forty-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:

As I write this it is Tuesday, August 12, and I am sitting at the front desk of the Roseville Library, three days from retirement. But in real time, as you can read this, my wife and will have been in Japan for over a week! So one might say that I have largely succeeded in setting up clerkmanifesto to run for awhile. This is good. We are very busy as we completely dismantle our lives, live with almost no furniture, and continue the labors; bureaucratic, physical, financial, and linguistic, of moving to another country.

On the other hand, I have been making a lot of stuff here! And it's not like now that I am pretty well caught up I'm going to stop! And on top of that, while my wife and I will be busy getting ready, I will also be retired!

RETIRED.

I'm kind of thinking that will mean a bit MORE free time?

So I'll still want to put more things into clerkmanifesto, but I'll also want to keep space open to put in new things. Like what if I manage to have images from, or meditations on Kyoto? What if I want to tell you something from an airport we're trapped in somewhere. What if a fit of cartooning comes over me!!!!

Where will I put all of that if I've already booked out clerkmanifesto for two months before even leaving the country?

The answer to all this is... I guess I'll just cram it in. I think I'll prepare every day's post well ahead of time, and get as far ahead as I can. But also, if in my travels and relocation I have new things to add, it might just get crammed in as a bonus rider on the post of that day.

I like this plan. And I think you'll do okay with it too.

With that, here is the last of the portraits from our estate sale that were pulled out from the previous estate sale seven years ago. They are all gone now, but you can see one here, very slightly augmented and cleaned up with AI (we'll say a 2 on a scale of 10).

This is the same picture, as above, brought unnervingly to life. Click on it to engage, click again to enlarge if you like large things, then click a final time to play it...

We jump forward in time once again to bring you a live post, so to speak, from Clerk Manifesto. This one comes to you after my darling wife and I have been in Kyoto for about a week. It follows the pre-prepared posts you’re reading above, but this is something of a bonus, or extra content, or contemporary content, as added below this post above.

I’ve been taking a careful measure of photographs, usually allowing for a few brief sessions each day, a minute at a time, to take what pictures I can. So I haven’t been conducting anything like a comprehensive photographic study of the city. But I’ve taken what photos I’ve managed to shoot and added my usual frills and personalizations. It’s a good solution, because it allows me to quickly capture interesting places, while also accepting the hurried nature of those photographs, and the many ways they fall short of capturing what things are really like.

This is my way of giving you more of a sense of what Kyoto looks and feels like in a more spontaneous, natural, and candid, albeit slightly ridiculous way. I have a lot of pictures like this. This, we can just say, is another sample with more to come as the days go forward: