Jonathan Carroll's Blog, page 8

I am my Lists

There is something very satisfying about making a list but I have never been able to figure out specifically why. A monthly feature in GQ magazine asks well known people for their list of “10 essential things they won’t do without.” These lists are often surprising because things on them vary from a rare kind of green tea in a bag together with grilled rice kernels, to a brand of cheap off the shelf available anywhere stain remover for clothes. In other words, what’s essential in your life is...

Dinner’s Ready

Life is like a child’s dream of how a meal should be eaten: first the dessert, which is youth in all its sweet deliciousness. Then the main course — filling but not always tasty or what you want. And finally the last thing on the plate you have avoided until now — the bitterness of Brussels sprouts, which is of course old age.

Dinner’s Ready was originally published in Jonathan Carroll on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Remember Me

In the French hillside town where the novelist Romain Rolland lived and died is a church that contains the bones (or so they say) of Mary Magdalene. The church is giant and ominous but the town is beautiful. On one of the narrow streets leading up to the church is a small store selling photographs and postcards of the town, the church, other things. They are very good, so I buy several postcard size prints. The man behind the counter says he took all of the pictures for sale there. After addi...

Thought from a notebook

The loveliness of dogs carrying their leash in their mouths as they trot happily down the street next to their owners.
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Groups of people standing outside buildings, smoking hungrily around a single large ashtray.
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The homeless carefully arranging stuff inside their many plastic bags. I always wonder what’s in them. What have they chosen to carry with them through their days?
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the small wonderful talent of a waitress bringing six different peop...

I know someone who had a terrible childhood.

I know someone who had a terrible childhood. Not just bad, or BAD, but genuinely terrible. The ingredients of a domestic horror novel, or the worst kind of OLIVER TWIST/Charles Dickens tale of deprivation and woe. Yet this person grew up to be not only a solid citizen, but a gem– one of the few people I know who is truly special in many ways. Is their specialness a result of having had those bad experiences when they were young but prevailing in spite of them? I don’t know. I don’t know if th...

The Museum of Me

When a love goes bad or dies, it changes from being a breathing nurturing part of our every day to an artifact that gets placed in the museum of me. However beautiful or rich it once was, it is no longer alive except in memory. Museums are fine to visit, but they can also be oppressive and static. I can admire all the beauty contained there, but after a while I always want to go back outside to the land of the living.

The Museum of Me was originally published in Jonathan Carroll on Medium, whe...

Second Snow

The dogs had been gone almost three days when she called. “I’m in Phoenix.”

“The dogs aren’t back yet.”

“They aren’t? God, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you worried?”

He licked his lips and looked at a small cut on his finger before answering. “Not yet. They ran away once before, but it wasn’t winter. It’s pretty cold here. I keep wondering where they’re sleeping or getting food.”

The phone against his ear was loud with her silence. He knew she was trying to think of something rea...

Dung Beetle or nothing — today’s questionnaire

Do you pick coins up individually off the table, or scrape them in a sweep from one hand to the waiting other? Whichever you do, is that any indication of your personality?

What goes into your coffee first — the sugar or the milk? Why?

If you smoke, do you obsessively scrape any sign of ash off your cig, or do you wait till a long drooping one is about to fall before you tap it into the ashtray?

Do you look at yourself in the mirror when you brush your teeth, or just your mouth?

How many times a...

Rain Beast, my love

In a heavy rain, I was walking quickly along trying to get there. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a large dog dashing across the pedestrian zone. It was so wet that water was flying off its long coat. It was moving fast and looked so excited that I stopped just to watch where it was going. Standing twenty feet away stood a very lovely, elegantly dressed woman. All in beige, she had long sweeping hair a la Rita Hayworth. She held a newspaper over her head in a futile attempt to keep it dry i...

Meeting the Wrinkled God

photo by Drew Kelly

Listening to a Tom Waits CD yesterday, I remembered a nice encounter years ago. I was in London on a back street near Covent Garden. Looking up, I saw Waits standing in a doorway smoking a cigarette. He was instantly recognizable with that head of broccoli- hair, alligator shoes, and wearing a wrinkled black suit. I’m a big fan of Waits, but who isn’t? As I approached him, I racked my brain for something cool to say to THE MAN. But when I got there, all I could come up with...