The active lifestyle in Southern Europe

 

Having been out in the hot Mediterranean sun during our grand burst of August adventurousness, with trips to Italy, 1,000 year old olive trees, small town festivals, and Roman ruins, I find myself struggling with how to tell you all about it all. And for each day we head off somewhere else, and I come back with another hundred pictures and twenty different stories to tell, I find myself then starting from scratch with a new plan and a longer list of things to prepare.

And then I remember.

This is clerkmanifesto: Where all plans fail and all plans triumph!

No, I'd rather not explain that at the moment, but thank you for your interest.

But that doesn't mean that I won't be showing you a hundred paintings of Genoa made in layers and through a process involving hours of hand drawing according to my original plan. Remember, all plans triumph here! Given the quite ample time we have left until the heat death of the Universe (which, with the heat of this summer I am not nearly so opposed to) there is plenty of time for all those vast pictures of Genovese Palaces and magnificently grimy alleyways I have been working on. It's just that I might decide to first tell you about what a revelation the focaccia is in Genoa, which is the home of focaccia and the home of pesto too. Or I may stop to tell you how much I despise Duolingo with my whole heart sometimes and why I still use it. I could talk about the terrible crowds in my city in the Summer, the women's tour de France, or, I don't know, I could suddenly get involved in making an AI video. At which point, bam! The heat death of the Universe will be here and I won't have finished those hundred paintings. Which, fair enough. After all, remember:

 All plans fail here at clerkmanifesto.

But then so do waves, eventually,

It doesn't mean we can't ride them.

World cup written ahead of time

The first game of the World Cup is over! And though I haven't seen it yet because it doesn't start for me for several minutes, I am aware of my obligations to keep you up to date on the World Cup regardless. And so it is. I am daring to give you the key points of this first match of the World Cup even though it hasn't happened yet!

Amazing!

But also accurate, maybe.

Actually, I am hoping that either:

A. I get super lucky and guess right.

or

B. You won't care enough to fact check, which, let's face it, this being the Internet, is more likely.

So, onto the key points of this exciting opening match featuring Mexico, playing at home, and South Africa, playing in Mexico.

If that counts as a guess I'm already one for one!

Here are your key points:

1. Mexico wins! Three to one.

2. Mexico's Gilbert Mora, a mere 17 years old and the youngest player at this World Cup, bags two assists!

3. Forty year old Guillermo Ochoa, also playing for Mexico, is taking part in his sixth World Cup. He is a goalie, and by "taking part" I mean "sitting on the bench" because he is old and they gave his job away. Which is a bit sad, because he would be the first player to play in six World Cups, pipping Messi and Ronaldo to it just a few days ahead. But he seems pretty happy to be there when the camera shows him.

4. Lyle Foster (who plays professionally in the U.S.) grabs the consolation goal for the South Africa team, giving them a slim ray of hope as they face slightly easier teams in their next two group games. It's not over yet!

Okay, you're up to date.

What's that?

The South Korea vs. Czechia game? 

Yes, that happened too! Or it's going to happen at four in the morning my time. 

How about you watch that one and tell me.

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.

seventy-two

 

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 have decided to run an old essay series of mine that long ago did much to inspire clerkmanifesto. It is called "The Secret Secrets of Writing". This one today starts a bit rough and then ventures into a discussion or explanation of time difference in writing that I obsessively put forth here every few days. But this version is the original source and so has historical value. Anyway, even if this all seems a bit muddled at first, it seems to come out in the end.

If in my travels I am able to throw anything current onto clerkmanifesto it will be down below today's passage.

This is the tenth one of eleven secrets:

10. Finish what you started.

Kurt Vonnegut said something about giving the reader as much information as possible as soon as possible. I have taken this to mean I should tell the reader everything. Yes, you are the reader and I am going to tell you everything! If this goes wrong I think we should hold Kurt Vonnegut wholly responsible. Although the advice that you should finish what you started came from Neil Gaiman, who actually said finish what you’re writing, and, reasonably speaking, Kurt Vonnegut then should not alone carry the weight of the failures here. Neil Gaiman must shoulder some of that load as well.

So this is secret secret number ten, you must finish what you started and my telling you everything according to the fearsome dictates of Kurt Vonnegut begins and ends with the troubling truth that I cannot finish it. This is rough draft number six or seven for me. I have experimented with the idea of stopping this mid sentence, mid paragraph (get it?). I wrote all about how I wasn’t going to stop it mid sentence. I discussed Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare at great length but could never work out why. I brought Kurt Vonnegut into it all early, expanded and contracted the Kurt Vonnegut portions but could never quite get rid of him, eventually settled for holding him responsible in a way that I think we can both see won’t stick. And now, sinking into a quicksand death of this essay I find my only solution is to break the fourth wall.

You may be thinking “But in non-fiction there is no fourth wall!” That is not so. There is always a fourth wall because the “camera” is always somewhere. In this case I, writing, am the camera and if we turn the camera (so to speak, I don’t want to put quotes on it anymore) many illusions about the room we are in (this conceptual writing, reading space) are exposed (we also unavoidably create a new fourth wall with the camera that looks at the camera but that gets infinite and makes me queasy.) One illusion is that we (me writing and you reading) exist in the same time-frame. Yes, there is some element of time travel magic where as these words spill from my pen you read them, but there is also the fact that to me you are a future being reading this in any possible way, possessed of strange and mundane future based knowledges I could not possibly know because they haven’t happened yet, whereas I, this writing, it’s form, content and context, am to you an artifact, immutable, defined, and historical. The writing voices in letters and words, on loose pages, books, computery devices or magazines don’t usually talk about this because, besides breaking some useful illusion of absolute unity, it is of limited interest. But I bring it up here because it is necessary to explain how you, by virtue of the fact that you even exist, know that this will be finished, is indeed finished. I don’t.

Except, to my genuine surprise, I find, suddenly, that I am, actually, pretty much finished. Weird. Well, there’s a lesson in here somewhere. I’ll just let you sort it out from here.

More travel posters today. These run the gamut, but I could surely put together dozens more if time and inclination strike before I’m onto other things.

fifty-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:

In your time I will have been in Japan for three weeks. But as I write this, stocking up all the future posts so as not to to break faith with clerkmanifesto and any of its readers while I may or may not be adding anything as I travel, I am now a mere five days from leaving the country.

My darling wife and I have been very busy. We knew this would be a demanding and complicated process, dismantling our lives and moving to another country, but I think it has been even a bit harder than that. It has been a life of paperwork, planning, cleaning, selling, studying, banking, and bureaucracy. And during this I have tried to weatherproof clerkmanifesto against needing to post anything until we are at least through our 40 days in Japan and slightly settled in our first (2 months, 6 days) French home. But so far I have, despite my best intentions, completed a lot of very finished, fairly articulate posts, rather than many many of the more sketchy kind I have suggested I would be doing in my standard green text above. In short, I have spent what clerkmanifesto time I have had on what perhaps have been fewer posts than I hoped.

I have finally finished my long project of a music video of my muppet co-workers. I have posted my backlog (or most of it) of old rediscovered artwork, and I have perhaps indulged my predilection for explaining what day it is for me writing compared to what day it is for you reading more times than is ideal. So what next?

At this point I am thinking of leaning quite a bit more on old clerkmanifesto posts from the past, and, though I've said it before enough times that it is a little hard for me to fully believe it, I really am hoping to leave off the explanations and move on to the next day. Twenty-five posts in four busy days seems unlikely, but I'll get as far as I can. But either way, there will always be something every day here.

As ever, see you tomorrow.

 Here are today’s pictures of our adventures in Kyoto, in the kind of dual timelines clerkmanifesto I am currently running . We are just past the middle point of our time in Kyoto, bogging down just a bit in the heat and pace of it all. We have been hiding out some in massive train stations, malls, supermarkets, and an occasional sky tower, but they’re as fascinating as the zen temples, and air conditioned!

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.