CarrollBlog 2.28

In the middle of a mini-blizzard yesterday I saw something that never fails to weird me out. It was snowing, it was blowing, it was cold enough so that I was hunched down into my goose down parka and stupid looking Polartec hat. Through squinted eyes and the attacking snow I saw coming toward me a man in a blue suit, white shirt and tie, carrying a briefcase. That's all-- no coat, no hat, no boots, nothing winter. It looked like he had just stepped out of the office, but his bright red cheeks and tousled hair said he'd been out a while. Several times each winter I see one of these apparitions and it goes about twelve inches beyond peculiar. A few weeks ago on a *very* cold day, I saw a guy walk by in shorts and sandals. The cheerful smile on his face said he was quite comfy, thanks. Whenever I see one of these people dressed entirely wrong for a season, something in me presses the PAUSE button. I think-- am I wrong, or is it very cold and that person is a nutball? Or conversely, at the height of summer when you see someone on the hottest day imaginable wearing a heavy coat and hat. Some of these wrong dressers are crackpots, yes sure, but I think most are not. They happen to live on an entirely different body-planet than we do. They've just come visiting for the day.

CarrollBlog 2.27

The well dressed, very old man scrapes snow off the roof of the car and starts to pat it between big bare hands into a snowball. The work is slow and careful. He watches his hands intently. It's plain he has done this many times over the course of his lifetime. But now his tools are rusty and awkward. They can no longer do the happy work with the speed and assurance they once possessed. I'm watching him work through the passenger's window of a car, hoping that he won't see me. When he finishes, the snowball is almost perfectly round, perfectly made. Only then does he look up at the world, his eyes as bright and hopeful as any naughty boy's. He looks around for something, or even better someone, to throw it at.

CarrollBlog 2.26

Maybe I'm a Luddite, a troglodyte, or some other kind of -ite, but be that as it may, I have a real problem with renovations. I rarely can get used to places, favorite stores and restaurants in particular, that have been renovated, re-done, refurbished, rearranged, retrofitted, whatever. The familiar, favorite restaurant that closes for a few months and then reopens all bright and new, but is never the same again. Not the ambience, not the food, none of what you once liked about it. You go there less and less until one day it falls completely off the map of your life. Or the funky little sidestreet bookstore where you spent countless contented hours roaming through the stacks, half browsing, half daydreaming, and where you discovered interesting obscure writers whose words sometimes made your life bigger. But one time I went to visit and the door to the store was locked, the windows were covered on the inside by white painters' sheets, and a sign was taped up saying closed for renovations. My heart sunk because I knew that whenever the place opened again, the ghosts, the singularity, and the eccentric appeal it once had would be gone. They would be replaced by fresh paint, rearranged aisles, bigger windows, refinished floors, and a new electronic cash register that had all the soul of a beige robot.

CarrollBlog 2.25

I will fan you,
with the white moon
on a cove by the sea.

CarrollBlog 2.24

There was a building here recently; an apartment building as I remember. They tore it down and now there's just a large empty lot waiting to be filled again. Empty lots in a city always strike me as vaguely sad things, like a gap in your mouth where a tooth once stood. But right in the middle of this space someone has put a battered easy chair. Next to it is a short standing Christmas tree, or what's left of one sixty days old. When I see this odd scene-- the big empty lot, the blue puffy chair with its own private Christmas tree, a few days shy of March-- I don't know if it's a small glimpse of wonderful, or sad.

CarrollBlog 2.23

Almost every morning two old men have coffee together in the cafe I visit. One of them is the talker, the other the listener, the perfect audience. Both men dress very well-- suits and ties, although it is plain by their ages that both are retirees. I have the impression they are dressing for each other. They like to look sharp in each other's eyes. Now and then during the week I also see them together walking around the neighborhood, chatting, looking in store windows, enjoying the day's hustle and bustle as well as their friend's company. Sometimes I wonder if either of them is married or has children. If so, what do the wives think of their husbands' buddy? Are they happy to have the men out of the house; out from under their feet for a while? Or are they jealous because they know how important this friendship is to their spouse? I like to imagine these men have been pals for years, perhaps
decades. That they have been there all along for each other's history and perhaps played a significant role in it. Yet there is the equally nice thought that this friendship evolved late-- that these guys met for the first time in their sixties or seventies and lo and behold, found their absolute best friend ever in the last part of their lives.

CarrollBlog 2.22

I woke up at 3 am and went to the toilet. On the way back to bed, I heard a strange but familiar noise. One of those noises you know well but can't quite place when you first hear them. I know what it is/I know what it is sort of thing. I shlumped sleepily to the window and looked down at the street. A small orange street sweeper truck was duddling slowly by, doing its job. I thought why on earth is a guy cleaning the streets at this hour of the night? I hadn't seen one of those trucks in months. And then I went back to bed. The suspicious thing is two more times today I have heard and then seen street sweeping machines wherever I have been in the city. Just now walking the dog for the last time, I saw the third doing its loud whizz in front of my building-- again. Like a character in a Hitchcock film or a Kafka story I narrowed my eyes and looked slowly from side to side, sure as hell now some kind of conspiracy was afoot. Something big was going on; these street sweepers were up to no damned good today...

CarrollBlog 2.21

The moon put her hand
over my mouth and told me
to shut up and watch.
-----------------------------
A nephew rubs the sore feet
of his aunt,
and the rope that lifts us all towards grace,
creaks on the pulley.
_____________________
What if everyone you've loved
were still alive? That's the province
of the young, who don't know it.
____________________
A book on the arm of my chair
and the morning before me.
_____________________
The Pilot razor-point pen is my
compass, watch and soul chaser.
Thousands of miles of black squiggles.

from BRAIDED CREEK by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser

CarrollBlog 2.20

A surprisingly large bunch of people sent in their answers to "What have you learned?" I have been getting so many responses that I think the best thing to do is just to keep adding them here. If you are interested, keep checking the entry for 2.20 for new additions.
--------------------------------
I have learned that I cannot fix everything I want to fix.
--------------------
That this too shall pass.
----------------------
Men love to be heroes.

CarrollBlog 2.19

Homework assignment:

CarrollBlog 2.18

I was watching television and bumped into championship poker. I don't like games, human or otherwise, and never play them. I do not know how to play any card games because they bore me cross-eyed. The last time I played Monopoly was thirty years ago. But while watching this program for two minutes, an idea crossed my mind. Despite disliking games, what if I were a supremely good poker player? But I'll never know that because learning the game doesn't interest me at all. Someone once taught a friend of mine Backgammon and for the evening that he played, he won every other game. He doesn't know how it happened and has never played again. Maybe it was just because he's wickedly good at Backgammon but never knew it before that night. So, what if I had the potential to be an outstanding poker or backgammon or whatever player, but because I never go near games, I'll go to my grave not knowing how amazing I could have been? And to take it a step further, what if the majority of mankind is astonishingly good at something or other, but most will never know that because doing it-- playing poker, playing the stock market, crime investigation, jewelry making, chemical research... is something that holds no interest for them. Yet if they *were* to do it, they'd discover they were supremely good.

CarrollBlog 2.17

A talented photographer sent me a picture they had taken of a beautiful woman in close up, posed as if she were dead.
Besides the obvious reasons, this excellent, throughly convincing image was chilling. There is always something extremely disturbing about seeing a very good looking person dead, whether the situation is real (it has happened to me twice), or a model is posing for a photo. That sounds snobby, but the truth is that when we see the beautiful dead, it goes against many of the things we know and believe. For example, beauty is or should be immortal. We know that after death the next step is decay and rot, and we never think of applying words like that to the few things or faces in life that stand apart from all the others and glow.

CarrollBlog 2.16

Seen through a restaurant window-- Four bright peroxide blond women climbing into a canary yellow car.
____________________________________________
It is tulip season. Every flower store I pass these days has large bundles of them for sale, usually displayed on tables outside in the cold. Their vivid colors are a welcome break from the winter's various sullen grays. They always appear in Vienna around Valentine's Day. Seeing them is for me the very first, albeit early indication of the coming of spring even when the weather is rotten. Tulips for sale are the beginning of Spring, horse chestnuts falling from the trees is the first sign of Fall. Doesn't everyone have their own private signs that mark the changing of the seasons?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bird flu has arrived in Austria. On the cover of every Viennese daily newspaper yesterday was the same thing-- a photograph of a hand holding the droopy dead bodies of two white long necked swans that were the first recorded cases here. The image immediately reminded me of some dark tale that Neil Gaiman or someone else witty and wicked might write.

CarrollBlog 2.15

For a while now I've noticed that I no longer get much spam e-mail advertising penis enlargers, sex goddesses, craven sex opportunities or things in the SEX!!!! direction. These days it's almost all stocks for sale. This red hot stock is already taking off! Could Manganese stocks be the next Google? This sleeper stock is about to wake up and rock Wall Street, etcetera. I've been trying to figure out what this switch on the spammers' part means. Maybe the sex angle is simply played out. All the dumbbells who were stupid enough to actually buy penis growers have been used up and now the new field of swindle is the stock market. Or maybe spammers think the new sex is owning a successful stock portfolio. Build it and they will come.

CarrollBlog 2.14

Valentine

by Carol Ann Duffy

CarrollBlog 2.13

a pre-Valentine's Day passage:

CarrollBlog 2.12

One of the favorite tricks of a literature teacher I know is to give her students a very difficult text or poem (like Mallarme's "Sea Breeze") to read. Then she asks the kids what it means. Invariably they'll say we don't know and make it very plain they don't care because the poem is lousy and a waste of time. She says fine-- I'll help you; this is what it means. And she gives a great detailed explanation that clarifies, enlightens and entertains. Students' eyes widen and they begin to purr-- Ahhhh, NOW we get it. Maybe it isn't so bad after all. But then the teacher puts an "X" through her interpretation and says I lied-- that's not what the poem is about-- THIS is what it's about. And she will give them wonderful interpretation B. It makes total sense to them too. But by then they're looking at her skeptically. Someone asks is that really what it's about? No, she'll say smiling, THIS is what it's about and give them brilliant interpretation C. By then all of them are annoyed, frustrated... and fully awake.
They demand to know WHICH IS THE RIGHT INTERPRETATION?
She shrugs and says "Maybe all of them. Maybe none. Class over."
And she walks out of the room.

Carroll 2.11

Once you have ridden on a tiger's back it is hard to get off.

CarrollBlog 2.10

an excerpt from a friend's letter---

CarrollBlog 2.9

Homework assignment:

CarrollBlog 2.8

Heavy snow yesterday morning, most of it melted away by afternoon. Every winter, days like this change a few peoples' lives, sometimes forever. A car is totalled when it skids off the road into a tree. A man slips on a patch of ice, hits his head on the sidewalk and is never the same again. A woman dies of a heart attack shoveling snow in front of her house. The vicious irony of these scenarios is that four hours later all trace of their cause is gone. The streets are clear, the sidewalk is stone brown again, the sky is blue, and the sun looks like your best friend.

CarrollBlog 2.7

She tapped her chest with her fingertips. "We are born with everything in here; everything we need to be happy and complete. But as soon as things start frightening us, we give away pieces of ourselves to make the fear go away. That is the deal: you want it to stop scaring you, so you give it a part of yourself. You give away your pride, your dignity, or your courage.
"When all you feel is fear, you do not need dignity. So you do not mind giving it away-- at that moment. But you will later. You willl need all those pieces later. By then they are gone though; you cannot ask them for help.'"

CarrollBlog 2.6

Years ago when I was teaching, two of my students were identical twin sisters. One of them was strong in math and science, the other in English and history. Apparently their greatest pleasure was taking exams for each other in the subjects where they excelled. They looked the same, dressed the same, took many of the same classes, had remarkably similar handwriting, and liked nothing more than to make people sweat trying to tell them apart. In the faculty room, teachers talked about them with trepidation and how embarrassing it was when they got the distinction wrong. I've thought about them over the years but only recently realized that these girls were interesting mainly because they were characters from a fairy tale come to life. The identical twins who fooled the world into thinking they were each other. Shapeshifters.

CarrollBlog 2.5

"Zombies are the Rodney Dangerfield of monsterdom, the poor relation none of the other monsters wants to admit to knowing. Vampires boast of ancient lineages and dwell in magnificent (if somewhat ruined) estates. They dress elegantly and quote poetry, and while they may not drink wine, you know that if they did, it would be only the best vintages. Werewolves tend to be average joes, ordinary working stiffs who say their prayers by night until stricken by lycanthropy. Aside from a few nights when the moon is full, they're just folks like you and me. Zombies, though? Rotting corpses, ripe and decaying, dressed in rags and covered with dirt, mindless, clumsy, slow, hideous and foul-smelling. The sheriff in "Night of the Living Dead" summed them up perfectly when he said, "They're dead . . . they're all messed up."

George R.R. Martin

CarrollBlog 2.4

The sheepish smile on people's faces when the waitress puts their dessert down in front of them
--------------------------------------
As a girl, she was so unpopular that when she broke her leg, the only people who'd sign the cast
were members of her family
--------------------------------------------
What she said struck him as so strange that he looked at her as if she had a green head.
---------------------------------------------
his empty glass was full of sunlight
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certain perfumes speak of wildly exotic places, or adventures impossible to the person wearing
the scent.
-------------------------------------------------
those times when everything goes so right that you have the feeling the day is in love with you.
-------------------------------------------------
the handsome man with the ugly laugh
-------------------------------------------------
I asked why she fell in love with him. The first thing she said was, "He wore the most beautiful
ties I'd ever seen."

CarrollBlog 2.3

Conventional opinion is the ruin of our souls
Rumi

CarrollBlog 2.2

When I first came to Vienna in the 1970's, the town was full of legless and armless men. I had never seen so many in one place. Trams waited with their doors open a long time while these men slowly made their way up the steps into the car. You held the door open for them and let them precede you into a store. There were frequently crutches leaning against a wall in a cafe or restaurant. When I asked a native about this, he said these men were WW2 veterans and had lost their limbs in battle. Today I saw an old man with one leg using crutches. For the first time in years it brought to mind all those others with their pant legs or shirt sleeves pinned up. You never see them anymore here which I suppose means they are almost all gone.

CarrollBlog 2.1

from a friend in Poland: