Work in progress

 

Maybe my magnum opus here at clerkmanifesto isn't the things I finish, but all my work in progress. It's all a work in progress at clerkmanifesto.

I have mentioned, and shown examples of, a series of layered ai and hand drawn pictures of Genoa. This is a faintly ridiculous project of about 80 pictures, which are made from probably more like 500 pictures. And as I create the layers to complete the actual final drawings, which is a project that has now gone on for a couple of weeks, I am sometimes struck by how nice some of the layers are by themselves.

So we are talking about process today!

Yes, I am keen to show you my 80 picture suite of Genoa photo paintings. But I still have a ways to go to do that.

And in the mean time I not only have a few pieces of work I am keen to show you, though I will try to keep it to a minimum, but I also get sidetracked by occasional bizarre ventures into mythologizing my very work on this series.

Yes, it does slow down the overall project, but I am ever a victim of my muse.

So, what do you want to see first?

The mythologizing of creating the work, or the work along the way (which actually appears in the mythologizing)?

Okay. Mythologizing series it is! Tomorrow we will show some of the work along the way.

And yes, before you ask, I am a cat now.

And yes, in my mind my studio is very large and not a computer cubby in a small dormer window.

And most amazingly, though you really wouldn't be able to know this part, the images of drawings and paintings in these photograph ARE actually the ones I am working on (easiest to see in the commonality of the drawing here in image one and image two).

fifty-four

 

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:

We'll just let this one mostly speak for itself. It's a more than two minute music video of some of the muppets I worked with at the end of my time at the library.

To operate it, click once to engage the video player. Enlarge it by click down at the bottom of the player if you want the big screen version. And then click again to play it. 

It has music so be prepared for the listening part of it too.

From Kyoto:

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…

twenty

 

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:

And then just like that, I don't work here anymore.

nineteen

 

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:

Last day of work at the Roseville Library.

31 years.

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.

To remember it by

 

In less than four weeks I'll be leaving behind the library I worked at for 31 years, and leaving it behind forever.

I know I keep talking about it.

It's a lot!

I suppose 31 years is enough that I am not likely to forget the place. Nevertheless, standing at the front desk this evening, as things slowed down, I had another idea:

What if I could have a model of the library? What if I could take my dollhouse version of the library with me? And if some years from now I briefly find myself a little wistful, I could take out my library dollhouse and...       move things around?

I work fast these days.

I'll have to choose from one of these, ranging from simple to fancy:

Three self portraits at work

 

My quota

 

Early in a busy morning at the front desk of my library, a library patron was looking for a book that the computers said was on hold for her. It had come in recently for her and she couldn't find it.

"I will track this book down for you if it's the last thing I do!" I declared with an early morning passion for library work.

It was on the cart behind me. I checked it out to her.

"Thank you." The patron said. "You all are always so helpful at this library."

"I'm glad it worked out because that's the last thing I will do."

The patron shrugged. What was that to them.

They got theirs.

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.