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.





 

One more year in Europe

 

It is a long, early morning where we pay the taxes of being immigrants. 

The taxes are literal (500 euros!) and figurative, the latter of which is more the one that has worn me out today. After a long, occasionally complicated, four month or more process, it was time to pick up our visa cards.

This is good news! 

But I could not describe it as an enjoyable adventure. We were up early in the morning to catch the tiny window of time in which the prefecture opened to us for this final stage of collecting our visa cards (titre de sejours). Jamming into a packed rush hour tram, we trundled slowly along the breadth of the city for half an hour or so. From there it was an ugly walk along vast crowded car infested roads that might as well be in Dallas, until we arrived at the vast and hideous governmental enclave; the Prefecture.

Not that I'm judging.

There we find a nice long line through the security check point. Then, having been deemed not to be dangerous, we are off to seek out our own way. We head into a magnificently windowless and institutional building where we instinctively join the longest possible line down a hallway. And... We have done it! We found the titre de sejour line!

Well done us.

We have plenty of time to enjoy our triumph as we then stand in that long, slow line for two hours.

It's fine.

Have you seen France?

It's lovely!

Well, I mean, many parts of it.

A side trip for the crows

 

Yesterday we had quite a talk about our crows here in France. I mean you and I. It will come to you momentarily. And it was all serious and educational and full of rich birding lore and anecdotes. Clerkmanifesto won many awards for it and received several offers to subscribe to ornithological journals across Europe. 

I was content.

Briefly.

But I kept looking at a couple of the pictures I took when my wife and I were down at the beach with the crows.

Here are those pictures:

I really like boats, and have been down my share of strange rivers and creeks and channels, and even floated into a few caves and mysterious undercity passages. But that's all a long time ago.

Still, this enigmatic entrance to an underworld, hiding in plain sight in my city, was compelling. So I did what I could with the tools I had at hand. I sent my crow friends on a little photographic, imaginary journey into this simple and secret subterranean stream. 

Here is the best I could make of it, a little travel story in pictures: