In the final moments

 

As I write it is Sunday. This morning the worst heat of the city broke back a little, and we went out down to the beach to find a steady breeze blowing in. A bit of cloud cover helped too to keep us cool. It was even cool enough for us to sit in the famous blue chairs of the promenade to look out at the ocean. But it's not the same in the Summer as all the wildness and beauty of it gets covered over by the thousands of people frolicing on the shore, bobbing around in the tiny Summer waves, and boating about the sea in every possible size craft there is. When I'm not driven hostile by the heat I can see their good time and wish them joy in it, but I am always ready to walk on.

We went to the Cours Saleya market for some arugula at one of the sellers we like. I got a garlic, two onions, and some basil as well. At another seller I got an avocado and a surprisingly cheap french olive oil (8.50!), and at a third I bought a very nice looking lemon that was unreasonably expensive, but that's a little bit how they are out of season here.

We had coffee and I a pain au chocolat at the large italian restaurant/cafe on the market that we go to a lot lately enjoying its corner scene, large spaces, and agreeable bathroom. Afterwards we walked through the old town looking for assorted things we needed but didn't find to our satisfactions. With the old city exhausted we headed back through the long Paillon Park that was full of children playing in various spouts and sprays of water.

I took some pictures of flowers along the way in there, and since we've been home I've been playing with those. Though my modification style I developed for these pictures has lead me to employ it with all sorts of other images, I'll stick to my various flower pictures for today's display.

But tonight for me is The World Cup, and the truth is, a World Cup Final is a pretty big deal for me, and so some of what I'm doing today is simply waiting. I am curiously agitated and full of nerves. With the right attitude I could surely see this as winning either way. Although, alas, with the wrong attitude I lose either way.

I'll try to have the right attitude, but for whatever reasons I still have butterflies.

Predictions?

No thank you. If you've been following along in my World Cup coverage I started out with no predictions, developed predicting into a magic trick to alter the future, and now return back to no predictions. It's Schrodinger's World Cup after all. From my side, both teams won, but you, sometime on July 20th or later?

 

That is the winner that was always meant to be.

So let's just look at some flowers, and breathe.

Another day in paradise

 

You may drop in here to clerkmanifesto once in awhile to see what it's like living in a vacation paradise.

It's very nice, thank you.

The ocean sparkles. You sit down somewhere in your neighborhood and look over at some tableau you've passed hundreds of times now and suddenly realize:

Whoa, that's like, incredibly charming!

Which is fun.

People say that when one moves to some fantastic vacation spot as a retired immigrant, there is an amazing honeymoon period that lasts for, I don't know, a few months. Everything is strange and beguiling and better, so much better! The food is amazing! And it's such an adventure. Winter is a joke compared to where you came from. Getting around is a charm and car free. Life is just vacation all the time somehow.

And then suddenly it all comes crashing down, you have a fall, your spirits sag, and oh the work of it all, the daily struggle, the fact that you're in your sixties and have all the pains and struggles of any human. The incredibly slow pace of language learning and the constant confusion and challenge of talking to people dogs every interaction. You can't get a decent corn tortilla or a taco. And suddenly you realize you only know a few people in the whole of your huge french country. Everything is bewildering and uphill.

This lasts for awhile, definitely longer than phase one.

And then, according to this standard charting of the experience, one slowly starts to adapt, to become part of life in your new wonderland. Light slowly starts to seep back in to this dark adventure and one can truly build one's new life over. You begin to understand the language. You accept the place on its own merits. You learn to take the bureaucracy in stride though maybe not with affection. It's just life, but now maybe in a little bit more liveable place than where you came from.

This takes, I don't know, the next twelve years?

I read about this scenario a lot when we were planning to come over. I thought it sounded inevitable.

And it's not entirely wrong.

But, also, it's entirely wrong! 

Which, I admit, is weird. The thing is, none of it goes away. It's all here at once. Nothing about the utter delights of where we are has ever crashed. Nor was the adventure ever not terrifying and difficult. What it really is is that I am still me. I can wake up in the middle of the night with some pain that terrifies me, and that makes me feel that we are spinning a million miles out in space connected to nothing, dreading everything we may soon have to deal with. And then by eleven in the morning I can be being served a cappuccino and a pain au chocolat facing a quaint market that probably started a quarter of a millenium ago and suddenly feel like the luckiest person on the planet.

We're all lucky and damned.

It's just sometimes you can see it really clearly here.

 

There is still the Cote d'Azur

Even though it is in the nineties now where I live, we still go out during the day. We do okay if we stick to the shade and don't move, but that's not what we mostly do. We mostly walk around the city, hugging the shadowed sides of the street, looking for coffee or groceries or whatever we're up to. 

Nevertheless there is this fabulous central square in the old city that we have started frequenting, and, a bit limp from long wanderings in the city, we had a drink and a little food there today while we nurtured the scraps of relief we could from every breeze coming through. After a large beer I was almost dry and marginally comfortable. For a few minutes it all made sense.

But we were soon off again and dripping, looking around at the crowds wondering: "What are all these people doing here? It's so hot!"

I guess they were having a good time. It's a good time here really, right up to the heat death of the universe, which, I am happy to say, has not quite happened yet.

So, while awaiting the heat death of the universe, we walk around, and I still find new things around town after all this time. And sometimes we go to new places. 

Occasionally I'll take a picture or two. 

Today we went out on a hunt for some pants in an outdoor store past the Liberation Market. I had no real success there with the pants, but we did find an interesting Art Deco (sort of?) Jeanne d'Arc church with a golden statue out front. I took some pictures, figuring anything might come in handy for some quiet day on clerkmanifesto. This sort of thing happens most days, so I have a small accumulation of photographs and experiments on those photographs.

Rather than wait for them all to present and organize into their grand themes, or into cohesive collections, I thought it would be nice to share a sampler with you today.

And with that here are some random pictures, some being variations on recent images I've shown, some reflecting on what I've been talking about above. 

I'll let you sort it all out.

Only one team wins a World Cup

 

This may be my last post about this world cup. Maybe not, but what else is there to talk about after this?

The final?

Okay, let's talk about the final right now.

For all my machinations about manipulating the future with my pessimism (which actually worked for once!), we have come to the end of the line. There are no more results to manipulate. Yes, there is another game, but, even understanding myself now as controlling fate, I don't know what to do with it. My magic power has become moot.

Going into this particularly thrilling and enormous World Cup of 48 teams, there were two teams that I loved. Two teams that I desperately wanted to do well. I was happy for some other teams to succeed to a point, and also a few teams I disliked greatly for various reasons that I wished failure upon, but there were only two teams in my heart, all pain and glory and desperate hopes.

There probably should only be one team, but when a person follows a sport with a great and avid interest for many years, and the sport is as sprawling as soccer, things can spread out a little. I have managed to keep to just one team in what is known as club soccer. I like to see other teams do well, but I only live and die on Barcelona. I am crushed when they lose, elated when they win. I love their history, though there is a lot of pain in it, their style of play, nearly all of their players, and, of course, their greatest player of all time, Messi.

But Messi has been gone for years now, and though the spectacle of his time in Miami is great fun, he has been, for maybe five years now, primarily Argentina's Messi. Meanwhile, in Barcelona, their brilliant young team is the backbone of the Spanish national team, with Lamine Yamal, Pau Cubarsi, Pedri, and Dani Olmo shining particularly bright in this World Cup, but with many other important Barcelona players in the team contributing at various levels. Indeed, Spain feels almost like an extension of my own Barcelona club team.

Argentina, Spain.

Even if you are barely paying attention to this world cup, those teams may be faintly familiar sounding to you about now. They are playing in the final Sunday.

Against each other.

Whispering behind my pessimistic plans and my conviction that all must be hopeless before France, was one insane, almost impossible seeming dream:

Spain vs Argentina.

What if it was Spain vs Argentina? 

Trust me. I didn't think about it. It felt like the faintest light could kill it. But there wasn't a single moment where I could fully keep it quiet.

But I guess I kept it dark enough, because here it is.

And now that I have it, Spain vs Argentina, I, who usually have some kind of an answer to everything, don't have an answer. And so I ask you.

I ask you!

I ask you:

Like the dog who chases cars, I have caught one.

What on earth do I do with this?

Mighty Casey

 

I fully expected France to win The World Cup.

And I can admit now that it is not just the phenomenal talent on the team: Dembele, Olise, Mbappe, etc., but it is also that, and this is important, I didn't want them to win.

I DIDN'T WANT THEM TO WIN!

It is a well known and classic strategy to concede the loss ahead of time in these sorts of situations. If one has already accepted defeat, the theory goes, then if one loses it is a mere continuation of the status quo, and if one wins?

It is the most glorious miracle of all time!

So, it is the most glorious miracle of all time then. 

Spain beat France.

Of course, this strategy only works well if one can make a reasonable case for being the underdog, if the neutral press and the bookies are strongly favoring the other side, and probably if the dread team, in this case France, has sailed with terrifying efficiency and sparkling brilliance through the Cup, while my team here, Spain, has merely... er, steadily improved? 

It should be noted that this method only works if you actually believe it. An eeyorish disposition is also a useful asset.

Because Spain looked like the most brilliant team in world soccer, and so also like a seriously better one than France in this semi final, it is worth remembering that this same Spain team kind of only got it together against Portugal when Portugal's best player, Nuno Mendes, went out injured, and then only really managed a win against Belgium when their best player, Thibaut Courtois, also went out injured. 

But I guess we should also note with the wisdom of hindsight, it might be a more ideal situation to start peaking late in the tournament, to improve, rather than to imperiously crush teams you just weren't going to lose to anyway.

Do you want to see me try this trick again?

Argentina is going to lose to England. 

I think they will. 

I believe they will.

Argentina took the opposite strategy to France, they came within a desperate hair's breadth of losing to all those teams they were "never" going to lose to. Like the proverbial nine lived cat, they have died more times than I can count.

I think they might be out of lives. 

And like a clock ticking down, I have been watching the great Messi's moments shrink. When I started watching him well over a decade ago now, there were 15 minutes of Messi magic a game. Through the years it dropped down to a few minutes a game, still amazing. Now, though they are still magical and brilliant, they can be measured in mere seconds.

It is getting very close to dwindling down to one, super dense molecule of the purest brilliance, and then blinking out all together.

Is this expectation of defeat a trick that magically makes it not happen, like with Spain and France?

Oh, I wish.

Bastille Day

 

As I write it is Bastille Day!

Fuck the Bastille!!

I don't think they call it Bastille Day here in France though. It is more July 14th around here, quatorze Juillet, or even La fete nationale. And more's the pity. I'm beginning to think the rest of the world is more admiring of the vision of the French as feisty rebels, tearing down the ruling class's evil and unjust prisons (The Bastille) and then tearing down the ruling classes themselves, than the French are. 

It is not hard to find monuments and tributes to the French Resistance of WWII even in my rightwing city. And what a vision that is, of a country bravely fighting tyranny from within and dying for the cause. There is the only value I can see to all this worldwide Nationalism. But I suspect these resistance monuments are all an indication of a charming and different era now in France. They have lost the thread of the ultimate evil of Nazism as much as they have lost it in Germany and America and Israel and across the world. When I see the far right wing mayor of this city on some glib newspaper here I think just one word, and I think it every time:

Vichy.

Wait, there should have been a celebration!

 

I long ago stopped tracking how many posts I have written for clerkmanifesto. But in looking around in clerkmanifesto's backstage area, thinking I had an old tennis raquet somewhere, I saw the tab for "Published" posts.

Yes, I have unpublished posts.

We'll leave those to my estate to sort out in the (hopefully) far distant future.

Anyway it turns out my "Published" posts now number 5,026.

I have done this now 5,026 times!

Well, not exactly this, sometimes I use different words.

And I used to talk about shelving more.

But enough about me, let's discuss you!

You have now read 5,026 clerkmanifesto posts!

That is

What?

You haven't read all of them?

OH MY GOD. You are going to be so busy tonight! And I'll let you in on a secret in helping you to get all caught up:

I won't say which, but...

There's one of them that's really really good.

Villefranche

 

We've done it. We've completed the Cote d'Azur!

Okay, that's a joke, there are a lot of towns around here, and so many things to see. But we have been to a lot of places now, having lived here for ten months. And I think we had a loose list of places we might like to check out sometime; Eze and Antibes and Monaco, and the mountain towns, and Ventimiglia, and St. Paul de Vence, and Cannes, and the mall on the beach and so on and on and on.

And of course, Villefranche Sur Mer.

But of all of them, Villefranche Sur Mer was by far the easiest one to get to. Though dating back to Medieval times it is so close to our city here that it is practically a surburb. Albeit a very pretty ancient old town suburb on its own cove with a deep water port.

We can practically walk there.

In fact, we almost did, heading out past our port area one day in the early Spring until we realized you have to walk on the road for awhile more, and we didn't want to.

But still, it's just a handful of miles away, so why bother going. I mean, sometimes when something is easy enough you just kind of keep it at hand.

But even though it's not like we're constantly running out on day adventures, we do occasionally bestir ourselves, and over the course of ten months, in the way of things, we ended up going everywhere we'd thought about going.

Except Villefranche Sur Mer.

I mean, it's so close! We can do that one anytime.

Which turned out to be true, eventually.

Maybe you've noticed this too:

A lot of things that are completely untrue suddenly manage to become true. Or, almost everything that is true starts out as something that isn't true.

So this morning, on a hot Sunday, after Argentina and England qualified to play each other in the semifinal of The World Cup, we got up super early (like, before nine!) and caught the train to Villefranche Sur Mer (at ten).

The train is very close to us and runs pretty often. It was crowded with all the people heading up the coast towards Italy with all those vacationy points inbetween. But we only had to go two stops, one of which is still in our city. And the trip barely felt like we went anywhere at all.

We had a nice time walking around Villefranche Sur Mer and saying how we'd like to live there until we understood we do that everywhere and wouldn't really like to live there. We had a coffee in some shade. We explored the secret undercity of Villefranche. We were hot.

Then we came home. It was early afternoon. It was a nice trip.

Maybe I'll tell you about it sometime.

Here are pictures. It was too hot, so I added water to all of them. I apologize if that confuses your understanding of the place.

Why would we leave?

 

We're still planning on moving from this city to another city in France a few hundred miles away. As we originally ran into a terrible time for apartment hunting we're now waiting until late in the Summer season to resume our search. In the meantime, here we are.

Do we hate it here?

Omg no!

For instance, after a long day of paperwork we wandered out to the old town of the city. It was crammed with people, mostly from other places all over the world, and they were as fascinating as ever. We sat in maybe the old town's prettiest square, in front of maybe its prettiest church. We had a spritz and a prosecco, a buckwheat crepe with lemon and sugar, and panisse frites. We watched everything going by, and we talked.

Above us, on the square, was an apartment that was advertised when we were looking for an apartment here, way back when. We tried to move there, but like most listed places, they weren't interested in us as tenants, what with our lack of French history and foreign status. Pleasantly (though very mildly) drunk, I got a bit wistful looking up at the fascinating 300 year old apartments there.

"I can't imagnine wanting to leave had we lived up there." I said in a moment of glow. The evening had turned mild. Some Brazilians set up to make some music and do backflips or something for tips. 

The church next to us had a big plaque commemorating the local dead of WWI. There were about 40 names which didn't seem like that many. Maybe it seemed like a lot to the guy chiseling the names into that stone? Maybe it seemed like a lot to someone who knew most of them.

Probably.

We walked down through the dinner hour to the beach. Old town seemed impossibly full of tables of people dining. Some of those pizzas looked really good.

We walked home along the beach. What a lovely night!

Ask me again.

Do we hate it here?

Weirdly, for no good reason, and definitely very rarely, but,

Sure, why not?

Clouds in the South of France

 

I have been so taken in the past by various clouds here along the Mediterranean in the South of France that I've just started pointing my camera at the sky and shooting:

click click click click. 

Et voila! I'm done. 

Oh no! They moved and they're even better now! 

click click click click click click!

click click click click click click!

And there it is!

Oh, but now look at it!

click click click click click.

I will never ever miss film rolls in film cameras. I was never rich enough for it.

Nevertheless this is not the easiest way to get a good picture. 

Many months ago, in Theoule Sur Mer, I tried converting my images into something akin to Monet paintings, but the loss of reality was too much for the delicate French reality of the skies. Today, from our kitchen window and out over the hills above a hotel built for Queen Victoria to winter in, on a hot, not particularly clear day, there were the kind of astonishing clouds that had me at it again with my camera.

The same thing happened really, the clouds kept changing and getting better or stranger, the pictures seemed grand when I looked at them one way, and then they looked like I took some pictures of clouds when I looked at them another way.

Which, fairly speaking, is what they were.

But I think I've got a better editing routine this time.

And I like this little series, though your mileage may vary.

I do want to say though that I don't think the clouds here on the Cote d'Azur are better. Yes, there are some things that are better here, absolutely. But clouds? 

One of my favorite things about clouds as they seem to be able to pull it off anyhwere.

Fortunately that still includes here...