Dear publisher, my many attempts

Dear Publisher;


Well, I throw my hands up. I don't know what to do anymore. I have written thousands of essays. I have composed dozens, possibly hundreds of letters to you. I have approached it from every angle. I have dreamed of being a famous author and applied all my skill to it. Nothing has worked.

I remain unpublished. I have no book deal. No publisher or editor has ever indicated the least bit of interest in working with me.

Allow me to just list the breadth of my different approaches:



1. Lying self-aggrandizement.

In retrospect doubling the number of MacArthur Genius Grants that I said I won was pointless.



2. Reverse psychology.

Oddly the only times I can reliably convince anyone is in my proposals that are attempting to use reverse psychology.



3. Bribery.

My lucky quarter and a signed glossy of myself apparently just don't mean what they used to to American Publishers. You do realize if you're not going to accept the bribe you have to return them?



4. Coercion.

Who was I kidding. I doubt I could convince your cat to like you less anyway.



5. Demonstration of a massive writing talent.

If only I didn't have the quirk where my massive writing talent only shows up in the thing I'm about to write.



6. Inclusion of a fake name and fake return address.

I don't know why I thought this would work. Actually, upon reflection, this one might have worked.



7. Respectful professionalism.

I kept nodding off every time I researched the best way to format my query.



8. Networking.

I know loads of people but most of them are semi-homeless loners.



9. Appeal to greed.

I'm not so sure the greed part didn't work. You probably just didn't believe we really could make an easy 20 dollars.



10. Never say die relentless "wear 'em down" persistence.

Do you have any idea how much postage my "One query a year" campaign cost? And what's the point anyway. It's all hopeless.




So now you see. I really have tried everything. Well, I mean, everything other than actually sending the letters instead of imagining sending the letters. But at some point a person simply has to say...

enough is enough.





Yours in the abandonment of all hope,




F. Calypso

Bistecca

This year my wife and I are going to Florence. And as i peruse the raft of guides to this city crammed with art and beauty it is difficult not to be overcome by all that Florence has to offer. Everything is so compelling and amazing and interesting and appealing and recommended that my limited choices begin to seem impossible.

That is when I turn my attention to Bistecca!

I gleefully don't care about Bistecca!

Everyone should try Bistecca. It is the classic dish of Florence. Every single guidebook brings up Bistecca as often as possible. I don't know why exactly. It doesn't sound that great, but then I have found that very little Italian food sounds good in the guidebooks. I read a lot of descriptions that run something like this:

"Chef Venucci brings these contemporary Norwegian sensibilities to classic Florentine cuisine. His delicate handling of razor thin slices of sheep spleen, layered with parsnip new pickles, will convert even the most timid American diner to this beloved Florentine slaughterhouse floor cut."

Bistecca is a pretty simple dish though, and once you get past the mundane dead animal aspect, it is not conventionally gross, like, say, a spleen. Here's my understanding of how you make it:

Slice a Tuscan cow in half. Cut a two inch slice from the inside of the "headside" half. Peel off the skin. Hang it up for a few weeks in a cool dry place. Throw it on a wildly hot grill for half a minute, being careful not to really "cook" it. Serve it oozing off of a large plate. Two can share.

I'm not saying I wouldn't try it, just, I could live very comfortably with it all just not working out for me. After all, there's so much sheep spleen to sample, and Michelangelos, and maybe a bit of gelato.

Gray day reading

I'd like to begin my comments today with a little joke. Don't worry, it's not funny.

Wait, you mean you'd like for the jokes to be funny? Weird. Well, I wish someone would have mentioned that a couple thousand blog posts ago. I'd probably be famous by now!

Here's the joke:

What do Right Wing Pundits and Weather Forecasters have in common?

No matter how many times reality proves them wrong they're still asked back.

And so a morning that was supposed to be partly cloudy and free of precipitation dawned and instead it was buried in clouds, drizzling heavily, and impossibly dark. Being unseasonably warm for January here in The Twin Cities just meant it was damp and cold. It was one of the bleakest days I have ever seen.

So I walked to work because I had to. The wee birdies cowered into themselves. The squirrels seemed a little depressed, for squirrels, and the geese sat on the river ice and refused to move. The cars all had their brights on though it offered them no help. The fancy river houses were all abandoned; dark, cold, and impeccable.

But every once in awhile I'd see some warm light on in the corner of an attic, or an encouraging glow in the middle of a dark apartment building, and I'd long to be at home, curled up on the sofa with my wife, with a pot of terribly strong french press and cream at hand, endless chocolate croissants, and, essentially, a large stack of almost impossibly good books.

Books, books, books, books. On such a day as this I sure would like to laze about reading books.

But I can't. I have to work at the library. Making it possible for others to do so.






 

History hullabaloo

Today my library is swarming with teens! We are having a History Day Hullabaloo which means, and this might get a little technical, my library is swarming with teens!

It's not so bad. In my experience library teen rooms draw a rough crowd. Mine certainly has. It's noisy. There are lots of social events in there. And it's an easy place for shitty parents to dump kids they don't want around. I have always been aware that if I were a teen the teen room is the one place in the library I'd have avoided like the plague. I wouldn't have avoided the library, just the one room in it that was supposedly for me.

But despite knowing all this, today's History Day Hullabaloo, a day where hundreds of thousands of teens are compelled to come to my library for some kind of major school project, has been something of an eye-opener for me. "So this is what an average cross-section of teens looks like!" I exclaim. Why, they seem very nice! None of them are shoplifting from the coffee shop or knocking over the old aged pensioners. They're just like other people! It's so different than... usual.

My mind had been clouded by my experiences with our normal denizens of the teen room.

When I was a teen we didn't have teen rooms in libraries. That is something I don't look back on in horror. I was okay with that. We barely even had teen literature back then, which is actually something I do look back on in horror. I was forced to read adult literature! They were still experimenting with teen literature. And though S.E. Hinton and Judy Blume weren't hugely to my taste it all worked out in the end. But I don't even have to go back all the way to my own teendom, which was iconoclastic anyway. I can just go back to when I started working in this library. There was no teen room, there was just a single row of books, on the flip side from the romances. And there was a chair.

"Sorry Sir, I'm afraid you can't sit there. That's the teen chair."

Those were the days.

Ancient libraries and their cruel methods

I work in what I like to call a near urban library. There are advantages and disadvantages to not working in an urban, downtown library. 

An advantage, for instance, is that someone peeing all over a section of our shelving is more of a special occasion than just a routine issue.

A disadvantage is our lack of history. Oh, we have a little history, like the pub that once preceded our library and sent ghost fumes of beer into the stacks in the seventies and eighties, but nothing to get really excited about.

This morning a library return came through us and it was not the kind of material we get to see very often. It was a book belonging to the Minneapolis Athenaeum, which in itself is a strange historical library artifact from the mid 1800s that now exists as a partner in the Minneapolis/Hennepin Library system. The book we got wasn't that old, but it was certainly far older than our library system. The first checkout stamp on it was from 1938, but the pocket that held the due date card was where the real fascination lay. It included all the library's rules and threats:

"Any person who shall mark, mutilate or otherwise injure this book, is liable by law to a heavy fine, or to a term of imprisonment, and in addition is liable to the Library for its full retail value"

I love that. A little underlining and bam, you get a couple weeks in prison, or a hundred dollar fine, and you still have to replace the book, which back then could run you, oh, maybe $2.50, which was a lot! It was still the depression.

Nowadays we have downtown libraries going as soft as possible. One near here is giving up late fees altogether. They don't want to scare anyone off from reading for fear there will be no one left. I have heard that the Seattle downtown library was designed with homeless people as a major constituency. And don't get me wrong, I'm all for it. I love a kind of casualness and humanity in our institutions. I'm delighted we're all circuses and carnivals in the library these days. It's a relief that our library materials have, through the changes in the market and in the ubiquity of media, come down from a status near to being holy relics all the way to one where they're, at best, faintly desirable under particular conditions, mainly if they're brand new.

But sometimes I see a family messily breaking out a picnic in the kids room, or some guy bodily seizing control of the copy machine for the rest of the day, or a couple of teens raging a pitched battle across the library, or a patron loudly conducting business on their cell phone, or a shelf is reported to smell of pee, and a faint feeling of yearning comes over me. Sometimes a book comes back and it has, yes, underlining, underlining!, and I get a little wistful for the olden days, brutal as they were.

Three star library

The 2018 Library Journal Star Ratings for Libraries is out. It has probably been out for awhile, but I only just noticed. You see, I sort of accidentally stepped in it and thought "What's that smell?".

Sorry, that was a little strong. I was actually just sending the magazine in transit somewhere, and since I always have hated the Library Journal Star Ratings I took a look at it because I occasionally like to hate things and I wasn't near the Internet at that time.

Boy, don't get me started on that Internet!

Now before anyone says "Aw, it's just sour grapes because your library only got three stars!" I just want to say, hey, we discuss things respectfully around here and there's no reason to bring that kind of tone to this discourse!

Oh, right, I did just compare Library Journal's list to dog crap, but I apologized!

So let's keep it clean everybody.

Anyway, yes, my library did get three stars, which is not four stars. And it is definitely not five stars. But there are a lot of caveats I'd like to point out about this.

1. Being on the list itself is already supposed to be a triumph. Most library systems across America have no stars at all!

2. This is for library systems. I can't help it if my "Jewel of the System" library is being dragged down in aggregate by other libraries in my system that are run by lunatics.

3. I don't take any offense. I guess in reality we probably are, fairly speaking, about a three star library.

4. And this is the super important one, actually it's the only important one: This is a terrible way to measure libraries! It's all data, data, data, and not even that much of it. It's all about how many visits per capita, how many checkouts, how many e-book checkouts, computer use, and program attendance.

Now I'm not saying this data is useless in measuring the quality of libraries, but I am saying that everything they do use is worth maybe three percent of judging a library.

Do you know how you can get the other 97 percent?

Here, let me present an analogy. Let's say you are one of the biggest food and restaurant magazines in the country. You want to name the best restaurants. So here's what you do: You find out who has the most customers per table. See how much butter they use per customer. Find out how many items they have on their menu. Add it all up, best restaurant!

Or you can go and eat there.

Throw up

The highlight tonight at the front desk of the library was throw-up. Brace yourself.

My co-worker's small son came for a visit and then with no warning threw-up just behind the front desk. Then he threw up some more. Then, just as one stood there in shock wondering how so much throw-up could come from out of such a small child, he threw-up a whole bunch more, gouting it from his mouth in an absurdly thick, lumpy, pink/tan stream.

Sorry, I hope you weren't eating.

After he threw up he said he'd had a piece of pizza. He felt fine now.

We, however now had a lake of vomit, and it did not smell good. It was a lot of cleaning. A custodial person was there and she cleaned, but it really wasn't enough. And even after the combined efforts of three of us and 45 minutes of cleaning I can still smell it right now, lurking underneath all the many cleaners and scents and soaps. 

It's funny how much and how often our library patrons need our help at our front desk, and yet for about a half hour in there no one needed anything from us. Nothing at all.

It's snowing eagles!

When I first moved to The Twin Cities seeing a bald eagle was an event. I had not only come from a virtually bald eagle-free California, but bald eagles were also still recovering from a variety of ecological disasters, so if my wife or I saw a bald eagle it was a special occasion. We reported in. It was a holiday. It was a treat!

Twenty-seven years later I'm not sure I ever experience a full day anymore where I don't see a bald eagle. I've seen bald eagles out over the parking lot at my job. One can see them driving on the freeway. Everything suggests that seeing a bald eagle now would have all the elan of seeing a squirrel or a mailman.  But to cash in my punchline here early, that doesn't matter at all. The thrill of seeing an eagle is mysteriously unchanged. Involuntarily a "Wow!" is still elicited from my heart. It doesn't matter if it happens every fifteen minutes. It's a funny bird that way.

I was thinking on my walk up river this morning, eagles swirling in the air above me, that I would like a souvenir snow globe that had a model version of the Mississippi River in it, all in its little gorge, fronting the Minneapolis Skyline, jewel-like in the light and as fantastical as the Emerald City of Oz. But when one would shake this snow globe, instead of snow, which with our global climate catastrophe we don't have quite so much of anymore, a confetti of bald eagles would swirl up into the globe, wings outstretched, floating in the air above the river in their plenitude, then slowly settling down to roost among all the tiny model river trees.

I counted this week. I see maybe five or six bald eagles a day now, on average;  out my window, up close, and in the far distance where a momentary flash of their white tail helps to confirm their identity. I see them wheeling over my head on my walks as they pridefully refuse to ever beat their wings, even if it makes them sink lower than they want and makes me gasp with joy to see them so close. Eagles are wonderfully lazy, but they love to fly. They have worked out a dazzling balance where they soar for hours on the oceans of air, keeping an eye out for dead snacks, seeing as it's the food that's the least work to catch.

Plus it's yummy! 

Or so I hear from the eagles, who say pretty much nothing, but leave what they mean lying around, if you want it. 

My loser country

I was walking through the University where, as usual, a great many large scale construction projects were going on. It was lunchtime, more or less, and all the construction workers were out on the sidewalks, wearing their yellow vests and hardhats, some carrying along their soft cooler lunch bags. I saw a group of them walking together towards Oak street and, seeing all those yellow vests on the move at once, something stirred in me.

"Viva La France!" I cried out to them, raising my fist defiantly in the air.

They barely lifted their eyes to me, expressionless.

Yeah, we're going down without a fight. 

Either that or they had no idea what I was referring to.

Probably both.

Mayonnaise

Simple foods are the best foods. What overwrought kitchen construction of a dish could possibly rival a sweet, pure mandarin orange, just pulled from out of its jeweler's cloak of a skin? What twisted contrivance of food can stand up to a summer tomato, cherry red and bursting from its flower? What overworked, complicated conundrum of an edible could ever rival a simple berry, wild on the vines?

The answer, of course, is mayonnaise.

Yes, mayonnaise.

Hey, let's make some mayonnaise!

You need a vintage, 1980's Cuisinart. Put a raw egg in it. It has to be organic so you can tell yourself you won't get any diseases from it. Don't include the shell. Throw in, I don't know, a couple hearty splashes of sherry vinegar and as large a pinch of salt as your fingers can humanly make. Squeeze in the juice of half a lime, but don't work at it too much. Plop in a goodly spoonful of honey. Pour in the amount of olive oil that if it were in a skillet would make you say "Whoa! Way too much oil!"

Close up the lid on your vintage 80's Cuisinart. Turn it on and let it go a couple of minutes.

Now you need toasted walnut oil.

Fill up your feeder cup with it while the machine is running. It will slowly drip out thorough the hole at the bottom. For years I didn't know about the hole and patiently poured in oil in as fine a stream as possible. Then my wife said "Hey, there's a hole!"

Whoa!

After the oil is done turn off the Cuisinart and open it up. Uh oh! It looks a little too soft and liquidy! Surely one has to add something.

You know what you add?

More walnut oil!

I know, crazy, but that's how it works!

But first peel a thumb-sized clove of garlic and throw it in.

Now fill another feeder cup of walnut oil while the Cuisinart is running. When it's all empty you will have...

Mayonnaise!

Spread it thickly on good, fresh, rough bread. You can put other things on the bread if you want, but you don't have to.

Why don't you have to?

Because simple foods are the best foods.

And what could be simpler than mayonnaise?

The difference between working hard and hardly working

It has been both quiet and busy today at the library I work at. This is a change from a December that ambled along in a seasonally quiet way. The library was sleepy all through the holidays. Now, with the new year we start to wake up a bit. Lines form up suddenly at the front desk of the library, and creating an on-the-spot quirky anthology of the history of comic literature for an interested patron is no longer feasible.

Ah well, we don't have any of those books anyway.

None of them were really all that funny.

And could you please step aside so I could register each member of this family of 17 for library cards?

But I'm not complaining, really. In the old days around here we used to work so much harder. I like to regale my modern era co-workers with stories about the bad old days, and often I wonder how I could stand it. No Internet, no reference work, and hands on checking in and checking out of every single item, all while staffing slowly decreased and circulation bumped up ten or 15 percent every year.

But I'm not complaining.

I always liked it here okay.

You see, as far as work goes, well, 90 percent of the effort is just being here. The rest takes care of itself.

Downvote party

Oh, hi.

Thanks for stopping by.

But unfortunately I didn't come to the Internet today to write a blog post. I have found writing original content for the Internet doesn't have the impact it once used to. I have found expressing my views, sharing my thoughts and insights, performing a bit of comedy, reflecting on the natural world, being personal, telling stories, all that sort of stuff, isn't the kind of thing that makes the Internet really tick. It doesn't make it move and breathe. I don't think it ever did. I'm afraid it's simply not the sort of thing that makes a difference.

I want to make a difference!

So I came onto the Internet today not to write, or say anything original, no, I came to make a difference on the Internet the one way that is left to any regular person: 

Downvoting.

I have set aside two hours to travel the Internet looking for things I don't like and downvoting them. Political comments, opinions about Premier League Soccer, funny pictures of cats that aren't funny, recipes, interpretations of news articles, news articles, the new cafe on Franklin Avenue, people complaining about my blog posts, cordless headphone reviews, weather reports, Library blogs, whatever. I am here to downvote.

I have come to the Internet to do the only thing any of us have left, downvote.

Downvote

Downvote

Downvote!

And then:

Downvote

Downvote

Downvote!


It is like pulling weeds in an endless garden. The more I downvote the more I see to downvote. If the Internet is a garden then it is a garden full of terrible things!

I disagree with everything. Everything!

Downvote

Downvote

Downvote!


Two hours will not be nearly enough to downvote everything that needs to be downvoted! But I will try. Because healthy, good, pure things, like clerkmanifesto, cannot survive when they are being choked off by so many weeds. I must downvote!

Because I have a beautiful dream:

If I work hard. If I downvote and downvote until there is nothing left to downvote, the beautiful garden of the Internet will finally be clear. Step by step the longest march can be won, and one day my work will bear fruit. One day my dream will finally be real. One day you will open up your Internet browser and you will go onto the Internet and finally, finally...

There will be nothing.




Well, I mean, except this.

Good fences make good neighbors

The partrons come into my library like they do at the start of every new year, and they want to know if we've got the federal tax forms yet.

"We will have the federal tax forms the day we have finished building a twenty foot high wall across all 2,000 miles of our southern border with Mexico and not a moment sooner!" I say, pounding the desk for emphasis.

Ah, but you did not peg me for wall supporter.

Well, I'm no ersatz, fake wall supporter, not like that Little Lord Fauntleroy in The White House, or his coterie of brainwashed admirers.

I am a real wall supporter. I am for a wall like you wouldn't believe!

But I am also against a single dollar going towards a wall unless we are serious about it. I will not stand for a bullshit wall. I want a great wall, beautiful, festooned with colorful lights, ramparts, towers, spikes, windmills, marble sculptures. I want it tiled and gilded, with murals and low relief. Arches, stone, steel, cheerful flags, and not a single door. And I want it to have drinking fountains and food trucks. And most of all I want it too tall to get over, too deep to get under, and too strong to get through.

Oh, and this part is really important so pay attention: did it ever occur to any of the simpletons in full charge of this country and its so called free press that any wall that is not enclosed simply lets anyone who wants to just go around it?

"Hey, I put a wall up in my yard but my dog still keeps getting out!"

Well maybe that's because your wall just RUNS ALONG THE FRONT OF YOUR PROPERTY!

There have to be walls all along the Pacific, all along the Atlantic, The Gulf, and all along Canada, or what the hell is the point?! Jesus.

Do I have to spell everything out for America?

I guess so: The ends of your wall have to meet up!

So let's say it's 11,000 miles of wall, to circle the whole fucking country.

Ten billion dollars is not going to be able to build a thousandth of that wall. Screw this President's amateur extortion attempt. We are going to need ten TRILLION dollars to build this wall.

But it's worth it.

And I have a plan.

No, not taxes.

No, Mexico is has never even seen a trillion dollars and Canada is too prudent even if they had it stuffed under a mattress somewhere.

Only the U.S. military, in all the world, runs budgets full of trillions of dollars.

But, aha, now it's dawning on you...

We don't need a military anymore. We will have a wall! The wall will protect us! Let 'em try and get us.

"They'll pick the locks on the doors."

Ha, no doors!

"They'll fling stuff over the wall!"

Ha, we build it higher! And higher! And higher!

Maybe we even put a roof on it.

No one gets in, no one gets out. Finally we can all be alone together.

I'm sure we'll all get along just fine.

Two trains passing in the night

Once every 35 or so blog posts I get really impressed.

What? Don't you?

Anyway, I get so impressed I just feel like everyone should know. So I go tell them. I mean everyone I can find.

"This is really good!" I exclaim, referring I guess to me saying "This is really good!" which, laid out here, seems vaguely confusing.

I'm trying, you see, to be self-aggrandizing.

My feeling is that if I don't self aggrandize no one will do it for me.

But when I do it everyone just thinks I'm kidding. So that doesn't work out, for good or ill.

And if they don't think I'm kidding, I think they are.

Trump's end times

At midnight, New Year's Eve, the whole north of town was laid at our feet like we were masterminds or millionaires. We could see fireworks go off from our high-rise aerie, marking the perfectly balanced fulcrum of the time to come and the time past. A green burst blooms at the foot of downtown, small against the horizon, then little white flashes erupt through some trees up a distant hill, the hard, blunt sounds of the explosions following well after the blossoms of light.

Burst of light...
one-two-three-four--boom

Burst of light...
one-two-three--boom

Burst of light...
one-two--boom

The fireworks are getting close.
The fireworks are coming closer.

I don't know what they'll do when they get here.

You know the saying about living in interesting times?

You and I we live in interesting times.

I'm sorry.

Brace yourself.

The sidewalk report

It's ten o'clock and time for the Clerkmanifesto Sidewalk Report brought to you by Sneed's Electric Shoelaces. Sneed's Electric Shoelaces, for when you absolutely need to know how securely your shoes are tied.

Conditions are icy out there folks, so step carefully. South tilted sidewalks are mostly clear but we'd advise caution on any other slanted or low lying walks. Avoid them altogether if you can. Watch out for skins of light snow disguising sheet ice. Fortunately most ice is pebbled and will provide a small amount of traction.

There are reports of an old lady down on the ice with a fractured hip on Princeton Ave, just east of Prior. An emergency vehicle is on the scene and North sidewalk traffic is being routed to the South sidewalk, causing delays of up to 40 or 50 seconds.

The St. Paul River Path is in relatively good shape with 60 to 70 percent secure footing, but watch out for a problem area south of Summit Avenue where the city has mysteriously refused to fix a severely sloped stretch of path which has become particularly treacherous in current ice conditions. There are no good detours for this, so just take your time. Remember to allow for heavier than usual jogging traffic as there are loads of people out there trying to make good on their New Year's Resolutions despite the cold temperatures.

And that's the Clerkmanifesto Sidewalk Report brought to you by Sneed's Electric Shoelaces. Sneed's Electric Shoelaces, for when you absolutely need to know how securely your shoes are tied. We will be updating conditions here on the blog every hour on the hour. So check in before you walk!

The sound of shelving books

I am shelving, or I was trying to, but there is a man talking so loudly at the reference desk that I cannot concentrate. He is saying banal things. The librarian is apparently helpless to stop him. But it is so distractingly loud!

I AM A HIGHLY TRAINED LIBRARY CLERK! I NEED TO BE ABLE TO CONCENTRATE TO SHELVE!

And then these people keep coming down my row even though there are currently 34 unused rows all full of plentiful space and ample books in this library. I went and counted the available rows but the count may be inaccurate because every time I went into one I was suddenly joined by throngs of patrons. And these people come down my row because, apparently, they need, they just have to have, I don't really know, human contact? some random books by authors whose last names start with "G", or maybe "H"?, except, no, there's nothing good here, so they wander on, presumably looking for other, rare, occupied rows.

And then there are people pacing the library to stay loose in between bouts of sitting and staring vacantly into space, an hour of staring, an hour of pacing, with both including a lot of breathing. And there are people in squeaky shoes going to the bathroom over and over again. Children are screaming so loudly the books stiffen and grow brittle and rustle restlessly on the shelves. I can hear them! And as people walk through a mysteriously sticky patch on a nearby floor their footsteps pull up from it with a sound like huge swaths of Velcro being ripped apart. Oh, and there's that cough again.

So that's it.

I will write a blog post instead of shelving. It requires less concentration, and the scratch of my pen and the roar of my genius envelopes me in a soothing, protective white noise. 

A year in review

Over the past year I have produced 365 blog posts, unless it was leap year, in which case there will be an extra one squeezed in there somewhere. You may have missed one or many of these posts. And while you could sit down right now (or, er, remain sitting) and read them all, here, on my website, on the Internet, where these posts quietly await such things with a kind of plaintive longing, I accept that you may only have a few moments in this busy world. I understand that you might like to get clear on just what all went on at clerkmanifesto in the past year, but you'd like to do it without any effort, and maybe all in a couple minutes. 

So with that in mind I have collected a representative line (or two) from my essays from each month of the year to represent our journey; a year in review by way of brief quotes. And so here, in brief, is 2018 on clerkmanifesto:




January:

Truth with its paltry rewards still beats the alternatives.


February:

The world is practically drowning in luck, until, finally, the luck runs our way, and then it's justice.


March:

Magic is the absence of illusion.


April:

The speed at which I work has absolutely no effect on the speed of time.


May:

In America those with time have nowhere to go, and those with somewhere to go have no time.


June:

A good idea is a good idea, until it is taken under consideration.


July:

Plato said:


The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.


Which explains an awful lot about our world right now, but then, who cares.


August:

If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all except "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." Which, I think, speaks volumes.


September:

Everything that touches you, everything you see, everything that ever happens to you your whole life through, it's all personal.


It's just not all against you.


October:

Golf is a peaceful game, but like everything else down here, only from the clouds.


November:


I'm a glass is half full kind of guy even if it's actually empty.


December:

You have to order the Universe or it will be ordered for you.






Happy New Year to you. And though that's just a paraphrase of a quote by several billion other people, I still mean it.

Wolves return to France

It's a good news/bad news situation as viable wolf populations have returned to France. 

The European Gray Wolf went extinct in France in the thirties, but in the early nineties a pair of Italian wolves crossed the Alps into France. Now there are over 500 wolves in France and they are considered to be "Demographically viable", which means, and I'm just winging it here, they are viable in a demographic way.

The really great thing about this is that there are way too many rabbits in France and everyone is hoping the wolves will eat up some of the rabbits. Also looking like winners in this ecological triumph are the sellers and manufacturers of Grandmotherly disguises, who will be expecting increased business for their line in small, outlying villages.  Of course, the sheep herders of France are not happy about the situation and have even brought their sheep to Paris to express their dismay. 

However, it is not the sheep herders who need to be kept happy...

it's the woodcutters.

Benefit of the Doubt

Readers and Neighbors:


Last night it snowed for a long time. But oddly, towards morning, the temperatures warmed a little. The snow turned to rain. And so by the time I went for a mid morning walk in my neighborhood much of the city was wallowing in two or three inches of pure, icy slush. It was extremely unpleasant to walk in. In fact, one couldn't exactly walk in it, it was more like stepping, or picking ones way through.

So that's what I did. And instead of ruminating on high things, you know, like birds or, er, the top parts of trees, as is my nature on leisurely walks, I ruminated unavoidably on the condition of the sidewalks. Many of them were in very bad shape for walking, but a few had been shoveled clear and were quite passable. 

I judged. I identified the guilty. And I handed out dispensations and condemnations.

The area where I walked today has apartment buildings, a few modest houses, and many really huge and fancy houses in shiny condition. Only the main streets had been plowed and I was forced to the sidewalks. But the streets revealed the first sinners: Public Works, also known as the city. They also got the first, tentative dispensation. Though guilty, I could forgive them for awhile because the snow falls everywhere at once and it takes time to get to everything. I was willing to give them a morning pass at least.

I was not, however, willing to give any sort of pass to the Apartment sidewalks. As a renter, after all, isn't that something I'm paying for? Isn't the ratio of renters to sidewalk incredible high? I doubt there could be more than five or ten feet of sidewalk per renting apartment where I live. I'm disinclined to give businesses, the most likely in our capitalist culture to lack any humanity, any allowances. Their cost in doing this right is small and they will take allowances here strictly as exploitable weaknesses rather than understanding gifts. However, and this is important, the apartment buildings, including mine, had been almost entirely shoveled and were the best places to walk of my whole journey.

Which brings us to the other end of the spectrum, the more humble houses. There were not a lot of these along my way, and they ran about fifty-fifty, some shoveled, some not. I did not want to forgive those which let me down, but I understand it's hard to work, and deal with the holidays, and get up early enough to shovel. Plus it was an odd snow, hard to make sense of, and we'll just hope these people who can't really afford to pay anyone to do it for them will manage to get their act together for the next snow.

Which brings us to the final and greatest offenders, the opulent houses, those all well cared for, full of brick and paved stone drives, many with half a dozen bathrooms, one with a tennis court, many sporting high up river views. All these pretty, million dollar houses were, but for a scarce few exceptions, not shoveled at all.

This, I'm afraid, is unforgivable. Every one of these houses shows signs of work from the last five years that had to have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. More than one place I passed is adding some monumental wall, or a seventh bedroom at a level of style that surely costs more than the whole house my wife and I just sold. These homeowners have every tool at their disposal to clear their sidewalks, from shovels made out of diamonds, to drivable sidewalk snowblowers stored in their own beautiful, heated brick sheds, all the way to simply paying some company an amount of money they could hardly miss from their lavish budgets to keep their sidewalks in ever perfect condition.

To those millionaire homeowners I offer no dispensation, but, if you are one of them, you will see that I did wrap this note around a brick and throw it through your front window.



Happy New Year,



F. Calypso