Jon Ronson

I wake up at about half past six, get myself some coffee and between about seven in the morning and ten in the morning, I just sort of drink my coffee and something sort of opens up something in the brain and I can write incredibly well for three hours and then at about ten o’clock in the morning it begins to drain away and for the rest of the day I’m desperately trying to pull anything decent out of my brain.

Nice to have all your stuff in here, it’s nice to have all the things that mean something to you like the little trinkets and mementoes I’ve picked up while on my travels and little reminders, that’s the other thin, when you, when you’re writing on your own too much in a room, you start to forget that anything else exists and you just become this kind of wolf child you know like Casper Houser, that was raised by wolves and then you go out into, into the open air for the first time and you’re sort of recoiling from the human race and, and it’s you know that’s what happens to me when I’m writing too much. Sometimes I’m slightly worried that this room is like a sort of it’s like an alter to me, because I’ve got my book covers and photographs of myself, there’s me with Ian Paisley, there’s me staring at a goat. But you know what I’ve got one thing too many of myself in this room, I’ve got a poster behind the door that says in huge letters, meet Jon Ronson, and as I put it up I thought this is, this is too much, now I’ve got to, I’ve got to tone down the amount of, the amount of myself that’s in this room. 

But I’ve also got, I’ve got, I’ve got a weapon called a predator which was invented by a martial arts instructor at Camp Pendleton in San Diego called Pete Bruco and what you do you can, you can hurt the hell out of people in a number of different waits with this, you can stick somebody’s finger in that and then just tug and you can gouge out an eye, you know, the guy who invented this is like a real maestro of violence. Anyway he liked what I’d written about him so much in The Men Who Stare at Goats that he actually named one of these weapons after me, called it the Ronsonator and now special forces and the 82nd Airborne in Iraq are carrying Ronsonators to inflict agony on insurgents which isn’t great, now I think about it. 

So this is me and Robbie Williams looking for UFOs in Nevada. He called me up completely out the blue saying he wanted to have paranormal adventures and we were going to spend a night in a haunted house and we were going to go on a psychic cruise but we ended up meeting alien abductees in Nevada. It was a great weird adventure that we had, you know like Mulder and Scully or Dangermouse and Penfold.

Here’s me with the Clan. I used to have terrible nightmares as a child of being lynched by the clan but in fact when you meet them, as you can tell they’re sweet, there’s me in the middle. That’s in Harrison, Arkansas. So it’s nice you know, when you die, this is what you’ve got isn’t it, you’ve got these, these little bits of proof that you had, you had great adventures. In the end that’s, that’s I think what matters. You have great adventures and then you wrote them well.