Retired

 

Apparently I'm not on vacation. I'm retired. And today I found out the hard way.

I got up early because as a person in my sixties I rarely sleep late even if I'd like to. It just doesn't usually... work.

I looked outside. It was windy, but the town beach is still in use and the sun was brilliant.

I had coffee with my lovely wife.

One of us suggested that we go for a walk and grab some things at one of our local markets. So we dressed appropriately, grabbed our things, and headed outside.

It seemed strangely shadowy out in the town.

"What time is it?" I asked.

It was 4:30 in the afternoon.

What is that thing?

 

I first noticed it in this picture I had taken for other purposes.

Do you see it?

On the wall by the door?

I took some more pictures of it in the bathroom:

It seems to morph around a bit, but it remains recognizable as it slowly makes its way across the walls. I don't much like to talk with my co-workers about what I find in the staff bathrooms, but I asked around among my co-workers if they had noticed this... thing.

No one had. They looked at me blankly when I spoke of it.

No big deal. It seemed harmless enough. Maybe it was all in my imagination anyway.

Later in the evening, though, I saw it out in the main part of the library. It's not very fast, but it seems to be a steady mover. Give it half an hour and it can cover some distance. That is, assuming it was the same thing I saw in the toilets. It was a lot bigger now.

Later, one came right up over the front desk! Or maybe it was just the same one? I never saw two of them anywhere at the same time. 

I asked a library patron if they saw this green thing.

"What are you talking about?" They asked. "That black pad?"

"No." I replied. "This." I showed them this picture. They just looked at me nervously and wished me a good evening.

I felt better when it worked its way to the counter behind me, but it was always on the move. 

I don't think the thing was up to anything, but I kind of liked knowing where it was.

Then I had to help a family get a few library cards, which can take some time. I thought I saw one of the kids staring at the creature, but when I turned around it was gone.

Then I realized it was clear across the library, and much bigger! I gasped.

"What?" Asked the mother of the children I was getting cards for.

"Oh, nothing." I mumbled.

But I was certain one of the small children was eyeing the thing nervously.

When the mother was distracted with one of their other kids,  I whispered to the child "You see it, don't you?"

The child nodded nervously.

"It's probably fine." I said.

He nodded.

It's probably fine.

The picnic again and other stories

 

Replacement

 

There are some mysteries I will never solve.

One that I have discussed here in the past involves the replacement of staff at my library. One would think, with all the billions of different, aye, unique, people in the world, that when some strange, idiosyncratic person leaves my library, a completely different sort of person would replace them.

But no.

It's like a specific space is vacated when a person leaves, and somehow an eerily similar person fills that void. They may even be a wildly different person in some general way, even personally, but as a co-worker, when it comes to their assets, foibles, and social place, they are weirdly the same. Oh, it may not be the direct replacement hour for hour, but in some short amount of time someone will come along and unerringly fill those shoes with a disturbing amount of precision.

A case in point: The worst person I ever worked with, who I wrote about many times here as "the worst of us", a person who could take 45 minutes to write a single sentence note on a patron record, or warp time around her to send all meaningful work to her colleagues, or quietly create errors that would filter out into agonizing time consuming clogs all over the library, finally retired after a couple of decades. And it was an unbelievable relief. Everything felt just a little bit lighter, like floating, for months to come. 

But today I worked with a substitute, who was a serious problem when we were training them in. This person was never really up to the job, but got passed along anyway, as we regularly do, and now seems to be showing up for more and more shifts. I was out at the front desk with this person. The day was busy. And I couldn't help notice it taking her 15 minutes to help every library visitor with absurdly simple two-minute things. I couldn't help but see her thrown wildly by every tiny problem. I couldn't not see that frozen, birdlike stare on her face, knowing that she would always make the wrong choice, but only after a long period of profound frozen befuddlement.

"She's back." I thought, with dread.

Ah well.

Everything changes now that I know I will be retiring from the library in just eight or nine months. No matter how bad it turns out, I won't have to live with it or with her for very long. This kind of unnerving, demoralizing, mystifying replacement is no longer what freaks me out so much. 

I now leave that horror to this thought:

Who will be replacing me?

Postcard from Nice

 

Four months later, a postcard I sent to my library from Nice is still hanging up by the pens at the back room computer. Someone put it up. No one has taken it down. Here is a picture of it:

I'm not sure when the picture on the card was taken. Maybe the twenties (the other twenties!)? I find it dreamlike. I bought the postcard at a used bookstore near the flower market. I loved the photo, but I wasn't sure where it was or if it still existed, or even if it was real.

Later in this trip my dear wife and I walked out past the Nice port, and then kept going, trying to find a restaurant that suited us. We saw something a lot like this picture in the distance. The boat on the rock was gone and replaced with more of a deck. It was now a very expensive restaurant, and still dreamlike, but more a daydream than sleeping dream. Either way, we had found the scene of the postcard!

We looked seriously at the menu but couldn't make it work for us with what we can eat. So we walked back towards the port and ate at a less dramatic restaurant still looking out over the water. I may have mentioned the truffled eggs I had there. Those were dreamlike too.

I love how travel makes strange and wonderful places real. But still sometimes, in the night, working yet one more of thousands of library shifts, I look down at this postcard and think:

We were there. There.

And I can't believe it.

More time

 

Just after midnight, after wishing my sleeping wife a happy new year, I got out of bed to cough and drink some water and watch fireworks on the distant horizon. The sound of the fireworks travelled insensibly across the miles, thundering randomly after their bursting illuminations. Way off in the cold night, across an empty world, a blossoming circle of shimmering white light would burst in the sky. And then, when it felt like it, the sound of the explosion would amble my way and reverberate in my ears.

Standing there I was consumed by thoughts of time again.

Yesterday I had been thinking of its orderly nature, how a longitudinal line, like the second hand of a great clock, came sweeping towards us, lighting us up in succession with each new second. But now suddenly, looking down on the city and the sweeping curve of earth, I was just as sure it was nothing like that.

It's more like this:

Sometimes it is now. And sometimes we are unstuck from our minds, and wandering among the seconds, backwards and forwards.

Time. Time is loose and roughly fixed. Yes, it moves forwards, but it glitches and sticks and skips and...

We don't belong to any of it.

It belongs to us.

Back again and again

After four days off I came back to work again at the library. I also had to write a blogpost.

But nothing had changed here. I mean, the date was different, but everything else was just

as

it

was.

And I have already covered everything in this space. Everything. Twice.  I even wrote about this very problem before of having covered everything, a couple of times!

But then, in a moment of clarity, I thought:

But I've never done it three times!

Do I dare?

No. Better not.

I may get it right, and then where will I be?

Six Stories

 

Working with my diverse sources of imagery I have been putting together pictures over the past few days. The funny thing is that I work on these for hours and hours and hours, and when I come here to present all my work it can be a little surprising that in all that time it turns out that I have only produced a total of six pictures.

Beyond time and style and tools, there isn't a lot to link up all these pictures. One of the greatest Children's book illustrators and writers, Chris Van Allsburg, whose work I have stolen a bit of in the past and surely will steal more of in the future, wrote a book called The Mysteries of Harris Burdick that has a series of compelling, somewhat inscrutable illustrations, and mostly leaves the reader to come up with their own stories to them. So, because that seems fairly easy, and a useful solution to my problem, that's what I'll do today myself, though obviously not as well.

Nevertheless here are my six pictures and whatever inscrutable caption I can now come up with for each one. 

Write your own story as you please.

Only by continuing to canoe could they keep the pond from freezing.

Late that day he would save his life, and then have his life saved.

The old car looked just as it was even though it was exactly 75 years later.

Whatever was down there was very, very large indeed.

Even the mice in the snowy fields suddenly stood on their hind legs and danced.

They never thought they'd make it there, and they felt a triumph in it just before the danger of the situation sank in.

Begging Week, Day 5, the Gallery

 

It is day five of begging week.

So many days.

I'm tired.

Tired of begging.

I'm not a very good beggar. Even as I beg there is some part of  me that wants to tell you why you shouldn't give me anything.

But the truth is, people giving me things has always built their character. The more anyone has given me the better the person they are.

I don't mean anything by that, it's just a weird thing I noticed in the Universe.

I'm supposed to beg you to go to this page today:

The Gallery

You won't have to read anything there. It's more of an oooohhh ahhhhh sort of page.

Pick one out that you like.

Thank yourself.

Unexplained phenomenon

Surely the Internet would be more intrigued if I had compelling photos suggesting extraterrestrial intelligence is visiting our planet, or perhaps yet more evidence of the deep corruption in our police forces and city government. But, perhaps fortunately, the Internet doesn't spend much time here at clerkmanifesto. And you who are here instead are just as likely to be captivated by smaller mysteries.  Tiny mysteries. A mystery on a bee!



But let's step back just a bit for a moment.




There I was processing my day's photos. There were the usual scant few good ones and the mostly not good ones. 


Here is my favorite from that day:

Also in that series of photos were a bunch of shots of a honey bee. They all turned out pretty blurry. Hoping that maybe one of them could be punched up into a nice enough photo (it couldn't) I noticed something peculiar.


Here, let me show you the picture (warning: lots of unretouched blurry pictures of bees coming up):

Right. 

So maybe if you look closely at this picture you will think "What is he trying to indicate with the white circle on the bee's right wing?" 



When I noticed that white circle I thought "Is that white circle on the screen of my computer?"



It didn't wipe off. So I looked at another picture:

There it was again. But since I couldn't exactly remember where the circle was in the last picture I now wondered if something was on the lens of my camera. 

But none of my other pictures not of the bee had this white circle.


So I looked at all the other blurry bee pictures:

 Okay, so it is definitely on the bee's wing. A strange white circle.

I took the clearest shot I had of the bee and sharpened it up (as well as I could):

Then I zoomed:

And I zoomed:

And I zoomed:

And I still had nothing.

Although I will say that in the super close up view of the inside of the white circle on the bee's wing, if you look very carefully, it looks a lot like a UFO sitting in a field in the woods.

I hope the cops don't find it.

Favorite color

Because I sometimes write about the visual arts here on clerkmanifesto people are always asking me "What's your favorite color?"

That's nice.



 I like questions so much I sometimes make them up just so I can answer them.






My favorite color?



This, I guess:

Or sometimes this color. There's overlap.

A couple days ago one of my top five favorite YouTubers, or, wait, let me put that the right way:

The greatest YouTuber there is (with there being five greatest YouTubers of all time), Captain Disillusion, did a video about color.

I learned that color is a fiction. 

And that Isaac Newton was smarter than...

everyone ever?

And the rest of it I basically didn't understand.

But the main point is that this: 

Is all in our heads.

And this:

This:

And this too:

Are all in our heads.

But then, what isn't?

I guess I'm still trying to work that out. 

Some things are all in our heads. Some things aren't.

Sometimes that's an important question.

Sometimes it isn't.