Two impressions of the city

 

Black and white, night and day, evil and good, pickled or candied, dead or alive.

There’s a lot going on in this city.

There are, every evening, folks staying in 30,000-euro-a-night hotel rooms directly over sidewalks people sleep and pee on.

But as the great Nicolas Cage said in Moonstruck, “I ain’t no monument to freaking justice.”

I just live here.

While living here, we both got something, maybe COVID, hopefully not whooping cough, whose main symptom, besides weariness and a bit of sore throat, is coughing.

So we’re lying around a lot lately, coughing, and two images from our city roaming keep playing out in my mind.

One:

We were in the port area looking for a butcher that might sell a lamb chop, but it was Victory in Europe Day, so it was closed.

We wandered to a main street, an intersection. A crowd silently gathered on the corner.

An accident had taken place.

A motorcycle sat in the middle of the street. A large pool of liquid was under it.

Was it gas? Oil? Or blood?

Ten meters beyond, two people inadequately held a blanket to shield the scene of a man sprawled face down on the road.

He was inert.

There was something unmistakably dead about him.

A woman turned away from him.

“C’est fini.” she said flatly and clearly.

“C’est fini.”

Two:

We are having coffee at a café next to the fish market part of the Liberation Market.

It is not a good café exactly, but it is lovely and charming.

My darling wife laughs and eagerly says, “Look up.”

A large, well-weathered, deeply stained canvas canopy covers us and the whole outdoor seating area of the café.

On top of it is a seagull walking around.

We cannot see the seagull, only his large, wonderfully comic orange feet appearing on the canvas as he takes each step.

In delight, we watch the colorful footsteps of the seagull appear and disappear above our heads.

Incident on the death stairs

 

Behold, there was an incident on the death stairs at the library!

This it now the 22nd incident on the death stairs.

Maybe we should have thought this kind of thing through before we called them The Death Stairs.

Oh waily and oy vey! Another victim has fallen. Tragedy and mayhem. Blood and peroxide. 

And worst of all, incident reports!

Hearts and prayers and our deepest condolences.

Down he went at the bottom of the stairs. 

He did not go head over foot, but they usually don't. He just sort of...

crumpled.

An older man crumpled down at the bottom of the stairs!

He grunted.

My colleague at the front desk rushed over.

The man was dead!

No, wait, that doesn't make sense. 

I don't think he actually died.

Maybe it was touch and go for awhile?

I get all mixed up now trying to remember the tragedy. Let me think.

I've got it!

He was bleeding from the forearm. The man was bleeding from his forearm.

That's it: A man fell near the bottom of the stairs and it caused some bleeding on his forearm.

I remember this because I advised on the spelling of "forearm" on the incident report.

First aid was applied.

Paramedics were called.

There were Band-Aids!!!!

So you can see why I confused it with the death of a man.

Alas, a journey into our current political situation

 

In my life I have always been politically attentive, sometimes even studious. Much of this comes from a genuine desire for a better world for everyone.

So naturally, like you, I have suffered terribly.

My sources for political knowledge and insight have varied from books and newspapers, interview shows, political, artistic, and economic theory, movies, radio, TV, magazines, and the video essay. With the advent of the Trump era my attention heightened for two reasons; The stakes seemed to be getting so much higher, and YouTube, podcasting, and the short video format produced so much more informative, entertaining, and thought-provoking content. And so I followed politics with increasing intensity.

I was very well informed.

And though I tried to share my political knowledge and ideologies with the people around me, I am, alas, better at art, magic, and clowning. So I also tried not to share my political knowledge and ideologies. 

With very mixed success. Jesus, look at this!

And then Trump was elected again in 2024.

I had to take a break. Not just because it was all too horrible to process. And not just because it seemed to demonstrate that all my attention was functionally meaningless. But because all of the people who I read, and appreciated, and who I still believe are mostly thoughtful and clever people, had, in a sense, failed.

I know that some of this is simplistic. I know that people fight, have fought, and must continue to fight for what's right. But I also understand that the election of both Donald Trump and a Republican majority was a failure of this country too large to really look away from. 

Too large for it not to have been the responsibility of everyone.

Everyone.

Me too.

Well, maybe not you, but you can decide.

I went on several deleted rants here in this space about how despite this spread of guilt, some people are far more guilty than others, in proportion to their power. But fine, let's just say that's true. The main point is that I have yet to hear any contrition, anywhere.

And so I walked away.

But fascism is loud. And I keep hearing it around the edges of things even as I try not look its way. But when the tide is low there is no reason to think of the water. And when it's high?

The water sloshes miserably in one's boots as one tries to walk.

And so sometimes I drifted irresistibly, accidentally back. Just a little. Just to a person or two who I respected, or appreciated, or learned from the most. Which is how I saw one of Innuendo Studios rare videos:  The Alt-Right Playbook: The South Bank of the Rubicon.

It didn't make me feel worse, exactly.

And I really think it's the best understanding of this country in the wake of the 2024 election, the best analysis, the best... consideration.

I don't hardly ever share things like this here, but today I'd like to just this once. It is not a bombastic piece. It is measured, and serious, and thoughtful, but I think, heartfelt. And I am hoping you might like to take it in.

The Alt-Right Playbook: The South Bank of the Rubicon.

Death, taxes, and debates

 

The debates came up with one of my co-workers out at the front desk of the library. "Isn't there supposed to be another one?" I asked.

She didn't know and wanted to, so I looked it up.

"Yes." I informed her. "There's going to be one more presidential debate on September tenth."

My colleague groaned.

I said "I know. It would be so much better if they both died of old age before then!"

This got me going. "John Lennon dies. Prince dies. Martin Luther King dies, but when you really need someone to die it just doesn't happen!"

My co-worker, probably because of being a long time Beatle fan, agreed with me. But if she were more of a Lord of the Rings fan she might have quoted Gandalf at me:

"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement."

To which I might have replied: 

"I'm not so much judging. I'm merely suggesting that god might want to get a little more involved here."

Actually, it's probably for the best that she's a Beatles fan.

Eulogy

 

She was at the library when I started working here, and I worked with her for almost 20 years. She was exactly the age of my own parents. And when I first met her she was about the age I am now. 

So why not write her eulogy here, while I'm at the front desk of this very library she worked in for 30 years? It might be her only eulogy. She requested no memorial service, which, in my best guess, would accord with a funny lack of fuss she had. So let's let this one be a plain eulogy, neither glowing nor condemnatory. I just knew the scraps of her anyway. That's how we know our co-workers, endlessly, in close-up detail, and then in a weirdly distant overview, but never holistically. And it's been a decade too since I spent three days a week with her in the vaguely common cause of library work, so all I'm really left with, despite the thousands of hours, are a few handfuls of anecdotes and impressions anyway.

The first thing I have to report then is that she was always healthy. Indeed, she was notorious for it, a hearty, athletic person who aged without ever seeming to get ill or have any physical problems, at least that I knew of. I would get every cold and flu, and burn through vacation time with back problems, but she was always there in perfect fitness. A half day of mild sniffles for her seemed a pure and outrageous exotica. It was only long after she retired, very late in life, and after becoming a library patron for many more hearty years, in her mid-eighties, that she somewhat abruptly became a little old lady.

And then, like that, 88 years old, she dropped dead outside of her house.

Her biographical data was in some newspaper someone here made a copy of and put in the breakroom. It listed the two sons, the grandkids, the long dead husband. I'm not here for that. 

Here are the bits I'm here for:

1. She was wild about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Strongly convinced that The Great Gatsby was as magnificent a piece of literature as could be written, she went so far as to attend many conferences, some over multiple days, concerning Fitzgerald, and even, occasionally, loyally, Hemingway, perhaps as much for the relationship between the two, as in admiration for his work.

2. She had the almost spooky ability to cause technology to break in spectacular ways just by her presence. This was perhaps a liability working at a library, and was compounded some by her sense of trepidation around technology, which further caused her to break computers and their like through quietly panicked, unhinged actions.

3. She really wouldn't approve of me sitting at the desk of the library writing this, though she did approve of my writing in general. Her solution to her disapproval might be to try to hand me work to do, or just shove it significantly in my direction.

4. Twenty-three years ago, when I took pictures for my portraits of all my co-workers at the library, she camped it up and scowled meanly at my camera. When I called her bluff and painted her just as she posed, she made me promise never to show her portrait to anyone.

4. Her best friend I have only ever known as "Bunny".

5. If she didn't want to do something at work she would try to give it to someone else to do, flattering them that they were so good at, as in "Oh, will you turn on these computers? You're so good at that!"

6. Her most common and interesting stories were always of the more eccentric of her two sons. The tales of his (and their- they did a fair bit together, notably taking care of a piece of rural land together) adventures were funny, and evenly mixed with her disapproval and engaged amusement. I may have gotten a disproportionate amount of these stories due to her seeing a kind of kinship between me and him.

7. She was whacky, forbidding, funny, stoic, secretly smart, cold, proper, ridiculous, mean, respectful of authority, kind, conscientious, self-effacing, bold, hilarious, and appropriate. I don't know that this string of adjectives says anything at all, and yet to me it speaks of a generation disappearing in a way that spells out all of the disaster and hope for the future of the world. 

And that is my eulogy for my colleague.

If I could see her just one more time, I would ask her:

"What is it like to be dead?"

And she would cluck at me like I am a reprehensible, but maybe slightly delightful, scamp. 

And then she would answer something funny. 

Ten improvements to a painting by John Constable

Today I have made ten improvements to a painting by John Constable. Can the John Constable scholars out there name all ten? There is a huge prize for anyone who can! I haven't even thought of the prize because I am so confident of the following:

1. No one will ever spot the claw coming out of the window!

2. John Constable scholars don't, as a rule, read clerkmanifesto.

3. Even if someone were clever enough to spot the claw, everyone will think the volcano was part of the original painting since John Constable was so obsessed with volcanoes!

Which brings us to the question:

How would John Constable feel about these extraordinary liberties being taken with his painstaking and quite brilliant art?

I think John Constable would enjoy the contest, but be unable to spot the hard to see tenth improvement due to his being dead.

Rest in peace, John.

 

Hey hey, my my

 

It was one of the loveliest afternoons... ever. My darling wife and I wiled away a full afternoon sitting outside on a perfect late Spring day at a restaurant we had long forgotten. Sitting there we easily remembered things from forty years ago. The River was behind me and the restaurant speakers played songs almost perfectly from the sixties, really meaning something more like '65 to '75, all of it strictly just a little before our time. 

The baby boomers might kill everything before they're done, but they were the best too. 

It's better to burn out, than to fade away.

There were Beatles and Rolling Stone songs. The Kinks. The Who. Dylan. Hendrix. Finally there was a Neil Young song. I was wearing a picture I'd made of him on my shirt; him with wings, playing a guitar.

 They give you this and you pay for that.

Does Neil Young mean it: It's better to burn out than to fade away?

Yes, but it's an elegy.

On the weighing of souls

Because of my long background in clerking I am sometimes asked to fill in working the registration desk in the afterlife.

My desk isn't the first place people come after they die, that would be kind of intense. They go first, as I understand it, to a neutral, pleasant place in order to adjust to being dead. This can be very quick or very slow depending, as everything does everywhere, on the person. But once they've accepted, in some basic way, that they're dead, they come to me, where I enter them in the system.

Sometimes we sit in chairs and I write their information in a large and beautifully bound ledger. Sometimes the information is absorbed into air screens, which is a technology most of us won't live long enough to see in the world. Sometimes I type it into my computer. But whatever the method, we are always in what looks like a library.

I ask them questions, but not always the same ones, which makes the whole thing way more enjoyable for me. I might ask one person how they liked the cheese on earth, and another for their email address. I can ask how someone did financially or I can ask about their first kiss, if they had one.

Not everyone has.

They have questions too. I can't answer most of them even if I try. A lot people ask me about God. What I usually say to a question like "Is there a God?" is "Yes. I'm sort of him for the time being." Just because a person is dead doesn't make the correct answers to spiritual questions any less ephemeral. Nevertheless there's plenty of good information in my answer, even if hardly anyone makes use of it, another common quality of spiritual wisdom.

I love when people are more generally curious. Like I'm always happy to turn my screen, or open my book to show footage of what dinosaurs really looked like, or a street scene in ancient Egypt. And if it's a slow night I don't mind letting the intake process get derailed like this for hours.

But eventually I always have what I need. I get their pin number, or social security number, or favorite color, and send them on their way to one of two doors.

In the end it's all very traditional.

The story of my life

We were cleaning the house, something that never fails to put me in a dark mood and set me ruminating on mortality. Cleaning, like death, is so... inevitable. And I don't particularly like either in an oddly similar way; I am skeptical of an afterlife.

We were listening to the local public radio music station, the Current. I wasn't particularly enjoying the DJ or the new music. But whether a bad mood can lead me to be deeply critical or being deeply critical puts me in a bad mood I stopped and remembered:

Everything is easy until you do it yourself. 

Read this to not die in ten minutes!

You are probably reading this in order to not die in ten minutes. Most people, according to our exhaustive studies, don't want to die any time soon, but the majority of the people we polled picked "in ten minutes" as the time they'd most like to not die in. 

We are here to help!

This web page, called 

"Read this to not die in ten minutes!"

is specifically designed to stop you from dying in ten minutes.

Well, it's closer to nine minutes now. So you might be thinking:

"Arrggggh! Hurry up! I don't want to die!"

Ha ha ha.

Don't worry, we've got this covered. 

We are absolutely sure that we can keep you from dying in the next ten, I mean nine, er, actually eight, minutes. Time sure does fly. That's why you've got to make the most of each moment. I mean, anyone could just drop dead at any time and then what do you have?

Oh, do you want me to answer that?

Yes, yes, less than seven minutes at this point, but now I wouldn't feel right not answering this thing about what you would have if you dropped dead.

You would have one of these four things:

1. Regrets.

2. Unconsciousness.

3. Lots of happy happy times in heaven!

4. Absolutely nothing.

But I'd better move on as we're down to six minutes.

Don't worry. It's all under control.

We just need a little information to proceed. Because unfortunately the instructions on how not to die in the next ten minutes (now a bit over five minutes to be honest) , is only available to subscribers. 

Simply sign up with the "Follow by Email" app on the right sidebar of this page to unlock the rest of this content.

If you're already signed up and subscribed here, or once you have completed your following by email, simply scroll down, and the rest of this informative, lifesaving essay, will automatically unlock.

Well done! And with two minutes to spare. We can still definitely get this taken care of! No one is dying in two minutes around here! I mean, not if they are reading this super important web page:

"Read this to not die in ten minutes!"

Everyone else practically everywhere is probably a minute from death though.

Oh, shoot, did I say a minute? Only a minute left! We better step on it!

But did you confirm your email?

Okay, good, good. Just checking. No need to panic. This will take but a second. 

In order to not die in ten minutes all you...

Ooops. Time's up. You still with me?

You are?

Wow! Excellent. 

 

I guess it worked then.

Tell your friends!

Mr. Toad's wild ride

Among the most mediocre (but as a fan, ever thrillingly delightful) rides of Disneyland there sits Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. It is a very short, dark ride, meaning an indoor environmental ride wherein one's party sits in a conveyance (a simulated roadster in this case) and is taken along a track on a little adventure. The Mr. Toad ride was based off characters from a kid's book called The Wind in the Willows which, it turns out, is about reckless driving and auto theft. Disney made half an animated movie about it three quarters of a century or so ago. Any further nuances are relatively moot as the premise of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is that you are in a car being recklessly driven through a variety of English Environments: The countryside, a manor, London, Hell, all of it full of ridiculous hazards like road construction, exploding factories, frantically gesturing police, and evil judges. Your car's headlong, dangerous, and crazy driving is ever bailed out by a fool's luck and sudden, last minute, skin-of-your-teeth turns.

I did not intend originally to provide so thorough an explanation of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. Most of you probably know the gist of it all already. I merely came here to talk about my library once again.

Right now my library reminds me a lot of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

Because of all the special limitations of the pandemic, and with all the very specialized, highly limited, and minutely scheduled things herein offered, my library has become a warren of stanchions, cart walls, "Do Not Enter!" signs, giant red arrows, closed areas, gated sections, and long, narrow access pathways.

All of it seems assembled with the same chaotic and ill fitting, makeshift and wild design that marks Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. And the library patrons that wander into this frantic, complicated, overly stimulating environment seem to me exactly like the cars jolting madly through Mr. Toad's. These people push on a door that reads "Warning: No Entry!" only to wheel off to another door, plunge through, and find themselves walking against the tide of an army of red arrows.

They surge away from that just as they are set to head the wrong direction down an endlessly stanchioned path to nowhere. They dodge through the proper entrance only to make an ill-advised turn to the computer appointments area where they find some County functionary looking admonishingly at them and saying "Can I help you" in a tone that implies it is not help, rather a stern correction they offer. Of course like the Disney ride nothing ever goes seriously wrong, except for in Mr Toad one ends up in Hell, and in the library there is a possibility the experience will lead to a terrible bout of Coronavirus and maybe an impending, tragic, and brutal death. 

 But, of course, you go for the ride, you take your chances.

Hand Sanitizer

Who would've thought we'd get a full half year into this Pandemic before we sat down and had a serious discussion about hand sanitizer?

I heard hand sanitizer is just a stopgap until you can do a proper handwashing. What happens with hand sanitizer is you throw a cocktail party in your hands for the virus until they get so drunk they all pass out. This is okay for awhile, but only until they groggily wake up in your hands, look blearily around, and then try to work out how to kill you.

It's just their way.

Oh, disclaimer. This isn't science.

At my library we have three kinds of hand sanitizer.

1. A weird paste-like substance provided early on by the county in a pipe stand dispenser that no right-minded person has ever used a second time. Ever.

2. The nice Purell Gel that is the last of our pre Covid cache from a large order in January or February. We lack the pull to ever get anymore of this stuff. Ever.

3. A mysterious, watery liquid that has been put into our Purell bottles and runs all over everything when one squirts it out.

This third, our main hand sanitizer, is not as bad as it sounds. I like to clean things by heavily saturating paper towels in it. I find its smell agreeably boozy.


And so, in conclusion:

1. Wash your hands anyway, as soon as you can.

2. If still unclear on any of this well researched scientific examination of all things related to hand sanitizer (Disclaimer: this isn't science), simply reread. Or, skip to...

3. You must be doing something right. You have not died of Coronavirus!

Death's respectful distance

I believe we can all learn to accept death, provided it keeps a polite distance.

I walked through my neighborhood. I was taking pictures of fallen flowers soaking in gutter water, of tiny bees and of old, patient cats. I took sewer grates and strange, secret worlds inside of plants. I took pictures of all these pretty things until I came to where I had last seen my local turkey flock, back between two backyards that bordered on a small patch of wild woods. I looked up there with a hopeful expectancy. There were no turkeys to be seen.

But something inert was on the grass, a hundred feet away. Lumpen and inert and tragic. I had my suspicions.

I raised my camera and zoomed in all the way.

It was a dead turkey.

I didn't take a picture.

It wasn't pretty.

They're not even jokes

At work today someone was looking at and commenting on all the stores that have been hurt in the riots. "The Dollar General Store was vandalized, looted, and badly fire damaged." They said.

"Oh." I replied. 

Then I asked "How can they tell?"

Several boxes of free materials had come into the library, but since the library is closed they're just sitting in the back for now. They're Senior Housing Directories, a guide that comes out annually. Two times people got curious what they were and looked in the boxes, and two times I resisted making my comment.

But the third time I said "It's  boxes full of Senior Housing Directories. They have an awful lot of empty spaces to fill."

On the phones tonight, running our curbside pick up scheme a patron called to check out her two books: One called Burning and one called Reckoning. Referring to the riots sweeping through town I said "You have chosen the perfect titles for our current situation."

One of these days I'll offend someone. 

Fortunately it hasn't happened yet.

The virus

"Language is a virus"

-Laurie Anderson

Doesn't this one look like it's going to be a deep essay? 


Anything could happen, but probably not that.


When I started to wear a mask the first thing that amazed me was how hard it was to breathe in it. After all, there I was wearing a mask to try and stop the spread of a horrible communicable disease that (mostly) kills by making it hard to breathe. What irony. What a terrifying way to die. What an insidious virus. So more and more I put on a mask and

It took my breath away.

I'm not here to talk about the efficaciousness of masks.

Oh, sorry, I said "I'm not here to talk about the efficaciousness of masks."

Wait, come closer. "I'm not here to talk about the efficaciousness of masks!"

Wait, let me slip off this mask so you can hear me. ""I'm not here to talk about the efficaciousness of masks."



Great. And now we both have the virus.

But not that virus, fortunately, so wear your mask!

"What virus then?" You ask.

Language.



What, do you think language doesn't spread and kill?

Exactly. All viruses are killers given suitable conditions. Watch:



"One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear."

-The President, two days before the first of more than a hundred thousand American deaths (at press time).




But it's true. One day language will disappear. And he may have been actually referring to language. 

I mean, he doesn't seem to like it.

It's a virus.

And every virus is a killer.



Actually, I know of one, and only one virus in all the great wide world that does not kill.





Love.





Alas that it is a reluctant spreader.

A walk with my wife in a late snow during a pandemic

All day it snowed, even though there were lawns hazed with the purple of a thousand little blooming crocuses. Minnesota doesn't care about flowers or seasons or where the water goes or how it comes down. And why should it. Minnesota knows what it's doing. It always has.

So when it was finally snowing less, my lovely wife and I went out walking. Crunch is the sound it made. We slipped at first because it has been Spring for awhile, then we didn't slip because it hasn't been Spring for that long.

All around us people died in hospitals unable to breathe, and businesses went under and people wondered how to pay rent or how they were going to afford to get food next week. 

But we mostly saw robins. Fat robins.

Down a hill, in a little vale that runs to a waterfall, the trees were loaded with wet snow. It was a dazzling maze, dark and white, complex and wonderful.

"Look." We said.

And so we both did.

100 Greatest Albums: John Prine Live

Well, I was going to do this album anyway. It's not like he had to go ahead and die!

But so it is. And he did.

No one ever said the world isn't stupid.

Really?

That's the way that the world goes 'round, you're up one day and the next you're down. It's a half an inch of water and you think you're gonna drown. That's the way that the world goes 'round.

I guess it's a matter of interpretation then, but sure, maybe sometimes the world isn't stupid. We can all take that one up with god if we've got enough gumption for it when the time comes.

Of course, the time is always now.

My friend Grape gave me a tape of this album. It's a live album. John Prine Live it's called. Grape sure did give me a lot of albums in these 100 Greatest Albums I've been putting together. I wonder how he's doing, still locked down in California, just a few miles from tangerines they sell for nine dollars a pound out here.

This album kind of has everything you want in John Prine. Well, except it doesn't have his late masterpiece, one of the great mysterious wonders of songwriting, Lake Marie. I guess he hadn't written it yet. But it's full of John Prine weaving slow cozy stories into relaxed, flawless versions of a healthy scattering of his light, dark, perfect songs. Light songs that are all killers. Sketches. Short stories. Pleas, wonders.

Two songs then to make my case.

As engaging as the story here is, it's in the telling. It is an act of pure magic how much feeling this absolute trifle carries in it. I'm not sure anyone writing anywhere could do so much with so little.

Sabu

And then there's this. No secrets here. No jokes. And a payoff that would seem almost treacly if it didn't hit about as hard as anything could- a deft line of American tragedy. It's as slim as that first song, but straight up. As straight up as any song you'll hear.

Sam Stone


Somehow you could take ten brief songs of John Prine and have yourself enough quotes for every situation- a bit of our own Shakespeare on a porch somewhere, I suppose.






Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.....





Rest in peace.

Bartleby the essential worker

Though I had planned on observing my Governor's sensible, but increasingly casual-seeming STAY AT HOME order by actually staying at home and having a bit of layabout, all posting on this blog a lot and drinking coffee constantly with my wife, I was stunned to find I am...

AN ESSENTIAL WORKER.

So here I am, at work, in a library, which is closed, and I am feeling very, very important.

The emergency service we are providing is one in which, say, for instance, season two of Facts of Life is on hold for a patron; well they can call us and we can prepare it for them, and then they can call us again, and we can put it out on a table in front of the library so that they can pick it up.

Did you know that both Molly Ringwald and George Clooney were at times in the cast of Facts of Life? I tell you this in case you had any doubts about me doing essential work here.

So naturally it has gone to my head.

The phone rings at the library. 

Clearly I am too important to answer that.

Can I shelve these requested books on the request shelves?

No. It's beneath me.

How about going upstairs and pulling some requested books off the shelf for an eighty-two year old woman who has decided to work her way through the whole Debbie Macomber ouvre one more time?

No.

I am an ESSENTIAL WORKER. What do people not get about this? I am like a Doctor or Nurse or something, but probably more important.

Stop asking me to do stuff!

I am going to stand in the middle of our first floor, as far away from everything I can, touching nothing. My hands hang loose in the air. I take deep breaths and conserve my energy. I am counting down from a million, holding back the storm of deaths. Don't talk to me. Don't go near me.

I will tell you when my moment has come.

Corona....... virus

 Lately, in the course of the pandemic it has become too crowded to walk safely along the river paths so I've had to switch to neighborhood routes. However, this morning dawned in the dismal gray of a lingering snow. The world dripped and slushed and I felt it might be discouraging enough to keep the river paths free of the infected masses for the morning. And so once again I walked with moderate safety in my bubble of copious space along the Mississippi.

While I was walking I got a really good idea for a blog post. It was the one a couple days ago about how Clerkmanifesto was designated as a Stage 2 Emergency Blog. It was satire. You might remember it.

No?

It was really good! I mean, I liked it. 

Other people have different opinions. Like, all the time. 

All the time.

Anyway my idea was so good (to me) I had to pull off the river and write it in the little notebook I carry with me wherever I go. Luckily I was right then at the monument to WWI veterans. A spacious overlook there provides a sweeping view of the Mississippi. So I stood there in the chill gloom and wrote. I wrote about the coronavirus. It was a dark humor, but it kept me warm for a while.

I finished. Then I put my notebook away and turned from the river. A bottlecap caught my eye. It was sitting conspicuously on the edge of the monument.

"Corona" it said.

I laughed. Someone had left a tribute, or the message of a Corona bottlecap. "That's funny." I thought. And I decided maybe it would be amusing to take it to work with me, so I leaned forward to pick it up.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!" I screamed.

Oh my god, I almost touched it!

100 greatest albums in the days of the pandemic: Gone Again

There is a kind of pattern in these 100 greatest albums I'm writing about, with each album being individually the greatest album ever. A seminal artist makes an album that revolutionizes music, that is essential, and revolutionary. 

And I set that aside. 

A decade or two later they make something else. It's just a little more personal and somehow deeper, with nothing to prove, but it doesn't add much to the evolution of music and its genres. 

And who cares. 

That, that later album, rarely written into the sacred book of the culture, is the album. 

At least, for me.

And so it is with this one. Patti Smith made an essential album that went some long way into ushering in all of punk rock. It also included maybe the greatest line of Rock N' Roll history: 

"Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." 

But... whatever.

Let's move a couple decades forward. 

Let's talk about the people she loved dying; husband, brother, close friend. 

Even Kurt Cobain takes his place:

Boy boy
Just a boy
Just a little boy
Just a little boy
Who will never grow 

Let's talk about Gone Again. All chants and hypnosis, rage and wisdom, grief and, oh, I wanted to say redemption because it sounded good. I don't know about redemption, almost nothing at all. Death is the bottom falling out. Falling out forever. There are some things we will never, ever, ever get back. 

In the end, all of them.

Hold on.




If there's one thing could do for you...