Chicken

 

My computer at home is pretty sick, and my tooth is broken, so I thought it might be better to make sure I have a few scheduled blog posts ready to go while I can.

That is how we got this chicken, in the library.

It's almost like a blog screen saver.

Don't worry though, everything is probably okay.

Plus there's this chicken.

Emergency picture network

 

Due to some technical errors (and personal errors too), today's clerkmanifesto post went sideways. This is why I am stepping in with an emergency picture immediately!

What is today's emergency picture? 

I took it just a few days ago. It looks like Saturn, don't you think? Kind of?

It's not though.

It's not Saturn at all.

Dear Minnesota Department of Transportation

Dear Minnesota Department of Transportation:



On foot I was approaching a rather large, 5-way intersection in Minneapolis. Though I wasn't paying close attention, I am pretty sure, as a point of reference, that I had not merely just missed my turn. The sign placidly said, and had said so for awhile "Don't Walk". So I didn't. I pushed the walk sign button and put my mittened hands in my pockets and settled in.

The walk sign button said, and I hope you'll read all of this carefully, the walk sign button said "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait."

You didn't read all of those, did you? You just looked at them. Ah well.

 But if you were to read them properly, at each comma you would have to pause for about four seconds. If you read it like that then you would know how long I waited, in the bitter cold, in the snow drifts covering the corner, while cars that were two miles away when I arrived at the crosswalk, passed me by.

I know what you are thinking. 

You are thinking I am a crank.

I AM NOT A CRANK!

Eh, well, maybe I am a little. But you would be too if you waited on the corner in the freezing cold for four minutes to cross the street.

Now you are wondering, "Maybe the walk sign was broken."

Ha!

I submit to you: Any walk sign that does not change to green the second one touches it is broken!

Let me give that to you again:

Any walk sign that does not change to green the second one touches it is broken!

Now you are remembering that I am a crank.

If I am then I am the crank who is going to save the planet! If we are going to save the planet we have to stop indulging cars.

You're indulging cars.

Stop it or all your children who aren't killed in catastrophic flooding and famines will be picked off by brutal gangs marauding across a shattered, post apocalyptic America.

Unless, of course, like me, you have no children.

In which case, like, whatever.




Yours for a brighter future,




F. Calypso

What you should read

I am not going to name             .

I know you want to read about      . I am the same way.                is compelling, hateable, important! And though we cannot blame the Internet for pulling our once mediocre democracy into a terrifying feudalism, or our culture into attention starved bait, there are correlations. But we, right here and right now, are the feeders, the oxygen. The spectacle of someone like              cannot live on its own. We make the dream, or the nightmare, real.

But I know that it is not enough for me to simply not name             , because with this figure, we are still dealing at the level of symptom. We must work at the root. Reducing the billions of mentions of             , even by half, would do little for us, like killing half of a locust invasion. In the end all the crops will be eaten anyway. No, our very reference must change, the world we operate in, and the kind of venues we trust. 

Usually, at about this point in any discussion of this nature, the author (me in this instance, but I'm not normal) trots out the old canards of moderation, prudence, and vetting what you read. I am not here to do that. In fact I reject that so far as to suggest those professional editorialists are disingenuous. Sitting on their giant media platforms  they are inherently interested in cooling the discussion, controlling it, evening it out. But what they really want is to be the discussion. And to be the discussion they must attract people. And to attract people you need bait. And               is perfect bait.        makes money for everyone.

Well, everyone except you and me.

The media has been unable to counter this American devolution precisely because of the rising news model they sometimes decry. If Capitalism and its siren call of popularity drives News media, then truth and accuracy become more and more unsustainable not only because on the one hand they are less eye-catching and entertaining than more inflammatory material, but also because, in a polarized ideological environment in which one side (the Right) has lost touch with any consistent reality, logic, or morality, these large media voices must constantly shave the hard, largely leftist seeming truth in order to appear even-handed and unbiased.  

These media empires cannot defeat this paradigm while still chasing popularity, even if they want to. And they are no longer able to operate effectively in a neutral seeming space.

But who cares about them? And who really cares about                 .

The real question is what will you do to stay informed?

Luckily, I have the answer.

You should only read clerkmanifesto.

You can get all the news you need on clerkmanifesto.

You can gather all the news you need from clerkmanifesto. That's this, here, where you're reading right now, which makes it especially convenient.

And what, you wonder, makes clerkmanifesto exempt from all the intractable issues I've outlined above?

I am immune to popularity.

But if popularity should, against all possibility, come my way, I'll let you know.

Though I wouldn't trust me at that point, as only then will I have become unreliable.








      

Learning Italian

I am finally buckling down to learn Italian for my upcoming trip to Rome. My goals are modest; I merely want to be able to tell people in perfect and natural Italian that I can't really speak Italian. This will confuse them so much that they will speak to me in Italian, but at that point the onus will be on them!

"What onus?" You ask.

Good question!

Anyway, it's a fair bit of work to learn Italian even to this admittedly paltry level, partly because it requires a background knowledge of greetings and numbers and rhythms and the ability to apologize to people. You have to get enough sense of language and the confidence to be able to clearly tell people you don't understand anything, especially in the stressful hurly burly of Roman life.

So the way I am learning all this mastery of non Italian is through a language CD my wife and I keep on a flash drive in our car. Lately I listen to it all the time. It's a good CD, but there is one part I particularly love and cannot stop practicing. It's the emergency section.

With real alarm the Italian speaker cries out "Fuoco!"

This means "Fire!" All day at work I walk around yelling "Fire!" But I do it in Italian, so no one is particularly alarmed. After "Fuoco!" on the CD they yell "Aiuto!"

That means "Help!"

Then there's "Ladro!" Which means "Thief!" This goes really well with "Aiuto!" So whenever anyone sets off the alarm at the security gates of my library I get to cry out "Aiuto, ladro!" which would probably be offensive to a library patron who innocently has a book from another library system that's setting off our security, but only if they were Italian and they understood that what I was yelling at them was "Help, thief!"

Fortunately I have a solution for the off chance that an Italian might be visiting our library and I yelled "Thief!" at them, or screamed that there was a fire, or that someone should call a doctor ("Chiami un dottore!").

I will look reassuringly at them. "Mi dispiace," I will say. "Non parlo davvero Italiano."

Depending upon my delivery, they might understand.

Bob Dylan finally says what it means

They served strong drinks at the cocktail bar Bob and I talked our way into at 15 minutes before they opened (It wasn't hard and involved people telling Bob Dylan that he's Bob Dylan, which he's already strikingly clear on). Perhaps we miscalculated in ordering a third variety each of their interesting cocktails. They made an infusion with pine tips and morel mushrooms that was confusing and dazzling. But we were way past that stuff and we were laughing too much at god knows what. 

But I remember the tingle in my spine when an increasingly loquacious Bob leaned in and said: 

"This is it. I'm going to tell you alone the secret truth all hidden in my lyrics." 

Then we both laughed as he waggled one hand like Marlon Brando. He does an amusing Godfather. You had to be there.

Then he said: 

"Here is the answer in all my songs and the thing I have been pressed for but not given." He laughed, but collected himself. "This is what I was trying to tell everyone..."

"Oh my god!" I exclaimed giggling. "I knew it!"

"The truth, the truth I have been trying to say, the secret truth..." He said before laughing. "The truth..."  And then he laughed so much it was infectious, and we burst into a hysterics it was hard to emerge from. My ribs ached. We did not actually fall off our seats from laughing but we did knock some strange table decoration flower onto the floor. It did not break, it bounced. Even this, stupidly, was hilarious. I still feel sore from it. Multiple times we both tried to talk, but could not for laughing. And, helpless, silent only to save our lives, and only after many minutes of recurring fits of laughter and some amusing hiccups were we finally able to calm down and dry our eyes. 


We paid. He got into his airport limo. And I walked home.

Loving the library

Today one of our regular patrons, spending the day as he does on one of our Internet computers, collapsed into the keyboard. Heart attack, stroke, sudden loss of blood pressure? Who knows. His normal bright pink complexion turned an alarming shade of gray. He was barely coherent and so 9-1-1 was called. First I knew of it was when the paramedics arrived, sirens ablazing. I looked up from my deeply involved phone call regarding a lost orange folder. I didn't find the orange folder. I suspect it's still in the owner's bag. "Huh" I said. "Sirens."

In my experience patron medical emergencies can easily be split into two categories: "In chair" or "On Floor". "On Floor" emergencies are almost unfailingly bad, "In Chair" ones, just as unfailingly, aren't. Because this was an "In Chair" emergency I didn't make much fuss. Also the quota of fuss makers was already vastly overfilled. People had already formed a long line to make a fuss.

I did peer out across the library to where the shining dome of the elderly, bald patron was enough in view for me to identify who it was that had fallen ill. He's a man who's here a lot. He's like a far crankier, more listless Bernie Sanders. I have helped him many times, but no matter how I try I can't picture him smiling. I can easily picture him passing out though. And for some reason I can picture him holding a Kleenex to his bleeding head. He may or may not frequently bleed from the head, but I can picture it without even trying to.

Though I feel no warmth towards the man I wish him no harm. The paramedics, ambulance, and police all wanted to take him away to the hospital, but gray as he was, he refused to go. "We can't make someone go to the hospital if they don't want to." The paramedic explained. I understand. For some of our patrons only closing the library is enough to get them to go. Imminent death is nothing.

What to do if mildly inconvenienced

The printing went down in our library this morning. I could give you a nuanced explanation of what happened so that what was once three working public printers became zero working public printers, but from the safety of clerkmanifesto I'd prefer to simply say: our computer services department sucks.

It was incumbent upon me to explain this to the people arriving at my library so I wrote a large, colorful sign on our six foot tall A-frame whiteboard. It said:

"We're sorry, but all printing is currently unavailable in the library. Except that which you can do with a pen."

I managed to refrain from adding "The computer services staff has gone into hiding." Even though this was true. We suddenly couldn't find them anywhere.

This is just as well because the patrons did not take the inability to print gracefully. One woman said that she would not leave the library until she could print her document. This was a curious threat as it was only about noon, we were scheduled to be open for another nine hours, and we like it when people are in the library. It's kind of the point. Of course, I have had other dissatisfied patrons threaten to never come to our library again! We like that too, we don't particularly need people in the library, especially difficult ones. So you can see how we're in a win win situation here.

One woman, it remains unclear whether it was the same one as the barnacle approach lady above, was so upset that she couldn't print that she called 911. That's a true story. The police never showed up so I guess they decided it was a more minor emergency. I guess they did something though because our printers seem to be working again, at least one of them, barely. I'm not sure because I haven't been out in the library for awhile. I've been in the  back work area, here, typing this. I hope you've enjoyed it. But if you haven't, just call 911. That should sort this out.

Pine nuts

Lately I have been buying small bags of pine nuts, precious pine nuts, over at my local co-op. Global warming, several years ago, began wreaking havoc on the pine trees whose nuts are large enough to harvest. If I recall correctly the Pinon Pine in particular was hit hard by rising temperatures. And so, accordingly, pine nut prices soared. I stopped buying pine nuts. I'm thrifty.

But inch by inch their $30 a pound price tag became more normal to me. And inch by inch those little nuts looked more appealing to me. Finally I bought some. "Hello." My mouth said. "These are my favorite nuts." And then my mouth added "EVER!"

Here are two stories from our vast array of cultural fictions that have made an enormous impression upon me over the years. They run through my mind. They are a portion of my personal mythology. In one young Charlie is a lover of chocolate. But his family is so desperately poor that chocolate is far too grand a luxury for them. Nevertheless, for this incredibly sweet and decent kid, on his birthday, they manage to get him a single bar of Wonka Chocolate. Oh how he treasures it, nibbling it and making it last as long as possible. To have a chocolate bar! To get to taste chocolate, even if only a tiny bit, every day for a month!

The other story has our hero invading the home of an impossibly rich person in the grim future it sometimes seems we are heading to. He opens the refrigerator. There is a small jar of strawberry preserves. He takes a spoonful of these strawberry preserves made with honest to god strawberries. Has he ever had strawberries before? Is it the memory of a vast, unbelievable childhood luxury? One little spoonful. Could anything ever be more exquisite or precious?

And so I buy pine nuts, my favorite of all nuts. Thirty dollars a pound, ten cents for each tiny nut. Scallops go for $25 a pound, as does good quality tuna, who would ever have guessed that one? A third of my shopping list goes to wild luxuries, figs, maple syrup, and ever they inch away from my means. Ever I chase them down.

Perhaps some of them will slip away forever. One day maybe I will never be able to afford a cashew or a piece of wild smoked salmon. And alas for our natures, my nature, that the second before they disappear forever, they are at their best, the elephant, the polar bear, pine nuts, life itself, the most glorious thing in all the universe, and then gone.

Olympic withdrawl, Zika Virus

PRESS RELEASE:



American Olympic hopeful Feldenstein Calypso today added his name to the list of athletes not competing in the Rio Olympic Games due to concerns over the Zika Virus.


PERSONAL STATEMENT FOLLOWS:



Though I know it may be a disappointment to many, I must regretfully announce that, due to concerns over the Zika Virus, I will not be competing in this year's Summer Olympics in Brazil.

As excited as I am at the prospect of being crowned "Fastest Man Alive", the risk to my family, friends, community, and nation must outweigh my pursuit of personal glory. I am as committed as ever to my ambitions for international glory and torrents of unreasoning adulation, but not regardless of any cost, nor in a way that could cause harm to others.

Would I have won the Olympic Gold Medal in the 100 Meter Dash? No one could ever say. I have never actually run a 100 Meter Dash so there is no telling how fast I might be. While most athletes who are crowned "Fastest Man Alive" are not yet in their fifties and don't get slightly breathless after a brisk walk, very few of them have my unique attributes either. I am frequently described as "quick" and am uniquely well suited to focusing on tasks that take less than ten seconds. It has also been suggested that I have lost a few pounds recently, which could have only aided me in my pursuit of an Olympic title.

I wish the other sprinters much success in the Olympics and in no way mean to suggest that, without having faced me to reach his goal, the ultimate winner of the Gold Medal in the 100 Meter Dash is not, or will not be, "The Fastest Man Alive" . Though we can never truly know who would have won that thrilling Olympic match up between us, his victory will nevertheless be hard fought and fairly won just as it is, and I freely salute him. I also extend condolences to him, his family, his friends, his community, and his country for the terrible ravages of disease he will be spreading through them as a result of his triumphant pursuit.


To my own disappointed fans I say that knowing that I might truly be the fastest person alive is enough for me, so long as all of you continue to be safe, well, and happy.

Good and bad

Another happy day out at the front desk of the library, but almost right away we've got a good news bad news situation:

Bad news:
Someone has spilled their extra large coffee, and it has formed a massive, pale brown lake to the immediate East of the DVDs.

Good news:
In the ranking of the utter vileness of spilled library liquids "Coffee, sweetened" is so far down the list of offensiveness that it nearly qualifies as "Charming".

Bad news:
There is no Janitor on duty today.

Good news:
I had purchased for us a special front desk bucket and sponge that I have been waiting for months to press into action.

Bad news:
No sponge has ever been as absorbent as I fancy they will be, and this one is not remotely an exception. Did I mention that there is a "Lake" of coffee? I did? Well I wasn't kidding. My first impulse before cleaning this sprawling pool of coffee was to rent out canoes.

Good news:
It is an unusually quiet afternoon at the library so I am freed up to meticulously mop up the coffee with my sponge, a thimbleful at a time.

Bad news:
I am working the front desk with the least functional of all my co-workers. While we were at the desk together I was able to easily help every single patron who came to us during which time she observed some kind of strange, non-compete clause and avoided helping anyone. But the moment I go to sponge up coffee she is overwhelmed to the point where a long line forms.

Good news:
I enjoy real world illustrations of our comparative efficiencies.

Bad news:
The cleaning water in my bucket has been so overwhelmed by coffee that it is now, functionally, coffee.

Good news:
My hands will smell delightfully of coffee for the next few days.

Bad news:
I cannot think of a decent way to end this blog post.

Stair monster

The dark spirit of the library stairs struck again today. In the back room we heard the terrible scream. We rushed out. And there at the foot of our treacherous staircase lay another mangled body. No blood this time. This one went down four stairs hard, more or less feet first, thankfully, but, alas, not straight, and now her foot seemed to be on backwards. That may sound fanciful, but no, that's a fair description. In my minor role I got a good look while conveying some message to the assistant manager, who was tending to the patron. The Paramedics came and removed her shoe. And there it was, a backwards foot, which might not sound like too much until one starts thinking about what it might be like to have such a thing out at the end of one's leg.

I imagined comforting the injured patron. "Don't worry, you're gonna be okay. It's not nearly as bad as the last person who fell down the stairs. So much blood! Then she died! Of course, she seemed okay when she left the library."

Then I might add "You know what? Never mind."

Like most institutions my library can be erratic in its reactions to things. One man smells so bad people are gagging throughout the whole wing of the library he's in. He leaves a wake of unusable, pee-stained chairs behind him, and we consider ourselves helpless in the face of it. But another man has a tendency to remove his shoes over in the chair he likes to sit in and we clamp down hard, insisting that he meet our shoe standard. We might shut down half the library to protect a few minor pieces of technology during some power problems, but drag our feet when the weather sirens go off. And so some minor leak may be cordoned off in a wide, dramatic fashion, whereas the staircase is free to go on maiming people with impunity.

Ah well, fair enough. How do you fix a staircase anyway? Even as it feels oddly dangerous when one walks down it, it's hard to understand exactly why that staircase is dangerous. Perhaps it is all as it should be. Upstairs is the whole of our traditional library collection, all of the fiction and non fiction adult books. So yes, you may be crippled or killed in your pursuit of enlightenment at my library.  But then there is always a risk that must be taken in the pursuit of knowledge.

Joking

I joke about a lot of things, but I don't joke about everything. The long running trend among professional comedians is the appearance that they will go anywhere, comedically, and joke about anything, but of course no one does that. Take a look at a favorite comedian and think about what they will never joke about. It will be part of the bedrock of their comedy. An astonishing frankness about sex or religion might co-exist with a fantastic prudishness about Capitalism or the American Military. "The stone that the builder refused will always be the head corner stone" Said Bob Marley, or The Psalms, or something.

However, just what I'm willing and not willing to joke about is a moving line, and I do occasionally wonder "Am I willing to joke about that?" A while ago we had the worst, goriest accident we have ever had at my library. Someone collapsed on our large, hard staircase. I made a joke about it to Dave in the back corner of the staff area that night. It was wildly inappropriate. The person in the accident seemed like they would be okay at the time, but they ultimately... weren't. Had I known that outcome I might just have shied from the joke, and yet I find it hard to regret because it was the one time in my life I made my co-worker Dave have a laughing fit.

When I walk down our stairs here now, the stairs of said tragic incident, I always think "Here I am, daring the stairs of death." Up until this moment that was fairly innocent because it was just a joke with myself. Not so much anymore, now that I have shared it with you.

Never boring

There was an incident in the teen room this evening. As far as I could get it a teenager living in a group home didn't want to leave the library with all her people when all her people were leaving the library. She yelled and threw things and resisted. I was pretty busy with the automated check in machine and was content merely to receive the reports as they filtered back to me. I refrained from gawking. For one thing it's not my favorite flavor for an incident; people yelling and having a fit, and for another it's pretty mundane. On average we get at least one large scale tantrum from a child not wanting to leave the library when they have to per day. This incident sounded a great deal like the same thing, only with a bit older and larger protagonist. 

Still, when there's great hubbub, and 911 is involved, one likes to keep loose tabs on whatever is going on. So I was happy for my colleague's briefing. And when he finished his briefing and said "It's never boring around here." I could have just performed my part in that call and response as I was supposed to. I could have said "No, it never is."

But that's not my way.

So I said "Actually, it is boring around here all the time." 

My colleague could only agree.

At my library there are crazy people, minor local celebrities, wildly adorable children, special one of a kind cultural events. The high watermarks of the human mind are ever at one's fingertips. There are diverse people of diverse backgrounds to talk to. There are new stories from patrons and co-workers and fascinating books everywhere you turn. Variable tasks, complicated problems, and unusual mysteries abound.

But, at heart, it's work. And it's boring.

Shelving, typing, requesting, searching, talking. Blah blah blah. Over and over.

So half of one's job is just making it interesting enough to bear, interesting enough to like, interesting enough to be interesting. Mostly one can do it. One can joke and chat with patrons and co-workers, one can apply oneself fiercely to their work, one can revel in being appraised of what's going on, one can read every chance they get, one can race over thoughts of everything happening around them for their blog, one can apply deep conviction to helping patrons, and one can disappear into dreams. There is a mighty lot one can do to make it all work.

But scintillating blog post stories, frightful tantrum throwing teen patrons, and challenging tasks though there may be, it's still pretty boring around here. And one should be a little careful about pretending too much, even if pretending a lot can be a pretty good idea.