A thrilling trifling anecdote

 

Standing in a multi story clothing store above the main street here, looking out the window, I saw a tram go by. It was festooned with advertisements for a museum up in the hills just outside of this city, near the glorious Saint Paul de Vence, possibly the loveliest village edging along the entire Cote d'Azur. It was for the Maeght Foundation Museum, a lovely estate-like museum we went to a few months ago. And all these ads reminded me of a trifling anecdote from there that I wanted to share with you because you adore trifling anecdotes.

You don't adore trifling anecdotes?

I could have sworn you were really keen on trifling anecdotes. Let me check my notes.

Oh, I see what happened.

It turns out you like something around here, but it's unclear what, so I guessed "trifling anecdotes".

You know what? Why don't I share this trifling anecdote and see how you feel about it.

I mean, you'll see how you feel about it. And I'll make up in my head how you feel about it, and, spoiler alert, in my imagination you are going to love it!

So there we were at this pretty museum way up in the hills overlooking the sparkling Mediterranean. The museum actually has gorgeous grounds and an amazing collection that oddly is just a bit less than the sum of its parts? Like, maybe if you took the best third of it, which would still be a lot, it would be the best modern collection in all of Southern France. But somehow it all seems a bit unfocused, and some of the lesser works can get a bit... off. 

Its curation is a bit funky.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. That's just me, er, judging the world around me with an implacable tiger-like ferocity.

Anyway, I'm walking around this museum in the hills near Saint Paul de Vence, and, this is important, so don't shut your eyes, I was wearing the same t-shirt I am wearing right now! It features this picture:

 

Now here comes the trifling anecdote.

Wearing this I started walking into a new room of the museum, and as I was walking in there was a woman walking out. She looked down at the picture on my shirt, and, in a knowing sort of way, she laughed!

She laughed!

"Hmm," I thought. "She must be a fan of Clerkmanifesto and an admirer of trifling anecdotes."

But no. I mean, probably not.

So I sort of shrugged my shoulders metaphorically, and I proceded into the new room of paintings. 

There were sixteen paintings on the pale ivory walls of this one big, but simple, room. Some of the paintings were quite large too.

And every last one of them was of tigers.

An amusement park for muppets

 

We may be nearing the end of my onslaught of felted everything pictures. This may or may not be good news for you. I'm currently generating pictures of flowers turned into felt, but we're not ready for those yet, and it's a bit too early to tell whether we'll ever be ready for them.

What we are ready for is a visit to Clerkmanifestoland, the thrilling amusement park with that charming Fox and Skunk in Arles ride, and the Condeluded ride, which is seriously the best ride ever, and the Catcher in the Rye ride.  You know, Clerkmanifestoland? The theme park that everyone says is

A MILLION TIMES BETTER THAN DISNEY!

Not that it's a competition.

It's not a competition.

I remember once long ago Disneyland had a very amusing 3D muppet movie. 

Breaking news: Okay, this is a little amazing. I thought, for all I know, the muppet 3d movie is still around so I paused my writing and I looked it up.

It closed today.

No, like, after 35 years, it officially closed today.

Literally today is the closing day of the Muppet Movie 3D in Disney!

It was Jim Henson's last project and opened in 1990.

It closed today, or, because I am ahead a bit on my posts, for you it closed about a week ago.

Anyway, wild coincidence.

But all the better that I have in homage my own muppet world version of Clerkmanifestoland today, which is a place like Disneyland, only better, and more muppety.

RIP, 3d muppet movie.

May all the muppet ghosts come visit this version of Clerkmanifestoland.

Library coincidence number 174

 

As a connoisseur of coincidence, I cannot resist bringing the latest one I came upon working at my library's front desk. 

This is a true story!

A notable library patron visited us for the first time in a few years. Once upon a time, this man came to the library every single day with an assortment of all his belongings, and an array of what looked to be assorted garbage, packed into four to six Target shopping bags. He never went anywhere without his Target bags. Because of this predilection for Target bags, he was known to the library staff as "Target Bag Man".

Upon reflection, this wasn't the most inventive nickname, but for years we didn't know his real name, and, let's face it, "Target Bag Man" was very descriptive. Target bag man was obsessive-compulsive about germs and used a lot of our Kleenex and hand sanitizer long before the Pandemic briefly made it de rigueur. He likely slept rough in the grounds and swamps in the back of our parking lot on many occasions. Target Bag Man was a lonely, sometimes noisy, unfriendly, daily figure of my library for many years and may even appear in an old blog post or two from those times.

But slowly Target Bag Man moved onto other things, and now it has been quite a long while since I've seen him. He came to my desk today to ask for an envelope. "Target Bag Man!" I thought but did not say. He looked old, a lot older, but his coldness and refusal to touch things remained. I gave him an envelope. He walked away.

And as he did another man came to the desk. "I thought the library might be able to use these." He said. He handed me a bulging plastic bag.

 It was stuffed full with Target bags.

A pure koincidence

 

My darling wife and I have been watching old seasons of Project Runway at our house. Fashion design is... interesting, and I don't have much more to say about it here.

Except that, in somewhere around the 2017 season, one of the contestant's names is...

Kovid.

Yes, pronounced just as you would expect.

Kovid is a very nice young person, and, as we are not nearly halfway through the season, I don't know how far Kovid gets in the competition. But it is mildly shocking to have people say Kovid this, and Kovid that, and have it entirely just mean a person and nothing else.

Even stranger, in the episode we just watched, which was a high fashion challenge where the contestants all had to use a single fabric print in their design, Kovid whimsically gave their model a facemask. 

A MASK!

I wonder how Kovid weathered the pandemic. I wonder if Kovid didn't call it "Coronavirus" for as long as they possibly could.

The mighty coincidence

 

Due to the wealth of cultural and subject references teeming about in a library, and the wide ranging nature of casual workplace discussions, libraries are an extremely fertile ground for coincidences. I have come across many, and probably talked about quite a few in this space over the years.

Great coincidences usually feel more like great fun to me, than they feel like magic. But that is maybe another subject.

Anyway, today I had a very simply constructed coincidence, but, boy, it was a doozy!

This is a true story.

When I am shelving these days, I usually have a bluetooth ear bud in my ear through which I'm listening to a recorded book. And so it was today up in the non fiction section. I was shelving and listening to Bruce Springsteen read his own autobiography, which is excellent, called, naturally, Born to Run. A woman came into my aisle and said something to me. I didn't hear it too well, what with Bruce talking in my ear, so I paused the playback, removed the earbud, and said "What was that?"

The woman, flustered, asked "Can you help me find a book?"

I replied "Yes, what book?"

She said "This one." And handed me a scrap of paper.

The paper had a call number on it and three words: 

Born to Run. 

The three-letter code

 

This is the merest trifle from today's library work, but if I can't share the small things here then...

Hmm, nope, nothing occurs to me. 

So let's workshop it! 

If I can't share the small things here with you then...

1. ...we may end up clogging the Internet.

2. ...you the reader may begin to fear reading clerkmanifesto because you can't take the intensity of having your mind blown EVERY SINGLE DAY!

3. ...they will probably end up all over the floor here and someone could slip on them.

Thank god we're done with the workshopping. You can choose any concluding phrase above, or, for fun, make up your own.

So here's what happened. We file requested books with a slip featuring a three-letter code made of the first two letters of a library patron's last name followed by the first letter of the person's first name; Feldenstein Calypso = CAF, cause I sure like my coffee! Sometimes these three-letter codes spell out something. This isn't enough to create anything amusing out of the situation (see "CAF" comment above). But sometimes, when the three-letter code is combined with the right requested book or movie that the slip is placed in, it creates a sudden frisson!

That's what happened today.

Someone requested a season of the TV show called "Mom".

The request slip read:

"DAD"

Maybe "frisson" was too strong a word?

The doorbell coincidence

One thing I have always loved about library work is the coincidences. I understand that when the vast number of names, famous stories and people, songs, books, and movies all come up together as they do in library work, they are statistically bound to appear magical when they weirdly synchronize. You know the story: Monkeys on typewriters writing Hamlet. But the story that says enough monkeys typing long enough on enough typewriters will produce Hamlet by sheer volume of randomness is a bit extreme. It would take surely billions of monkeys billions of hours with billions of people scanning the endless random pages.

But what if your job was monitoring the work of a hundred monkeys randomly typing all day on a hundred typewriters. There would be nothing but gobbledygook for days, maybe a few coincidental short words from out of nowhere. Maybe rarely there would even be one longer word, or half a sentence. And then one afternoon you suddenly see among the long readouts of nonsense:

"GOto the pond at 2oclock!!."

Weird.

Sure, it was bound to happen.

But there just happens to be a pond near where you work.

Don't you think you'd better go there, at two?

And what if those monkeys typed "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

I mean, that's hardly any of Hamlet. But it's still not the worst time to believe in magic and little gods.

As Shakespeare said:

Don't waste your time believing in the big gods and impossible things,
The little gods are easier, demand less, and take your breath away with more sweetness and danger.

Well he would've said it if he typed randomly on a typewriter for long enough!

Which is all to say I had my tiny burst of coincidence magic today at the library. Actually I had a few coincidences, and this was my favorite one:

Our curbside pickup doorbell, that non phone owning patrons use to alert us to their arrival, got turned off or reset so I needed to fix it. Not finding the Scarborough Fair doorbell song we were using I programmed in something else, not at the time sure what song it was. Then someone rang the doorbell. It was a Christmas song: We Wish You a Merry Christmas. My co-worker, who hates out of season Christmas music, was nearby, so I said "Oops. I didn't realize it was a Christmas song. I'll change it as soon as I come back."

And then I went out into the July heat to help the patron who rang our doorbell.

It was Santa.

Elevator surprise

We live on the top floor of a building with an elevator. Sometimes I use the stairs, sometimes I take the fancy way, especially if I'm heading out for my solitary morning walk commute in the bitter conditions of this Winter. It gives me extra time to finish putting on my vast array of outerwear. Even though my building has dozens of units in it it's rare to run into anyone on the elevator and it's easy to take it for granted that one will have it to oneself.

So when today, on the first floor, the elevator opened up to suddenly reveal a woman with her rambunctious dog I was startled. I was so startled I sort of yelped.

"Sorry." she said, tugging her dog into the elevator with her as we passed.

"You just never expect anyone in the elevator." I said to explain. 

It's the fifth time I've said so this week.

Streets paved with gold

I was walking through the city thinking something about money when all of the sudden I came upon a dollar bill sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. I laughed. "What are the odds," I thought "That I would be thinking something related to money at the moment I found some!"

And then my ever American brain answered sadly "About fifty-fifty."

Shakespeare in time

As regular readers of my blog know, I recently received a time machine. It is in the form of a stocking cap. You type instructions on a cloth keyboard in the hat, with a general description of where, when, and/or to whom you'd like to go to, and the AI in the time traveling cap does the rest. In a painless blink you're back in time.

Except mostly you aren't. Because it is impossible to go back to the past and effect the future, the time travel hat can only take you to a "safe" spot. In an obvious example you can't go back and stop your grandparents' meeting. It doesn't let you in the same way gravity doesn't let you jump to the moon. What this ultimately means is that out of maybe 200 time travel attempts only one will work. This makes time travel less fun and amazing than one might think. Imagine if out of every 200 things you looked up on the Internet only one was interesting or worthwhile.

Oh, right, that is how the Internet works. But you take my point.

So anyway, if I want to go on any trip to the past I need to devote hours of futile attempts to it in the hopes of getting briefly lucky. When I do make it back to the past, anything I do, or, really, intend to do that will change the future sends me back to the present. I never know what that might be, or might've been, but even keeping a low profile and doing nearly nothing might only give me 15 minutes in some wildly obscure place before I pop back to the now.

So while one might love to go back and see Jesus or Dinosaurs, these are the least likely attempts one can make. The more famous a person or influential a place the more susceptible to changes it is. Also the further back one goes the easier it is for some minute thing to cascade into change. All this translates to an annoying error sound in the hat and a trip back to the drawing board. It turns out that the sweet spot for being able to time travel, at least as I have found it so far, is to go back to somewhere in the 1990's, to a patch of remote, unremarkable woods, and then sit there very quietly. I saw a deer once.

I, your time traveling reporter, am here to report that a second growth Canadian forest in the 90's is pretty similar to the ones we've got now.

So time travel would be something close to a bust if it weren't for loops.

Loops are unexplained, and possibly unexplainable, phenomenon in the past that appear, to the acute eye, to be the result of time travel. If something in the past is the result of time travel, then one will be able to travel back in time and make it happen. This is how I received my time machine hat from the future, and this was how I was able to travel back in time to meet William Shakespeare.

Of course, I didn't know it was a loop, not for sure, until my attempt to travel back actually worked. After countless futile endeavors to reach dead writers I admired I was amazed to find myself in a dark room in England in the late 1500's. Shakespeare was working at a desk. I doubt we could have communicated but my time travel cap comes with a built in field, or area of effect, translator that actually works pretty well.

"Wow, Shakespeare!" I exclaimed. This was way bigger than seeing a historical deer in a obscure forest in the 1990's.

"Yes, that is I." Said Shakespeare with a bemused trepidation. "Where do you come from?"

"The future." I replied. Why not tell him? Either I could or I couldn't. "I brought a few of my best essays and wondered if you'd read them and give me your thoughts."

"Sure." He said, holding out his hand. I gave him the blog posts and he started in on them after an appraising feel of the, to him, unusual paper.

He read with quiet concentration for awhile, then, amused at something, he snorted through his nose. I'd kill to know now what he thought was funny, but at the time I didn't want to break his concentration.

"These can be tough to understand sometimes." He said. "I wish they had footnotes. Who is Bob Dylan?"

"Oh, right." I exclaimed. "I forgot I put that one in there. It depends on who you'd ask. He's either a crappy singer who wrote some tolerable songs, or the "You" of the last half of the 20th Century."

Shakespeare nodded and continued reading. "I like this one:

If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow, and which will not,
Speak then to me...

It seems apt for our meeting." Shakespeare added.

"Hmm. That's odd. Did I write that?" I asked leaning over his shoulder. "Or did you?"

He perked up. "Can I use it?"

"Sure." I replied. And with that, as is consistent with the delicate nature of time travel, I popped back, with no fanfare, to the present. Perhaps there is some weird architect to the Universe and my job was done. It's hard to know. Either way, it goes to show that time travel either doesn't work, or it's too confusing to bear.

Did I somehow bring back to Shakespeare this very blog post to read?