Jurassic France

There comes a time in every year, whether I am working at the library, wandering the trails of the Mississippi River, or enjoying a retirement in the south of France, when I am compelled to add dinosaurs to my surroundings. The first iterations of these kinds of images were probably done in and of the Roseville Library and predated any functional AI's. Back then I would have to digitally cut out meticulously collected images of dinosaurs and carefully match them to scenes of my library, hoping for something approaching realism.

The level we're at nowadays is ridiculously better, and it is only the fact that we have become jaded by what is so easily possible now that prevents what I think is the proper "gee whiz" reaction. Nevertheless...

Gee whiz!

I mean seriously.

These are just casual scenes of where I have been walking around the past several days, which, first of all, is kind of a neat place to live for all our issues with it, and then, more specifically and amazingly, it now has dinosaurs!

While I am delighted to self aggrandize, that is not my point here. This still takes some skills, just not a ton of them. Mostly it is merely the delight in the magic trick that I exult over here, as the viewer more than as the creator. It is a pleasure in such wonderment that I simply hope you might share.

 

The town heats up

 

The first really warm weather since we moved to France is headed our way. The sun has often been strong here, but the cool air rolling off the ocean has always made it pleasant underneath. But now I feel it starting to turn as we quickly approach Summer.

And so perhaps with that weighing on my mind as I've wandered the city the past day or two, I seem to catch a sense of something out of the corner of my eye. Hurriedly I would pull out my phone and try and caputre it. Sometimes I'd just get a blur, but sometimes there is something a little clearer...

More seagulls, more liberties

 

Having excitedly shown some lively seagull pictures the other day, keeping faithful to the real world, I am ready to move on. It's not that these pictures today are fake, or all AI generated, it's just that they take a wider variety of liberties.

These are still mostly from photographs taken during a visit to the huge six day a week market here, called The Liberation Market. For instance, the moon in one of these pictures is real, though it's probably been made bigger. The seagulls are real... sometimes. The building is as is. If all that's important to you, I understand. I like to know what's real and what's not too! It's just, what's real is never what we think, is it?, and the old truth pointer keeps moving like crazy, and sometimes one just has to throw one's hands up.

It's not a pleasant realization but...

The truth is drunk.

Not going it alone in France

 

I do keep an eye on the French immigrant experience as people write about it on the Internet. Apparently it is very hard to make French friends! Sometimes people get very lonely trying to make a life here in France.

Though I guess people get lonely everywhere. Loneliness is sweeping the world.

If I ever decide to try and make a French friend maybe I will see how hard it all is.

So if you want to move to France, you might want to bring a friend with. That's what I did. 

We alone can understand each other's French.

Seagulls and rejoining the city

 

I recently resolved that it's probably simpler and better suited to my overwhelming coughing illness to set aside some of my more visual projects, like drawing and photography. Sitting at home for larger portions of the day made me more inward, and perhaps less inspired to comment so much, visually or otherwise, on the thriving city all around me. Yesterday I could hardly even imagine what I might want to photograph, or what kind of thing I could show you about this city that I haven't shown twice already.

But I am slowly getting better. And today, finding myself wandering the city with at least a little more energy, I found myself once again struck by idiosyncratic moments of interest and loveliness. And for the first time in a week or two the city felt like a canvas again, an expression of my heart, or a story to share with you.

We were over at the Liberation Market today, and passing by the fish selling area, and seeing the back of the old Gare de Sud train station, which I find delightfully lovely even if tragically it is not a train station anymore, I couldn't resist pulling out my camera. It wasn't just the thrilling colors of the day, the brilliant design of the back of the old station's facade, but there was the sheer liveliness of the seagulls too. Their comically grand biology was such a charming augment to the colorful human designs. So I did what I could with the two elements together.

And then, as one fervently hopes when one is photographing, luck struck!

I am ever keen to capture the seagulls here in flight, but I am rarely successful. But for once my timing was excellent and, well, like I said, lucky.

This is expressed mostly in two photographs. I experimented with ai and with turning up the volume on some of my pictures of this scene, but I am a little too proud of these two pictures below to muddy the waters with a lot of fakery. For today I will leave my pictures mainly as they were, the two that were great surprises to me: my first real successes with seagulls in flight (or almost in flight). Yes, I cooked the clarity and color as I would in any edits of pictures, but these are basically my as is pictures taken on the scene as it played out:

Life in France, the update

 

We still go out into the city, or to the beach. We shop the markets. We've even managed to grab a coffee a few times. We work industriously on the move to Montpellier, not entirely knowing if it will work out, but willing to throw ourselves calmly at it and give it a chance.

But mostly still, I just cough.

The nights are worst and I'm counting 2 to 4 hours of sleep a huge victory for any night. I sip tea and pee and I cough every 20 seconds until four in the morning. I listen to music on the couch in the dark, study some French, and I scroll the Internet. There is no more anything of real value on the Internet than there was great entertainments on the television set 50 years ago. 

Astonishing how much things change and stay the same.

What's life like in France, one might wonder who has vaguely dreamed of doing something like what we're doing.

It's almost amazing.

It is shocking how many things have to go right. 

But I am still managing to keep this in mind:

When they do go right, suddenly the strangest thing is how few of them need to.

From the lost files

 

I found this file of some old photos. Maybe I showed them here on clerkmanifesto in the Winter, but I simply can't find them posted anywhere, so, since I'm so busy coughing and could use the break, I thought I'd take the chance and show these, hopefully for the first time, and then be able to go lie down for a bit.

Then I'll start coughing, cause that happens a lot when I lie down, so I'll get up again and make some tea.

These are photos mostly from the windows in our apartment.

Yes, there is always a fox somewhere outside where I live. You just have to look hard enough

Solutions for coughing

 

As the worst cough I have ever had appears to be doggedly persisting I am thinking about how to apply my meager energy in effective ways to clerkmanifesto. I could dig around for unused photographs I have inevitably bulging in my phone and swelling up in already unfindable folders on my desktop. Or I could bring up classic posts from our copious history of missives here on clerkmanifesto.

But the truth is... those solutions seem like more work and energy than just... writing... something...

And despite being utterly exhausted and wracked with coughing, there's still always something to be talked about in this new French country I live in.

Like, for instance, honey.

I am going through a dangerous amount of honey. Decent advice for coughs is pretty thin, but sometimes it seems to all unsatisfyingly come down to hydration and honey.

So I drink a lot of water and hibiscus tea. And I put perhaps a bit too much honey in the hibiscus tea. Unfortunately my last honey, the jar I finished this morning, that I think is from somewhere in central France, had an odd medicinal taste. This would have been fine if it miraculously cured my cough, you know, like a medicine, but it didn't, you know, like everything else in the world at this moment. 

So I might as well get some honey that tastes really good.

My favorite honey in town is sold in the Patisserie around the corner (well, there is a patisserie around basically every corner surrounding our apartment, making for eight patisseries! This is the one to the South and the West). We went out to this patisserie this morning to find they are mysteriously closed until the start of June!

Honey crisis!

There are only about 847 other places where I can get honey near here. That probably makes it sound like an easy endeavour, but it is actually a bit exhausting in my current context. Like, do I have to go to all 847 of them in order to choose?

So we just had to come home and gather strength. 

I'll try to endure plain and sour tea for a couple hours, and then we can stumble out later.

With any luck it will result in something riveting to tell you about tomorrow.

The color of the sea in fewer words

 

Having so recently waxed eloquent (I mean, I tried) about the beautiful colors of the sea here, in heavy clarifying winds, and in the aftermath of rain, we went down to the Mediterranean again on yet another windy day. My cough was bad enough that I had not gone out at all the day before, something I have done every day since we moved here. Thrown a little by the bright day and impending Summer, I was underdressed, but the sun helped. And seeing the same kind of sea I had tried to describe to you, perfect and wild, I thought it might be nice if I could try to show you the colors if I could.

So we walked down to the shore. I took pictures and dodged the waves. I thought maybe I would end up with something I could madly augment to make my case to you. But looking at the pictures, even though in some ways they are a little plain, I did not think there was any honor or manipulation I could enter them in that would give any better sense of the sea today.

So at the risk of being a bit plain, and only because I am so eager to show you the strange and wonderful colors and texture of the sea here lately, I present these photos as they are. 

They still lie, but earnestly, and only in the sense that they undersell it.