense of style, clever quips, and, occasionally, physics, is generally defaulted to in the mythic lexicon as "Smart". But look at what he once very famously said:

God doesn't play dice with the universe.

Let me lay that on you one more time while I calm my raging thoughts and my excitement over stumbling onto my post subject for the day:

God doesn't play dice with the universe.

I was looking out my window watching the flocks of late Autumn birds. I think this may slowly be becoming my actual job now that all that library work is done. And perhaps something about the order and randomness of those birds, flinging about over a city of majesty, chaos, and misfortune, made this "God does not play dice" thing start slowly growing out of the cool earth in my head.

As soon as I could see all the clear veined leaves and the budding flowers I had it:

Oh Albert my dear man. At this point, God only plays dice with the universe.

He is absolutely fucking addicted.

It has gotten so bad we need to do an intervention.

If only those worked.

Distillation

 

I am slowly going through old photographs and image projects and trying to creat a master folder of all my best pictures. I have a couple hundred in there now although I have a ton more to go through. Realistically, when I finish, I should have very roughly 600 photos.

But why stop there?

If we're going for the best why not run through those 600 and pick out the ones that really stand out, maybe a top hundred if you will? I bet those would be a kind of short hand for all of clerkmanifesto, and great to have but...

Surely some would stand out to me more than others?

What if I took those and really honed it down, my ten best and most perfect pictures? There's some cream rising to the top for you! Just ten pictures! But, I mean, once we're down to ten surely there is one master image that stands out from the rest? One picture to rule them all. Ash nazg darbatuluk, and all that, right? Now that would be a picture! Maybe that's what I should be aiming for!

Show it to you?

OH, no no no.

No.

That picture we throw in the cracks of doom.

Anyway. In other news, while I was sick my lovely wife so kindly brought me some flowers. And since I wasn't yet much going outside (in the rain no less!), I took pictures of these instead. I didn't much like these pictures no matter what I did to them, so I decided to recreate them in wool and fabrics and stitching. By the end we go a bit overboard to test the limits of the approach, but you'll get the basic idea.

Will any of these make it into my folder of 600? Maybe the one with the stem and water in the vase, but realistically, probably not.

On the plus side I won't have to melt any of them.

If I weren't sick

 

In my city it is raining. And in my city, usually, when it decides on a particular sort of weather, like 91 degrees, or "sunny", or raining, it just doggedly sticks with it for as long as it possibly can. I think that since we moved here it stuck with "not raining" as much as it could, but there is an end to everything. And so now my city is going a bit Biblical and is sticking to "raining" as well as it possibly can.

 We'll see how long it can make it. 

Admittedly we are nowhere near "Ark" yet.

As I intimated earlier, I am sick, albeit not terribly at this point, more just with an unpleasant cold and the even more unpleasant cough. So our plans to go look at a far off city's apartment were scuttled. Although now we are having a peep at said apartment in a virtual viewing and not leaving our apartment at all for the day. Which is shockingly easier.

So I look out the pretty windows and wonder what I would do if I weren't sick. And this is what I have decided:

I would plunge out into the drenched and fully romantic city. There we would find some chill cavern of a wine cafe, looking out on the splattering streets splashed through by the thrum of people never thwarted in this city by mere weather. I would order a bottle of Shiraz wine on impulse. My wife and I would drink it right through "pleasant glow", into "optimism", and then inadvisedly on into "a slight touch of invulnerability".

We would walk down to the sea at twilight, recklessly having macchiatos on the way. We'd amble on the wet stones of the beach like we were dreaming, until we realised we were a bit wet and cold and would rather not walk home but had no ability to teleport.

We'd splash through the puddled sidewalks and lights bouncing everywhere, marveling at how busy everywhere was, which is something we do in this city no matter what, every single time we go outside. We'd get home and take the elevator, ancient, tiny, and seemingly untrustworthy as it is, to our floor. Wet in our front hall, I would empty a mysterious number of rocks, that I remembered as more dazzling, from my pockets.

Then, with the slow burn of a sore throat, followed by running nose and a miserable cough, then I'd get sick,ending up exactly where I am now. 

It was always my destiny anyway.

More travels, but to the same places

 

On what is starting to feel like a neverending apartment hunt, we are likely headed off, on short notice, to one of our chosen cities to look at a small but very interestingly located apartment, on a street in the Medeival center of town. So instead of a long, complicated diatribe against cars, which takes hours of me researching swear words in order to write, for today I think I'd better just show you a few new flower pictures.

Who doesn't like pictures of flowers?

I mean, besides them!

And them.

Let me rephrase that:  It will hardly take any time at all to look at these pretty pictures of flowers.

I will say this though about cars: the apartment we will be looking at is in one of the largest pedestrianized urban areas in Europe! We could live on a street with no cars!

Which is certainly a point in its favor.

 

A musical digression with Keith Jarrett

 

My ever so dear cousin, who is also the only other human we actually know in this entire country, recently mentioned The Kyoto Concerts, by Keith Jarrett. This was a lovely full circle to me since said cousin, a gifted piano player himself, was the very person who recommended Keith Jarrett to me probably within half a dozen years of when those Kyoto Concerts were actually recorded. 

Those Kyoto Concerts are 50 years old now!

I never really listened to the Kyoto Concerts though I have practically memorized the Paris and Koln and Vienna Concerts, where Keith Jarrett sits down at a piano and... wings it. But here the Kyoto Concerts are on YouTube. I'm listening now.

Well I'm not listening now. I can't write and listen to music. So I write. And then I stop and listen for awhile and oh.

Oh.

So its time for a little altar to Keith Jarrett, an old, saucy post for you today, and then a few other related posts featured up on the sidebar as we've been doing lately.

 Review of Keith Jarrett's Solo Album: Paris Concert

from 12/13/17

This is one great album. I love this album. It is Keith Jarrett at his best. It's like if Chopin played the piano, making it up as he went along, all the while accompanying himself absent-mindedly on a kazoo. It also sort of sounds like they gave him a piano with something loose in it that rattles and buzzes whenever he really gets going. "What's that buzzing?" You might ask. "Is there something wrong with his piano?"

Ha ha ha, no, there is nothing wrong with his piano, he's playing a kazoo!

Oh don't be silly. He is a genius piano player. He wouldn't play the kazoo. He's just humming along tunelessly with his own piano playing.

Oh. Is that a good idea?

Not really. Try not to let it bring you down too much.

So, five stars?

Five stars!

And how many stars for the kazoo playing?

Not quite as many.

Your car gives you the power of the gods

 

The thing that the modern urbanist movement gets wrong about cars is how much better they can be. They are made for this world. And this comes from a person who does not love driving and now lives in a dream city in which 647 different boulangeries are a seven minute or less walk from my front door!

Wait, 648!

They added one while I was writing the first paragraph. 

Although there is that one boulangerie over there that I'm not sure ever opens? So fine, we'll stick with 647.

When you dream of living carless in a place like I currently live, perhaps while on vacation in my very city, you might not fully take in the following aspects of non car transportation:

1. Having to carry your mundane, or sometimes not mundane purchases, in a sack on your shoulder for anywhere from a couple of blocks to half the day, depending on what you're up to, takes its toll! Milk is heavy! Toilet paper is bulky!

2. Public transportation, even at its best, is squalid. It shouldn't be squalid. If no cars were allowed in all of my city it might actually not be so squalid. And it is not nearly as squalid as say, in Saint Minneapolis. But from Kyoto to Nantes, it is crowded, competitive, desperate, and tense. You want to stand two inches from other people lurching about and hanging by your hand to a metal rail? I bet that's how I got my cold!

3. Public transportation is limited. If you want to go anywhere, ANYWHERE even slightly off the beaten path, sure, it is likely possible, but you better be prepared to tell the rest of your day to fuck off. Because those eight miles are going to take an hour and a half, but only if you can time one of the four daily buses and their attendent transfers going in that direction perfectly. 

4. Trains. Trains are great! Except when they are overcrowded (see above). And if you don't mind paying absurd amounts of money for them, regularly exceeding flying on longer trips. And also if you only need to go to 5% of all of the places in the country. And if you have plenty of time. 

But well done trains!

Yes, all of this is way better than sitting in plush seats to go exactly where you want with exactly who you want, quickly, and protected from a cruel world by your own personal music playing robot exoskeleton.

So, that said, what's my whole problem with this glorious, deluxe car thing, that people can enjoy so much?

What's with all the Fuck Cars hullabaloo?

That's what we'll get to in our next installment because I'm all shaking with rage as I try to formulate my thoughts, and every explanation seems to involve things like Nazis and Racism, which is possibly a warning sign for me to calm down.

Though I should warn you that from my personal experience, that's not likely to happen.

 

We come down with a cold and more birds try to cheer me up

 

Here I am going on about the crows half the time and then this happens!

Last night my throat started hurting. And so began what seems to be a cold. Thus we started the morning prudently, and then took it down a few notches from there. But by mid afternoon it seemed like a good idea to stumble out and see what kind of walk we could work into the day. After about a year here, we found a strange little back alley route that takes us down near to the garden, which we then pass through to the Sea. I love secret routes, and this one is grubby, but also enchanting in its way, (except when we have to dart across trafficky crosstreets). And so while I thought I'd be giving up and going home early, mostly lulled by the new route, we made it clear to the garden.

As we were poking around in all the fabulous refuse of the Autumn plants in the mansion's front yard I looked up and...

Starlings!

Whoa.

In French they call it: Murmuration d'etourneaux. It is lovely. Eveyone in the garden looks up, their hearts full of wonder.

Or so I assume. I didn't actually look into the hearts of the people in the garden. 

But it stands to reason...

I took pictures, and though it was hard to capture all the graceful, dazzling fecundity of the moment. I left my pictures alone, feeling it wouldn't be right to mess with them before showing you.

When they flooded out of this Palm Tree in the last image, they made a great sound with all the sudden beatings of their many wings. It was the very sound of murmurations, a susurration of a murmuration if you will.

Of course, now that I've shown you the unedited versions, those that struggle mightily to give the proper sense of the wild glory of it all, I am free to try my hand at beefing it all up to something closer to how it felt. After all, the images that were wide enough to show the vastness of the flock rendered them nearly invisible.

Fuck your car

 

I'm in an unusually sweary mood lately, and so why not bring it all together with cars? 

Fuck. Cars.

There is even a popular subreddit, r/fuckcars which I usually avoid because I find them too pro car.

Just so you know where I'm coming from.

Fuck.

Cars.

They go together so well, swearing and cars. I have never sworn so much as when I was driving. My theory is that the weird disconnect of the luxurious comfort of driving a modern vehicle simultaneous with the brinksmanship with death in propelling along at 70 mph creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. A pressure, if you will, that needs to find irrational outlets, like flashes of anger, or a sudden compulsion to be desperately in a hurry. It doesn't take much going wrong, when you're hurtling down a road in a metal box at wild speeds, for you to suddenly end up dead or... murdering, but who wants to constantly dwell on that? It is a far better distraction to be really upset at some goober for not signaling, or at a bicyclist SLOWING EVERYONE DOWN.

Or, look at that fucking old lady who wants to cross the fucking street! Can anyone walk any fucking slower!

If I'm going to risk my life going 50 mph to the grocery store I'd damn well better get there quick!

Oh boy. I have a lot to say on this. I think it's why I've avoided the subject here for the most part. It's unsettling.

But clerkmanifesto needs content every single day, so what the hell, open the floodgates!

And I'm sure your car is just fine. It's everybody else's.

I'll give you some time to brace yourself.

Maybe put on your seatbelt?

Blurry days in France

 

Sometimes I can tell you in excruciating detail all these vivid details of living in the olde world here in Western Europe, with all its strangeness and age and wild color. 

And then sometimes it's just Thursday.

Holy crap. It's not Thursday, it's Friday!

What the hell happened to Thursday?

Does anyone out there have an extra Thursday?

Well, whatever, when they're gone they're gone. The days man, sometimes they're great. I'm not saying that sometimes they aren't, but they... are... fucking... relentless.

So, fine. What did I do on Friday?

I don't know. Could I have slept all day? I'm not that good a sleeper so I must've done something. 

I know, I'll check my phone!

Yes, pictures! I was down on the beach again, wandering after crows and peering up into the underground rivers like some satanic beast is calling me on into the darkness...

No, there is no satanic beast calling me on. It was a simile. Also, I will not be showing you pictures of me riding into this (larger than our earlier pictures) underground river and encountering the Lord of Hell.

At least not today.

Even if we lose everything we will still have the weather

 

Summer lasted forever here. Fall took its sweet time coming. But even here, in a kind of temperate paradise, I could nevertheless see it slowly gathering in the trees and curling the buds of old flowers like they were afflicted with arthritis. 

And then, finally, the rain came.

I, who waited so long for it, was suddenly chilled to the bone and overcome with weariness. How gray it all is! And I asked the question that has been a curse and a joy of my entire life, ever waiting for the merest excuse to be proposed:

Can I just stay home?

Here is me staying home. This is an old post from this same time of year in 2019, in a different country, and in a different climate that still sometimes matches this one. In honor of this post, I have pulled a series of writerly weather centered posts to be linked on the sidebar on your right, just in case this is exactly your sort of thing too...

Unusual Tastes

This is a funny time of year here in Minnesota. It is not embraced by many. Grey nearly all the time, sometimes the temperatures drop into the bottom of the teens and snow falls from the sky. Ice forms on the roads. Bitter winds blow. And the rakish fops say:

"How do you like this? It's still a month before Winter even starts. Ha!"

But you wonder: How can this be Fall?

It can't possibly be Fall.

And then the cold relents. It gets so misty out that one can't even see down into the Mississippi River Gorge. The scattered inch or two of snow and ice vanishes into a great dampness everywhere, and one realizes it really is still Autumn, in it's peculiar, late way. There genuinely is a steady progression from Summer to Winter, secreted between the blizzards, and this is what it looks like. Strange fruits hang from out of bare and dead-leafed trees, rotting. Gouts of ravaged, soaked leaves are piled up in the underbrush turning to slime, the wild places tucked into the city are a tattered tableau as the very world around us breaks down.

And then there's the smell. 

Above all it's the smell.

It's not everywhere, but it's not hard to find. I don't know how to describe it. I suppose it is made of all the ragged matter, all the leaves and branches and cold fruits long past their expiration, rotting, battered by the brutal, altering freezes and thaws, the incessant wetness, all being packed together and forgotten. It is a smell that rises out of the riverway valley, out of the gutters, the collapsed flowerbeds, and the treed borderlands lining the bike and walking paths of my city. It is a rotten smell, of death and decay. It is the smell of things turning, of funk, and of mold. I don't think the smell has any name to know it by. I can't quite conjure this smell to mind, it is strangely unimaginable. But it is full of adjectives and description: putrid, rotted, festering, corrupt, spoiled, decomposing. It is a heady smell, oddly fresh in its rancid way, wine gone too far, dark mushrooms, the secrets of the earth. Death.

I quite like it, and seek its heart, like an appealing pain of which I want to see how much I can take; An exquisite and repulsive morbidity, and yet, the last living breath of a doomed thing before real death, and Winter.