Oh well, another Nobel Prize come and gone and nothing for clerkmanifesto. Not even the one for literature.
We were super close this time though! Not that I care. I do this for the glory of god.
Do you hear me God! I'm doing this for you!!!
So it's not my fault you come off looking so bad.
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."
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:
I still hear from god, even as my situation changes...
Despite it taking a few hours of work to resurrect my cartoon character of god, I slipped him in rather incidentally to my Condeluded Ride post yesterday.
But it is nice to have him back. Sort of. My AI robot picture generating friend occasionally tries to give him a face, probably because robots don't understand that one should never look upon the face of god. And my god character still yells a lot.
Here are a couple of cartoons for you featuring god. We more or less picked up where we left off thirty years ago with him.
He doesn't change much, but there are new modern references!
My AI video generation obsession continues. Whether that is good news or bad news for readers of this long running bolt hole of the Internet is beyond me. However it goes for you in particular, the new instructions apply and are blessedly simple: click the enticing (or not at all enticing) picture below, and watch it come to life.
It is a miracle!
A miracle!
And to say that each miracle comes at the cost of a hundred slowly and obstinately misunderstood requests would be churlish.
The Universe has always been hard of hearing.
Continuing from yesterday's theme, wherein we discussed the cruel inheritance from my childhood:
If only I would apply myself!
I did have a moment, after spending another 12 hour day of working on my photoshop/AI pictures of my library co-workers posed with their spirit animals, or daemons, as Philip Pullman called them, where I thought:
What if I put this kind of relentless effort into clerkmanifesto?
And then I thought:
Oh. I do put this kind of effort into clerkmanifesto.
Which is why (Choose one, and only one, from the list below):
A. It is as good as it is.
B. I am so mad that only a handful of people read it.
C. I have had such a good time here these last ten years.
D. The gods return my calls, but only when I cannot answer the phone.
Dayenu: It would have been enough
My darling wife and I were driving back from somewhere in the south suburbs, and as a scenic route to our home, we turned in along the river. There, on an expansive grassy median between the river road and expensive houses, were some turkeys.
"Ohhhhhh, look," I said. "Turkeys!" Because turkeys, glorious, round, colorful, wild turkeys, always warrant an observance.
And, as if that wasn't enough, there were more turkeys.
And more and more and more turkeys.
And then more turkeys!
There were more turkeys than we could count. Is Dayenu a number?
I have found that any overly magnificent spectacle of nature takes on a touch of delightful comedy.
I mean, unless it's killing you. Like, maybe seeing a Grizzly with its cubs isn't so funnily wonderful if at that moment the mother is mauling you.
But these turkeys totally weren't killing us. And there was a magical whimsey to seeing more and more of them long after it was already a wonder. They were all very chill, pecking around on the ground peaceably, gathered together perhaps for some annual bounty of nature.
Maybe there was something good to eat in that grass?
I mean, besides the turkeys.
Verse One
If you have come here looking for one, simple, secret rule to explain everything, and to tell you how to live your life, you are in luck!
I have the simple, secret, easy, magic answer right here.
Unfortunately it is long and complicated.
I have been talking a little more than usual lately about not believing in god. It's a little more complicated than just that. And though I may have some seriously dark questions about your religion, peoples' varied beliefs in Greater Powers is of no great driving concern to me. From my lofty perch here on clerkmanifesto, at the slumping podium with an old armchair on the banks of a muddy river at the end of an abandoned alley full of cats, in Internetland, I let loose my torrid proclamation:
Believe as you will.
But for me? There is no god. And god does not mind that I feel that way.
But this does not mean that I don't believe.
I believe in more things than you can shake a stick at!
I believe them with a fever.
And here is one:
The Universe is so large, and full of so many pieces, that some of them, one, at least, was made just for you.
You do not own it.
It is not yours.
It exists in full autonomy and independence, and it carries no debt.
But by some strange magic that is bigger than your overwhelming gods, it was made for you.
It's just one of those strange things I know.
On this day...
Because of this day...
I know.
There are accidents, and then there are accidents.
Or
In life, a car might spin out of control and careen into a front stoop.
You might stumble on a stone when walking.
It is an accident.
Maybe there is meaning to it, or maybe not. Some people say that in God there are no accidents. A Polypantheatheist like myself believes in many beautiful, terrible things, but I do not believe in any monotheistic God- in any singular god, ruling the Universe. Because there are accidents, and I have no need of a God that allows for accidents. For that, science has that Universe well enough covered.
Around the edges, we can come in with love.
Oh...
And art.
After all, in art are there no real accidents.
Readers here will know that I enjoy the union of disparate elements; Calvin and Hobbes romping through Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood, or maybe an invasive insect on a Valentine's Heart. So it was a delight to me to catch a recent clip of Bruce Springsteen reminiscing about making his opus, Nebraska.
Let me explain:
Springsteen was showing an interviewer the home where he wrote Nebraska, and the room where he did the work for it. Bruce had been facing the first, deep depression he would battle for many years to come. He'd returned to this New Jersey house and wrote what he (and I!) consider his best and most essential album. Nebraska. It is very dark.
So here is the buoyant, energetic artist with his finest music made from his heart of darkness. And the notebook, a three-ring binder, that he had put all his Nebraska songs in, curiously features another artist who created a buoyant, bright work, that also is, at heart, full of darkness and grief.
And yet despite these similarities, one would never, ever, in a million years, think to juxtapose these two people, or their work, together in any way.
Until now.
Here is the picture of Bruce Sprinsteen with his old notebook he put together all his Nebraska songs in.
In as much as it is art, it is is no accident.
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."
I have a dozen blog posts lined up to reflect my many trips in the woods of the last week. It is the best season of all, and I have never been so keenly out on so many walks here along the rivers of Minnesota. Sometimes I am out by myself, taking pictures that I later spend whole days mending and stitching and carefully trying to make into something. Sometimes I am out with my darling wife, and I like those walks best, but I don't take pictures on those.
The real problem of course, as it always is with art, is that try as I might I can never really take a photograph as good, as magical, as evocative as the places I see.
All these places along the river are just so... holy.
No god, fuck god, no great spirit, no mighty Lord of the Universe, but there is something. Something something something, invisible but apparent. Wonderful, Beautiful. Unphotographable. Holy.
I will never get a picture of one of those places, though they are weirdly easy to find.
But there is something in me driven to keep trying.
I don't hardly believe in God. But I believe in gods. And maybe even more significantly I believe in symbols and signs. Our very spirits are in conversation with the world, and the world is alive in myriad ways, in a conversation with us that is elaborate, subtle, outlandish, and inscrutable. The world speaks with a language, a language of falling rain and birds, the smell of fire, the sound of thunder, and the taste of fruit and flesh.
Alas that this language is almost impossible to understand. It's like art, full of meaning and feeling, but only absolutely clear in strange and magnificent moments.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if I were here to tell you about one of those moments?
But it's a difficult language and even if I were to tell a tale of the world suddenly ringing clear as a bell in my soul, it would probably sound only like a dream to you, and maybe to me too in the recounting.
On Tuesday I woke up after a poor night's sleep, and my heart was heavy. I was, in short, sad and inclined to nothing. But at ten in the morning, I grabbed my camera and went out to walk in the snow. Not as a cure, but merely to continue to do what I do.
I headed carefully into the white woods. I am not good at photographing snow. And while the world can feel as distinctly beautiful in the purity of Winter as it can in any season, there always seems to me to be less to photograph.
But as I said before, the world speaks, and what it says, in the shape of reality itself, is informed by the location of our hearts.
I looked up.
There was a nest, the remains of a wasp's nest from the summer.
I don't know what it means.
But I know that it means something.
Hanging out with the deer of Pike Island was fun. Every once in awhile I stopped taking pictures of them and reveled in the largesse of nature. I thanked the great spirit for the magnificent gift of deer company. I praised the small gods for the mercurial bounty of nature.
And then I hoped none of the deer were giving me Covid, because it turns out a huge number of white tailed deer in America are infected with our dreaded virus.
One of the deer even had a runny nose!
But mostly I went with the thankful thing.
And then I took some more pictures. They're such good pictures I decided I'd better make them less impressive by adding cheeky captions.
Check out his tongue!
Photo bomb!
Hiding in the bushes to avoid the photographer doesn't work so great when there aren't any leaves:
We were of mutual interest to each other
