Preparations for the World Cup

 

The World Cup begins in a few weeks, and what better place to follow it than Clerkmanifesto, especially if you are not interested in it. 

But maybe you’re only interested enough to wonder who will win.

I don’t know, but pessimistically speaking, and probably realistically too, stupid France will win, which I say with all due respect and love as a person living in this beautiful country. 

The French are a team positively crammed with talent, and they keep winning or almost winning the World Cup so much that we are all worn out by it!

But having started negatively, let me tell you what I really wish for this World Cup, even if I know what I wish for is beyond my meager abilities in this direction.

 I would like everyone to win, so that, whenever anyone does win, I will rejoice: 

Even France, or England, or the Netherlands, or Portugal, or Germany!

Though I think this nice plan would be a lot easier for me if it were Argentina, Spain, or Brazil who won.

In the past I would run a World Cup betting pool at the library which was fun and a lot of work. I actually miss it. There was something about nudging people into a mild interest in the World Cup that weirdly appealed to me and my Quixotic nature.

Luckily I still have Clerkmanifesto for this kind of endeavor. So pick your team! 

Pick your team!!!!!

Post it in the comments.

I mean it.

 

If your team wins you will receive REDACTED BY THE CLERKMANIFESTO LEGAL TEAM. 

I promise.

I know it sounds too good to be true, but on my life I swear that REDACTED BY THE CLERKMANIFESTO LEGAL TEAM. 

So choose a team in the comments below! Dreams really do come true.

For myself I would delight in seeing our ancient Messi get one more World Cup, but I don't think that lightning will strike twice and though willing, I am also ready to move on. 

Always hostile to the soccer vanity of England in the past, I am suddenly finding my heart softened by my beloved club team, Barcelona, having signed an English player in Anthony Gordon. 

Maybe, dare I say it, England has suffered long enough?

And the same for Brazil.

But in the end, and when choices must be made half the Barcelona team is playing for Spain, so I simply cannot resist them. Plus, I choose Football! This is delightful, intricate yet direct soccer, with some of the most dazzling technical players in the world. 

But don't worry. If you're at loose ends you can pick Spain too!

Or Ecuador.

Japan?

Norway?

Senegal?

Curacao?

Wait, Curacao is in the World Cup?

Ah fuck it. Let's just all adopt Curacao.

A note on immigration

 

Sitting in all the heat and loveliness of the Chagall Museum garden café, I suddenly noticed two French flags carefully arranged on the cement facing of the main entrance to the museum galleries. How proud the French are of their French museum.

As an immigrant to this country, I feel a small tincture of delight in presenting this list:

What if the three greatest French painters ever were:

1. Van Gogh
2. Picasso
3. Chagall

Sure, there’s a perfectly fine case for:

1. Delacroix
2. Monet
3. David

But that's just an argument, and not choosing the list with Van Gogh seems like a tough sell.

Did you know that the country with the most International visitors every year is France?

I'm proud to contribute.

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.