Jonathan Carroll's Blog, page 9

The Perfect Anything

The small but real pleasure in life of finding an object that is the absolute best of its kind for you and subsequently knowing you don’t need to look for others anymore because you’ve found THE one. The right coffee, the right roller ball pen, the right breed of dog, the right underwear, the right restaurant, the perfect tomato soup recipe. In many ways life is an ongoing (and sometimes unconscious) series of searches for big things and small. Happiness, a partner, peace, the perfect chocola...

Cool Bullets

I spoke with a woman who once was a Czechoslovakian border guard. She said the Russian mafia often passed through the checkpoint where she worked on the Polish/Czech border. Now and then their cars had various bullet holes in them. There was no question that’s what they were. When they stopped these cars to inspect them, she and her colleagues liked to ask ingenuously, “What are those?” She said the drivers invariably answered with straight faces, “Oh, that’s for the air conditioning.”

Cool Bu...

Old Gold

There are moments in life that usually happen out of the blue, where you remember something you haven’t thought about in years. And as the memory comes and goes, you realize only now how incredibly special the moment was. You’ve needed years more of life and experience to comprehend that experience way back when was like few others. At the time it happened it was nice but nothing more. It doesn’t necessarily have to have been a big or important event either.

Today I remembered a meal with my m...

Water Can’t be Nervous

At dinner that night he told her of his discovery. “I went on a secret mission today.”

Her eyes lit up. She nodded for him to continue because she loved his stories. She loved the way he told his stories.

“You know that apartment down on the third floor? The one they’ve been renovating forever?”

“Yes! We just talked about it last week, remember?”

“Well, I finally got the scoop on it. I noticed around noon every day the workers leave for about half an hour for their lunch break. Most of the time t...

The Woman Who Married a Cloud

How could she ever tell him that? How could she ever look him in the eye and say I’m sorry, but sex with you doesn’t work. I don’t like how you touch me. I don’t like the way you kiss, and worst of all is your smell. She’d read once that if you don’t like another person’s smell it’s because your genes are wrong for each other. An early warning system from the body, it’s saying if you get together with this person and have children , they’ll likely be damaged — so don’t do it. Maybe she could...

Little White Truths

Readers frequently ask if certain scenes in this or that novel actually happened, or if specific characters are based on real people. I guess I wonder the same thing when I read, but why is it important to know? If I were to tell you character X was based on someone I know, or that Y really happened and I was later able to use that experience in a book (in one version or another) because it was appropriate, would that change the book for you? Would knowing where these things came from make yo...

Talking to Ghosts

Often I’ll be walking along and seeing something, instinctively think, “Gee, I wish X were here to see that.” Or I wish X were here so we could see it together and talk about it afterwards. X can be a person I see every day and am intimate with, or someone I haven’t seen in years and have no idea where they are or what they’re doing now. But this thing is so THEM that more than anyone else, I want to share it with this specific person.

More interesting still though is sometimes X is a person I...

My Very Own Loch Ness monster

Sometimes memories are like those huge sea creatures that for mysterious reasons, rise from the bottom of the ocean and wash up on beaches. Some are incredibly rare because they have come from unimaginable depths. It takes five experts to even figure out just what the hell they are. Others are instantly recognizable but still marvelous because of their size, shape, and mostly because they haven’t been seen in years.

Once in a while you suddenly remember something from your early childhood, say...

A November Memory

We were standing on the street talking fast and furious. We hadn’t seen each other in years and were both delighted that coincidence had bumped us into each other for no reason other than a real unexpected surprise.”Hey! How are you?”

While we spoke, city workers were high above us in a canary yellow crane putting up Christmas decorations and lights on the lampposts. They were having a great time doing it, chatting and laughing, horsing around but getting the job done too. Down below we were i...

Breathing You

This came a while ago from MH out in Portland who works there at the wonderful Powell’s Books. It always makes me smile:

“There are many little rewards to working in a used bookstore. One of them is the privilege of being surrounded by old books, to learn about and from them. When people sell their books back to us, you often find personal inscriptions inside. Some are lengthy and heartfelt. Reading them, you imagine the giver had hoped the recipient would cherish it forever, and yet here it i...