Casual
Carlson, Tucker
Casual THE WRITE STUFF I got a new job a few months ago. It happened suddenly. One day, I was writing stories for The Weekly Standard. The next day, I was doing a daily show for CNN. Virtually...
...Before I could throw them away, I had to go through each and remove everything I'd stuck between the pages...
...She begins sentences with, "Actually...
...The room was filled with junk...
...It seems like she has gotten so old...
...looking at it all...
...The first thing I found in my office was the head of a parking meter...
...It was terrific fun, the sort of fun I realize now I'll probably never have again, at least in public...
...I sat at my desk till almost 3:00 a.m...
...There isn't room, and in any case it may be time to stop pretending I'll ever need to look up John Hagelin's 1996 position on NAFTA...
...I had a lot of them...
...A flag from an Elian rally...
...Handbills from a Labor Day protest in Denver...
...And so on...
...We'd been sent out to cover the victory parties at hotels downtown...
...I found pay stubs, hate mail, invitations, travel itineraries, birthday cards written in crayon, notes from my wife...
...I found an entire stack of self-published manuscripts people have sent me over the years, including Donald Trump's autobiography, and something I've yet to see in bookstores entitled "The 21 Unnatural Deaths of Members of Congress, from 1952 to 1992...
...Carlson, this is not a conspiracy theory...
...That's the thing about books and jobs...
...It seems like I have too...
...Tantalizing, but I never followed up...
...Virtually everything about my life changed dramatically...
...The thought made me feel relieved and sad at the same time...
...Most everything else on my shelves had something to do with stories I'd written...
...Propaganda from the Shining Path, Berkeley chapter...
...We wound up getting too close to the story and, well, the parking meter thing happened...
...She was reading a book with no pictures...
...I've been here a long time...
...I have a lifelong habit of using books as file folders...
...A bumper sticker from the Million Man March...
...You think you'll have them forever...
...She drank from a bottle and slept in a crib...
...on Election Night 1996...
...I'd wanted to save all this stuff, and until now it hadn't dawned on me that the books in my office would be a bad place to do it...
...There was the Unabomber Manifesto, the Starr Report, six books by Jonathan Kozol, three biographies of Christie Whitman, five Marilyn Manson CDs, radio commentaries by Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a bound copy of the Natural Law party's 1996 platform...
...Finally, one night last week, I had to face the truth: I'm not a magazine writer any more...
...I knew right away I couldn't take home all the books...
...That one still had a cover letter attached: "Dear Mr...
...Time to unload...
...This wasn't surprising...
...Here was the detritus of half a decade at a weekly magazine...
...It took a while...
...When I first got to the magazine, our only child was seven months old...
...It's gray and pitted and ugly, but it's one of my favorite things...
...I did my best to ignore it...
...TUCKER CARLSON...
...Dozens of mementos from my time on the Hopeless Candidates beat: a note from Lamar Alexander, a green necktie Steve Forbes once gave me after an interview...
...A friend and I liberated it from the streets of D.C...
...It's been a wonderful five and a half years, I decided...
...It hit me when I showed up at the Standard to clean out my office...
...I tossed the meter head in a box, and started going through drawers...
...Then I got to the books...
...I tucked her into bed tonight...
...She is six now, with two siblings...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 24
