four

  

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

Some decorative fruit and vegetable:

Purple and yellow onions hybrid:

Striped Tomatoes:

Spiral Apples:

three

  

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

I walked into the library breakroom to take care of some dishes and a small child was there. He seemed very polite. "Hello." He said.

"Hello." I replied.

This is when the thunderbolt hit me!

I have always desperately wanted to get a library cat. But anytime I bring it up it's always "Yes, but some people are allergic to cats!"

Whatever.

But you know what nobody is allergic to?

Orphans.

How could anyone be allergic to an orphan!?

I think the library should get an orphan.

I think the library should get an orphan!!!

I just finished a book that took place in an orphanage and let me tell you, this place would be way better to grow up in than that orphanage. I also saw an Oscar Nominated short that took place in an orphanage. My library would be way, way better to grow up in than that awful place! We could read books to the orphan here, for instance. Also the food we bring in is... nutritionally diverse. And though the quality of supervision and care that the library staff could provide would vary widely, I think the sheer quantity of parental figures would even out the worst bumps.

And we don't even need a good orphan- the kind of sparkly three year old that some charming young couple would would scoop up anyway from the County Orphanage. We can take a grown, problem orphan that no one else would want! 

I think that kind of orphan would fit in better here anyway. Say our problem ten-year-old orphan is throwing a tantrum. We can put them in the kids' room and they'll blend right in.

Though for the best overall effect they should probably know how to read.

This all may seem a little callous. A bunch of random library employees rearing a troubled ten-year-old? Adopting an orphan like a cat? You may wonder, thinking back on thousands of my very mixed accounts of my library and all the weird stories of those of us who work there: "Yes. But could you possibly meet the average standard of child rearing in your community?"

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

two

  

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

A blessing, or, I suppose, in some cases, a curse:

May you be loved exactly as much as you love. 

one

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

I may never see Dan again as long as I live. Which is fine, except, I like Dan.

Dan is one of the most annoying co-workers I worked with over the years, or at least so I thought for the first half dozen years I worked with him. Once I worked it all out though, the next 12 years with him were a joy; his absurd complaints, bizarre ideas of how things should be done, and highly emotional reactions to his work environment were like an entertaining unhinged cartoon version of my own. I've written about him plenty here in clerkmanifesto and once made a dramatic comedy film about him as an alcoholic with a dinosaur problem, so we're not going to go into all that again. But I will say that a couple of weeks ago, knowing that I was weeks from retirement, he confided, in the strictest confidence, that he would be taking a couple of months off for... something.

If someone takes you into the strictest confidence, and makes you swear to tell absolutely no one, the least they can do is actually tell you something that would, theoretically, be of interest to anyone, absolutely anyone at all! But no, Dan's confidential information, that he hadn't told anyone yet, was that he was going to be off for unspecified reasons.

"It isn't anything bad." He assured me.

Fascinating.

Every few years Dan has one of these 'absences'. Our general theory is that some kinds of medical procedures are going on. And as his closest work friend he has privately confided in me that... oh, wait, no. He hasn't confided anything to me. Well no, that's not right either. He has taken me into his strictest confidence to tell me...

nothing.

But at least it was only me he told.

I'm honored.

I guess it was a warning that one day he would stop being at the library until well after I was gone. And so... goodbye?

Unless he's at work today.

Time will tell, but it won't say much.

Preparations

 

In just less than three weeks I will officially be retiring from a 31 year job at a Minnesota Library. If you are young, I have nothing to tell you about something like this. If you are old, I have nothing to tell you either. 

Life doesn't work like that, where people can tell people... anything.

But I'm not about to let that stop me.

In conjunction with an early retirement my darling wife and I are utterly collapsing our carefully built lives down to a few wheelie bags and disappearing into the wilderness of the world. Which means that in three weeks I retire and then two weeks after that we leave everything behind to fly to Japan. Forty days after that we fly through Singapore and Zurich to end up in France. There we have a one year visa to start off with, and we will live... somewhere. The ocean will be involved. The process is... complicated. I know that it sounds full of adventure to you. It would to me too.

But there's a lot of paperwork in adventures! 

So far it's mostly paperwork. 

But I have faith that all the beautiful adventures will find their way through all the terrible papers, eventually.

And what a great story it will make for clerkmanifesto.

Maybe one day I'll tell it.

Or maybe it will squeak through in glimpses and snapshots for dedicated readers to form their vision around.

The truth is, though, that I will be terribly busy doing all this adventure (and its attendant paperwork). And contrary to the insane Internet's opinion, doing something is in profound contradiction to telling about it.

And so we come to the dilemma I wanted to discuss with you today.

Clerkmanifesto must go on!

And clerkmanifesto has a few strict defining rules: maybe even just one?

It must report in daily!

But I need a way to do this, at least in the next three or four profoundly unsettled and uprooted months, that allows for something more spontaneous. A way that doesn't require me to give context to everything I write and show you, that is not such a finished product. Because, and you may or may not know this, clerkmanifesto is nearly always a finished product.  It always takes the time to explain its context so that one can land in any random one of my nearly 5,000 posts, and at least have a chance of understanding what is going on. For example: though I have surely written a couple thousand posts about working in the library, every one of those will have explained anew how I work in a library, where I am in relation to that work, and then will give some context for the library itself. 

Each piece I construct here is bespoke reintroduction to clerkmanifesto.

But for the next few months I'm not going to do that.

Instead I am going to cut and paste a passage that I am hoping will allow me to keep faith with clerkmanifesto as a place of entertainment, reflection, self expression, and invention, but will also give it a more in-process feeling where interesting things might happen, wonderful ones hopefully, but also ones that don't make sense or fall flat or are mere sketches of things that may or may not come. 

Think of it this way: Clerkmanifesto is usually the careful masterwork journal of my life. 

But for the next few months it will more be the notes smuggled out of an adventure in full flight.

Here is the passage I will put at the top of my next 100 blog posts. It will be in color and I hope you will be a regular enough reader that you will soon learn to ignore it.

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

Nature boxes

 

The thought of packing up is on my mind. Perhaps this is because we are reducing our entire lives down to a few carry-on bags and three suitcases. We'll take all this and wander around Japan with it, shaking off the dust of our lives for awhile before we go to France. So much dust.

Dust never sleeps.

As you have recently seen here I first went this route by packing my library up into little to-go dollhouses I could bring with me. But yesterday I was down by my lovely river, and wanted to take that with me too. So I tried to put that into a box as well. 

It didn't work out like I planned.

It's hard to put a river in a box.

But then when I was putting together today's post, which was going to be called "Unsuccessful", I saw all these pictures of the river in a box, and I thought:

"Failure is like dust. I'll have plenty of opportunity for that sort of thing later."

So today I wanted to show you my river boxes.

They are made out of the flowers in people's front yards, and the staircases down from the bridge, and the tangle of the trees, and bees, and water. And then I added literally anything that would fit.

They're almost what I was looking for. And I'll take them with because they use no space.

Berry season

 

The berries are ripening!

Not that I can do much about it. I just don't feel right picking and eating the berries people are growing in their yards, even if sometimes they are spilling onto the sidewalk and falling, ripe, to the ground to be trodden underfoot.

Such pretty berries!

But, if you can't eat your food...

Play with it.

Revisiting a solution to the problem of cars

 

For a short while we were revisiting old posts of clerkmanifesto once a week or so here, but I soon hit a prolific patch and our trips to the wit and wisdom of clerkmanifesto's history ceased.

But soon we will resume our revisits. 

In fact, as we launch into an extraordinarily busy month, wherein I retire from the library, and then, with my darling wife, completely dissolve our life here, get rid of virtually everything we own, flee the country to travel in Asia, and then resettle in Europe, dealing with my daily commitment to clerkmanifesto is going to get...

complicated.

But it won't stop.

It won't pause.

It will carry on!!!!

But as it carries on it may, for awhile, have a looser quality to it. It may feature random pictures, old posts, and less of a carefully introduced and explained structure. I'm thinking about how that will all work. And you will soon hear more about that. But whatever I do it will surely include pieces from my past, like this one.

As a brief introduction to this particular piece from a few years ago, I have to say that one of the serious reasons we are leaving America for France is so that we can live without a car, something perhaps too challenging to do without enormous effort and expense anywhere in this country.

"Fuck Cars"

While recently perusing the "fuckcars" subreddit, a subreddit hostile to cars and concerned at how much worse they make life for everyone, I came across a post discussing Salt Lake City's large scale reduction of speed limits to 20 MPH in order to save the life of children. As usual with this sort of positive, but almost certainly tepid and uncommitted city movement, the fuck cars subreddit (an unfortunate subreddit name, since despite the salt of its name it is about as civil as any other subreddit, which is to say not that civil) sliced and diced the Salt Lake City action with some people going along the lines of "don't let the perfect be the enemy of good", and some people claiming that without traffic calming street design this paltry speed limit reduction will be largely ineffective.

It was then that a solution hit me.

And let me just say, that for all of reddit's lack of civility, this is the kind of solution one never sees.

But I'm going to show you what a working solution looks like.

Are you ready?

Summary executions for speeding.

Summary executions for speeding!

That's right. If you go more than 20 MPH you will be pulled over and shot.

Too extreme?

Meh.

You ask:

 "Would you drive the speed limit all the time if you could be shot for exceeding it?"

No. I'm not crazy

I'd never get in a car again.

Fuck cars.

To remember it by

 

In less than four weeks I'll be leaving behind the library I worked at for 31 years, and leaving it behind forever.

I know I keep talking about it.

It's a lot!

I suppose 31 years is enough that I am not likely to forget the place. Nevertheless, standing at the front desk this evening, as things slowed down, I had another idea:

What if I could have a model of the library? What if I could take my dollhouse version of the library with me? And if some years from now I briefly find myself a little wistful, I could take out my library dollhouse and...       move things around?

I work fast these days.

I'll have to choose from one of these, ranging from simple to fancy: