Jon Carroll

I'm a hopeless newspaper reader.

I know: newspapers are dying; nobody reads newspapers any more; newspapers are the mainstream media and you know what that means (what does it mean?); you can get anything you want online anyway; blogs are the future; etc.

Whatever.

I like the newspaper: it's a routine; it's there every morning; I don't have to turn anything on; it's quiet; I can hold it in my hand; I can skim headlines all at once; I can get funnies and the weather and the score and the news and Dear Abby (or whatever advice column that particular paper offers, because all newspapers have advice columns, and I'm not one to go out and seek advice columns, or advice, for that matter, out in the hinterlands of the internet, but like everyone else, come on, admit it, I like me a good advice column, if only to be reassured that I am not so badly off and, admit it again, stupid, as lots of other people out there).

I pretty much always read the local paper: in London I read The Guardian and The Independent (and The Sun or The Mail whenever I managed to pick up a copy on the Tube) (really, London is the best place in the world for newspapers); in New York I read the Times (OK, that one I read online wherever I am) (of course also the Post, if I can pick up a copy on the subway); here I read the local liberal establishment paper (and, yes, I will admit that it sucks) (and don't forget the local conservative tabloid, yes, whenever I can pick up a copy someone else has bought and discarded); and in the Bay Area I read the San Francisco Chronicle. And now I am having kind of a spelling/grammar/writing problem, because in London and the Bay Area I meant "read" to be past tense, whereas "here" and in New York, where I am more often these days, at least than when I lived in the Bay Area, "read" should be present tense.

This is important because you need to understand the context when I say that after I left the Bay Area, I kept reading the Chronicle online for a long time, first because I missed the Bay Area, but then because I loved Jon Carroll so much. Jon Carroll is simply the best columnist ever: he is funny; he makes sense; he nicely balances the big issues and the small, as a good columnist should; he has excellent politics; and, really, I think he should be president.

Eventually I had to embrace my life in Red State (where, yes, I read the Red State Capital City paper every day), so I gave up the Chronicle, but whenever I stumble upon it, I check up on Jon Carroll, and today, once again, he is so smart and sensible that I vow definitively to give up complaining about Vanity Fair.