Does Minnesota still exist

What a funny thing to be running through my color shake up pictures so excitedly. Today we are returning to Minnesota and grabbing from a vast catalog of seen and useen photographs mainly of the Mississippi Riverlands, and then changing them. And while this sort of color randomizing effect has captured my attention for now, it isn't the first time. 

Indeed, my first experiments of image witchery were along these same lines.

Long before AI and maybe even before photoshop existed, I started to have some access to color copiers. I took old photographs of mine, or new ones if I had any, and hand tinted black and white copies of my pictures. I then made color copies of them as overdialed and saturated as I could. The pictures you are seeing now are much the effect I was going for back then, but of a nature I was not technically capable enough to achieve.

Back then I think pictures like these would have amazed you, but you likely never would have had a chance to see them even if I could have created them. Now maybe, amid all the noise and magic of imagery that is created and tossed around the world like it is nothing, these are perhaps not so amazing as they would have been. But here they come, with ridiculous ease before your eyes on your magic device.

Minnesota. Saint Minneapolis?

Of course I miss it! I have a few delicate connections to the people I love most there. I am still made of a life there. And the river still runs through me and always will. I like this style of picture so much because this dreaminess and reality, fading and overclear, wrong and right, tells the story better than...

I don't know.

It just seems to tell the story of that world better. Instead of coming upon a picture and thinking "I remember that place" something else happens. I come upon the picture now and it is a dream I had instead, which really is more like it.

Seven years ago...

 

Every once in awhile I like to see what we were up to at clerkmanifesto on this day some years ago. I haven't done this for awhile, perhaps because there is a lot going on in keeping up with my adventures of living in France. But that very thing is what has made me wonder today, when everything is not so brilliantly new here, but still feels like a strange dream, what was it like on a clerkmanifesto of seven years ago.

That doesn't mean I'll find anything useful. This is a grab bag moment. My choice is random. It even makes me a bit nervous. When I pull up the clerkmanifesto post for March 17, 2019 we could find absolutely anything!

And then we'll have to read it!

All of the sudden I understand the sheer terror of opening up clerkmanifesto to see what's there: it could be a lot of fun or, 

it could be A DEVASTATING ASSASSINATION OF OUR MOST CHERISHED INSTITUTIONS!

It might also be boring.

You never know.

March 17, 2019 (if you read this already, don't worry, you will have forgotten it)

"The Great Pothole"

You peoples out in the weather gentle states might not know so much about potholes. But out here in Minnesota, especially as the Spring comes, and the frozen ground opens up, we get real potholes, legendary potholes, potholes that nearly made the great buffalo herds go extinct. Let me put it this way: We are known as the land of 10,000 lakes, but they're not lakes really, they're just really big potholes. We got one pothole up here that is 1,332 feet deep and 350 miles across. You hit that sucker and guaranteed you will crack your axle in two.

One of the worst problems with these early Spring potholes is that there is so much water everywhere from the melting snow and frequent rains that half the time one can't see the potholes to avoid them. The road is a shallow river and one drives blindly on the tar road until, BAM! you nosedive into a crater that'll either crack your jaw with the impact or leave you to struggle to undo your seat belt in time to allow you to swim for the surface. 

Out on the river road we've memorized all the really bad invisible potholes, but there's one that's worse than any of the others. My wife and I have both hit it once and it's not something we'll easily forget. I'm surprised our car is still intact. It's not terribly wide, but it's deep, deeper than one would even think possible.

The other day I was out walking and slipping and splashing, as I do, along the river, and I was thinking about this deep pothole. I thought I might like to have a look at it seeing as I was so nearby. I thought I might like to see just how deep it went. So I waited till the road was all clear of cars, and I carefully found my way to the edge of it. A few clear, slightly colder days had cleared some of the waters and I had an unobstructed view into this epically deep hole in the road. I peered down.

It was dark in there.

I peered down and down and down and down.

It was a deep pothole!

I searched for the bottom. I dropped in a pebble that never made any sound. I looked and looked for some sign of the floor. And then, at the very end, way down below, I finally saw something that blew my mind:


Stars.

So many people

 

It was fine when I stayed put in Minnesota for the most part. The world seemed large, but Minnesota sort of spoke to the rest of the world. It acted as a microcosm. And even the travel we took from there hearkened back to that place as a kind of knowable reference point. Minnesota was an analogy.

Then we tore up all the flimsy roots and flung ourselves off once again into the wide world. And there are so many people. Japan was crammed, absolutely crammed, and not afraid to go out and show it. It's not much different here. People are everywhere!

You will not understand how many people there are and neither will I. Yesterday I was talking about all the people taking pictures of the beach here. Everyday ten thousand new people come here and they take a picture of the beach.

I ask you:

Where do all these pictures go?

I follow ten stories, a hundred stories every day, I have a thousand, and I write just one. But do you know how many stories there are?

534,565,109,336,298,004,288,776,364,987,303,219,997,136,399,001,002,697,142,314,688,887,410,014,879,523,659,823,226,444,112,970,003,660,985,321,658,017.

And those are just the good ones.

Yearbook photos

 

I have been working on these yearbook pages and they go just as I planned, until I look more closely and realise that there are just a few small problems that I can't seem to fix. So while I have nine or ten of these, full of interesting details, there's always some weak point that leaves me unsatisfied.

So I give up.

But I do kind of like this one Minnesota homage:

twenty-five

   

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:

Whoa! Look what I found for you today! A historical post!

I read that the best thing to bring, as an expatriate to France, is Maple Syrup.

Duh!

That is the best thing to bring anywhere!

Here you go. I believe the reference is likely to when we stayed in a house on Lake Superior, north of Grand Marais, an amazing house and happy time, and just the sort of thing I have been longing for in this time of upheaval and tumult in my life.  This, I suppose, was the last of many pretty posts handwritten originally by the shore of a very great and wild lake:

Crap.


I was supposed to be done with every last scrap of any mention of my very Minnesota vacation. I made a fuss about being done. I formally finished. I attached an appendix. I added an afterword just to tell you how safely done we all were. I closed off the vacation with a concluding post. Then I shut the book on it, laminated it, bronzed it, put it in a sealed, underground vault in the middle of nowhere and burned the map to it.

I didn't have anything against these 78 essays about my two week vacation. But the sprawl of them made me want to set a final end to it all. 

So I did.

And then I had to tell you about the maple syrup. 

Not just any maple syrup, maple syrup bought on vacation.

I love maple syrup, but I love maple syrup best when it's bought in a little cabin in the far maple woods that the syrup comes from. And when, because it is bought there, it is not insanely expensive. And I love that maple syrup the best when it's bought on vacation.

Find the vault. Dig it out. Crack the bronze coating. Delaminate it. Open the book back up. And pour out champagne flutes of maple syrup for everyone! I have something more to say about vacation.

I got some maple syrup. 

My wife and I drove through the back, dusty one lane roads of the north woods. And though it does require prior knowledge and driving on actual, rough, one lane roads, we do like to increase the challenge. We take secret back ways to those one lane roads. We get lost. We travel along roads so tiny and messed up that we feel fear. Our little car has the adventure of a lifetime.

Look to your right, look to your left. There are the trees! Tubing runs rampant through these woods to carry the sap along. There is tubing everywhere. Follow the tubing. We are almost there. Don't stop for wild raspberries. Here is the barn. Here is the cabin. It is always open. We step inside. There are old maple syrup relics from the days of yore. There are pictures on the walls. A moose was here once! And there is the maple syrup for sale. The more you get the cheaper it goes. A pint is 11. A quart is 18. A gallon is 64. One day I will do a gallon. I'm working up to it. This year is 2 quarts. Write what you bought in the book. Put your money in the box with all the other money that's just sitting there. Trust itself is a great tourist destination, but maple syrup is an even better one. 

Goodbye maple syrup cabin.

I am only ever so slightly gluttonously ashamed that I make a thick quart of maple syrup last for but one week, and then only by being moderate with it. Ha! Moderate. Two brilliant maple cold press coffees a day. Yogurt with maple syrup. Maple syrup cookies. Oh how easily and sweetly it pours out of its glass jug. Clean the rim with your finger. Mmmm. Spill some more on the rim to clean it more with your finger.

Okay, I'm 60% sure we're all done with the vacation posts now.

Homeless

 

My lovely wife and I went out walking in our city. At some late point we stopped and had a prosecco sitting at a metal table on a sidewalk next to a busy street. It was lovely and unpleasant, which I found confusing. The sidewalks were full of life. People walked by. Parents rode along with bikes jimmied together with giant buckets carrying their children. Couples dated. A man came along eating an ice cream sandwiched in two cookies, which is a specialty of a nearby eatery. People picked up pizzas, went desperately looking for their dog that ran away, and biked happily along until, and this is where we come to it, someone honked at them and nearly killed them with their car.

Yes, bisecting in the most savage way, a city of life and humanity, were two massive streets, four lanes or more wide, with loud, fast, polluting cars racing by. It was like there was a nice city trying to claw its way out from ugly and dangerous design and... not quite making it.

There is a cartoon I once saw, maybe a little famous in the Urbanist community, where the streets are not removed, rather they are simply deadly abysses, a perilous drop. People cling to the little ledges of sidewalks and, crossing the street is done on narrow planks. I love that cartoon, but also don't feel it does it quite justice; the normality of the streets everywhere, their sense of danger and carefully ordered alienness to a person on foot.

But we drank. We walked along on a warm summer night. And the whole time we talked about where to live.

And never came to an answer.

VFW

 

At a farewell happy hour for one of my favorite co-workers, of almost 20 years, who is leaving the library for a different job in the county, five of us went to have drinks at the local VFW.

The VFW is not my normal scene, seeing as I have never actually fought in a foreign war. 

Having been invited to the festivities after the venue was already chosen I had two bracing responses.

1. A snobbish recoiling in horror.

2. A concern that I might have to dash up to Canada and get in a tussle in order to qualify for membership. 

There was nothing to worry about though! After thirty years of gritty, low paid, barely respected county library work, I am just the sort of down to earth, salt of the land, gritty person of no pretensions who can wander into an unglamorous VFW and have a rye and ginger and...

not gawk for too long.

So, whoever keeps quoting Charles Bukowski to me in my comments section, take note!

We all sat at a round table, surveying the room, er, maybe slightly gawking, but not for too long. There were five of us, all in our fifties to early sixties, and the best part was when I looked around the crowded room and observed "We are easily the youngest people in the room." 

You'd be surprised how often that happened to me in the nineties, but it's getting weirdly less common for every year that races by our windows.

The furnishings were bingo hall basic. There was a single set place, dusty and empty, set aside for the POW/MIA, I guess like the cup of wine for Elijah. The food and drinks were artless and passable, but, and this is important, didn't gross me out because I am salt of the earth, even if I have been to France. I had a rye and ginger, an appropriate drink I had researched beforehand by typing "What do you drink at a VFW". I also had a beer. And I had a burger and fries. In contrast to our current inflationary world, the prices were intriguingly low! Seven dollar drink! Six dollar burger! But consistent with the current inflationary world it all came out kind of expensive anyway, after a dollar for a meager slice of swiss on the burger, and the fry upcharge, and not very cheap beer, and all the usual taxes, fees, and tips.

As a group we talked about all the things we talk about at work, only at greater length and in more detail. One gets an even clearer picture of the co-workers that are universally suffered, and finds out which co-workers are disliked more than deserved, and one tries to gently illuminate their redeeming qualities.

In the end I paid for the guest of honor's bill on my own. This may have been worth it for the feeling of magnificent superiority it gave me, and for the warmth it directed to me from the guest of honor.

In the end, what do I rate the VFW?

I don't know.

I rate it:

Midwest!

or,

Sixty Dollars!

or how about this:

I'd like to thank all those people in there for their sacrifice for us all in WWII.

 

Northern Lights

 

The Northern Lights put on a spectacular show across vast swaths of the northern hemisphere. This included Minnesota. 

But you can't see the Aurora Borealis worth beans from the light polluted cities, or even from the small cities.

So everyone hopped into their cars, late at night, and drove off as far away from everything that they could get!

And when they got there they found that everyone else came with them, and they were crowded horribly together on the sides of the road and in the tiny parking lots of the small muddy lakes of forgotten regional parks. 

And cars came and went, their blaring headlights flashing over the masses tramping through the mud. And the trampling masses could hardly get all mad about it, because ten minutes ago they were the ones blaring the lights!

And so the poor wonder seekers had to go farther and farther. But they only found other cities and other people, all gathered together in great bunches to get away from everyone else!

But yeah, they saw some Northern Lights. And it was neat, vaguely, like, kind of neat. It depended on how far you drove.

Yes, I was there, with my dear and intrepid wife.

We drove and drove like we were going to a ballgame or a giant concert or something. And even though we did not know where we were going, everywhere was the destination that everyone else was headed to as well.

It was less awful than I have made it sound.

And not as good now as you might imagine.

Yes, it was right there in the middle with most things.

If you saw some pictures you may have been enviously amazed!

But pack up your jealousy for you won't be needing it. You have missed less than you thought. It turns out that the cell phone cameras see totally differently than the naked eye, and they produced far more colorful and amazing pictures than anyone could see with their simple, puny meat eyes.

In short, the pictures you might have seen of the Northern Lights were hideous lies that people downplayed the inaccuracy of to feel less bad for driving in traffic to nowhere at midnight!

Here is a rendition of kind of what the scene we were at looked like, but only according to what a phone camera might show of it:

Sorry, no, there wasn't a flying saucer. That is just something only cameras see also.

But what, you might wonder, did the Northern Lights look like with the naked eye?

Not as good as this, above, but,

BUT,

And this might be important:

You had to see it.

The loon people

 

Two of the people who work at the library have chosen the loon as their spirit animal. This isn't entirely surprising considering we are in Minnesota and the loon is our official state bird. The unofficial state bird is the mosquito.

No one has chosen a mosquito as their spirit animal.

Yet!

Our state flag and our state seal are in the process of changing as I write, but I don't think anyone is going to mess with the loon. So far the only specifically "double" animal besides the loon is the panda, an example of which we featured here yesterday.

I did not have an easy time with the loon, the AI is not all that clear on what exactly this bird is, and I even resorted at one point to cutting and pasting with actual loon pictures. My earlier loon pictures were finished awhile ago and recently I went back in to try again despite having too few reference photos for both of my subjects, as you will see in the duplicate faces of these pictures.

I'm still not sure if I'm finished. 

Here is where we are now:

Jeff's Loon:

Dan's Loon:

Life in a Minnesota winter

At precisely 11:14 in the morning the sun was sighted over my library. One of my co-workers announced it to the back workroom and we all immediately ran to the window. 

Due to the angles and general haze and cloudiness we couldn't quite see where the sun was, but it was definitely different. Two people walking by appeared to be illuminated. Direct light was shining on them.

"What color was the sun again?" One of us asked.

Several colors like green and blue were suggested and it was all very funny. Then we fell silent. It really had been a long time since anyone had seen the sun. A librarian walked by.

"The sun came out!" One of us exclaimed.

"Oh please." She said dismissively. I guess it wasn't out anymore. She was not keen to countenance some brief, muddy, and incomplete glimpse.

"The sun was yellow." One of us said softly.

I don't know if it was a joke or not.

Reflections on Duluth

 

Having returned from a very happy vacation in Duluth with my wife, I am eager to somehow convey my impressions of this strange, appealing, decrepit, beautiful, and fascinating northern city as succinctly as possible.

But before I do let me describe this of Duluth's downtown: It is by no means small. It extends for 16 or 17 blocks by my count, and is four to six blocks wide, its width climbing a steep hill away from the mighty Lake Superior. The downtown is abundant in great, many storied, stone buildings, and though perhaps 25 percent of its storefronts are in various states of abandon, it still supports a strangely rich and interesting collection of businesses, shops, galleries, libraries, cafes, restaurants, and oddball stores.

And with that said, and without agenda, or theory, or the least ambition to insult or complain, here is my signal comment on Duluth:

Walking, often, as we did, in fair weather and daylight, through the breadth of this reasonably dense, long, and economically active cityscape, we almost never saw any person I was more than half sure wasn't homeless.

In the spirit of compromise

 

It has been noted that my politics can be... overwrought. 

But in the end I really do believe in the spirit of compromise. I am willing and eager to bring to the table fresh ideas that address the concerns of all parties in the spirit of mutual respect and understanding.

That is why when the Democratically controlled Minnesota House passed a bill legalizing recreational marijuana, something I strongly support, but the Republican Senate vowed that they will absolutely not pass a bill legalizing recreational marijuana, I only focused on how we can come through this deep disagreement together.

I did not say harsh things against Republicans and their opinions, despite disagreeing with them. And I did not over value the Democratic opinions I agree with.

I came up with a solution. It's very simple, and I think everyone will be happy with it.

Going forward recreational marijuana will be legal for registered Democrats and a felony of registered Republicans. 

This seems fair for everyone concerned.

Texas blackouts!

 

The shocking failure of the Texas electrical grid and the massive blackouts sweeping Texas during an epic cold spell have brought to all of our attention the terrible problems of deregulation, the ruinous disfunction of Republican politics, and the calamitous results of the inability of American media to speak squarely to the problems haunting the vast sweep of America. 

But I'm here to step into the fray!

I am here, on the amazing, all powerful Internet, to offer healing to the desperate peoples of Texas.

So come in close.

Huddle into my light, dear Texans. I am in Minnesota. I understand the cold. I can help you. Gather round. Hear the crackle of my fire. Feel the warmth of my weird, unearthly Northern Lights. Take a sip of this meltingly delicious orange cognac.

Mmm, cognac.

So dear citizen of America Texas. Though much divides us, we are one. We are a people. We must bridge the divide between us with love. Now is the time to set aside partisan squalor, past grievances, and ancient enmity. Ice has frozen your world. The power grid has failed you. You are freezing to death.

I have help.

I can save your lives and the lives of your precious pets, children, and perishable items. Read on, and all will be well.

Oh, right, there's a blackout there, you can't.

A striking view of Saint Minneapolis

 

In my tireless boosterism of the beautiful city of Saint Minneapolis I like to occasionally feature interesting photographs of the city so that people will say:

"Gosh, that Saint Minneapolis city is real interesting!"

I don't generally care one way or the other if these people move here or visit our lovely city. I mainly just want them to say "Saint Minneapolis" because too many people are still calling the city by its old names of "Saint Paul", or "The Twin Cities", or "Bloomington", or whatever crazy expired names people insist on using. This is like people who continue to call Volgograd "Stalingrad" or Alabama "Alabama".

It's unwholesome.

So here are some pictures of a morning just before Christmas Day, in Saint Minneapolis, just after it snowed, when the early sun is lighting the skyline on fire (metaphorically). These pictures are of a Saint Minneapolis neighborhood (borough?) known as "Minneapolis". But what say we don't get caught up in these local neighborhood names. Anyone locally will readily recognize this as:

Saint Minneapolis