Not saying

I like it when people at the front desk of the library are impressed:

"Uh, I'm looking for that book by that author. I forgot the author's name."

"Patty Janes House of Curl?" I inquire on a hunch.

"How did you know that!???!!!???" They exclaim.

But that's not usually how they respond.

"Patty Janes House of Curl? Yes, that's it. Do you have a copy?"

I thought it was a pretty good magic trick, but, okay, I can take neutral. I just don't like it when the expectations are too low, when the meaning of my knowledge is misread.

"I want to know if you have a book called Redshirts." A patron says to me as I sit at the front desk.

"By John Scalzi? Yeah, sure, I'll see if we have a copy checked in."

"You know John Scalzi? I guess he's a lot more popular than I thought."

"No, he isn't." I don't reply. "I just work at a library. I'm just reasonably knowledgeable about books!"

Or there's the man who came in tonight. "I'm looking for a couple documentaries by a man named KEN BURNS." He says the name slowly and carefully like he might say "DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?" And he might as well be saying exactly that.

"No." I don't say. "I have no idea who this exotic, unfamous person is you're talking about. Besides, we're a library. We only check out books."

For a talkative person sometimes I find I don't say much.

Sometimes I just tell the jokes to myself

I'm filling a spare half hour of work at the library. I am emptying bins. Seeing as it is my first half hour at work I am still limbering up. I put a few children's books on a cart. I read one about a roller coaster ride. I put a few more on the cart. There are many co-workers and volunteers to say hello to. There are many pointless things to discuss with people. I put a few more books on the cart. I take a look at another children's book. This one is about a witch's broom. I stare into space for a bit. There is much to think of and I very much enjoy not thinking of it when I can. I take a small cluster of books out of the bin and add it to my cart. Gosh, I think, I must have emptied dozens of books onto this cart already!

"Hello." My mind cries out theatrically. "I can't do it all by myself!"

Dark matter

The fact that you are reading this probably means that I am not writing the dark matter of the Internet. But I am near it. I can hear it through the walls. I try and stumble to it. But though the dark matter of the Internet is most of the Internet, an endless sea of fruitless attempts, tiny audiences, abandoned projects, forgotten bursts of optimism, and the inconsequential, it is curiously hard to get there. Think of the hobbits trying to get through the Old Forest. They want to go in one general direction but all passage is relentlessly difficult in that direction, the trees and undergrowth thick, an unclimbable ravine steering them slightly away, until they finally end up entirely locked in, resigned to going in a direction they didn't want to go, to what turns out to be to the malevolent heart of the forest, Old Man Willow.

And what is Old Man Willow, the hobbit eating tree, in this analogy?

I don't know. Perhaps it is Google?

Well, that's good enough for me. And I understand. Popularity is a siren song to us all. And though I may head out on a search for obscurity on the Internet, obscurity is located in some miserable, tragically abandoned neighborhoods, crossed with razor wire fencing, great nasty pits in the ground, giant, cracked cement walls with spokes of rebar ugily protruding, and nothing interesting to see. Whereas at the slightest gesture, even at the mere wavering of your will, something like Harry Potter's Knight bus will instantly be there to whisk you back to the bright lights and well tended pathways of the popular Internet, the approved Internet, the vetted Internet.

The dark matter of the Internet is the mysterious background of all the Internet you see, humming behind everything. It's nearly unreachable billions contain treasures and horrors indeed, but, far less glamorously, it is actually mostly made up of the mundane and uninteresting, the forgotten and pointless. It's a fascinating, dim, mysterious world, but not for long. Ten minutes of exposure will leave you exhausted and bored.

Nevertheless you need the darkness to define the light, the trivial to set off the notable, and the mundane, like lottery tickets, to set off the unique, like winning lottery tickets.

Perhaps my description of the dark matter of the Internet is a little murky, indefinite? Yes, of course it is. It's dark matter we are talking about. How is one supposed to describe what can only be seen in absurdly miniscule fractions. I have deduced the multitudinous dark matter by its ripple effect on the Internet, by human nature, and by what hovers just beyond the frame of my screen, shaping what it is that I do see. It is negative space, damaged by light out of itself. My looking at it is an act that disturbs it and starts to change it.

I have been thinking about this for days. I did a variety of Google searches and started wondering: What if when Google comes back with its millions of results I went to, say, page 100,000? But I found I could only go ahead about four pages at a time. I found an experimental search engine called Million Short which removes the million most popular websites from its search results. Still operating on basic rules of popularity it surprisingly was only a small assist in my journey to the dark matter. I found Petit Tube, a site that will show only YouTube videos no one or almost no one has seen. This is very much an excellent path to where I'm trying to get to, and, though useful and strange and somewhat interesting in its own right, it would be ideal if it involved websites. I'm still working on tracking down something like that.

But as interested as I am in the dark matter of the Internet, it is a largely theoretical interest. Besides the fact that it disappears some even as I find it, it can also be pointedly meaningless, completely without ambition, and boring. Ten minutes of searching through detritus is as much as I can take. I am happy to replace some of my Internet exploration with that, but what about when those ten minutes are up?

I have been considering alternatives. I hear good things about "books".

A healthy post

To my delight my colleague Dave brought in homemade cinnamon buns to share with his co-workers yesterday. I'm one of his co-workers! I'm like, actually, his favorite co-worker, but don't tell the others. The cinnamon buns were accompanied by a tub of buttercream. Dave was emphatic about his buttercream. "This is real buttercream." He wanted us to know. "Butter and powdered sugar. There's plenty. Apply it generously."

Okay. 

I enjoyed these cinnamon rolls. The buttercream was particularly good, but I foolishly refused to heat the things up and so stole some of the pleasure from my treat. One of my other co-workers emerged from the break room to say delightedly that he had taken "a healthy amount of buttercream".

I enjoyed this curious use of the word "healthy". I appreciate a word whose appropriate uses can actually run opposite to itself. As you well know the most common meaning of the word "healthy" is "good for you" or "imparting good health". But here it has evolved from that meaning to mean instead "large" or "of goodly size".  So, a healthy portion of buttercream, that is a healthy portion of a huge chunk of butter mixed with half a bag of refined sugar, would, in one sense, be a small portion. But a healthy portion of it also means a large portion. I just think someone could have a lot of fun with that, I mean, if they were a really, really good blogger, maybe just a little better than me.

River of mystery

Last week I told you about my preferred, scenic walking route along the river and up over the pedestrian bridge, winding into the University campus. It's a route rich with secret nooks, graffiti, belligerent geese that make me slightly nervous, spirit turkeys hanging around to dispense wisdom, river wreckage, oddly friendly bald eagles, and mysterious hints of my city's history. A mudslide closed this route down a year ago and it preys on my mind. What's going on down there by the river? Has a wall of stone crumpled into the Mississippi? Does a mysterious West Bank medical building threaten to come crushing down the bluffs? Why is it taking so long to open this best of routes back up again?

Last week I told you a story about it, with aliens and avocados, because I needed some explanation. Now I'll tell you a plain story.

Today I threw caution to the wind and ventured through the barricades, past the skull and crossbones, between the razor wire, to see what I could find. Where the river road closes, and has been closed, for a year, I ventured on. Cat-killing curiosity took me over.

The first exciting revealment as I slipped into the no man's land was a vision of a post apocalypse city. The road was perfect and undisturbed. Everything lay in absolute readiness for people, and yet the people were all gone. I was inches from the heart of a major American city and yet walked through pristine abandonment alone.

The second thing was the graffiti. This was always a rich area for graffiti, but abandoned it had flourished. I had strong mixed feelings about this. I am a great fan of graffiti, and some of the pieces here were good, even very good. I've even started recognizing certain artists. But seeing some of these beautiful Civilian Conservation Corps stone walls along the river covered in paint seemed half a desecration and half an ingenious use of texture.

If I have a weakness or strength as an explorer it is in my loathing of turning around. I hate retracing my steps and can become quite imprudent in my quest to find a way through. So as I pressed on further and further along the forbidden gray riverside wasteland/wonderland I knew I would be more and more unwilling to not fight my way through. This sort of impulse tends to lead me to scrambling along cliffsides hanging on poison ivy to save myself a plummeting death. It leads me into dark caves and abandoned sewers, and has brought  me to crawling on my belly getting torn apart by savage thorns.

You may be surprised to learn that these are things I do not normally enjoy. So as I neared the heart of the forbidden zone I was filled with some trepidation.

The first thing there I noticed was that the mudslide was kind of cleaned up. No great river bluff had gone tumbling into the mighty Mississippi, or maybe it had a little, but now it looked a lot more like the hillside had just sort of deflated.

The road was completely clear, so was the biking path. A small, very unused construction site sat in the middle of it all. It looked very, very, very safe to proceed. But for my protection there had been erected three heavy duty, carefully thorough lines of fencing to protect the site. On the river side they hung well out over the water to foil we intrepid interlopers. On the slope side the fence ran as far up the bluff as possible.

I was very irritated. But because the people of my city are generally sensible my solution was far less bad than a swim in the freezing river, or a crawl through a sewer. Explorers before me had worn a nice path up the hill along the fence and back down again, three times. I followed in the footsteps of others before me and was through. As is this story.



 

Manuscript sells for record at auction!

It was a huge day for auctioned manuscripts last week. In a Christie's auction the lyrics for American Pie sold for just a stitch over 1.2 million dollars. The levee sure wasn't dry then! It was the third highest price ever paid for an American "literary" manuscript. But all records were shattered later that same auction when a surprise offering sold for a record 4.7 million dollars! What was it that sold for more than twice the previous record holder Like a Rolling Stone?

Well, I'm blushing. It turns out it was a post it note on which I wrote the original draft of a clerkmanifesto blog post called "I need to make a list".

That's not at all what I think of as my best blog post, but it had several things going for it.
 
1. The post it note was, unusually, in pristine condition. They usually get bent, dirty, and smeary.

2. The post itself is just one of those that captured the American zeitgeist of the time, like the invention of Peanut Butter for instance.

3. Buyers were motivated by the rarity with which things I write on post it notes come up for sale in major auctions.

Are you wondering how much of the 4.7 million dollars went to me?

Not a penny. I had accidentally handed the note over to someone who asked me if I had any scratch paper. I'd long since lost track of it.

Am I bitter?

Not at all. I do this for love.

My paper shame

As I drunkenly wobbled through the Internet looking for things to yell at or be dazzled by or something, I confusedly clicked on a story about how rich people in California are using all the water there.

That's okay. I loathe rich people too. It's just good sense. Left to their own moral devices they do not behave well and they need our collective, steadfast moral condemnation to help them along. But my righteous indignation fell apart at the harrowing story of how they wantonly use California's precious water resources to grow their hobby rice, or wash all their tesla automobiles, or delouse their servants, or whatever. It's not that I don't think it's the usual wretched business for the rich people. It's not that I don't think they're wrong or horrible, wasteful and narcissistic. No. It's just, who am I to say? It's just, what about the paper towels?

Alas it is hard for me to appear before us all in so unflattering a light! It is painful for me to so frankly confess my shame. But when it comes to me and conservationist issues it all comes back to the paper towel dispensers at the library I work at.

I use roughly eight linear miles of plain, one-ply paper towels every single week that I work at the library. That's more than two leagues of paper towel! If I were to attach a paper towel end to my belt loop and walk home, dragging towel behind me, I could get there, never exhausting the towel and leaving an unbroken trail behind me.

Birds could not eat all that paper towel.

It's a lot of paper towel.

Why am I such a savage despoiler of the environment?

I could blame it on the flamboyant paper towel dispenser. It's motion sensitive, but that's a kind of an understatement. Draw near the towel dispenser and with a friendly motoring noise it rolls out a fresh foot or two of paper towel. "Towel?" It seems to winningly say.

"Um, thank you." I reply. There's always a use for a towel, and I don't want to seem rude, to the towel dispenser, who is being so nice and all.

Plus, there aren't, surprisingly, any actual perks working at a library. I mean, there are a lot of advantages, but ever since they took away the whole "staff doesn't accrue late charges" all that's left are the towels. I carry food in them, wrap stuff in them, wipe stuff down with them, dry things with them, polish things with them, dry some more things with them, and mop my brow with them. Definitely the mopping my brow with them. It's hard work using that many towels!

I am a one man deforestation machine!

I don't know what to do about it. I can't help myself. Maybe if the County got us a pizza every once in awhile. A staff parking spot? A bowling alley. Free weeded items? I need something. Something.

But until then I have no choice but to ball up the rain forests in the palms of my hands and avert my eyes as the rich utterly destroy the planet. Fair is fair.

People give us stuff!

On a recent evening a man came up to me at the front desk of my library. He was carrying a large plank of plywood. On the plywood were copious amounts of what appeared to be a flour and water mix. He might have put yeast in it to make it airier and lighter. He had shaped the mixture into a kind of giant map. There was something I took to be divisions for states, or provinces. He'd created a facsimile of a capitol building out of flour mix, and he made hundreds of tiny people as well. There were cities and mountains and rivers, all of it roughly discernible in its pasty white mush.

"I'd like the library to have this." The man said, setting his weighty plank onto my counter.

"I can't take this." I replied. "I don't even know what it is."

He looked at me like I was a fool. "It's a dough nation."

My spirit name

I headed out on my river walk this morning under a damp and blustering sky. My neck hurt and my spirits were low so the birds came. Eagles. What a thing to stop you from thinking of anything but blog posts.

What do the eagles say? They say:

Always think in blog posts.

One bald eagle swooped and dipped and glided around me but followed my general path, coming close and venturing away, for so long that I had a delightful sensation that I was taking a walk with an eagle.

If I had been a native to this land perhaps my name would have been Walks With Eagles. That would have been a good name, but I probably would have been called Mocks the Chief. Which would have been an okay name too.

Just a little churlish

If you have been here before you may have noticed a small- tiny really- strain of churlishness in my writing. Sure, you would require a clear and penetrating eye to pick it out, but don't you think that describes your eye wonderfully- clear and penetrating?

And so you are right again! For instance let us take a look at gratefulness. When I see the admonition to be grateful, I curdle a little inside. There are surely no more things to be grateful for than there are things to be bitter about, and I don't see any reason for hoisting one over the other. If I have any Shakespeare level quote for you today it is this: Anything you carry you eventually have to set down.

I was terribly thirsty after an eight mile walk I took today, and, as I drank cold water from my quart mason jar at the library, all of me rejoiced and luxuriated. Why would I want to foist gratefulness on that? But when I started that same walk, before my feet started their angry blistering and before I was stressing about how late I was running, I was so completely delighted to be in the world, walking, just walking, that my heart sang and my lungs filled and I had this feeling, this strange feeling. It was gratefulness. I was grateful!

And so here is where I will relent. I believe it is fine and good to open one's door to gratefulness. And if gratefulness walks in, it is welcome. And if gratefulness should sit down at my table then it is a fine and beautiful guest, to be treated with all honors and proper hosting. But if gratefulness should tentatively slip across my threshold, look at my table disapprovingly, and wander diffidently back out my door, then I am not going to be dragging it back in against its will. Like all good things in this world gratefulness should be free to go where it likes. The bastard.

What you can do with ponies

In an absurd context that's not worth going into, I thought of a quote. I ascribed it to Mark Twain, as is the current tradition, and after it got its small laugh I wrote it down. I liked the quote. But I write a blog, not a twitter account, so it's hard to know what to do with a quote. Usually it's a matter of figuring out what it's the concluding sentence to.

Perhaps it would be simpler to have a twitter account for it. Perhaps I would be one of the finest tweeters on the Internet! I mean, I've already written:

The cream rises to the top, and dead things float.

and

Babies might not be so great, but they just get worse the more the years go by.

and

It's not that I don't hear God, it's that he seriously won't shut up!

And on and on.

But I know where all that leads.

Once upon a time I wrote some blog-like pieces and I thought "I bet if I really applied myself, of all the things I've ever done, I could have a brilliant blog."

And I'm afraid you'll find this a tad immodest, but I do indeed now write a mighty blog, a great blog, a blog for the ages.

But that doesn't make it popular, or well read.

Which brings me to that Mark Twain quote that's not by Mark Twain:

"Even if you have a flying pony, you still have to stable it somewhere."

And that would be the sad end of this post. But then I thought of a new, related, and better quote:


"Even if you have flying pony, only one person can ride it at a time."

All the pretty birds

It is a brilliant day. The temperature has gone up 20 degrees to something Springlike. An occasional cloud is smeared across the sky as if for contrast to demonstrate the blueness. Nothing is budding yet, but the river is full of Spring birds. No great beasts, none of your drama birds, it is all, one after the other, the pretty birds. All the pretty birds.

I am not a fancy birding guide, able to throw out to you advanced and dazzling birder terms like "Cardinal" and "Woodpecker". My on the fly constructed bird names are shared by no one: "Three high whistles and invisible", "The little one who likes to fly with its wings closed", "The metal one with the thin, spear beak". I guess they describe something, but they are not professional. I'm an amateur out walking on the river, writing my blog posts to you in a flurry of mental scribblings that are all long gone again when I sit down to write. Are my invisible, fleeting blog posts that we never get to read here better than the blog posts we do get to read? No, not better, they are just different. They are ghosts winding through these written words, smelling of earth and smoke and feathers, finding their way to you so that, at some time in the future, you will remember reading things here that never happened, that were never written. 

You won't quite know what they were, and you will carry them alone.

Complaint number 434

This will be complaint number 434 in my series Eleven Hundred and Thirty-Seven Complaints About the Internet.

Not to be all negative. There are several very nice things about the Internet too!

Today's complaint (number 434, have I mentioned that?) I am calling The Fallacy of the Discussed.

Few are the days now that you can spend talking to acquaintances, loved ones, or various social groups, where someone, somewhere doesn't bring up a notable anecdote, telling tale, or item of interest they found on the Internet. I am not casting aspersions upon these short tales. Judging them one way or the other is beyond the purview of this complaint. Indeed, to stack the cards against this complaint let us say that every one of these anecdotes is sterling, illuminating, and revealing. Like, you are having a quiet talk about your mutual fears and anxieties with a colleague you are growing closer to, and they say "You know, I just stumbled on this story about Rilke on the Internet and he said Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love." 

Let's say they're all like that.

This makes the Internet look very good. Every time it is referenced it has performed at some of its highest capabilities and demonstrated the best of it's enriching qualities. Almost every time the Internet comes up in casual conversation it looks great and shiny and clever and accessible. We are like Vegas gamblers who only share stories of our wins. Although at least when you go to Vegas and say nothing people might ask you about how the gambling went, causing you to confess the more common truth. "The main thing is I had a good time. I look at the money I lost as the same as what I would have spent on Hokusai prints on a different kind of trip."

And gambling is the perfect analogy, because roaming the Internet is a gambler's game. With each click you will mostly lose. But the next day, chatting with a co-worker, you do not say "Well, last night I was on the Internet and I saw a bunch of stuff about the director Christopher Nolan. He said I've always been a movie guy, movies have been my thing. I love movies, all kinds of movies."

"What does that have to do with anything?" Your co-worker asks, perplexed.

"Absolutely nothing." You reply. "It's like I took an hour of my life and stabbed it in the heart."

Alien mudslide

Almost a year ago one of my commuting walking routes was closed down. It was the prettier, longer one, that swept low down on the river, wound up through some curious, curling back ways of the University, and slipped over the river on a pedestrian only bridge. I liked that route.

It was apparently the victim of a mudslide. And I was happy to believe the mudslide explanation all the way into the middle part of last summer. But there comes a point where all those trucks, all those many, many people toiling away on some hidden part of a long closed road, must produce some results. And as the road persistently remained closed I began to grow impatient, suspicious even. When Spring made its first tentative ventures out of Winter, and I longed for my moseying route once again, I wrote the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

They wrote back to me!

They said:

The delays in the reopening of the West River Road have nothing to do with the crash landing of alien spacecraft. They are entirely due to the mudslide caused by the heavy rains of last spring and the engineering challenges of stabilizing the eroded bluff.
 
Whoa. Wait. Who said anything about aliens? Who said anything about crashed spaceships?
 
Something was very fishy.

I started to pay even more attention. Why do they need all those tents? Why is the unaffected walking path so thoroughly shut down when there must be a safe way through? Why does the whole operation, viewed across the river, look more like an archeological dig than a construction site?

I asked my friend Doris.

My friend Doris is an alien!

Really. She is! If the pale, whitish green skin doesn't tell the tale, there is the fact that her face consists entirely of a giant eyeball.
 
"Do you know anything about a crashed spaceship down by the river?" I asked.

She looked really embarrassed. I think. Sometimes it is hard to read just that one big eyeball. You have to kind of look at her mouths/hands too. But I'm pretty sure she was embarrassed. "It wasn't exactly a crash." She said. "It was more like we accidentally dropped a load of experimental avocados."

"Experimental avocados?" I inquired.

"Very experimental." She replied significantly.

"So if I were to illegally start using that route again would I be in danger?"

Doris mused. "You might temporarily turn into an avocado tree."

"How long would I be an avocado tree?"

"Less than a week."

"But Doris!" I exclaimed "I thought you liked people. I thought you were a pacifist utopian vegetarian alien, on a mission of peace and education. Why would you mess with something that would turn everyone into an avocado tree for a week?"

"I am all that." Doris replied. "And I know it's terrible. But it is less than a week, and, and, well..." She trembled. Her eye got a strange, slightly feverish glow in it.

"Yes" I prodded.

"Well," She burst out "Just think of all the guacamole!"

A name is a terrible thing to live up to

A true story.

The library phone rings this morning. It is my job to answer it. It's all very old fashioned.

"I WOULD LIKE TO RENEW SOME BOOKS." Says the patron in an unmistakable fashion, one that is terribly easy to hear. Perhaps it is a trifle too easy to hear.

"I need the barcode off of your library card." I say in a quiet tone, hoping to bring down the volume of our discourse.

"JUST A MOMENT. I'LL LOOK FOR IT." A volunteer across the room, startled, looks up, wondering what all the racket is leaking out around the edges of my ear. I wait patiently, cowering slightly.

"The barcode is 21120827544462" The patron broadcasts.

I type it in dutifully. The computer brings up the patron's account and name:

Elizabeth Yells.

Wow. She sure does.

Diminishing returns

Recently I was at a retirement event, an art show closing, for a beloved University art professor. I have no objection to telling you her name, Joyce Lyons, and that she is a brilliant artist. She is especially good at trees, forests, the ground. She is very good at the ground. To my delight you could find her work online but none of it looks particularly good, and all of it is a false representation of the beauty of her work. I am delighted because I wickedly rejoice every time the great and terrible Internet falls short and proves incapable and we are all thrust back into the fleshly world.

At this event my wife and I were sitting at a table. I was trying to eat as many things as possible from the very appealing looking Italian Antipasti table, but in retrospect I wish I focused more on acquiring additional glasses of the Prosecco. The cushion of slight drunkenness would have mixed warmly with the event. We would have been delighted to remain alone at our table, but this Joyce Lyon person is one popular professor. No space stayed unfilled, and soon we were joined by a couple; an artist and a physicist. The artist was very extroverted, and we're usually reasonably polite anyway so discussion ensued. We went around informally, exchanging all our bona fides, chatting. The library came up and inevitably I was called on to dispense my bit of library wisdom, which mainly came down to explaining why the thing the artist wanted to happen at her library (a longer time to come pick up her requested items) was untenable (it makes the wait lists unreasonably slow and long).

Then the subject of my blog came up. 

Exciting!

"What is it mainly about?" I was asked.

"Mostly, these days, it's about how great it is."

"But if you just brag." The artist said "You will have no readers."

Looking back on this now, an alternate, strangely appealing response to this springs to my mind:

"There are infinite paths to blogging to no readers."

In the end, though, what I responded was "I guess that's the point."

I suspect they have not since checked in to see what all the fuss was about.

Advice

I have, on occasion, handed out my share of advice here. But I don't mean it.

I have begun to think there is no such thing as advice. Advice is the box you use when you're reorganizing for "to decide later". Any organizing book, of which there are many, will advise you that in no way should you ever have a "to decide later" box. This is very good advice. I will take it under consideration.

If I take out all the splendid advice I have received in my life, like one of my art teacher's admonitions to learn a valuable skill, like carpentry, I find it is all beautifully preserved, like in aspic, just sort of jiggling around in an impenetrable gelatinous cube. My wife and I were once in a fascinating food shop in Belgium. We stood in line. I have no idea what we were buying. But an old lady in front of us proceeded to order slice after slice of mysterious aspics in loaf pans. These gelled loafs were chock full of mysterious body parts and obscure vegetables and mushrooms. The counter person meticulously wrapped each individual slice in layers of butcher paper as the line grew out the door. I can't imagine any of us minded. It was fascinating. "Is that a boar's snout and pickles in aspic?" we all hypnotically wondered to ourselves.

What did that old Belgian woman do with all that aspic? I like to think she arranged it on the many shelves of her apartment, in between her many, many bibles.

An alternate theory is that she ate them.

And so here is my advice to you:

Don't hand out advice unless you're prepared to have a couple of bites of the horrible stuff yourself.

Your benefits

If there's one thing I'm not good at, it's marketing. Marketing and sales. And bowling. Bowling, music, marketing, sales, and sewing. And money, endurance sports, filling out forms, and corporate style professionalism.

There's a few other things, but I don't want to get too far off topic, or try your patience. The point is that I am not good at marketing. Sometimes my blog feels a little sad that I am unable to properly perform the tasks that will allow it to flourish in the world. But my blog has a very sporting personality and, to disappointment, my blog is inclined to say "As long as you try, that's what means the most to me."

And so, in that spirit, I would today like to inform you as to the various benefits one can accrue as a regular reader of clerkmanifesto. You might want to consider increasing your level.

 

Dilettante Level:

To reach the dilettante level you need only occasionally read one of my posts and not react with outright hostility to them.


What you get:


Several humorous anecdotes that don't really work for sharing with others and a useful reminder to get off the Internet.


Trying to Keep Up Level:
 
To reach the trying to keep up level you need merely have the vague ambition to read all my posts, which you only sort of, but not quite, manage to do.

What you get:

All of the above benefits plus the hope that you will one day be mentioned in a blog post.


Subscriber Level:

To reach the subscriber level you need merely sign up to receive the blog regularly via email.

What you get:

All of the above benefits plus a less appealing font to read it in and the comforting sense of watching the brutal hurly burly of an intense blog in action from the safety of a luxury box seat with tinted windows.


Commenters Level:
 
To reach the commenters level you need to read fairly regularly and comment once every couple weeks, usually in batches of comments.

What you get:

All the benefits other than subscribers level plus personalized responses to each comment even when the blog writer is slightly heartbroken that the comment did not start out by complimenting the blog.


Proselytizer Level:

To reach the proselytizer level you need to regularly read the blog and work tirelessly to spread it around and bring it to a wider audience, never admitting defeat no matter how fruitless your efforts.

What you get:

All of the above benefits plus useful tips on how to spell "proselytizer".

Embarassment of riches

I guess it's bald eagle season around here or something. There's one soaring over the library now. Over by the river yesterday I saw a bald eagle carrying a branch like some kind of ferocious biblical dove. Apparently it was putting together a nest in a big pine tree behind one of those pretty river road houses. It's all about the water view with these bald eagles, one percenter birds if ever there were any.

Two bald eagles today were flinging about in the wind over the Franklin Ave. bridge. "I don't care." The eagles say to the wind "I've got nowhere to be. I can do this all day."

I like how even though bald eagles are floating all over our skies like so much confetti (as long as that confetti is made with huge sheets of exotic and majestic paper), even though bald eagles are squatted down on riverside branches nibbling on horrible rotted carp, staring their dark stares, even though you can spot them without trying, from the back window of the library, from your car, by looking up, I like how it's still always an event.

"Oh my god! A bald eagle!"

"Really! Where? I haven't seen one for 15 minutes!"

Down by a railing over our river gorge an eagle that looks like some kind of monster vulture is plunked on an oak branch, adjusting its wings and looking irritated, probably at the thick tree branch for having the temerity to sag so heavily underneath it. But really, that eagle could be irritated at everything and anything. If ever there's a bird that looks irritated that's the bald eagle, irritated one percenter birds. Surprisingly though, it does not seem to be irritated at the crowd that has gathered at the railing to watch and photograph it. "Of course everyone is obsessed with me." It says. "Why wouldn't they be? But I'm not going to bother noticing it. I'm an eagle!"

Hey everyone, don't crowd! There's plenty of eagle for everybody! Plus there's an eagle on every block around here, and one up here, and one over there. And that one. Plus there are other birds. Lots of other birds!

Hey, anyone wanna check out these crows?

Anyone?

Don't worry, it works out in the end

In any field where greatness is possible there is a standard age at which people peak. This is obvious in sports and even varies from sport to sport down to a specific, measurable consistency. For instance a baseball player will peak at 29 or 30, and Olympic sprinter at about 24. Fortunately writing has a much later peak. In writing the peak age is exactly the age I am now. Exactly. I am how old Mark Twain was when he wrote Huck Finn and how old Terry Pratchett was when he started writing the Tiffany Aching books. I am the same age now as Tolstoy was when he wrote Anna Karenina, Richard Brautigan was when he wrote whatever he would have written if he lived, and Ursula K. LeGuin was when she wrote everything she wrote. No one knows how she did that.

It is precisely because I am peaking that something like this sentence, which is tangled, convoluted and awkward, still somehow magically achieves a transcendence. According to my study of this I have about three peak years left, with a second, somewhat lesser peak five years later. So get it now while it's hot.

In popular song the peak is much closer to the peak ages in athletics. There is a peak in the mid twenties (so, think Blonde on Blonde), and then, if you're really brilliant and it all comes together just right, there is a second peak, one that is shorter, but I think is even better, that happens in the artist's mid thirties (so, think Blood on the Tracks). The music world tends to slightly overrate the new and groundbreaking, and so doesn't always recognize that second peak, which is deeper but a bit less exciting, as highly as I think it should.

Elvis Costello fits pretty well exactly into this paradigm. His great second peak album is Spike, done when he was right about 35 years old. This morning I woke up thinking about a splendid and searing line from one of the best songs on the album.

One day you're going to have to face
A deep dark truthful mirror
And it's going to tell you things that I still love
you too much to say

And I started thinking about all of this.

This writing.

Eight hundred posts and never a single one of them venturing out beyond its distant corner of the woods, let alone going viral and infecting the whole forest. Publishers do not beat down my door or know I exist. Blog comments remain rare and are almost never filled with awe, unless I write them myself. A year or so ago I had maybe 35 to 40 occasional to regular readers. With the meticulous nurturing of a year I now have 35 to 40 occasional to regular readers.

It makes it hard not to wonder: Maybe this blog isn't as amazing as I think it is. Maybe people are too kind to tell me so. 

Maybe it is time for me to face that deep dark truthful mirror.

I am fifty. If this is not epic now, at the peak of my powers, perhaps it never will be. Perhaps a reckoning is due.

So with a racing heart, with my blood churning, I take up the deep dark truthful mirror. I look in the face of this writing and dare not to see what I want to see, but rather what is there.

My hands shake. I am shivering.

Would I read this if I were a stranger? Would I assign it merit if I did not write it? Is it actually, at least kind of, great?

Steady on.

I have chills, trembles, feels.

I can't breathe. I have to breathe into a brown paper bag. My stomach hurts.

Okay.

Okay.

Unflinching, the answer.

How strange. It talks about itself all the time. It's like a mirror looking into a mirror. But then you step back a little and it's like the facets of diamonds, stars in the sky. Where does the light come from? It has generated light out of darkness just by saying it is so.

It's, it's wonderful. It's just wonderful.






Oh how I love happy endings!