New uses for the history of clerkmanifesto

 

As I may have just barely peeped around the corner of improvement for what is possibly the most intense cough I have ever had, it occurred to me that it might be nice to take care of clerkmanifesto in a way that was gentle on my energy levels.

It takes a lot of energy to cough so desperately and frequently!

And wanting to tell you all about my cough it occurred to me after 13 years of writing clerkmanifesto, and possibly as many as 20 or 30 miserable coughs, I may have shared some of my feelings on this subject in that glorious and exhaustive past.

I have.

I have written about my coughs several times, and I found one post that I felt does justice to what seems to be going on with my coughing right now. 

I think its just the sort of thing to read about on a lazy Sunday afternoon while at least some of us are coughing our lungs out, though we may just barely be starting to improve. 

And so here it is again:

From 2018:

Unlike in yesterday's missive, I will not be ceaselessly interrupting my comments here to cough. Well, I will be, but I won't be narrating it.

But let us take a moment now to reflect on The Cough. What a clever little piece of engineering it really is. One has this whole, essential, air system, with the lungs at the core. And they are really exposed to quite a bit, I mean, they are exposed to pretty much anything in the world. So there's this mucus stuff to protect the system. And if something nasty gets into it, or some virus invades, the mucus goes into overtime and throws itself mercilessly over everything, rendering it mute and neutral. But now one has to bundle this huge amount of cleverly used mucus out of the lungs and trachea and pipes and all that. How is one supposed to get rid of this stuff?


That is what The Cough is a solution to. Get a breathful of air. Compress it in one's lungs, and then blow it out one's throat in an explosion that blasts out the used up mucus into the mouth where it can be properly discarded. 

So the solution to getting stuff out of the lungs? An explosion made of the air that's just sitting there anyway. It's brilliant.

Unfortunately it is pure misery for everyone involved in the process. One could easily use this to prove that the universe is fantastically clever, but cold to the point of sociopathology. But I prefer to picture someone so wildly carried away with a piece of fantastic design that they forgot it was going to be used on real subjects. Although it might all be the same thing. There is no god, really, it's just one great big Mad Scientist.

Storybook city

Continuing from where we left off yesterday, with a selection of my local collected street photography that I've taken here in the Belle Epoque City. These are peppered with an array of storybook characters quietly occupying the available spaces of the images. I leave it to you to suss them out as you like, or just take them overall as pleasant views of my city as Summer approaches. 

Everybody visits this city, so surely do these people as well, and no need to make them uncomfortable with a lot of gawping and fuss.

 

Street scenes

 

While I am here in our apartment coughing my lungs out, I thought it might be simplest to show you a scattering of local street scene experiments I have been idly playing with. I don't manage to get out much into the city lately, what with the hacking and exhaustion from lack of sleep, so we can count these as more imaginary trips, or even hallucinations brought on by my illness. 

That sounds about right...

Seven colors of the sea

 

Coughing, we walk down to the sea.

We weave along the sidewalks, sometimes side by side, sometimes single file, past the restaurants starting the evening service, past the French Polynesian Chinese bakery that is closed, though I see the super friendly proprietress cleaning a counter inside.

We pass the juice stand and closed antique store, the horizontal striped raincoat store, the ice cream, liquor, and souvenir shops, sometimes those all in one place.

And there, across the road, is the sea, always colorful.

In half a year, it may have never been this colorful.

The wind blows dramatic waves in flashing whitecaps. The wind has also blown all the muddying fluff out of the hues.

Shadows throw the blues into a deepsea lapis lazuli. Sunlight throws specks of gold scudding across the surface, and the aqua, well, it’s what the whole area is named for.

We make our way across the road and the riot of humanity.

We stand at the little rail and watch the water.

In shadow and light, tide and wave, seven colors I count.

Then, back aching, coughing, we make our way, stopping just once for a juice, home.

Two impressions of the city

 

Black and white, night and day, evil and good, pickled or candied, dead or alive.

There’s a lot going on in this city.

There are, every evening, folks staying in 30,000-euro-a-night hotel rooms directly over sidewalks people sleep and pee on.

But as the great Nicolas Cage said in Moonstruck, “I ain’t no monument to freaking justice.”

I just live here.

While living here, we both got something, maybe COVID, hopefully not whooping cough, whose main symptom, besides weariness and a bit of sore throat, is coughing.

So we’re lying around a lot lately, coughing, and two images from our city roaming keep playing out in my mind.

One:

We were in the port area looking for a butcher that might sell a lamb chop, but it was Victory in Europe Day, so it was closed.

We wandered to a main street, an intersection. A crowd silently gathered on the corner.

An accident had taken place.

A motorcycle sat in the middle of the street. A large pool of liquid was under it.

Was it gas? Oil? Or blood?

Ten meters beyond, two people inadequately held a blanket to shield the scene of a man sprawled face down on the road.

He was inert.

There was something unmistakably dead about him.

A woman turned away from him.

“C’est fini.” she said flatly and clearly.

“C’est fini.”

Two:

We are having coffee at a café next to the fish market part of the Liberation Market.

It is not a good café exactly, but it is lovely and charming.

My darling wife laughs and eagerly says, “Look up.”

A large, well-weathered, deeply stained canvas canopy covers us and the whole outdoor seating area of the café.

On top of it is a seagull walking around.

We cannot see the seagull, only his large, wonderfully comic orange feet appearing on the canvas as he takes each step.

In delight, we watch the colorful footsteps of the seagull appear and disappear above our heads.

French flowers redux

 

More flowers, because the French Spring here is turning out very pretty. Admittedly, these are mostly the same flower pictures as yesterday, but given an alternative treatment that I also liked a lot. This one involves seeds and painted sticks, making for something like detailed wicker models of these flowers.