Life is a paradise with room for a thousand improvements

 

On a warm, sunny day, I sit with a pint of beer in the garden café of the Chagall Museum. Olive trees loom over the ramshackle white garden cafe structure, half open to the calm grounds of the museum. Emotional French music is playing. It’s all pretty good.

The white structures of our café are festooned with fake plants, even as the whole building threatens to collapse under the weight of the completely genuine vines and trees growing wild and swallowing it all up. Oddly, the juxtaposition works, though it strikes me as possible that the challenge of putting a café in a grove of ivy and small olive trees, in the graceful garden of the Chagall Museum, in this beautiful city, would be in its not working.

A large tour group of Japanese people makes its way to the tented entrance of the artfully weathered cement museum building. Some of them carry umbrellas, which was a clever thing I saw people do in Kyoto, and that I copied to endure its terrible September sun.

My wife and I both sit here writing at the edge of the shade. This is the extent of our visit. Having seen the museum many times we will not go in again today.

My beer is almost gone and the strong sun makes its way to the tall trees at the west end of the garden.

I thought maybe I’d like to make a list of everything wrong with perfection, but now I’ve forgotten why.

Live from France

 

My cough is much better thank you. It still happens, mostly in a bursting chain, but it is so mild compared to the sleepless week of coughing that I almost enjoy it now. Like after the library I worked at was so visciously busy and relentless for years, and then got quieter simultaneously with our getting a giant automated check in machine. Everything just felt light forever.

It all still feels a little light.

I am floating...

Summer is coming and I am committed to taking my family out for coffees and leisurely drinks in lovely shady courtyards and even sometimes at the slightly pricier beachside restaurants until I have used up all my month's money. In the warmer weather I often have large beers. Today we had a camembert with thyme and honey.

We continue to look to move from this lovely town that's not quite right. Montpellier awaits, which is maybe the right place, but the process is slow. Apartment hunting in France is very difficult. The prices are mostly not bad, but nice apartments, which one can casually see in the multitudes while walking around ("I'd like to live there, and there, and there, and there!") are strangely rare when it comes to the actually available listings. I guess it makes sense. If you had a lovely one bedroom apartment in a 17th century building with patio windows overlooking some postcard looking square in the middle of everything you need, why would you ever leave? 

Wouldn't you just die and be buried there?

The answer is yes, apparently.

We went to Biot the other day, which is another of those medeival hill towns I don't get tired of but my darling wife does a little. It was an easy 9 out of 10 on the Seussian scale. I guess I can see my wife's point: they're all so ridiculously quaint in similar ways. But for me it always makes me lose my mind completely. My brain madly races. "Can we live here?" I ask. Sure, there's practically nowhere to buy food, and everyday would just be spent in the glorious town square cafe, and walking the same enchanting maze, but when I see the charming colors and winding ways my analytical abilities and common sense fall apart.

I just want to live somewhere ridiculously pretty!

It's all in reach.

I didn't take any real, arty pictures of Biot, just a few quick ones from the cafe in the square where we lingered with increasing length over our coffees. So naturally I had to clerkmanifesto the pictures up so they gave off the proper feeling. 

And I added Doris.

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