Jonathan Carroll's Blog, page 4
August 7, 2019
A Writer’s Dream
Something lovely from a few years ago:
An old friend asked me to hand write a sentence from one of my books onto a piece of paper:
“A monster is not a monster if it doesn’t scare you.”
Yesterday they sent this photo with a note attached:
“Your words and handwriting, my skin. Remember how Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ clicks her heels and repeats “there’s no place like home”? This is my sentence. This is my savior. When things go bad and I feel I’m dissolving, I close my eyes tightly and let my he...
August 4, 2019
Failing Upwards
There’s a tailor shop up the street. They do bad work and your clothes are never ready. You can go back there two or three times to pick stuff up. The boss smiles warmly and says “It’s not ready yet,” even though he told you the last time it’d be ready today, guaranteed. The interesting thing about this place is it is always full of customers. I stopped bringing clothes there to be repaired years ago out of frustration. But since that time, the shop has become more and more popular. Why? Wher...
July 25, 2019
A Gravity Thief
Harvey had had a good day. He’d been having a lot of good days recently and knew exactly why. But he wasn’t about to tell anyone the…
July 14, 2019
Crimes of the Face
My father was a careful man. He taught us to count our change before leaving a store, check the tires on our bikes before taking them out…
July 11, 2019
Reverse Cinderella
Up the street from my apartment is a hot dog stand (wurstelstand, to you German speakers). The food there is only so-so, but the place is open all night and is a popular hangout for people in the neighborhood. Today coming home in the late afternoon I saw her standing there as usual at this time of the day with a small bottle of beer in hand chatting with some of the regulars.
Whenever I see her, even if it’s from one day to the next, I am surprised she is not dead yet. Every time she looks wo...
July 10, 2019
Asleep in Wolf’s Clothing
Look at this hat. The worst, right? You wouldn’t be caught dead in it, right? Whoops, maybe I shouldn’t say that, seeing as how where I find myself at this point in time.
I found it in a two dollar bin on 14th Street. You know, down where all those cheap-o stores are lined up like fifty year old whores, selling everything you don’t want. T-shirts that say “Yes, I am Elvis,” toy robots, twenty dollar stereos.
But I was in this mood, you know? It was a nice day out. Mary and I’d been in bed all m...
Alone Alarm
And they lived happily ever after. Damn it, that was what was supposed to happen! They met, talked, fell in love, he asked her to marry…
July 8, 2019
The Language of Heaven
As soon as he saw her he began to run. He had to. You see a face like that perhaps twice in your life. If you don’t chase it, you’re doomed. Doomed to looking at yourself in a mirror late at night wondering what would that woman have been like? What might have happened if I’d been bold enough to introduce myself? Maybe she would have smiled and come for coffee. Maybe she was as amazing as she looked. Maybe she was cool. Maybe she was hot! Maybe everything in my life would have changed the mom...
July 7, 2019
Works of Heart
How brilliant some people are at counterfeiting love. They’re so good at copying the real thing that even experts, those who have known great love before, are often fooled at least for a while by these cunning works of heart.
Works of Heart was originally published in Jonathan Carroll on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
June 27, 2019
These are a few of my most unfavorite things…
People are always making lists of their favorite things: books, travel spots, restaurants, music. But this morning while on a walk I thought how about a list of the things you really don’t like: most unfavorite food, person, movie, place, song, smell… the possibilities are endless. When I started thinking in this direction I smiled on realizing some of these things are not as easy to pinpoint as one might think.
These are a few of my most unfavorite things… was originally published in Jonathan...
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