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With this blog post below I am officially opening the door to Life is a Fountain. The piece below the pictures is pretty much as it was published on Clerkmanifesto, which is what I am now thinking of as the previous iteration of Life is a Fountain. It is thus geared for that audience. Hopefully most posts going forward, which will be simultaneous on both sites, won’t be so specific to one or the other! This one is, but I have spiced it up with three pictures for you in case you are coming over to check things out from Clerkmanifesto and already read this.

 

 

 

 

Life is a Fountain

 

My new website isLife is a Fountain. 

It occurred to me that the Internet has no competition.

Because it has no competition it sets all the terms. It has monopolized the discourse. It lords it over everyone! It has become BOSSY.

So I have decided to create another Internet. 

It is called Life is a Fountain!

The Other Internet.

It’s not quite as big as the Internet you’re familiar with. Actually it’s quite a bit smaller.

You can’t buy stuff on it.

There aren’t any maps and it won’t tell you if your local café is open.

It does not hold a vast wealth of scientific papers or the literatures of ancient peoples.

You probably can’t share with your friends on it, or make travel plans, or find a recipe for every dish in the world, or diagnose your illness, or translate languages, or find a job, or date anyone, or see what movies are out, or conduct business, or play a game, or learn how to play the clarinet.

But,

And I say this with full humility,

I think Life is a Fountain is way better than the regular Internet!

Actually, that might not be full humility. 

It’s probably like two or three percent humility.

Whatever.

Just, check it out. Please.

It’s called Life is a Fountain. It’s at www.lifeisafountain.com.

As I write this no one has ever ever been there!

I consider it the inheritor and evolution of this blog you are reading now, clerkmanifesto. 

Life is a Fountain will be in what is known as Early Access for awhile. That’s a time for me to iron out it’s roughest spots and develop its basic ideas, and for you, if you would only be so kind, to leave your input. There are lots of forms and comment places on Life is a Fountain, and it would mean a lot to me if you left your thoughts on what you like, or don’t like, as I go forward with it.

Life is a Fountain will run concurrently with Clerkmanifesto indefinitely. The posts here will also largely be carried on the BLOG page of Life is a Fountain. But my main energy will be towards Life is a Fountain, and it will be, going forward, the more articulated version of what you see here.

Thank you for reading this, and I hope you enjoy the more Carnivalesque Life is a Fountain.

 

 

 

We were out with a very old friend.

No, she is not particularly old, I mean, no older than my wife and I. It’s just we were all friends from long ago. And we walked on a perfectly beautiful Summer’s night in St. Minneapolis, clear around a lake. The boats were beautiful in it, reflected like a picture from Portugal, in the low flat water. A turtle crossed the path slowly. There was an enormous raven. There were ducks with small babies already paddling beautifully. We kept going on our long walk until we were all sort of hobbling with our own personal ailments. We are old friends after all. 

We sat talking into the night. We reminisced about things we all remembered different pieces of. Then we drove her to her hotel across from a tangle of construction and a lit up Cathedral. Tall buildings surrounded us and, though it was night, one of these was wrapped with screens at the top that showed clouds in a blue sky. I got kind of excited seeing the buildings close up that I can right now turn and see out my window.

We haven’t been out much for awhile.

There is a kind of joy in not missing anything from the past.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was having a drink with Bob Dylan. It probably seems like I have drinks with Bob Dylan a lot because of how much I write about it here. But we just have drinks occasionally and I write several essays about each time we do.

Anyway, we were pretty thick in it with Cognacs. Bob looked up from his snifter and said “I was thinking of retiring to Becketwood.”

Becketwood is a retirement home on the Mississippi River here. I mean, it seems very nice, but not the sort of place one would go if one had, for instance, two hundred million dollars.

“It seems really nice.” I said. “But it doesn’t seem like the sort of place one would go if one had, for instance, two hundred million dollars.”

“I don’t have two hundred million dollars.” Bob said a bit sullenly.

“A hundred fifty million then.”

Bob had no counter to that. 

We sipped cognac.

“I don’t think you’ve dealt with the wage slave service industry so much, uh, lately.” I observed. “You might prefer a more bespoke assistance when you, um, er, get older.” I suggested gently to my 80 year old friend.

He took it in stride with a begrudgingly accepting nod.

I took a sip of Cognac. “You have a hundred and fifty million dollars?” I asked in a hushed voice.

He didn’t answer. But a couple weeks later he sent this fantastically beautiful $7,000 bottle of Cognac to me.

I saved some to drink with him the next time we were together. We were sitting over it when I said “You know what my favorite cover of one of your songs is?”

“All Along the Watchtower?” He guessed.

“Sign on the Window by Melanie.” I said.

I played it on my phone as he took a sip of the deeply colored and subtly scented Cognac.

“Not bad.” He said admiringly.

But I did not know whether he was referring to the Cognac or the song.

 

 

James Joyce

“Dear Hewitt Costello, Equerry, were daylighted with our outing and are looking backwards to our unearly summers.”

book of the day

finnegans wake

It was St. Patrick’s day at the library, but I swear I wasn’t thinking of that at all. I was upstairs shelving in fiction where it gets very heavy at the ends of the “J’s” and the start of the “K’s”, literarily heavy, all James Joyce and Franz Kafka. As I do, compulsively, frequently, and appropriately, I pulled a book off the shelf to take a look. Something about Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, called to me. I think it was the nice old edition we have.

Oh my. This book is splendid! Out amidst the stacks and stacks of books all screaming about their own wonderfulness, but all roughly enough the same with their stories and characters and normal English and all that, I finally open a lauded book and it is MADNESS. I cannot even begin to dare to formulate any real opinion about this thing by looking at the first page. Do you know how rare that is?

You may have read every word James Joyce ever wrote and this is nothing to you. Surely I have opened Ulysses several dozen times and thought how wonderful I might be if I would read such a thing. But today I am here without agenda. There is no way I will read Finnegans Wake. If I didn’t decide to tell you about it I doubt I would have fully worked my way through a whole sentence. A whole sentence… here, let me share a random one with you from the first page of this book:

“Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.”

You can’t see my Google spell check light up like a four alarm fire here, but it has. In fact, I think that sentence just broke my spell check, and more power to it. That spell check and I have never gotten along. And if you’re thinking I only chose that sentence because it was especially fulsome, you are mistaken. I chose it because it did not contain the word 

“bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk”

which is a word that I seriously did not want to have to type. The jokes on me though. I typed it anyway.

It wasn’t so bad.

I took Finnegans Wake downstairs with me to admire on my dinner break, or, as it turns out, to blog about, but certainly not to read. But who needs to read it when I’ve already extracted such joy from it?

So, I wish to you, a late happy St Patrick’s day from “out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.”

Well, I may read it just a little…

read it with help

 

 

 

 

“Suck it yourself, sugarstick!”

leaving the gold in the hills

 

 

 

 

 

 

I want to see the shitty wonderful.

I just want everything to be shitty and wonderful, like it is.

It’s so easy to find, in the world, the shitty. Just look at all this crap around you. Badly run, cruelly done, lying, greedy, cheesy, measly, hard done, selfish, stupid fucking shit.

But wonderful is just as easy. It’s not just the nearest tree you can find, wonderful!, but look at your heart, listen to this song, can you smell the Summer, taste this berry, feel this breeze late at night? Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

But oh the shitty wonderful, where is that? That’s where the trouble happens. That’s the glorious reckoning. I need some shitty wonderful RIGHT NOW.

Stolen and free. Generous frugality. Sloppy, lazy genius. Unmarketable unfashionable ugly loveliness. Failure failure failure shining with the inner light of success.

I was driving home from my almost shitty wonderful job. I was looking for something on the radio.

Then I found it. 

 

 


Racist Sexist Boy by the Linda Lindas.

 

This is shitty wonderful, I thought.

Shitty wonderful, shitty wonderful, shitty wonderful. It was some 10 to 16 year old girls in Los Angeles doing a punk song in the L.A. Library. It was a little terrible and really great. Shitty wonderful.

Maybe it was already too wonderful.

I never understood those too cool people who only liked the great new thing before everyone else found it, and it became popular, at which point they turned their back on it. But maybe it’s this. Maybe they just want the shitty wonderful. 

I looked up the Linda Linda’s and, while I still admire the young people’s spirit, and their song, finding out that their parents are all deeply connected, influential figures in the arts and culture, and that the Linda Lindas have just been on Jimmy Kimmel brought me down. 

Wonderful, yes. 

Shitty, yes. 

But the shitty wonderful was slipping through my fingers.

Who, you ask, wouldn’t want to clean the shit off of wonderful?

But there is a terrible balance to the world. 

There is the horrible law of equilibrium. 

And it says for every time you clean the shit off of wonderful someone, somewhere will snuff the wonderful out of the shit.