Sepis, Subway, and Jimmy John's

I loathe chain sandwich shops. Or because there are mainly two I come across it might be easier to say that I loathe Subway and Jimmy John's. Some of that comes from a history of them being the provided food at the annual staff day at my job, which even now, thinking of it, and despite having missed said day for five years running, fills me with an alarming, unreasoning rage. I mean, do I think the management that provides this food should be summarily ridiculed and dismissed for malfeasance? Do I think my co-workers are compliant sheep with horrible taste for putting up with it? Do I think it is emblematic of everything wrong in the World and our culture?

Unfortunately, yes. And sometimes, embarrassingly, I actually express these feelings.

It's a little out of proportion.

I mean, I can see that to be true even as I consider these shops to be poisonous blots on our landscape and literal crimes against humanity!

Oops, I did it again.

So, fine, I don't like that the county and library system I work for is cheap, lazy, and hostile to its workers as expressed by the use of these establishments. I don't like the shoddy, manipulative, stultifying quality of their food, their labor exploitation, and their sickening abuse of animals in the interest of unseemly profit. And I don't like the ugly way one can walk the streets of Paris and come upon one of these pustules mysteriously operating, in public, with seeming impunity. Oh how the French have fallen! But it does all kind of beg the question: Why them? Why, so particularly do I hate them? There are almost endless hideous chains out there peddling their ruinous brand. In the food world alone why don't I experience this level of hate for Taco Bell, Starbucks, Domino's, Wendy's, or Caribou Coffee (well, I kind of do for Caribou Coffee)?

I didn't have an answer. Until a couple days ago, when I thought of Sepi's.

Sepi's was the almost mythical sub sandwich place of my childhood. Located in Westwood, in L.A., it was far enough away from where we lived to be a small, occasional treat in the litany of our fast food eating. Since it is probably 40 years since I had a Sepi's sub everything about them has a rosy haze around it; their plenitude, delightful wrapping, perfectly pitched baguette, rich and vinegary saturation, thick layers of tasty meats and lettuce and slightly cured onion. I do not believe it is actually as good as I remember, and the fact that it has remained irreproducible only confirms that understanding.

But even if there is no matching a mythical sandwich, it nevertheless remains true that an actually good sub sandwich, let alone the dream one, is not something I can find in the modern landscape of American cities. Does it not exist? No, somewhere probably there are a few around, even if I haven't come across them. But they are not readily available. There is excellent Mexican food around and about, I am a five minute walk from fantastic coffee and they are not the only purveyor in town even if they are still the best. Independent, interesting pizza is plentiful enough. Clever, conscious and delicious hamburgers are positively ubiquitous these days. But subs? These chains of Subway and Jimmy John's appear to have fully broken the spirit of the consumer base. They have shattered the standard so badly that the genre of sub sandwich is no longer a viable part of the every day food landscape.

Yes I dislike Burger King and Papa Murphy's and will say annoyingly hostile things about them to co-workers who just want something cheap to eat, but their damage, though insidious, is still limited. It is still qualified. It has only sucked half the oxygen out of the equation. The duopoly sub shop hegemony is more complete, and so more horrible for it. It has, effectively, murdered the sub shop.

Although, I mean, I guess I could still make a pretty good one at home.

Update according to charter

According to my blog charter I am required to submit, on blog, an annual status report of my blog.

"But what about the funny story about kitties you were going to tell us instead!" You cry.

I know. I feel terrible. But if I don't submit my annual status report my blog is downgraded from a "blog" to a "Paste like material for patching cracks in the Internet".

Although what the difference between the two is is beyond me! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Anyway, you might want to just skip your regular blog reading for today as the following is simply a filled out standardized Form 780e.

Form 780e

Report on blog status according to charter.

Name of blog:

The Clerk Manifesto


Age of blog:

6.3 years


Last form 780e filled out:

Well, see, I haven't done one yet, but I have an explan


Readers/Subscriber/Followers in millions:

Um, eleven one millionths?


Blog debits:

I guess I owe a lot to Daniel Pinkwater and the Marx B


Blog assets:

I don't know, I'm kind of funny sometimes?


Annual profit:

I learned a little bit about myself?


Total profit:

We're all better people for this..... er, paste like materie


Main subject matter:

Me! Me me me. But seriously, also things that happen t


Total annual blog posts:

365


Number of posts exceeding 500,000 pageviews:

Zero. I think maybe I have the wrong form?



Number of posts exceeding 5,000,000 pageviews:

Is there like a Form 780b? I should probably have a For



In three words or less please sum up your blog's content:

Wait, is there


Would you like to apply to upgrade from "Blog" to "Webpage"?

I don't really see what's the point.





Thank you for filling out Form 780e.


Submit Form 780e.


Please correct improperly formatted and incorrect answers in red text and resubmit.






 

Positional awareness

If there is some skill or ability I enjoy most in watching sports it is probably positional awareness. I love positional awareness. In soccer it is that nearly magical ability to know where everybody is and where everybody will be in a second or two. It's the ability to know all of that even while one is super busy with other things, like maneuvering for position with another player, or kicking a ball, or both, all at the same time. The two athletes I've most enjoyed watching in my life were transcendent in this ability: Lionel Messi and Magic Johnson. Messi doesn't just thread the ball in a pass like it's going through the eye of a needle, he sends it through two moving needles to float into the perfect trajectory of a player hidden across the field who then, with open space in front of the goal, well, it wasn't a great Spring for his team so we'll just leave the story off there. Magic, in a very different game, would look completely away from the play and, functionally blind and operating purely from positional awareness, feed the ball into his onrushing teammate who would score, because basketball is different than soccer, and it's easier to score.


Curiously, positional awareness comes into play heavily in my job as well. I don't care that much about hard work, which is only relevant to me with surprising rareness and can be a bit of a scam anyway. I value accuracy and competency very much, but it can be a little hard to track it in all these many people I work with at the library. But the positional awareness of my colleagues makes a difference to me every day I work and it is the main thing I judge my co-workers on and value them for.

What is it?

It's knowing how many empty bins are left and whether we're likely to need them. It's knowing how competent the co-worker next to you at the front desk is and what the third person in line at the desk is probably there for. It's knowing where a book might be and what the whining squeak means on the automated machine behind you. It's knowing when you can walk away for 15 minutes and effect no one instead of leaving someone helplessly to do your job, who, after all, might be me, or you, or it might be no one at all. There is a momentum to the work of any institution, and positional awareness in it is all about keeping that immensely useful momentum going forward while essentially, at the same time, keeping everyone out from under its dangerous wheels.

But really, in the end, having a skill in positional awareness, whether in sports or in some occasionally grinding job, allows a fundamental, important, and valuable thing: When something comes one's way, one will be able to gracefully handle it according to it's value and importance, all while best complementing everything around it. Which is not a bad plan for life.





 





 

Whoa, that Vivaldi guy is the shit, a classical music review

This is a music review for some music by Vivaldi, who, apparently, was the shit.

I mean that in a good way.

I don't know what the songs were, but, I mean, fuck! Seriously. I heard this shit live on the radio and I was like, what? the? fuck?

It was thrilling. I was going crazy. There were all these, like insane violins that were super old and all these dudes were going nuts on them, like, super fast and all at the same time so that it was rocking. I mean it was screaming. My heart was racing. I had all these goddamn feelings fucking bursting through my chest! I thought I was going to die it was so fucking amazing!

Then it got quiet for a minute like I was being hunted in the woods, and then it took off like it wanted to tell me things I didn't know you could even fucking feel.

How can something this old still be so fucking new and wicked? I didn't know whether to tear my hair out or weep or what.

7 out of 10

Trespassers W

My favorite sign that I come upon in my work commute is located on the fringes of the University of Minnesota. I am either walking or biking along and see a well made plaque posted to the corner of a large building. It reads:

Please trespass silently.

It's at once clever and faintly creepy, but most of all it seems like a kind of giving up. As if to say, "Fuck it, y'all are gonna be tramping through our yard anyway, the least you can do is keep your goddamn voices down a bit when it's two in the morning. And if you're going to be throwing a brick through a window have the decency to wrap it in an old t-shirt or something to muffle the crash. Some of us have to get up for work in the morning you know!"

Fireworks again

In a recent post called "Fireworks" I mentioned my wife and I watching a movie for the tenth time in our apartment aerie over the city as fireworks burst behind the screen. This could have been taken by a reader as a disparagement of watching the same movie over and over. This would not be the fault of the reader. Sometimes I leave the meaning of these things I write very... open. The downside of that is a lot of things can walk in through such a flung wide door. And sometimes they can fit, even if, as in this case, I don't want them to.

So I would like to take this opportunity to throw out this disparagement of repeated viewings. It is unwelcome. I believe art is at its most enjoyable and powerful when we are already acquainted with it. It is only by repeated exposure to myths and stories that their deeper meanings are revealed and can inform one's life. Also I find the tension of the evaluation and coming to terms with (slightly) new ideas, stories, images, and events to have a desultory effect on engagement.

I love engagement. I believe the real power of art, and even of entertainment, lies in its depths, in our deeper relationship to it, and even in its familiarity. On a simple level I can say things like Caravaggio's The Calling of St. Matthew, or The Godfather, or Moonstruck, or Ocean's Twelve, or Hat Full of Sky, or Blue are favorite works of art of mine. But each time I interact with any of them is different, and on another level it would be far more accurate to say the third time I read Hat Full of Sky is one of my favorite books ever, or the eleventh time I watched French Kiss is one of my favorite movies. The fifth time I walked into that Church of the French in Rome and saw The Calling of Saint Matthew hanging in the gloom is the moment where it was the greatest painting I ever saw.

There is very little that I have seen or read or heard just once that has full power in my soul.

All good things have depths.

We learn and grow by doing the same things over, being changed by them and changing them a little on our own.

Like with blog posts. 

Though you might need to read this six or seven more times for it all to come sufficiently clear to you.

I'm in the movies!

One doesn't expect in the normal course of one's life to spontaneously recreate an iconic moment from a famous movie. I don't see myself scrabbling in the dirt for root vegetables in front my tattered mansion crying out "As god as my witness I'll never be hungry again!"

I don't even have a mansion.

And I don't expect to ever excuse myself to go to the bathroom in an Italian restaurant in order to retrieve a hidden gun to come back with to shoot a Police Captain. Even if there are probably a few of them who totally have it coming.

Also I'm fairly indifferent when it comes to cannoli.

I fervently hope I am never stabbed to death in a shower by a lunatic but wish I didn't mention it because now I'll be vaguely worried about it when I do shower tomorrow morning. I am exceedingly unlikely to drown out Nazis by singing the French National Anthem with a bunch of other people at a nightclub, especially given how I don't know any of the words of the French National Anthem, though I guess I could vaguely hum it. And as fun as it might be I guess I won't really be hanging out with a lost, beneficent space alien, helping them call home.

But the other day at the library our check in machine was having a lot of problems. I left the front desk to help. After multiple reboots and temporary fixes things went completely south. It clearly had something to do with the return path from the front entryway. I opened the locked door behind the Friends of the Library bookstore to get access to where returns come through an automated flap, run up a long ramp, and proceed along a conveyor system hugging the ceiling. At the top of this ramp was a clot of hundreds of materials, massed into an almost biological host, rammed up above and contained only by the ceiling itself. 

I climbed onto the conveyor belt. I ascended halfway and got on my knees, and then, as the space between me and the ceiling shrank, crawled on my belly to get at this fantastical lump. As I slithered along the belts and pathways of this huge industrial machinery in service to its problems it suddenly struck me:

I'm in Modern Times.

Publisher reap what you sow

Dear Publisher:



A while back I wrote you asking you to consider my manuscript for publication. You weren't interested. That's fine, I mean, it's extremely painful, sure, but I only let that bitter disappointment strengthen my resolve. I turned right around and sent you another proposal.

You weren't interested.

I don't know why. My writing is terrific. It's funny, and wise, and elegiac, and extremely unpopular. So I was mystified.

But I wasn't defeated! I sent you a manuscript again. Then I sent another hoping that my new edits, in which I got rid of the words "a lot", would make my work a lot more appealing to you. It might have, but not appealing enough for you to publish it.

I didn't say die.

Winners never quit.

I persevered.

I tried new angles. I took new approaches. I reformatted. I experimented with fonts, paper stock, ink color, veiled threats, small gifts, and decorated envelopes.

But after 37 submissions to you (and counting!) I still haven't met with success.

Oh well, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take. Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly. When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. Fortune favors the bold. It's always darkest before the dawn. Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

I learned that from all the books you do publish.




I refuse to believe you're a liar.





Yours truly, 

at least until the stamps run out,



F. Calypso

The garden I till

It's tiger lily season! The tiger lilies are blooming all across The Twin Cities. I love the beautiful, bright tiger lilies. They're like if cats were mixed with sunsets and sprinkled across the thickest part of Summer. When we had a yard we had tiger lilies growing in it. Now I just walk around and visit them and guess what?

It's just as good!

It turns out one doesn't have to own a tiger lily to enjoy a tiger lily.

What if it turns out you don't have to own things to enjoy them?

No one would bother to own anything. No one would steal anything. No one would bother to buy anything. No one would sell anything. The whole world would be a...

Library.

Marine museum better late than never

Among the unexpected treasures of the Upper Midwest is the Minnesota Marine Art Museum of Winona. Winona is a little Mississippi River town that's roughly a three hour drive south of the Twin Cities. The population of Winona is around 27,000. I guess someone there created a gigantic hardware supply business that made a fortune and so they collected "Great art inspired by water" and built a very beautiful museum out on the Winona riverbanks to house it.

Now maybe you're thinking "That's nice. How quaint." I might think that too. But when I say "unexpected treasure" I mean it. One of the interesting paintings this museum has is "Washington crossing the Delaware". The artist, Leutze, painted two copies of the original back in the mid 1800's. The original was destroyed in WWII. One copy is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One was in the West Wing of the White House until 2015, but now it's hanging in the Minnesota Marine Art Museum.

"Okay" Maybe you're thinking. "That's just a weird one-off hung up among the more regional bric-a-brac." I might think that too. So here is a very partial list of artists who have paintings in this Museum:

Monet
Van Gogh
Picasso
Renoir
Degas
Turner
O'keefe
Matisse
Chagall
Hopper


Oh. 

Or, "Oh." You might say. I know I totally did.

Now with all this praise you might think that I have actually been to this intriguing sounding museum.

I haven't! It's hours away!

There's this elderly library patron I talk to though who is super into this museum. He is almost obsessively into this museum. I have been helping him and his wife at the front desk of my library for at least a decade. Every single time I see him, for years and years, he says "So, have you and your wife been to the Marine Museum yet?"

I always have to say no and make lots of excuses like "It's hours away!"

Then he gets all disappointed and tells me how I really should go.

And I say "Mmm hmm." 

It's like a ritual.

But now I am going to the Minnesota Marine Art Museum with my fabulous wife on an exciting overnight trip. I am super excited!

And I am really keen to tell this (sort of) nice old man about my upcoming trip.

Unfortunately I haven't seen him around for awhile and think he might have died of old age.





Hmm, that kind of turned out to be a bit more of a bummer than I meant it to be.

He's probably fine. And even if he's not I think we should look on the bright side:


I'm pretty sure my wife and I must be fulfilling his final wish. 

Reaching across the aisle

Hey, you on the far right,


Come on over to our side on the far left! It's almost exactly like where you are now except facts, science, truth, art, psychology, ethics, and God, if God would only have the decency to exist, all support us! I think you'd really like that!

Also, out here on the far left no one gets hurt. Well, except us, which, come to think of it, you probably wouldn't enjoy that much, but you sort of get used to it.


Have a nice Summer! (Unless you're still a Nazi),


Your (future) friend on the far left.

Fun

It was Monday morning after a lovely extended holiday weekend. I was walking across the Mississippi River to get a bike to take to work. The sun was shining out all jewels on the cold river that the Kayakers paddled on below me. As I so often do on Monday morning, faced with the prospect of working all day, and also faced with Summer and all the promise of the World, I thought "I just want to have fun today!"

But what is fun?

I don't know.

I think it might be something that only happens when I'm paying it no attention.

Not a boring blog post at all!

I was just sitting here writing a super boring blog post when I suddenly thought "Hey, you don't have to write this super boring blog post! You could instead write a really fun, witty blog post that will make you chuckle deviously to yourself at your sharp wit, and it will be this super funny blog post. And everyone out on the Internet is going to think it is totally clever what you wrote, and they will share it all over Facebook and Myspace and Imgur and Reddit and Wikipedia, where it will go super viral, so viral that CBS News will report on it in the morning saying "And in Cyber news today there was a super funny blog post that went viral today and it was so so funny! You should totally check it out." And then even more people will share and read it until there are, like, hundreds of people who read it, and there will be t-shirts of it and Random House will call you up, though how they found your number I'll never know, and they'll say "Hey, are you the guy that wrote that super funny blog post today that CBS News reported on?" And you'll say "I am!" And they'll say "We'd love to do a book maybe if you have any more that's as super funny as this one. Do you have any more like it?" And you'll say "No. That one was so super funny though!" And they'll say "Oh. Okay, thanks for your time." and hang up, and you'll feel like maybe you blew your big chance, but that doesn't matter because the important thing is you have a good time!"


Which was a good point.

Fireworks

Among the many magnificent tableaus of the Ocean's movies there is a typically brilliant one in which Basher, the team's demolitions expert, is sitting watching TV in a luxurious hotel room in Las Vegas. Behind him, out the large, upper story windows, an old multi-story building is being demolished with explosives. He watches the event happen on his television, apparently oblivious, with his back turned to the perfect and real view of the spectacle behind him.

Where we live we have a clear and excellent view too! And so I was much looking forward to our first Fourth of July here.

It came early.

On July third the golf course hosted some sort of big annual outdoor picnic. I came home from work to see it still plugging along below us. It looked like there might be fireworks.

There were fireworks! They were really good, really long, really expensive fireworks. And from the privacy of our apartment we had an astonishingly close and perfect view. Neither of us has ever enjoyed fireworks so completely. It was an amazing treat.

And so July Fourth itself became more of a curiosity.

The real Independence Day fireworks started around 9:30 on Thursday night. It was still pretty light out, but I guess people were keen to get going. Three different locations out on the horizon, fronting the skyline, were running steady shows. There soon were occasional sporadic bursts climbing out of the trees of the Minneapolis neighborhoods. Some people had clearly climbed down to the river to shoot stuff off from the shore out towards the St. Paul side. Over the hill in St. Paul another slow show began as it got darker. At any given moment, in the distance and sometimes nearer, I could see three or five explosions flowering the sky or in among some trees.

It wasn't that long though before it all stopped being that interesting. So we put our TV screen up against our window, where our couch faces, and we watched a movie. 

Only ever so rarely were we distracted by the dazzling displays carrying on in the background of our screen. Instead we sat peacefully among the explosions, watching instead a movie we'd already seen a dozen times before.

Trump derangement syndrome

In my wanderings across American Culture I have occasionally come upon people siting a condition called "Trump Derangement Syndrome". Apparently this refers to people who are so apoplectic about the President of the United States that they somehow take leave of their senses by being all... angry. Really really angry. Unreasonably angry!

Being, as I am, susceptible to these feelings of rage, alarm, and disgust at Trump and what he means about my Country, humanity, and the state of the world, I have decided to take stock.

And so I asked myself: "Self, is it wrong to get angry at evil?"

Good question.

Probably not.

And so as I leave you to go wandering some more out in Internetland I will look upon the mentions of  "Trump Derangement Syndrome" with fresh eyes. 

"Oh calm down." They are saying. "Don't you want to do evil too?"

Communicating in libraries

A total stranger came up to me yesterday and asked "Do you have sweet dreams?"

What kind of question is that?

It's a little bit too personal for me, thank you very much!


 

Unless maybe they were talking the movie starring Jessica Lange. 

Which they were. We didn't have it on the shelf so I requested it for them.

Though why they didn't simply ask me if I had Sweet Dreams I guess I'll never know.

Magic box

Imagine if you will a box.

Every time you open the door of it something different is inside. Open it one time and there is a crumpled five dollar bill inside. Open it again and there is a silver ring with a Celtic design. Open it a third time to find an espresso cup, or a chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano.

Now imagine that that box is so big that you can get inside of it. 

You walk in through the open door of it. You close the door. And when you open the door again you find that something entirely different is outside; a room with a table of flowers for instance, or a party. You close the door and open it again to find there is a bright hallway there that leads to where you live.

This is why I love elevators.

The future is secure

I am upstairs once again shelving 65 books (an average cart load). There are four relatively easy levels to shelve on, and there is one, miserable bottom row.

To spot where your book goes you have to be able to see the Dewey Numbers. This is plain and easy on the top four rows, but the bottom row requires shuffling along sideways with your body bent into the shape of a candy cane to be close enough to see. Once you have acquired sight of the theoretical gap your book belongs in, you must squat, insert the book, them climb into a standing position. Then you rub your lower back vigorously, take a sip of water or coffee, and then walk around for a bit stamping your foot and leg which has badly cramped up.

I hate the bottom shelf.

All 65 of the books I am shelving today go on the bottom shelf.

"How" You wonder "Is this possible!"

You and me both.

Even if we accepted the outlandish, against all odds premise that people were searching for specific books and luck had it that they were all bottom shelf books, these books are too low quality and random for people to have chosen them ahead of time. These books were all the result of random browsing!

But we also know from our long study of human behavior that people do not browse from uncomfortable positions. They browse where it is convenient to their reach and their eye level. 

Which brings me to the strange, inescapable, and surprisingly hopeful conclusion of our study:

Small children are the only people checking out our adult non fiction anymore.

Requiem of a sports fan

Over the past five or so years I have seen a lot of soccer games. And in almost every one of them a team has lost. Even in the occasional tied game there is the lurking element that it is a kind of loss for both teams because ties in soccer are worth so much less than a win. So then let's just say that in every single one of this vast array of games I have had to watch a team lose.

It happened yesterday.

It happened today.

And it will, ugh, happen tomorrow.

I am too sensitive for this! I already bear a burden of grief. Where am I supposed to put all these losers? How big a heart do you think I have?

That last question was directed to god. I don't expect you to answer. Though go ahead if you like because god sure as hell won't be stepping up.

Excuse me. Let me just take a deep breath.

Okay. 

I am a strong person.

I think I could handle this. I have resources to draw on. I believe in myself.

I could probably endure a team losing in every game of soccer I watch. If only it wasn't so freakishly often the team I want to win.

Summer in library

How can you tell it's Summer in the library?

By the smell.

In the warm weather all the human fats, pressed millimeter by millimeter into the plastic covers of the books, loosen up, and an old, slightly stale, musty, uneasily human smell drifts out around the building.

But we don't talk about that. If we did who would want to take the books home?

I guess I still would, but I'm not happy about it. I'm American too. I like new, shiny, untouched things full of promise.

But I like literature too. It's so confusing.

But then, Summer is confusing here too. The sea of patrons becomes volatile, pouring in in great surges when it's raining, or night, or when it's beautiful out, and then leaving us practically vacant when it's hot out, or when it's windy, or just because it's a Friday at lunch time. It's hard to see any rhyme or reason for why they come or don't come. Science can detect no pattern. Groups of people apparently don't think. And individuals are all mysteriously bespoke. We can ask them questions, but if we remain open to their full answers they're all mad answers. We have to ignore what they said for them to make sense. And only when we systematically gather their collective data together, carefully process it, interpret it, and subject it to a ruthless, exhaustive analysis can we see that... it's Summer, and things just happen.

And here is where we make up the fake explanations.