The Dag Hammarskjold letters part three

Dear Dag Hammarskjold,


Thank you for the further clarification of your quote that I see every day on my walk to work. As you know from my previous letters your quote is in a mini plaza I pass through, where it is etched in stone, which just goes to show that other people have found it as important and inspiring as I have. In case you forgot it's the one that goes: 

“We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny, but what we put into it is ours.”


So I get it now that you can't change the frame of your destiny (thanks, it's so obvious now), and that includes any resizing (thanks again). I also understand that I can put whatever I want into it. But what I'm wondering is, can I put a different frame of my destiny inside the frame of my destiny that I'm given, so long as I can fit it in?

And if I can, do you think it will look weird?


Thanks again for taking the time to help me out with this.


Yours (again),


Clerkmanifesto

The Dag Hammarskjold letters part two

Dear Dag Hammarskjold,


As I recently mentioned, everyday I walk to work through a little plaza that prominently features one of your most illustrious quotes:

“We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny, but what we put into it is ours.”

As you have recommended I have been spending a lot of time lately carefully placing things into the frame of my destiny, trying to make sure it's not too cluttered and that nothing sticks out. Unfortunately I think there's something, I don't know, off about it. Something is not quite right no matter what I try. I understand now that it is not possible to change the frame of my destiny, but do you know if there's any way to adjust the size?

Thanks for your help with all this.

Regards,

Clerkmanifesto


 

The Dag Hammarskjold letters part one

Dear Dag Hammarskjold,


When I walk to work in the morning I go through the University. I pass along something called "The Scholars' Walk" where great, honored scholars are memorialized. In the middle of it all is a sort of mini plaza that features a quote, etched lavishly in stone no less.

It's by you!

Well done.

It says “We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny, but what we put into it is ours.”

So I wanted you to know I have been totally packing the frame of my destiny with all kinds of stuff, just like you suggested. Unfortunately, no matter what I try I cannot seem to change the frame of my destiny. Surely this can't be right!

Is there some button I'm not seeing?

Any tips you can give on this would be super appreciated.



Regards,

Clerkmanifesto




 

The business of upvoting

I have only recently discovered that a curious, even ridiculous feature of my work email at the library is that it is possible to upvote emails. So someone sends around an all staff email like "A box of DVD cases seems to have gone awol in the delivery. If you see it around please let me know." And there is a little thumbs up near the top right of the message where I could, if I so desire, click. 

One upvote.

Someone liked it!

In my exhaustive research for this post I learned that not only does it show how many people liked an email, but it even shows who! I feel like I've discovered a little universe here, with an emphasis on "little". Not many people seem to take part in this upvoting feature. Or, fairly speaking, maybe almost everyone does, but most people can't find any message they quite like enough.

Still, I've learned a few things from the votes. For instance the head of automation tends to get a couple upvotes on his messages, even when they're dry as can be. One of them is always some mysteriously random name I've never heard before. No one upvotes our branch manager, which makes sense I guess. It doesn't seem like it would suit him, all that fuss. The Circulation Manager gets upvoted only by people outside of circulation. I think they're trying to cheer him up.

The biggest number of upvotes I've seen on any all-staff email is the one we got from the library director wishing us a Happy New Year. The upvoters on that email were exactly who I'd think they would be, a more aloof, ambitious group. I was not inclined to think well of any of them. Well, actually, one of them was okay because I found in my research that that person upvotes pretty much everything by anyone.

I think from now on I'm going to cc her on all my messages.

Expanding on a theme

Yesterday I touched briefly, almost in passing, on some solutions to the current WWIII precipitating crisis involving the U.S. assassination of an Iranian General. He was something of the number two guy in Iran, and much of that country is on the streets crying out for revenge.

I'm not taking sides.

I just want a peaceful resolution to this dangerous situation.

And in that neutral spirit I propose that America hands over to Iran their Vice President, Mike Pence.




Yes, yes, Iran would probably want to blow Pence up or something, but that's up to them. And the U.S. will invariably want revenge for this, but at that point Iran could just hand over in kind their new number two guy. Surely they'd have one.

Presumably at some point the two sides will tire of killing all those endless number twos, at which point they can maybe start storing them in warehouses.

Eventually they could start renting them out as doormen.

I don't know, I don't have all the answers.

Gallows humor

I don't want to be too harsh on us, but I think toying with WWIII might not be the brightest course of action for our country. Assassinating the second most powerful person in a large, reasonably well-armed and powerful country can have... repercussions. If those repercussions are that they then kill our second most powerful person, and we go back and forth killing second most powerful people like that forever, I could probably live with it. I mean fair is fair. On the other hand if it leads to the extinction of all life on the planet, I probably can't live with it.

Get it? Can't live with it? Cause we'd, like, all be dead. Except maybe some clever bacteria. But they wouldn't really be that happy without us. We're surprisingly cozy.

And if you are inclined to think, actually like I am inclined to think, that this all is not our fault, that most of us here in America distinctly do not support this sort of, um, murdering, I can only be of two minds. Sure we've opposed this sort of thing all our lives, but, um, we kind of mumbled when we did so.

One of my favorite things to mumble about is the press. I find they have a tendency to disassociate from reality and context at convenient and controversial moments, taking refuge in obtuse reporting. But I'm only going to go so far into that thesis here as to say this:

Today one of my local papers, The Pioneer Press, loudly screamed its headline from the newspaper boxes:

Trump: Aim of killing Iranian general was to 'stop a war'

So I did the only reasonable thing I could think of under the circumstances; I broke open the box of newspapers, threw them all away, and left a note:

Pioneer Press,

I have removed all your newspapers to foil thieves.

What is a Romantic Comedy

Seeing as we have been discussing Romantic Comedies in this space lately, it has occurred to me that it might be useful to articulate what, exactly, a Romantic Comedy is.

It's a comedy, with romance!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Oh, we laugh, and laugh and laugh and laugh!, but in my regular, deep researches of the Internet for more Romantic Comedies (there are never enough!) that is precisely the definition, whether they'd admit or not, that most people are willing to go by. And the reluctant truth is that I understand. Does it raise my hackles a bit to see a relationship comedy like Annie Hall featured prominently on so many "Best Romantic Comedy" lists? Yes. But if I were putting together a list of the greatest 20 Romantic Comedies, after I'd plucked the super easy low hanging fruit of pure Romantic Comedies like French Kiss, Long Shot, Music and Lyrics, and Moonstruck, I would eventually start to come to movies I love that are portionally Romantic Comedies, that are like Romantic Comedies, that feature Romantic Comedies.

After all, most comedies have a romance. Nevertheless I'm afraid that does not make them Romantic Comedies, no matter how much I, or anyone else might love them.

That is why maybe, sometime, we should discuss here just what, exactly, a Romantic Comedy is. 

Oh, right, we are.

No, I didn't forget. I was just, you know, kidding.

Yes, I know it's super hard to tell. For me too.

So let's cut to the chase.

A Romantic Comedy is a humorous movie (comedy!) centered primarily and essentially on the happy coming together (romance!) of two decent (ultimately) and appealing (mostly) people.

That'll do.

Nevertheless there are more or less pure Romantic Comedies. The fabulous Notting Hill (more of that low hanging fruit) is a pure Romantic Comedy, steadfastly and thoroughly concerned with the romantic union of the characters played by Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. But what about the roughly as charming About Time or Morning Glory? Both of them center strongly on happy romances, but they're just a piece of the whole picture. The romances resolve early, run into some trouble, and resolve again, much like a pure Romantic Comedy, but they do it early. They aren't quite fully centered on that romance. The relationship takes a larger share of About Time, but it is as much a family comedy and drama as it is a Romantic Comedy. And Morning Glory is more of a workplace comedy, more concerned with the heroine's work success and her relationship with Harrison Ford as mentor/foil than with her romance with the guy who rowed, for Yale. I love those movies so I would feel a temptation to just toss them into my list of great Romantic Comedies. Because after all, these movies feel the same way as a Romantic Comedy does to me, and they do have a Romantic Comedy in them. 

But somehow I know it's not right.

Maybe this will help.

One more rule for an authentic Romantic Comedy: 

To truly qualify as a Romantic Comedy the penultimate, or ultimate scene has to be of the two main characters emotionally and dramatically getting together. 

How's that?

We can figure out how to squeeze My Big Fat Greek Wedding in later.

World of the Romantic Comedy

As with any other genre or piece of art there is no singular way to measure the quality of a Romantic Comedy. But that doesn't mean there aren't motifs, or certain qualities that come up to shine regularly in the best of them. I mean, there are my personal hallmarks of great Romantic Comedies, like how many tears fall from my eyes in the last third of the movie, or how often my wife and I are willing to watch the same movie over and over, or how many times while watching the movie I think "I need to write a blog post about this!" But there are slightly more objective measurements as well; how fresh the writing is despite all the deeply entrenched and must-be-observed structures, how charismatic the lead actors are, and the one we're going to briefly explore today, how manifold and rich are the side characters.

What the best Romantic Comedies do, aside from the given of having rounded, engaging leads, and teaching that love is the answer, is they populate the world with a society of quirky, complex, amusing, and delightfully authentic associates, friends, relatives and bystanders. The charming Isn't It Romantic, starring Rebel Wilson, which (mostly) cleverly lampoons the tropes of the Romantic Comedy (on the way to being one) suggests that the quirky side characters exist to serve the main characters, like the gay best friend who positively lives in the joy and excitement of helping, egging on, and heartening the heroine of the movie. And while there is an underlining truth to this, in the best Romantic Comedies something quite the opposite takes place with these characters as well; they build a world.

World building is something more familiarly discussed in regards to Fantasy novels, but Romantic Comedies, while generally set in our own specifically real world, take enough liberties with that world that they become slightly fantastical worlds in their own right. They take sufficient dark edges off the world as it is, they are leavened enough, that they become lightly fantastical worlds in their own right. Just Like Heaven, with Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, has on the one hand the specifically fantastical element of a ghost-like materialization of a woman in a coma (an essential and main feature of the plot), but it also includes as a key feature of the story an apartment, affordable apparently to both a medical student and to a depressed, unemployed landscape designer, that, in looking up a roughly comparable rental on my little computer here, would go for $8,000 a month. This, as Isn't It Romantic well knows, is its own particular kind of fantastic. It's a fantastic that needs a little weight so that it doesn't drift away. It needs a population of characters who suggest whole universes of themselves, that can tether the movie to earth.

I like Just Like Heaven. I did not come here to use it as an example though. A good, but not great Romantic Comedy, it is buoyed by terrific leads. It has a nice story. And it contains, for modest proof of my exegesis, precisely one very quirky and eminently engaging side character, Jon Heder, an occult bookstore clerk and/or an expert in the field of extra sensory phenomena.

But compare this to two masterpieces of the genre, one acclaimed (though not enough),  and one (I suppose justly) a bit less so. 

I went to look at the cast of Moonstruck, the greatest of all Romantic Comedies. I was trying to come up with a number of eccentric, strangely appealing, and entirely gravitational side characters who swirl around the epic performances of our romantic leads, Nicholas Cage and Cher. I found it impossible. Aside from the obviously brilliant supporting role masterwork by Olympia Dukakis, Vincent Gardenia (the parents), John Mahoney (a side character who interacts mainly with the mother) and Danny Aiello (the fiance), there are a series of side characters rendered with exquisite and increasingly brief brushstrokes; the expressive aunt and uncle, the old man (that's actually his character name! He is Cher's grandfather in the movie), Bobo the waiter, the undertaker who is a genius, Chrissy the bakery counter staff who loves Ronny, but he could never love again since he lost his girl and his hand, and on and on until we've descended to roles like the almost incidental arguing and making up married couple with a liquor store, an unseen priest at confessional, the fiance's dying mother who has naught but a few gestures in the distance, or the hairdresser taking out the grey in Cher's hair, each of them tinily rendered with an economical charm. Moonstruck is an enormous confection, but one so lavishly and relentlessly decorated with purpose that the weight of its Italian New York is as ridiculously grounded and real as any two hour movie of any genre could ever be.

Originally I conceived of some vague version of this post in the glow of watching Music and Lyrics with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. It's successes are surely more modest in comparison to Moonstruck, what wouldn't be? Nevertheless the same richness of side character is what gives the movie its level of power and conviction and places it among the best of Romantic Comedy. The eccentric yet grounded elan with which the roles of the agent, Brad Garrett, and the sister played by Kristen Johnston, are perfectly done, but like with Moonstruck the quality of the characters does not diminish as we run down into smaller and smaller parts; Cora, the at once over drawn and convincing pop star, the brother in law, all the way to the charming apartment desk clerk who is tone deaf but listens to the leads' songs, and to Derek, the guy who provides steamy and sticky beats. All of them are engagingly rendered. The romance of the main characters does not set the rules of the universe on its own, nor does it exist precisely in our own world, but it does fit perfectly into the ever so slightly daft, swirling world of the defined and colorful characters that thickly populate and even create the film they live in.

Like I said, there are no hard rules. One could even, somehow, put together a good Romantic Comedy on the strength of the excellence of just one of the leads, if, for instance, it's John Cusack in Say Anything. The nutty, almost garbage plot of When in Rome can be charmed into quality by the sheer vim and conviction of its brilliant cast. And surely one could come up with a very fine Romantic Comedy with simply two wonderful leads and a thinly rendered supporting cast, but I have had no particular luck in my search for an example of that so far. But to be honest, I'm not that interested in finding it. After all, I don't see why I should be responsible for watering down my main point. So let's just let it stand.

By a river at one in the morning

As I looked out on 2020 I was astounded at how late it had become. Late in the future. Late in the World. Late in my life, even if I am not so very old.

And a tiny piece of Buddhism flashed through my heart: 

Be here now.

There is a religion surely written by an old person! You can't be here now. Sure it would be nice. Yes, try for it if you will. But without the past and without the future there is no story. 

We are as much story as we are water.

2020 New Year's resolution for us all

Recently the librarian in charge of the themed book display cubes at my library was collecting books for "New Year Resolutions". Because I was loitering, or shelving, or whatever, in the non fiction section at the time, I pitched in on the project for a bit. It quickly became apparent that the whole field of New Year's Resolutions, while certainly self-improving in focus, is also rather negative. The books I collected, or that were being collected, said "Lose weight", "eat better", "exercise", "be happy", "learn a hobby", "get organized" and "start managing your money properly". And all of that's fine, but it also has a way of saying "you are currently a fat, unhealthy, depressed, broke person who is a mess that fritters all your time away on nothing!". We managed to throw some "travel the world" books into this sea of negativity, but then those books simply salted the wounds with "and you never do anything or go anywhere!"

Ow.

Well the buck stops here, at clerkmanifesto. Cast away whatever cruel New Year's Resolutions you have drunkenly assembled in the run up to this new year. This is not the time for Yankee can do. I have your New Year's Resolution for you for 2020. All you need to do is trust me.



New Year's Resolution, 2020:




You who have accomplished so much, if ever there was a time to coast...

2019, year in review

Welcome to my 2019 year in review. 

It's short because...

In the end, nothing much happened.

It is a terrible, terrible thing that nothing much really happened in 2019.

And a bit of a relief.

Ice storm of the apocalypse

It rained in the wee hours of the morning. But it was still very cold. So before I went to work and looked out our window the world was shiny and black. And my wife and I had to ask ourselves "Is it wet or is it all perfectly frozen?"

Because it was the holidays, and a Saturday, there were almost no cars on the road. But it turned out there was one other reason there were so very few cars. One vehicle approached the big intersection we can look out on. It turned left. It was going two miles per hour. And still it slid.

"Is it wet or is it all perfectly frozen?"

The latter.

Uh oh. I had to drive in this. 

I went to the car and drove carefully out of the garage. I slid. I drove along at a crawl. I slid. Fortunately I had the roads pretty much to myself. I looked for spots with traction and slid between them. I inched my way to the highway. Horrifically smashed cars were eerily abandoned along the way, their interiors filled with expanded airbags. No emergency vehicles were on the way to help.

I turned on the radio. All the stations said "There are crashes everywhere. We advise not driving under any circumstances."

Oh.

But I am driving.

What now?

My route has a lot of those electronic traffic message signs. Often they say something cute, but safety oriented. This time they all said the same thing:

NO TRAVEL IS ADVISED

Oh.

I whizzed past the cars going ten miles per hour. The cars going 30 miles per hour whizzed past me. I was in the sweet spot, theoretically. Safe driving is when you think some cars are driving dangerously slow and some cars are driving dangerously fast. Maybe. Hopefully.

I made it to the skating rink parking lot of the library I work at. I managed to ease my car to a stop, got out, and slid my way relievedly indoors.

All my co-workers were there. One could argue that was not wise, but they all made it.

And they all had many, many, long, long stories.

I heard them all orally, as they don't have blogs.

Just need

Among the many insignificant but excruciating annoyances of working the front desk of a library, there is none that drives me to such tiny agony as the following issue.

But first, as little background as we can get away with here:

At the front desk of the library the most quietly irritating, weirdly protracted, and most time consuming thing we commonly do is the library card registration. There are uncommon things we do that are far more time consuming and complicated, and there are many less pleasant endeavors at the front desk that can get dicey pretty quickly. But a simple card registration always takes a fair chunk of time, involves boring data entry, and calls for a share of rudimentary, repetitive, and sometimes wordy explanation. And I say this all as someone who quite likes, even loves working the front desk of the library. It's just, library card registrations are always a little bit of a drag.

And so here's the thing:

Library patrons can be genuinely contrite and apologetic about all kinds of needs. They might ask to borrow a pen like it's the biggest favor in the world. Checking out without a library card will be treated as if I am making the most magnanimous gesture in the history of public libraries. They regularly apologize for disturbing me at a desk where I am sitting there for the express reason of helping them. They might even express guilt at making me take time to receive their overdue charges money. But the one time library patrons approach me like they're asking for pretty much nothing is when they want a library card.

"I just need to..." They start to breezily announce.

And before they finish I know what they'll say.

"I just need to get a library card."

There's nothing "just" about it. It's unjust.

But fine. Okay.

Just this once.

Don't make a habit of it.

Charging station

My library just got a new portable devices charging station. It's great for when you've lost or forgotten a cable! You just choose an available locker number on the key pad. Then it asks you for a six digit pin. I suggest something at least a little complicated. So I type in something semi-random. Then what I do is I enter the pin into my phone so I'll remember it. Then, at the charging station, it asks me to enter the pin again and, voila! The door pops open.

Inside my little locker there are three or four different charging cables hardwired in there. I choose the one that fits into my phone and plug it in. It's charging! Great. So I close the door (I'm in box number five) and off I go into the library to look at... stuff.

Then after a little bit I return to the charging station. I choose locker number five (I remembered!). Now I simply enter in the six digit pin and, where did I put that?

Oh,

crap.

Bread Tube

We are what Google advertises to us.


Or maybe I have no business lumping you in on this. After all it's my unseemly browsing habits that have lead to this sorry state of affairs.

Since my computer was up, forlornly longing for me to write a blog post on it even though the next order of business was making pizza, my wife and I decided to put some music on. While our selection of songs from that lovely Alison Krauss, Robert Plant album Raising Sand was perfectly sound, the delivery system of YouTube was slightly more problematic.

There were ads. Lots of ads. All of them perfectly tailored to me, theoretically, based on the algorithms of my extensive YouTube viewing.

Here's what YouTube thinks I'm interested in, or should be interested in buying:

1. Medications for complex medical conditions. There are tons of ads for horrible, complicated ailments I don't even understand, but could probably be convinced that I have. The ads mostly list wildly dangerous side effects from these very drugs they so desperately want me to ask my doctor to prescribe for me.

2. The Nintendo Switch.


Yep. That's it.

I do actually have a Nintendo Switch, but almost never use it as it's too complicated to set up for a big screen and playing it handheld is hard on my body, especially my neck and back.

Presumably some of those drugs would help with those problems.

Although since what I most watch on YouTube is far leftist political theory and analysis that's not particularly friendly to Google, YouTube may just be trying to kill me.

Oh well, fair enough. I like the videos.

Boxing Day, 2019

So many of the great old traditions are falling by the wayside. But here at clerkmanifesto we refuse to let them fade away. And though for awhile some of these cultural conventions seemed arcane and even offensive, in these new times, with new understandings of mistakenly discredited institutions like Feudalism and Servitude, it is only appropriate that we revive the grand old observances of the past.

And that is why today, here at clerkmanifesto, we are celebrating Boxing Day!

Boxing Day isn't about us, it's about the little people. It's about the people who toil in our kitchens and laundry rooms. It's about the people who answer our doors and lay out our clothes for dressing and keep our hedges clipped and trimmed. It's about the washerwomen who polish our floors each morning at six a.m. and about the scullery maids polishing our silver. It's about the footmen who serve us and our guests at table, all in quiet anonymity. It's about my sommelier who calmly indulges my obsession with French Champagnes and obscure vintages. And it's about my Master of the House who I consult with so closely I could almost call him my friend, if only it weren't inappropriate, and if I could remember his name.

And so Boxing Day is for them. I let them (outside of the essential barebones staff) all have the day off. And I box up gifts for them; usually leftovers from our Christmas Feast and a crisp five or ten dollar bill.

I encourage you and yours to do the same. As we bring back some of the most elegant traditions of the past, let us not stint.

Let's bring them all back.

Presents

Dear Staff,


As the supply person for the library I have endeavored to find a solution to our smelly backroom bathrooms. Finally, after a series of uneven attempts, I landed upon automatic scented sprayers, leaning in to the lavender and vanilla side of the odor spectrum. Then I got some cheap shelving so that these dispensers would be perfectly placed to spray to their hearts content. There was an adjustment period where staff members were sprayed in the face and where every time I checked on our automated sprayers it looked like people had strangled and shaken them to get them to work. Some tasteful, explanatory signs seemed to alleviate these problems quickly though.

And so the automated sprayers quietly settled in to our library bathroom experience.

Then one day I went in to the bathroom and found that someone had put cute cartoon eyes onto the top of our sprayers, giving them a surprised look. This was pretty charming I guess.

Much later the sprayers got little gold bow ties. I asked around who was doing this but no one knew, or would admit it.

More clothing showed up.

Shoes. Polka dots. Bangles. Disco lights were added in. Fog effects. The sprayers were dressed in velvet jackets. They got back stories and glamorous pedestals. Little librarian diorama scenes were added. Speech bubbles showed up, and later there were sound effects. Seasonal additions were included. Fangs appeared at Halloween. Pumpkins. A pet turkey for each sprayer appeared at Thanksgiving. And now as I write each sprayer character has a Christmas Tree, miniature of course, but with real twinkling lights and tiny wrapped gifts under the wee branches.

So I just want to say to whoever it is that's messing with this anti deodorant sprayers, whether there be one of you or a whole group:

Thank god for you. You are a gift to our community.




 With regards,


-The Supplies Department

New decade

File this one under "Numbers".


I'm here to talk about the new decade. Or, specifically, how one can, excitingly, use the new imminently arriving decade to make things seem much longer, bigger, and older than they really are. For instance I am inclined to sometimes see it as pretty impressive that I have worked at my library for 25 years now. 25 years? Ha, screw that! As of this coming January second, I will have worked four decades at this library! That's a lot of experience. And as to my being 55 years old. Forget it. I am seven decades old now, or I will be very soon. Sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, aughts, teens, and twenties.

Although I confess all that prodigious age is making me a bit queasy. Nevertheless let's try and just roll on blithely through as we enter into this being a two decade blog. Two decades of blogging. Wow. Although while we're doing that we should keep in mind that this "decade" stuff is pretty small change. Which is easy for me to say, after all:

I have two centuries of writing experience.

Me and Elton John

This is sort of a book review.



Many times when I am over at Elton John's house, and we're arguing about soccer and playing charades with the terrible charades player Bob Dylan, and Lady Gaga says something funny, I want to ask Elton John to tell me about John Lennon and Liberace and Groucho Marx and Elvis and Katherine Hepburn. But then Neil Young suddenly starts playing us a new song so I don't ask. The Royal Family shows up from out of nowhere and one of the Rolling Stones asks me something, usually Keith, well, always Keith because I don't think Mick likes me and Keith tries to make up for it, and Charlie Watts is real quiet, but before I can answer I find myself in the middle of an argument between Richard Gere and someone in The Who. So I extricate myself from that and see if there's any food around the place, but there isn't a single bite to eat!

Then Elton comes into the kitchen with Elvis Costello and Cher and Ringo and some politician I think I'm supposed to know, but can't for the life of me place, maybe because he's English, and we're having a kind of actually nice conversation. It's mellow. And I'm just about to say to Elton "Hey, tell us about Lady Di and Freddie Mercury and Gianni Versace and Oprah and Simon and Garfunkel and Franco Zeffirelli and David Bowie and Andy Warhol and Elizabeth Taylor and Rod Stewart and Billie Jean King and Yoko and Cary Grant and The Queen and The Band and Aretha Franklin." But all of the sudden I get too shy and the moment passes.

But I'd kind of like to know, so I say strongly to myself "Next time I'm going to ask!"



Now I don't have to.

I am the Internet

I am well acquainted with the famous artists who never look at or listen to their work after they're done making it. 

"I never listen to my albums, and if a song of mine comes on the radio I have to turn it off."

"I don't reread anything I've written after it's published. I just see the mistakes."

and

"I never want to watch my own movies. I'm only interested in the next thing."

are all representative of the kinds of things I have read and heard notable artists say about their own work. And that's fine for them. But I don't have that luxury. They have millions of people to look at their artwork for them. Millions.

I just have a few.

So, thank you by the way.

But while Cat's Cradle is (fair enough, deservedly) being read somewhere every second of every single day, the vast, vast majority of my own handcrafted 2,500 plus blog posts are floating in the black, anonymous space of the great, sleeping Internet. At any given time it is likely not just that no one is reading any given essay of mine, but that no one is actually reading anything I ever wrote. And while I genuinely count myself fortunate to have had ten or 15 readers of any of my posts, for some of my posts that moment of light might have happened five years ago! Some of even the nicest things I have written have been wallowing in absolute Internet darkness for half a decade now.

And so that is why I regularly, constantly even, go back and reread my old posts.

Or wait, let me put it an entirely different way:

I am on the Internet a lot! I am on it slightly more than I can get away with at work. I check it out regularly at home. I shop on it, watch movies on it, and play games on it. I check the weather on it. It is not accurate but I keep trying. I even work on the Internet! But in all that Internet time I am often dissatisfied. I have a lot of problems with the Internet, a great catalog of problems, many of them exhaustively articulated here, on this blog on the Internet. Sometimes I come to my senses and turn off the Internet. But sometimes I go round and round until I come, in desultory fashion, to my blog.

And I look at my traffic.

And I see that some weird bot in Russia that I don't really understand went to Saturday, October 3, 2015. It's one of those letter to the publisher posts, First Follow Up Letter to Editor. So I go there too. Just like the bot. But unlike the bot, I read it. Maybe the first time anyone has done so in years.

I like it! 

So, as the right sidebar of my blog lists the other blog posts in nearby sequence, I choose one by title, October 6, 2015, My Friend Bob Dylan.

I like it too!

How about October 1, 2015, Dear Jerome Foundation?

I think, "Hey, I should send this letter. I could use $250 in stamps!"

And I realize, this is all I want the Internet to be. I just want it to be this good. And then I read some more of my old posts until I get tired of them and stop thinking they're so great. And then I go to Reddit and watch some cats fall off couches.