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Chris Jones

@EnswellJones

17 Apr

I'm glad I inherited my mum's stress response—incessant cleaning and tidying—rather than my dad's, which was going outside and throwing his coffee mug as far as he could and then sitting alone for a few hours.

My brother got both: I remember one time he was rage vacuuming and the cord got tangled and he karate kicked that machine in half like he was Bruce Lee.

My brother had no formal karate training, but in that moment, he summoned perfect form from somewhere deep inside himself. He was like those people who wake up from comas and can speak fluent Spanish all of a sudden.

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Chris Jones

@EnswellJones

2 Apr

https://twitter.com/EnswellJones/status/1247916123682725888

It’s been nearly a year since I told my first story here. “Pete Simon Saves the Day” was about kindness—about how one person doing a small, nice thing can change the trajectory of someone else’s day, year, and even life. Today I want to tell a story like that one.

https://twitter.com/EnswellJones/status/1247916123682725888

@brendanhannan

I might get in trouble for this, but I don’t care. @brendanhannan recently left the LA Galaxy football club. He was the media guy there. He was awesome at his job. The relationship between journalist and publicist can be fraught, but he navigated that role with grace.

Here’s all I need to tell you about Brendan: Long before he worked for the Galaxy, he worked for Make-a-Wish as a “Wish Event Coordinator.” Do you know what that means? He made last wishes come true for gravely ill children. Now you know exactly the kind of guy he is.

Read 14 tweets

Chris Jones

@EnswellJones

26 Mar

When my VERY REAL GIRLFRIEND and I started seeing each other, she lived in London. I was born in London, and it’s my favourite city in the world, excepting the acid attacks and knife culture. I’d happily fly there once a month to see them both, my loves old and new.

I always took the same flight, Toronto to Heathrow. I flew on my Canadian passport, and most of the time the customs line for foreigners wasn’t too bad. But one summer evening, I arrived to a customs line that was FOUR HOURS long. There was zero wait for UK citizens.

I had my old British passport on me, but it was expired. That’s… an understatement. I was 45 at the time. My UK passport was from 1988, when I was 15. It was an old black hardback, and my very common name was WRITTEN ON IT IN PEN. All the security features of a tent.

Read 12 tweets

Chris Jones

@EnswellJones

19 Mar

In 2009, I was lucky enough to spend time with Roger Ebert. I’d seen him on TV when I was a kid, but I came to admire him more through his blog. He had cancer in his jaw, and the surgery left him unable to eat, drink, or talk. But he could still write, and he wrote up a storm.

At first he wanted to do our interview by email, but I convinced him to let me visit him in Chicago. He later said that it was an “inexplicable instinct” that made him say yes. We were both nervous, I think—neither of us knew how conversation would work. We worried for nothing.

Roger talked at home using text-to-speech software. When we were out, he replied to my questions by writing his answers on blue Post-it Notes and passing them to me to read. Sometimes we’d get on a roll, and notes would fill the air between us like confetti.

Read 13 tweets

Chris Jones

@EnswellJones

12 Mar

Long story short, a magazine writer who had wronged some of my friends tweeted that his dream story was a profile of Carrot Top. So I called my Esquire editor, Peter, and said I’d always wanted to write a profile of Carrot Top. A few days later, I was on a plane to Las Vegas.

I first met Carrot Top—his real name is Scott—backstage at the Luxor, where he performs 240 nights a year. The first words out of Scott’s mouth were: “So what’s the joke?” He thought I must be there to rip him to shreds. I promised him I was not. I don’t think he believed me.

I watched him that night, and I laughed really, really hard. You might be thinking: Bullshit. You don’t know. I watched him, like, six times that week, and he always put on a great show. One night, a woman shit her pants. She laughed until she dropped a deuce right in her chair.

Read 14 tweets

Chris Jones

@EnswellJones

26 Feb

By request, here is the story of an unfortunate airport incident involving my CBC T-shirt. I come off badly in it, but some context is necessary: I had just landed, barely, at Pearson in Toronto. It was a PAN PAN emergency. My flight made the news. This was my plane.

We had lost hydraulic power and flown over Lake Ontario to dump fuel. It was 20 minutes of pure fear. I had literally written farewell notes to my kids. I was not in a good mental place, and then I entered Customs to find a crowd of thousands. I was molten-lava hot.

Anyway, there was this guy, maybe 50 years old, in line in front of me. He was there with his wife and two daughters, who I’d guess were 21 and 19. While we were waiting, he kept looking back at me, and at my awesome CBC T-shirt (pictured), with this puzzled look on his face.

Read 15 tweets

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