Revisiting a solution to the problem of cars

 

For a short while we were revisiting old posts of clerkmanifesto once a week or so here, but I soon hit a prolific patch and our trips to the wit and wisdom of clerkmanifesto's history ceased.

But soon we will resume our revisits. 

In fact, as we launch into an extraordinarily busy month, wherein I retire from the library, and then, with my darling wife, completely dissolve our life here, get rid of virtually everything we own, flee the country to travel in Asia, and then resettle in Europe, dealing with my daily commitment to clerkmanifesto is going to get...

complicated.

But it won't stop.

It won't pause.

It will carry on!!!!

But as it carries on it may, for awhile, have a looser quality to it. It may feature random pictures, old posts, and less of a carefully introduced and explained structure. I'm thinking about how that will all work. And you will soon hear more about that. But whatever I do it will surely include pieces from my past, like this one.

As a brief introduction to this particular piece from a few years ago, I have to say that one of the serious reasons we are leaving America for France is so that we can live without a car, something perhaps too challenging to do without enormous effort and expense anywhere in this country.

"Fuck Cars"

While recently perusing the "fuckcars" subreddit, a subreddit hostile to cars and concerned at how much worse they make life for everyone, I came across a post discussing Salt Lake City's large scale reduction of speed limits to 20 MPH in order to save the life of children. As usual with this sort of positive, but almost certainly tepid and uncommitted city movement, the fuck cars subreddit (an unfortunate subreddit name, since despite the salt of its name it is about as civil as any other subreddit, which is to say not that civil) sliced and diced the Salt Lake City action with some people going along the lines of "don't let the perfect be the enemy of good", and some people claiming that without traffic calming street design this paltry speed limit reduction will be largely ineffective.

It was then that a solution hit me.

And let me just say, that for all of reddit's lack of civility, this is the kind of solution one never sees.

But I'm going to show you what a working solution looks like.

Are you ready?

Summary executions for speeding.

Summary executions for speeding!

That's right. If you go more than 20 MPH you will be pulled over and shot.

Too extreme?

Meh.

You ask:

 "Would you drive the speed limit all the time if you could be shot for exceeding it?"

No. I'm not crazy

I'd never get in a car again.

Fuck cars.

To remember it by

 

In less than four weeks I'll be leaving behind the library I worked at for 31 years, and leaving it behind forever.

I know I keep talking about it.

It's a lot!

I suppose 31 years is enough that I am not likely to forget the place. Nevertheless, standing at the front desk this evening, as things slowed down, I had another idea:

What if I could have a model of the library? What if I could take my dollhouse version of the library with me? And if some years from now I briefly find myself a little wistful, I could take out my library dollhouse and...       move things around?

I work fast these days.

I'll have to choose from one of these, ranging from simple to fancy:

Baroque dinosaurs

 

Two days ago I had some dinosaur pictures to show you. I had taken these pictures down by the river and, after much working with them, I ended up with several variations of pictures of these prehistoric animals in the river woods. My two favorite versions were the vanilla variety, which were realistic images of the scenes, and versions inspired by Caravaggio, or, to some extent, inspired by the best painting interpretations of dinosaurs from before the age of computer generations. I decided to show you the photographic variations the other day, but I really liked the painting ones too. I liked them too much to just leave them behind, it turns out, and so I am hoping you can bear seeing much the same pictures you've already seen, but with a very different feel to them. 

A hopeless attempt

 

I don't know how to convey it. I'm not even sure it's all that interesting. People at this point ask me everyday about retiring and about moving to France. And sometimes, in some ways, I try to tell them that everything seems exactly as it has always been, but underneath it all my dear wife and I are working tirelessly to make it all... 

disappear.

To all the people I know around here I suppose I will just disappear.

But for us, we're going to make the world, the world we know, go away. And one day, six weeks from now, we'll wake up...

In a different life.

And then, I guess, piece by strange piece, we will start filling it up however we can.

Anyway, here are some pictures from this side.

Dinosaurs on the river

 

Last week I went walking on the river's shore. I love the tangled woods down there, the high river, and the lowlands that so easily flood that the city has more or less left it all alone for a hundred years. It feels rich and ancient, independent and wild. It may not be the abode of dinosaurs, after all, the world of deciduous trees was not the world of dinosaurs, but I find dinosaurs fit in well enough anyway...

The wall of Ting

 

One of the features of my show of pictures (my last show of pictures) at the library has been a wall of portraits that features just one of my colleagues. I started with an array of images of one person whose visage worked particularly well with all my iterations, but he felt a bit shy about his prominence in the show and asked for relief. This was a blessing in disguise because my seventy or so Plexiglas picture frames are insufficient for the quantity of my images and this problem suggested the idea of a rotating feature in the show. Every week or so I have been changing out this section (about a sixth of the total show), to concentrate on one co-worker at a time.

Today that co-worker is Ting!

Ting worked here a long time ago, but only for a brief period, and recently she has come back again to work here once more. She has a lot of energy, which is why for a couple of my images I made her into a superhero called "The Whirlwind". I picture her turning into a tornado to fight evil. Ting is nicely enthusiastic about all my pictures and art, and she comes out nicely in many of my iterations, so she was a natural choice for a stint on this wall of fame.

The following are not all of the pictures that are currently up in the show, but by the same token, not all of the pictures here are up in the show either!

This first image is of The Wall of Ting as it currently is. The rest are the portraits.

The last one is my favorite.