A reversal

 

At the risk of clerkmanifesto becoming fundamentally just a place to catch up on news about me, I feel compelled to follow up on yesterday's post concerning our moving.

We were moving.

We had agreed terms with the landlady and were preparing to give notice in our current place.

And then the lease never came.

And then it never came some more.

So I guess we're not moving... quite... yet?

The story seems to go:  Because we opted to not buy any of the previous tenant's weirdly overpriced and unpleasant furniture the landlady, who is very fond of the previous tenant though she also considers the tenant's furniture weirdly overpriced and unpleasant, nevertheless wants to help her out by maybe choosing a new tenant who might want to buy her furniture.

One of the challenges of moving to a new country is that one has a kind of impulse to ascribe individual events, interactions, and encounters to a national character. But I don't think French people are bad at keeping their word or weird about their tenants' furniture. There are just weird people out there. 

You know it's true. Weird, awful people.

So watch yourselves!

And it goes both ways. People all over France are probably meeting us and thinking: "But I had no idea! Americans are so warm and witty!"

No they aren't! They're about half of them stupid nazis just like French people. You just got lucky.

I mean, unless they don't consider talking to people who speak their language like drunken toddlers to be lucky.

 

Procrastination

I had one of those moments. I said "I better organize all my old pictures." So I opened up a random folder called "Dioramas new". Where all the old diorama pictures are I don't know. There is no "Diorama" folder, nor a "Dioramas old" folder. Just a single "Dioramas new" folder.

I started looking throught the folder.

Did I ever show you this one:

Maybe. I mean, why wouldn't I show you this? I still remember the place this diorama was built from, inside a kind of walled imperial park/city in the middle of Kyoto. So I definitely showed you this.

But probably not exactly this one, since there were like 25 assorted versions of it in that folder.

You know, maybe I'll just organize my pictures on another day?

 

Another day in paradise

 

You may drop in here to clerkmanifesto once in awhile to see what it's like living in a vacation paradise.

It's very nice, thank you.

The ocean sparkles. You sit down somewhere in your neighborhood and look over at some tableau you've passed hundreds of times now and suddenly realize:

Whoa, that's like, incredibly charming!

Which is fun.

People say that when one moves to some fantastic vacation spot as a retired immigrant, there is an amazing honeymoon period that lasts for, I don't know, a few months. Everything is strange and beguiling and better, so much better! The food is amazing! And it's such an adventure. Winter is a joke compared to where you came from. Getting around is a charm and car free. Life is just vacation all the time somehow.

And then suddenly it all comes crashing down, you have a fall, your spirits sag, and oh the work of it all, the daily struggle, the fact that you're in your sixties and have all the pains and struggles of any human. The incredibly slow pace of language learning and the constant confusion and challenge of talking to people dogs every interaction. You can't get a decent corn tortilla or a taco. And suddenly you realize you only know a few people in the whole of your huge french country. Everything is bewildering and uphill.

This lasts for awhile, definitely longer than phase one.

And then, according to this standard charting of the experience, one slowly starts to adapt, to become part of life in your new wonderland. Light slowly starts to seep back in to this dark adventure and one can truly build one's new life over. You begin to understand the language. You accept the place on its own merits. You learn to take the bureaucracy in stride though maybe not with affection. It's just life, but now maybe in a little bit more liveable place than where you came from.

This takes, I don't know, the next twelve years?

I read about this scenario a lot when we were planning to come over. I thought it sounded inevitable.

And it's not entirely wrong.

But, also, it's entirely wrong! 

Which, I admit, is weird. The thing is, none of it goes away. It's all here at once. Nothing about the utter delights of where we are has ever crashed. Nor was the adventure ever not terrifying and difficult. What it really is is that I am still me. I can wake up in the middle of the night with some pain that terrifies me, and that makes me feel that we are spinning a million miles out in space connected to nothing, dreading everything we may soon have to deal with. And then by eleven in the morning I can be being served a cappuccino and a pain au chocolat facing a quaint market that probably started a quarter of a millenium ago and suddenly feel like the luckiest person on the planet.

We're all lucky and damned.

It's just sometimes you can see it really clearly here.

 

Only one team wins a World Cup

 

This may be my last post about this world cup. Maybe not, but what else is there to talk about after this?

The final?

Okay, let's talk about the final right now.

For all my machinations about manipulating the future with my pessimism (which actually worked for once!), we have come to the end of the line. There are no more results to manipulate. Yes, there is another game, but, even understanding myself now as controlling fate, I don't know what to do with it. My magic power has become moot.

Going into this particularly thrilling and enormous World Cup of 48 teams, there were two teams that I loved. Two teams that I desperately wanted to do well. I was happy for some other teams to succeed to a point, and also a few teams I disliked greatly for various reasons that I wished failure upon, but there were only two teams in my heart, all pain and glory and desperate hopes.

There probably should only be one team, but when a person follows a sport with a great and avid interest for many years, and the sport is as sprawling as soccer, things can spread out a little. I have managed to keep to just one team in what is known as club soccer. I like to see other teams do well, but I only live and die on Barcelona. I am crushed when they lose, elated when they win. I love their history, though there is a lot of pain in it, their style of play, nearly all of their players, and, of course, their greatest player of all time, Messi.

But Messi has been gone for years now, and though the spectacle of his time in Miami is great fun, he has been, for maybe five years now, primarily Argentina's Messi. Meanwhile, in Barcelona, their brilliant young team is the backbone of the Spanish national team, with Lamine Yamal, Pau Cubarsi, Pedri, and Dani Olmo shining particularly bright in this World Cup, but with many other important Barcelona players in the team contributing at various levels. Indeed, Spain feels almost like an extension of my own Barcelona club team.

Argentina, Spain.

Even if you are barely paying attention to this world cup, those teams may be faintly familiar sounding to you about now. They are playing in the final Sunday.

Against each other.

Whispering behind my pessimistic plans and my conviction that all must be hopeless before France, was one insane, almost impossible seeming dream:

Spain vs Argentina.

What if it was Spain vs Argentina? 

Trust me. I didn't think about it. It felt like the faintest light could kill it. But there wasn't a single moment where I could fully keep it quiet.

But I guess I kept it dark enough, because here it is.

And now that I have it, Spain vs Argentina, I, who usually have some kind of an answer to everything, don't have an answer. And so I ask you.

I ask you!

I ask you:

Like the dog who chases cars, I have caught one.

What on earth do I do with this?

Why would we leave?

 

We're still planning on moving from this city to another city in France a few hundred miles away. As we originally ran into a terrible time for apartment hunting we're now waiting until late in the Summer season to resume our search. In the meantime, here we are.

Do we hate it here?

Omg no!

For instance, after a long day of paperwork we wandered out to the old town of the city. It was crammed with people, mostly from other places all over the world, and they were as fascinating as ever. We sat in maybe the old town's prettiest square, in front of maybe its prettiest church. We had a spritz and a prosecco, a buckwheat crepe with lemon and sugar, and panisse frites. We watched everything going by, and we talked.

Above us, on the square, was an apartment that was advertised when we were looking for an apartment here, way back when. We tried to move there, but like most listed places, they weren't interested in us as tenants, what with our lack of French history and foreign status. Pleasantly (though very mildly) drunk, I got a bit wistful looking up at the fascinating 300 year old apartments there.

"I can't imagnine wanting to leave had we lived up there." I said in a moment of glow. The evening had turned mild. Some Brazilians set up to make some music and do backflips or something for tips. 

The church next to us had a big plaque commemorating the local dead of WWI. There were about 40 names which didn't seem like that many. Maybe it seemed like a lot to the guy chiseling the names into that stone? Maybe it seemed like a lot to someone who knew most of them.

Probably.

We walked down through the dinner hour to the beach. Old town seemed impossibly full of tables of people dining. Some of those pizzas looked really good.

We walked home along the beach. What a lovely night!

Ask me again.

Do we hate it here?

Weirdly, for no good reason, and definitely very rarely, but,

Sure, why not?

Sometimes you're on one train, sometimes the other

 

I'll show you the pictures first for a change. 

They're really both the same scene, trying to get it right, two versions if you will:

I was thinking about how it is here in this city, living in a vacation wonderland. I remembered an old Woody Allen movie that made a tremendous impression on me: Stardust Memories. In one particularly magnificent scene, the main character is on a grim train, full of disconnected, strange people in a bleak and worn setting. He looks out the grimy window of his old train and sees into the train on the next track, going the other way. Richly lit and luxuriously appointed, this train is full of beautiful people, celebrating, partying, and drinking champagne.

My unfortunately Eeyorish disposition has always been prone to feeling like this, that somehow I am on the far worse train, but I think the feeling comes up a bit extra here. People are having a good time here! With the false richness of vacation they have entered into a starrier version of the world, and my city invites it. They have no obligations, plenty of money in their pockets, and no concerns for the future.

 There is so much made of how unhappy locals in popular European tourists towns are getting. They are increasingly displeased with tourists' loud, disrespectful, and drunken behavior, with the way that the proliferating airbnbs they stay in have blown up the local rents, and with how their foreign tastes erode the local true culture and cost of their city. And while I think there is real merit to their complaints (though even within that there is the usual misdirection of blame that should be levelled at the local rich, the ownership class, and their local government more than the tourists), I think there is also a certain amount of understandable jealousy: "Who are all these people coming to the city where I work, am sick, have plumbing problems, keep to a budget, etc, who get to do nothing here but have a good time!"

We're retired, as you know, and it is hard sometimes to separate out how much we are tourists here and how much we are simply everyday residents in this city. It comes and goes. I think even for people born here there can be a little of both sometimes.

Sometimes we are sipping champagne on the beautiful train and, sure, it can be wonderful.

But sometimes too, I'm just looking longingly into the light, on the way to the Carrefour Market, to get more toilet paper, and maybe a toilet plunger, if they have one.

Life is a paradise with room for a thousand improvements

 

On a warm, sunny day, I sit with a pint of beer in the garden café of the Chagall Museum. Olive trees loom over the ramshackle white garden cafe structure, half open to the calm grounds of the museum. Emotional French music is playing. It’s all pretty good.

The white structures of our café are festooned with fake plants, even as the whole building threatens to collapse under the weight of the completely genuine vines and trees growing wild and swallowing it all up. Oddly, the juxtaposition works, though it strikes me as possible that the challenge of putting a café in a grove of ivy and small olive trees, in the graceful garden of the Chagall Museum, in this beautiful city, would be in its not working.

A large tour group of Japanese people makes its way to the tented entrance of the artfully weathered cement museum building. Some of them carry umbrellas, which was a clever thing I saw people do in Kyoto, and that I copied to endure its terrible September sun.

My wife and I both sit here writing at the edge of the shade. This is the extent of our visit. Having seen the museum many times we will not go in again today.

My beer is almost gone and the strong sun makes its way to the tall trees at the west end of the garden.

I thought maybe I’d like to make a list of everything wrong with perfection, but now I’ve forgotten why.

Life in France, the update

 

We still go out into the city, or to the beach. We shop the markets. We've even managed to grab a coffee a few times. We work industriously on the move to Montpellier, not entirely knowing if it will work out, but willing to throw ourselves calmly at it and give it a chance.

But mostly still, I just cough.

The nights are worst and I'm counting 2 to 4 hours of sleep a huge victory for any night. I sip tea and pee and I cough every 20 seconds until four in the morning. I listen to music on the couch in the dark, study some French, and I scroll the Internet. There is no more anything of real value on the Internet than there was great entertainments on the television set 50 years ago. 

Astonishing how much things change and stay the same.

What's life like in France, one might wonder who has vaguely dreamed of doing something like what we're doing.

It's almost amazing.

It is shocking how many things have to go right. 

But I am still managing to keep this in mind:

When they do go right, suddenly the strangest thing is how few of them need to.

A nocturne

 

For a person who has never been able to handle well the stresses of life, and is prone to paroxysms of anxieties about everything from health issues to having to ask for something at a store, it may not have been the wisest thing to move to France. Every doctor, every interaction, every procedural requisite of life here is just a little, or a lot, more stressful. And though my interests in clerkmanifesto generally don't carry to a discussion of what we might or might not need in order to open a bank account, it would be disingenuous to go on about how good the cheese is everywhere without at least letting you know that all of this this this... paradise... 

is full of shadows. 

It is full of all the shadows I've carried in my life, and all the new ones that accelerate as I roll into my sixties. The sun is amazing here in this Belle Epoque fantasia of a city, but, you know,

shadows.

And so, when I tell you about tonight, with all my high falutin ecstacies, just, it's still life. And life, yours, or mine, is as good or as bad as it ever was.

But if you could come here, you should see it.

We went to the beach.

We went down to the vegetable and flower market at the old city, which, of course, was long finished and completely washed down, which workers do with great hoses every afternoon,  as sunset approached. Now it was a lovely place to stroll, lined with cafes and restaurants in various stages of opening. On a cool Sunday night the ever present buzz of people was there, even after the holidays in early January, and all those people were up to too many things to really account for here. The waterfall in the sky was maybe lit up in reddish lights, or perhaps that light was a quirk of the setting sun. The light is often strange and wonderful here, and this descending night was especially rich, seeming to fill up the lush Roman colors of the buildings with an illuminating power.

Through some columns were glimpses of the nearby beach, and as we had been stopped from our morning visit to the shore by what appeared to be a large marathon, we decided on a brief visit. Looking out at a particularly intense sunset, more down over the coastline than out over the horizon, we heard piano music and drifted over.

Along the large promenade someone had brought a piano. He had some system for pushing it on temporary wheels, and was now set up above the beach playing classical pieces. A crowd gathered, though not a huge one considering all the people about. The song ended and he started a new one, a particular favorite of ours, one of Chopin's Nocturnes, something we listen to at home as it is one of our very small new collection of record albums. In a state of unadulterated wonder, where all things are perfect, we gazed around us at everything that was beautifully dipped in dusk and sprinkled with night music. And as we acknowledged the unimprovable ecstacy of the moment, one by one, all the old streetlamps and strings of lights on the palm trees turned on, in a glorious, orderly, astonishing procession up the coast.

We sometimes talk about "plus one" here, where things that are complicatedly difficult always seem to have one more problem, one more layer to deal with. And just as you solve one issue it turns out there was one more thing in it, plus one. You get your medicine but they don't have the last one you need. They send you to the place that does. They have it, but not quite enough. Come back tomorrow.

But standing there listening to Chopin while the surf whispers in the background and palm trees light the way out into the Mediterranean, it must also be acknowleded that the "plus one" can work both ways, and sometimes you think things cannot get more lovely, but they do.

twenty-nine

 

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:

Putting together posts like these weeks ahead of time, it occurred to me that I might like to find an old one that references all the many people I have just been saying goodbye to as I left my job of 31 years. So I went digging around in historical clerkmanifesto posts and found this slightly acid, but accurate as ever, post after only a few quick tries. 

"This will do." I thought. 

It was called (and so surely must still be) "Liking Everyone".

Given enough time I find I like all my co-workers. But even I blanch at the word "all". How can that be? And considering the many years I've worked here, that comes out to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people (I can't quite believe it makes it to a thousand, but it comes close enough for me to keep saying "hundreds" over and over). This is a notable illustration of my character. For a cynical, embittered, angry misanthrope it turns out I like an astonishing number of people. I like a perverse amount of people. When you factor in the tens of thousands of library patrons who I also seem to like, despite every reason to encourage the contrary, it almost looks unsettling.

I suffer from a surfeit of empathy. I have a hard time keeping grudges. I can spot the charm of a person even as it's dissolved into a 99.99999 percent loathsome personality. Indeed, the very minute proportion of their virtues themselves makes them fascinating to me, like drinking a red wine with a hint of oregano so small that you keep sipping the wine delicately trying to detect it again, trying to let yourself know that you didn't merely imagine it.

So, as with any sensible person who is burdened with a personality trait that is so heavily skewed in one direction, I try hard to compensate. With co-workers for whom my disrespect is profound I keep my distance as much as possible. Proximity softens me. I harden my heart. For every coldness I want to set forth I have to plant my feet and concentrate. It does not come naturally. Over a long enough time, with enough familiarity, liking people comes completely unbidden to me. And so even if someone crosses the red line with me my default is to forget it over and over, like America with Republicans. Who wants to be like a Republican? Ick. So when peoples' toes slip past that horrible line of evil I do what I have to do. I try to memorize the transgression. I nurse it like a precious drink I cannot afford to finish and have no good way to replace.

It helps. But I am dealing with a deep seated handicap, and all I can do is try to manage it, which I must, day after day, with small triumph, endless struggle, and a casual affection for vastly too many, which has attracted the gods themselves to me, like fruit flies on a ripe peach.

In a state of organizational chaos, some random pictures

 

I currently have a show of my pictures at the library. C'mon by! 

These pictures in the show are in a state of flux and change and rotate at all times. Except I am off work for a whole week to practice for my never working again forever, which is coming up soon and so needs lots of practicing! 

Since I am not at work then, my 100 plus pictures at the library are free to just remain as they are for awhile. And I can, I can, I can...

What can I do?

I can get organized?

No no no!

I can make more pictures!!!

I can throw these pictures onto my gigantic pile of pictures because that will have to do for now.

And I would love to show you some of these pictures, but at this point I have no idea... 

1. Where any of them are.

2. If you've already seen them.

3. Why I made them.

or

4. What they're supposed to mean anyway.

I'm sure we'll work it all out...

Keeping up on unfolding events

 

The softness of my latter days

 

I helped a library patron at the front desk of my library. She looked around adoringly at our library and said "This is such a wonderful library! You must love working here!"

As in the stories of people dying and having their whole lives flash before their eyes in an instant, so a hundred thousand feelings and responses came flitting through my brain at the speed of light. 

But all I said was "Absolutely. It is magical."

And I twenty percent meant it.

My advice to you!

 

Outgrowing the library

 

Putting cartoons of me, especially cartoons of me in my library, wasn't meant as some great metaphorical act. But the reason I keep making them is because they tend to come out that way anyway.

I have written thousands of little essays and stories about myself, of my observations, my (mis)adventures, my small pleasures, and my struggles at the library I work at. And with time running out on me working in my library, maybe there isn't that much left to say. I don't know. Maybe there are endless things to say. I have always operated as if the well sinks down forever. But either way, putting my cartoon character into the library feels like saying new things, and even if it isn't, it at least says them in new ways.

Metaphors spill out of them.

And that is never more true than in the next several pictures I'll be showing you.

I am tempted to say more about these and about my feelings at the library right now, which are a little uncomfortable, but the metaphor here is so wide ranging and nice and simple, and outsized, that I think I'll just leave it to itself from here.

All that being said, and after writing all this introduction, I'd rather the pictures stand on their own, so I'm going to let them out individually throughout the day...

Mumble mumble mumble

 

The artificial intelligence that I am currently using, ChatGPT requires a lot of instruction from me in order to work, and though some of the results have been fascinating to me, it has not been feasible for me to type all of those instructions constantly into my phone. It’s too laborious. But I quickly learned that I could speak my instructions into the phone instead. Unfortunately, doing this anywhere remotely viewable by other humans, and especially at work, makes me appear unhinged. Nevertheless I am driven so strongly by my fascination with my projects, and by the expediency of dictation, that I set aside my looking like a lunatic, and hope instead to assuage the pejorative opinion of the public by showing them the thrilling results of my chronic obsessive whispered instructions into my Phone. Unfortunately the results of my obsessive whispering into my phone usually consist of comics about me not shelving books, or comics about my finding weird Kafkaesque travesties throughout our library. I have begun to suspect those images may not have the opinion altering powers I was hoping for.

Not only do the instructions that I issue to the artificial intelligence lurking in my phone tend to be long and complicated, but, unfortunately, they do not result in great success nearly as often as I hope they will. Don't get me wrong, the things that AI produces are triumphs of the most powerful creative tool I have ever encountered, when they work. When the Artificial Intelligence works like I want it to work it is like a dream of superpowers coming true, like flying, or shooting lightning bolts from my fingers. Unfortunately it only works like this about five percent of the time. Thirty percent of the time it works poorly, or not at all. And the remaining 65% of the time comes down to some version of tantalizingly close to working in a way that causes me to think it surely must be correctable, but probably isn't and will cause me to nearly lose my mind if I'm going to insist upon trying. I don't know how amazing or ridiculous this sounds as a venture. But writing it all out it puts me in mind of someone plugging dollars into a slot machine with endless fervor. And before we dismiss this with easy disdain as an image of the pathetic obsession of a gambling addict, it requires one analytical correction: I am playing with house money here! The gambler is a doomed loser as he or she grimly feeds the machine, but I grimly feed the machine and go home loaded every day. (Weirdly this is probably a pretty good analogy for most people's jobs, but maybe set that aside). The important thing is that perhaps you can understand then how this causes me to be persistent and to try over and over again, which causes me to whisper into my phone all the more frequently to get the desired result. 

But because, like with the person on the dollar slots, the volume of my entries becomes such a key element, I rarely examine very closely what I’ve actually said to my phone. I simply hope for the best unless I know that there is some kind of chronic misspelling mistake that I have to go in and manually correct. However, one evening recently, after issuing a long set of instructions into my phone, before entering that information I decided to read over what I had said. The AI seemed to be getting so many things wrong I wanted to see if part of the problem was on my end. Perhaps my minutes of rambling description, begging, and exacting clarification was not as articulate as I hoped. Maybe even the transcription of my voice into words was not working as well as I hoped- certainly my furtive whispering in dark corners couldn't be the easiest thing for my phone to interpret.

So I read what I said.

What do I sound like when issuing instructions to an AI? What do I sound like when speaking to an eager to please, lying, wildly idiotic genius assistant who is always eager to do what I want and is sure it can, but can actually only manage it about five percent of the time? 

Unfortunately, to my horror,  I sound a little like the current President of the United States.

It is not pretty.

Encyclopedia Feldenstein

 

In the process of considering this collection, I briefly flirted with the idea of adding "The Encyclopedia Brown" book series to my collection of favorite books, featured in a post on the right side of this page. My list is a pretty ramshackle list to begin with, full of erratic, unsavory books that are occasionally of questionable literary merit. So why not add a stupid children's series that always fascinated me and is full of seemingly unearned and mysterious charm?

I don't know.

I just couldn't quite get myself to do it.

I loved the "The Encyclopedia Brown" books growing up with their primal nostalgic view of childhood (and the world), their tiny simple stories hardly bigger in narrative than a comic strip, and, most of all, their knotty little mysteries of absurd simplicity (once you look in the back!). "The Encyclopedia Brown" books taught me that I like mysteries, but also that I am not particularly gifted at solving them (you cannot put a small child with bare feet on the hood of a car that has been driving for hours! The man is lying!). Indeed, to this day I am not the sort of person to read a mystery and suss out the clues and divine their meaning. No, I know the way to figure out who is guilty of the crime and why and how they did it, is to read faster. The end will tell me! 

This is the beauty of books: They are written.

But there is one canon element of "The Encyclopedia Brown" books that is too pointedly at odd with human reality to embrace. I am all for rewriting the rules of humanity and the universe for our pleasure and edification in fiction.  But this is so absurd in its contradiction of human behavior that I fear it may  even have had a deleterious effect on the world itself. I speak of the device in "The Encyclopedia Brown" books wherein a character (or criminal) is caught irrefutably in a lie and so promptly gives up. This instead of simply lying more. The horrible petty criminal and bully Bugs Meaney cannot refute reality and logic itself!

Ha!

May I present the theory to you that the inability to bring down Trumpism in this nation, despite his being every bit as stupid as Bugs Meaney, has its source in "The Encyclopedia Brown" books? All these old democrats, these Reddit social commentators, these lawyers and journalists across the nation, they all read Encyclopedia Brown. Or at the least they were close enough to absorb its insane fantasy: That villains blush. That the evil doer caught in his web of lies will stop spinning. That if like in Encyclopedia Brown we can just come up with the perfect, distilled, most logical and unmistakable gotcha moment, the criminal, crushed and exposed, will be defeated.

How's that working out for you America?

Although come to think of it, I'm not sure it stopped Bugs Meaney's neighborhood reign of terror either.

This is quite an introduction to how I changed the cover on these four books on National Book Day. So who am I to complain about justice, being hardly better than a vandal. 

Alas, who will stop me?

I know!

We'll put Encyclopedia Feldenstein on the case!

Me, and also me

 

Surely I've told this story before, but there should be a provision for how many times I think of a story in relation to how many times I tell it. Like, if every once in a while I think of a story (and "story" in this context is a little grandiose, let's call it a trifling anecdote), but have already told said anecdote to you here, then probably I should be able to contain myself and maybe never tell that story again. But what if I think of the anecdote eleven times a week, every week? Maybe in that case, after eight years or so, I should get to tell the anecdote again, albeit with a long justifying preamble.

I think so.

To set the stage: 

One can return items from other library systems to my library. We take books from other libraries all across the greater metro area systems, put a slip in the book that identifies the system, and ship it to an agency that disperses the item to the appropriate system. It is mildly irritating to have a dozen books come in on the automated machine that the machine cannot recognize, and to have to take those items out of our exception bin, put a marked slip in every one of the items, and put those all in a red box we have along our "outgoing materials" wall. But it's all part of the game.

Which brings me to the Me, also Me.

Me, when 20 kids books that belong to another system come rolling through our check-in machine:

"Why can't these fucking people return their fucking books where they got them!"

Me, when a library patron asks "Can I return my Washington County library book to your library". ":

"Absolutely! Any time. No problem. You can return any item from any one of the public libraries in the metro area to us, and we'll send it back to the library it came from."