thirty

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

We have been stripping our lives down to bare essentials, hoping, possibly unreasonably, to get all our belongings into two suitcases, but certainly no more than three, and all the carry on bags we're allowed. The estate sale people are coming tomorrow and the sale is in five days, or, in your timeline, two and a half weeks ago. The main point in telling you all of this, is that I am pulling out a lot of images from my history as I go through everything I own, many of them are from long before clerkmanifesto.

Today's pictures aren't that old though, and come off some old backup drive, and probably appeared here in some form or other. But I have some nice tools to make them work better these days, sometimes even how I originally imagined, but had no way of doing back then. And then some of these were probably nice photos I experimented on like a mad scientist years ago, and then now, accomplished as I am, I could come and simply wave a magic wand to make them whole again.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the assortment. There's more where this came from:

twenty-nine

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

Putting together posts like these weeks ahead of time, it occurred to me that I might like to find an old one that references all the many people I have just been saying goodbye to as I left my job of 31 years. So I went digging around in historical clerkmanifesto posts and found this slightly acid, but accurate as ever, post after only a few quick tries. 

"This will do." I thought. 

It was called (and so surely must still be) "Liking Everyone".

Given enough time I find I like all my co-workers. But even I blanch at the word "all". How can that be? And considering the many years I've worked here, that comes out to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people (I can't quite believe it makes it to a thousand, but it comes close enough for me to keep saying "hundreds" over and over). This is a notable illustration of my character. For a cynical, embittered, angry misanthrope it turns out I like an astonishing number of people. I like a perverse amount of people. When you factor in the tens of thousands of library patrons who I also seem to like, despite every reason to encourage the contrary, it almost looks unsettling.

I suffer from a surfeit of empathy. I have a hard time keeping grudges. I can spot the charm of a person even as it's dissolved into a 99.99999 percent loathsome personality. Indeed, the very minute proportion of their virtues themselves makes them fascinating to me, like drinking a red wine with a hint of oregano so small that you keep sipping the wine delicately trying to detect it again, trying to let yourself know that you didn't merely imagine it.

So, as with any sensible person who is burdened with a personality trait that is so heavily skewed in one direction, I try hard to compensate. With co-workers for whom my disrespect is profound I keep my distance as much as possible. Proximity softens me. I harden my heart. For every coldness I want to set forth I have to plant my feet and concentrate. It does not come naturally. Over a long enough time, with enough familiarity, liking people comes completely unbidden to me. And so even if someone crosses the red line with me my default is to forget it over and over, like America with Republicans. Who wants to be like a Republican? Ick. So when peoples' toes slip past that horrible line of evil I do what I have to do. I try to memorize the transgression. I nurse it like a precious drink I cannot afford to finish and have no good way to replace.

It helps. But I am dealing with a deep seated handicap, and all I can do is try to manage it, which I must, day after day, with small triumph, endless struggle, and a casual affection for vastly too many, which has attracted the gods themselves to me, like fruit flies on a ripe peach.

twenty-eight

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

Three pictures of a bird taken from where I sit at my computer.

As simple as that. 

I changed the neighbors' balcony wall to a branch, and used all kinds of magics, but, in the end, it is that bird, who stood there for a minute or two, and then flew away.

twenty-seven

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

I recently posted a picture to Instagram. I do this occasionally, but there's nothing there you wouldn't see here. An acquaintance was impressed with the picture, asking if it was real.

I understand the question.

I don't have the best answer.

In the wider Internetland I have seen plenty of evidence of hostility towards AI images, sometimes even approaching a kind of hysteria. I have encountered some of that in posting my short youtube movies. I have not particularly encountered it in the real world, where my heavily AI collaborated images have mostly evoked wonder and curiosity.

But also I make very few straight up AI images. Most of mine start with a traditional photograph, well, maybe not "traditional", an ever shifting word, but a photo taken with a phone camera. Then it is either massively or subtly altered by an AI reimagining, meaning an array of directions and attempts with, these days, usually Chat GPT as a photo generator/editor. From there it is sometimes finished off in Photoshop, which now may or may not mean more AI tools.

So for that picture where I was asked if it was real? I think it was this one:

Yes, this is pretty much how the bee was arranged in my original camera photograph. I guess it's pretty real. I mean, I think if I showed it to the bee he would be all "Hey, that's me! I look nice! What's the purple on my legs?"

The problem, well, let's face it, the fun of photography is that it is already plenty fake and alterable from the start.

Here is another picture I took recently. I haven't shown you this one yet. We are having a lot of smoky sunsets here and actually the air is pretty bad.

This looks very fake.

I tried to do some interesting things with it, but it's too weird and fake looking and nothing worked.

This one's real.

But I think you know you're just looking at a bunch of little dots on a screen.

twenty-six

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

Here are a bunch of pictures that were working around other posts, trying to fix other posts, alternate versions of other posts, or even one-offs that didn't quite seem to warrant their own posts. This should be easy for me because in real life August is entirely a month of cleaning out the cupboard. The hard part comes when I am not sure if one of the pictures hasn't already featured. If any of these pictures are ones you've seen already, I apologize. If you could please try to enjoy them just one more time it would be deeply appreciated.

twenty-five

   

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

Whoa! Look what I found for you today! A historical post!

I read that the best thing to bring, as an expatriate to France, is Maple Syrup.

Duh!

That is the best thing to bring anywhere!

Here you go. I believe the reference is likely to when we stayed in a house on Lake Superior, north of Grand Marais, an amazing house and happy time, and just the sort of thing I have been longing for in this time of upheaval and tumult in my life.  This, I suppose, was the last of many pretty posts handwritten originally by the shore of a very great and wild lake:

Crap.


I was supposed to be done with every last scrap of any mention of my very Minnesota vacation. I made a fuss about being done. I formally finished. I attached an appendix. I added an afterword just to tell you how safely done we all were. I closed off the vacation with a concluding post. Then I shut the book on it, laminated it, bronzed it, put it in a sealed, underground vault in the middle of nowhere and burned the map to it.

I didn't have anything against these 78 essays about my two week vacation. But the sprawl of them made me want to set a final end to it all. 

So I did.

And then I had to tell you about the maple syrup. 

Not just any maple syrup, maple syrup bought on vacation.

I love maple syrup, but I love maple syrup best when it's bought in a little cabin in the far maple woods that the syrup comes from. And when, because it is bought there, it is not insanely expensive. And I love that maple syrup the best when it's bought on vacation.

Find the vault. Dig it out. Crack the bronze coating. Delaminate it. Open the book back up. And pour out champagne flutes of maple syrup for everyone! I have something more to say about vacation.

I got some maple syrup. 

My wife and I drove through the back, dusty one lane roads of the north woods. And though it does require prior knowledge and driving on actual, rough, one lane roads, we do like to increase the challenge. We take secret back ways to those one lane roads. We get lost. We travel along roads so tiny and messed up that we feel fear. Our little car has the adventure of a lifetime.

Look to your right, look to your left. There are the trees! Tubing runs rampant through these woods to carry the sap along. There is tubing everywhere. Follow the tubing. We are almost there. Don't stop for wild raspberries. Here is the barn. Here is the cabin. It is always open. We step inside. There are old maple syrup relics from the days of yore. There are pictures on the walls. A moose was here once! And there is the maple syrup for sale. The more you get the cheaper it goes. A pint is 11. A quart is 18. A gallon is 64. One day I will do a gallon. I'm working up to it. This year is 2 quarts. Write what you bought in the book. Put your money in the box with all the other money that's just sitting there. Trust itself is a great tourist destination, but maple syrup is an even better one. 

Goodbye maple syrup cabin.

I am only ever so slightly gluttonously ashamed that I make a thick quart of maple syrup last for but one week, and then only by being moderate with it. Ha! Moderate. Two brilliant maple cold press coffees a day. Yogurt with maple syrup. Maple syrup cookies. Oh how easily and sweetly it pours out of its glass jug. Clean the rim with your finger. Mmmm. Spill some more on the rim to clean it more with your finger.

Okay, I'm 60% sure we're all done with the vacation posts now.