seventy-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:

Well, now what?

As time plays out as I write this, my darling wife and I are in the last stages of disassembling our lives in Minnesota for our uncertain future. In less than a couple of days we should be fully reduced to a modest collection of baggage we will lug across the world, and even as you read this, when we would be near to the end of our Japan trip, that same baggage (perhaps with a few precious belongings traded for souvenirs and upgrades as, like astronauts, every weight and space is accounted for) awaits yet another round of lugging, this from Tokyo to Singapore to Zurich to Nice to our first two month home in France. What will really be happening for us in this mystery future remains to be seen. I would like to reflect happily that this incredibly long and challenging time of preparation, farewells, and speculation is coming to an end for us, but life is full of speculation and farewells and preparation. And though I experience flashes of excitement, time will have to change me. 

And maybe a few Zen Gardens in Kyoto.

Clerk Manifesto here in the present, probably for the last time in Japan as referenced above. We will be leaving tomorrow for a long process involving Singapore and Zurich to get home to France, or over to France. I am not quite sure how to put it just yet.

Tokyo is amazing, and I have been working on a set of photographs for the whole time we have been here. This is the complement or conclusion to the images from yesterday, in the sense that these were all taken within a very short walk of each other, which is perhaps the most astonishing thing about Tokyo.

We are in a neighborhood of Tokyo called Kichijoji, and it is just a minuscule fraction of the city, not really at the center, and yet nothing like a suburb in any way. It feels more like the middle of the largest city I have ever been to, which, I suppose, is exactly what Tokyo is.

Anyway, here are some pictures of where we have been these past days. They are, once again, fundamentally real photographs, though you will probably note that their coloration and tonal qualities have been altered… somewhat. But you can take their fundamental content as a real thing, so to speak, inasmuch as photographs have anything to do with reality.

Until next time,

Clerk Manifesto, from Japan.