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 left this space open for me to write a post in case I had something significant to say on this momentous day, since as you read this it is the day my darling wife and I are landing in Japan, at the beginning of living out across the whole wide world. Two small people free and at large.
Farewell Saint Minneapolis.
So do I have something significant to say?
I always have something significant to say!!!!
In the end all of these postings made ahead of time, full of references to my future and to your past, create a kind of confusion about time. But I'm not going to fault it. Life is jumbled up. And retiring from a place I worked for 31 years has a touch of the quality of waking up from a dream. What just happened? Was it two days ago, or twenty years ago? At my retirement party scatterings of different co-workers from several different eras of the Roseville Library showed up. They gathered naturally into small groups of their time period. One could see the past hovering about them, but there they were, unmistakable in that exact moment.
As I write you now it is the first day of my retirement. I sit on a couch that we have already given away but that has not yet been picked up. Yesterday I was at one of the largest and most significant endings of my life. Today is one of the larger beginnings of my life, and that works whether you count my today or your today.
I take it back. I don't have anything significant to say today. I said it all here over the last dozen years. And I will say it all here in the next decades. And some of the things in the future I already said, and some in the past I have yet to say.
Welcome to my retirement.
