sixty-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:

Here as promised, or warned, is another repost. I like this one because it is about my lack of clerkmanifesto fame, which, finally, I find more amusing than anything. Increasingly people who have known me follow me in instagram for the occasional bits from here that I post over there, which only confirms my worst suspicions about how we use the Internet.

But mostly I just like this post because it has jokes, and I find it funny.

 

Today I was reviewing some of the history of Clerkmanifesto. Perhaps my recent, unmarked passing of the ten year anniversary of my daily posts here, sometime last week, made me nostalgic. And maybe once again I was puzzling out how, while for everything I can find to read and watch on the Internet, I do so alongside ten thousand to ten million other readers and viewers, but for clerkmanifesto it's just... us. 

Hi.

Sometimes, rolling through the past work, I wonder what it is about it. What ingredient is missing? What has kept ten years of my writing out on the deepest backstreets of Internetland, where the wind howls and the cars rust? Tumbleweeds roll by.  A baseball field tucked into  acres of parched corn lies unused. And next door to me, the things you thought were on the Internet, but couldn't find no matter how hard you looked or thought should be there, play backgammon with each other and never answer the door.

But there is a classic joke, and I prefer a joke here:

A great flood is coming. A man waits in his house. A car drives up to the house. The driver calls out urgently to the man "Quick, get in the car. The flood is coming!"

The man replies "No. Thank you. I trust in God."

The car drives away. The waters rise. The man goes upstairs as water fills his house. A boat arrives at an open second floor window. "Get in the boat!" The boat driver says. "The waters are rising!"

"No, thank you." The man says. "I trust that God will save me."

The terrible flood rises some more. The man climbs onto his roof as his house is subsumed. A helicopter flies over and a rope ladder is lowered down to the man. "Grab the ladder!" The helicopter people cry.

"I have faith that god will save me!" The man calls back.

The helicopter flies away. The waters rise and sweep the man off the roof. He drowns. He is dead.

In heaven, he demands to be taken to god.

The man says to god "What happened? I had absolute faith in you, and yet I perished in the flood!"

God replies: "What? I sent a car. I sent a boat. I sent a helicopter..."

And so I imagine dying, long from now, and going to see god. And I will say "First of all, thank you. Second of all, what was the whole deal with Clerkmanifesto?"

And god will reply "I sent a car. I sent a boat. I sent a helicopter..."

And I'll say "You did?"

And god will say "Forty-seven N. Oak Street, Buffalo, New York?"

And I'll say "No. That wasn't my address."

And god will say. "Ah well. Let us not dwell on these things."