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: