thirty-six

 

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 left this space open for me to write a post in case I had something significant to say on this momentous day, since as you read this it is the day my darling wife and I are landing in Japan, at the beginning of living out across the whole wide world. Two small people free and at large.

Farewell Saint Minneapolis.

So do I have something significant to say?

I always have something significant to say!!!!

In the end all of these postings made ahead of time, full of references to my future and to your past, create a kind of confusion about time. But I'm not going to fault it. Life is jumbled up. And retiring from a place I worked for 31 years has a touch of the quality of waking up from a dream. What just happened? Was it two days ago, or twenty years ago? At my retirement party scatterings of different co-workers from several different eras of the Roseville Library showed up. They gathered naturally into small groups of their time period. One could see the past hovering about them, but there they were, unmistakable in that exact moment.

As I write you now it is the first day of my retirement. I sit on a couch that we have already given away but that has not yet been picked up. Yesterday I was at one of the largest and most significant endings of my life. Today is one of the larger beginnings of my life, and that works whether you count my today or your today.

I take it back. I don't have anything significant to say today. I said it all here over the last dozen years. And I will say it all here in the next decades. And some of the things in the future I already said, and some in the past I have yet to say.

Welcome to my retirement.

thirty-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:

The day you read this will be me and my darling wife's last day in America, at least for a very long time.

But as I write this it is just the day before I retire.

And...

On the night before my last day of work at the library I took a shower.

I felt sad. 

I was not sad to be retiring. I don't exactly know what makes me sad.

Leaving?

Ending?

The passage of time?

I got out of the shower and saw myself in the mirror. In the center of my chest was what looked like the finest of pure white feathers. As I pinched it in my fingers I realized it was a patch of hair, pure white, on my chest.

And everything ends and begins again.

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Last morning in Minnesota with everything we own in this world…

eighteen

 

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've occasionally warned myself here: don't wish your life away. There may be a few choice blog posts in the history of Clerk Manifesto exhorting one, particularly me, not to wish my day away, not to pound too hard for the end of the workday and the advance toward free time. God knows I was inclined regularly enough. To see my dear wife again? What could be sweeter? But free time goes fast, and work goes slow, and if one makes the slow part fast too, won't the whole thing just end up a great racing blur through life? 

So I've had my eye on that. Don't wish the work time away too much; it's wise counsel, and I certainly don't fault myself for it. I could easily find some 12 years back a lovely piece or two that understands the nature of time like this, and I'm not going to fault its fine, mature wisdom now. But here, at the very end of it all, on the eve of retirement, I come to say to you that, no matter what you do or how you do it, with all savour and presence, time passes. Time still passes. And no matter what you do, no matter what it is, one day you'll find yourself at the end. 

It may be the bad end: death, decrepitude, or the heat death of the universe. And it may be the good end, some Friday night, the arms of the one you love, or even retirement. 

But either way, and with everything, ever regardless, it comes.

Raise and raised again

 

I have to admit, it’s not the worst thing in the world, and it's possibly even a bit churlish of me to complain, but now that I find myself on the edge of retirement here at the library, after so many, many, many decades, they keep giving me raises.

These aren’t raises given to me because they think I’m doing such a great job. I've... actually never received one of those. These are raises that are the result of all kinds of automated and union mandated mechanisms built into the system. But it is a bit shocking that I’ve now gotten what amounts to three large raises in less than half a year. These are raises that would have meant the world to me ten years ago, even five years ago, and certainly twenty years ago would have been even somewhat life changing.

But to receive one now, ten weeks before my last day, this one a three-and-a-half percent raise, after already receiving a raise in the spring, and one at the start of the year as well? It’s astonishing. 

And faintly appalling.

Am I supposed to work forever just to take advantage of these things? Can I give them to someone else? How do I extract any value from raises that are based on time alone?

I guess there’s no good answer to any of that.

I'm just going to be out the future value of these raises.

So I will hurriedly appreciate the late blooming of my wages, eeking out a few last moments of joy. There will come no more. And soon I will fade away and disappear from the library. 

I will rejoice and revel in that extraordinary freedom. I am sure of it, though it oddly comes just when the going is at its best.

The picnic again and other stories

 

Three scenes from the library

 

Vintage pictures of the library

 

I'm so absorbed in the vast powers and capabilities of ChatGPT's new photo generator and editor capabilities that though I am accumulating huge amounts of images, I don't have time to polish them or even add them as extra posts here. But in the interest of letting you have a taste of the kinds of things I am working on, I do have a little series of library pictures (one of many, many series) that I will call the "The Daguerreotype Series". These are pictures of the library from the second half of the 1800's.

I was tempted to say "from back when I started" but that's a kind of a joke that's vastly older than these photographs pretend to be!

Anyway, here's our little trip down memory lane (if you're 150 years old). There are so many! And I'm sorry about the damage, but all of these pictures were metaphorically dug our of our oldest archives, stored in damp County basements for decades and decades. But despite all that, if you look carefully you will see that for all this time, libraries really haven't changed as much as we might think.

Dipping into the magic hat

 

Is six years ago a long time, or is it practically yesterday?

I thought I would crank up the way back machine and travel to the March 3, 2019 post and see if it felt like a long time ago, or if it felt like it just happened. But I have a secret suspicion that no one here reading today is so familiar with the history of clerkmanifesto that it will seem like anything other than...

New.

But it would also be nice if one of you out there encountered this and thought:

"Oh, yes. This one."

This one was called "Guns"

It goes like this:

Due to some initiative of the County we hand out gun locks at my library. This means every once in awhile someone wanders up to me at the front desk and says "I heard maybe that you might have gun locks to give out?"

And I cheerily respond "We do!" (I like to give out good news). "How many would you like?" I ask.

I see their eyes light up and I see the calculation run through their brain that says "I would like 20, but what is the amount I can ask for and not seem like I'm planning on killing a bunch of people?" So I add "You can have three." Because that is how many they can have.

They say "I would like three" because this is America and that's how we roll. Well, not anyone I actually know, but on the Internet it's how I hear we roll.

So I go to the secret box in the Many Managers Office and get three gun locks. I take them to the front desk and I say "I need to see your guns to hand these over."

Just kidding. I don't say that. Though it might be fun. No, what I say is "Please do come back if there's a Zombie invasion. We'll need help."

They say "Ha ha ha." Then they go home and do gun safety and maybe do and maybe don't kill a bunch of people.

So, that's it.

That's nice.

You know what I said when I read this?

"Oh, yes. This one."

Here then is a random movie clip bonus for you today because that's the kind of blogpost we're having. 

No sound cause it's... short. 

Click to set, enlarge with the bottom right corner, click to play.

Leaving early

 

I can see that this is the kind of post that might give the casual reader the feeling that I don't like my job. So you should know this:

I kind of like my job!

I just like not working way better!

One of the peculiarities of my schedule at the library is that every single day I work, I work until closing. My library is open for 59 hours a week so this is not true for any of my colleagues. For the most part, I am happy with this schedule, although there is a touch of pained jealousy at that all too common point in the day where I have to watch my co-workers leave while I have to stay behind. Another side effect of this schedule is that when I do leave early, for an appointment, a minor catastrophe, or in some prearranged vacation, I get the peculiar feeling of transgression, like I am playing hooky, or leaving something incomplete. Of course, it is a sublime feeling as well, like I am stealing time. 

Time is delicious.

With this in mind, over the past few years, on the almost but not quite rare occasion where I go out after work with one of my two local friends, I have taken to leaving one hour early and using one precious hour of vacation time to do so.

This is great.

This is happening today and in 75 minutes I am leaving to go to a restaurant called Lynette to schmooze with old Marcus. Leaving an hour early is not much really. And an hour of vacation time, though small, is terribly valuable to me. But outweighing all of that is the invaluable fact that all day long a secret refrain quietly rings out in my spirit, like a lovely whisper slightly lightening everything:

I'm leaving early, I'm leaving early, I'm leaving early, I'm leaving early,

Getting ahead of ourselves

 

Bon jour!

It is hard to believe it is already 2026!

How the year has flown by.

I write you barefoot from our apartment in the South of France. I wander into the kitchen like Pablo Picasso to get a bit of cheese and a glass of cognac before I sit down to conduct the art of my later years.

This is that art!

If it does not look much like art, well, yes, you are not alone. But let me tell you: It has never been easier to find people who feel exactly the same way about the work of Picasso.

Not that I'm really like Pablo Picasso. 

I even wrote a song about it. It included the lyric:

"I'm not Pablo Picasso".

But there's not much profit running through all the other lyrics as the key point has been made clear enough.

You are probably wondering if I'm going to do one of those boring year in review essays where I tell you the stocks that went crazy in 2025, the Superbowl and Champions' League winners, and which cities were wiped out in nuclear holocausts in this year past, but I am not.

I say we look forward to better and brighter things. And I think 2026 is going to be delightful. Or, as we say here in France, delicieux.

Oh, what's that?

It's not 2026?

It's 2027?

My god how the time flies.

Time crawls, but it accumulates

 

"Time crawls, but it accumulates." Said the nearly sixty year old man.

"That's me!" Cried the nearly sixty year old man excitedly, upon seeing himself in his own blog post.

Well, when I put it like that it's not as impressive.

Do I think too much about time? I fleetingly wonder.

If I consider the last couple of days it is merely a few minutes of consideration altogether. But over the course of a lifetime? 

Empires have fallen.

Time crawls, but it covers leagues. Why not consider time? Time has all the answers!

But it has way more questions.

Every four years

 

I try not to repeat myself around here... much, but the Olympics tend to evoke a similar reaction in me, and they come around every two or four years. So I sort of forget and am yet again inclined to come here and say:

I really like the Olympics.

I get a little obsessed by the Olympics.

In the pre-cursor version of Clerkmanifesto, from the mid nineties, there was my cartoon: I. E. Skin's Guide to All There Is to Know. And even back in 1996 this was all true, and I was compelled to go on about the Olympics in precisely the same way I am now.

For your reference:

Not much has changed in my feelings from this from 28 years ago. In fact, I even have the heat rash of concentric circles on my forehead again! The wonders of human achievement are as enthralling to me as they ever were. Indeed, the biggest difference is that the technology has changed and made everything even better. On my computer right now I can pull up any event. I can watch them in replay at any time I want. I can watch them with subtitles if I need to. I can watch them on my phone in the library stacks. I (mostly) have no commercials. I can watch four events all at once, shifting my focus wildly to take in the peak moments of each competition. It is all amazing! 

But it is also far, far worse. There is vastly more to see now of the Olympics, and my little cartoon joke about barely having time to go to the bathroom is all the more true! With the deciding set of a live archery challenge in play, it would be better to just... hold it.

The obsessive coverage of U.S. athletes has not gone away completely, but it is so avoidable that I hardly notice it. I'm even willing to cheer for some American athletes. Although in rooting for the U.S. women's gymnastics team as they won their gold medal, I could not help but note in all the jubilation that I never even saw who won the bronze and silver. I was kind of hoping Italy did well. I might have to check out some of the replay.

Finally, as to cartooning not being an Olympic sport, well, blogging isn't either. But all these years later I'm far more comfortable with that. All my Nobel Prizes keep me company. One can't win everything.

Sea change

 

As I emerge from the cloud of constant pain and attention to my cracked rib, I find that the world has changed in my absence. 

It's only been two and a half weeks cloistered from the society, but there have been more staff changes at my library in that brief time than there has been all together for years. So many people have left in this period, and yet it's strangely hard to feel their absence. 

I don't miss anything right now. 

The weather has grown unstable, with storms rushing terribly in and raging. Then it's beautiful out. Then it's hot and muggy. Young people show up and they're old. Miraculous inventions appear but no one knows what to do with them. Rabbits are everywhere, but somehow they have improved. Small children walk by and the same exact things happen over and over, but they are slightly different.

And surely that can't be.

And here I am at the front desk of the library again.

I don't know what happened.

I think I just got younger.

We revisit time travel

 

I'm not sure if time travel stories are a genre, a motif, or simply all of fiction. I do lean towards the latter view, which I think Kurt Vonnegut was suggesting somewhat in Slaughterhouse Five. What is narrative other than something that proceeds in a directed linear fashion like a timeline, and yet can be visited at any point at any time, defying sequence?

Well, tons of things, I suppose, but that too.

I just finished a pretty good time travel novel call The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley. It starts out being about a program where doomed people are plucked out of England's history and integrated into the present day. It begins as a bit of almost realistic romantic comedy and gets more spy thrillery as one goes along. Time travel stories have a way of ramping up like that. Time travel is hard to keep from running wild.

My favorite time travel stories are often only partly time travel stories, and they pull off dazzling narrative tricks with narrative, where everything makes perfect sense even if it shouldn't. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, arguably the only really terrific book in the series, pulls off a dazzling version of this where events that looked one way when we first encounter them turn entirely different in a new context, and yet remain consistent from every angle. Jasper Fforde, one of my favorite plotters ever, never goes all in on time travel narratives, but casually employs its devices at will to dazzling effect.

Of course, there are no rules with a feature I love so much. The movie About Time is a time travel coming of age romantic comedy about a family where the men can move back into points in their life and change the future. Not only is it full of charm, but it oddly manages the rare grace of keeping time travel low stakes despite its inherent Nuclear Bomb like power. On the other hand it is an absolute disaster class in time travel mechanics. I can't not notice that, and yet am regularly mystified at how little it ultimately matters to me.

There are also pure time travel stories out there that I love, with tightly assembled mechanics. I've talked about Stanislaw Lem's brilliant short story in The Star Diaries here before (The Seventh Voyage), and I've even done homages. Favorite authors of mine like Mark Twain, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Terry Pratchett significantly employ time travel. And maybe that starts to explain some of it to me. If we say that Time Travel is not a genre, it has a distinct predilection for all my favorite genres: Romantic Comedy, Farce, and Science Fiction and Fantasy Adventure. It is no accident that The Ministry of Time is all of these, as are most, no, ALL, of my examples.

But what's my favorite time travel story?

I'll get back to you.