《Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls》David Sedaris

Attaboy

I don't know how these couples do it, spend hours each night tucking their kids in, reading them books about misguided kittens or seals who wear uniforms, and then rereading them if the child so orders.  In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: "Shut up."  That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off.  Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognized it for what it was: crap.  They did not live in a child's house, we live in theirs.

Think Differenter

The iPhone 2 led to the 3, but I didn't get the 4 or 5 because I'm holding out for the 7, which, I've heard on good authority, can also be used as a Taser.  This will mean I'll have just one less thing to carry around.  And isn't that technology's job?  To lighten our burden?  To broaden our horizons?  To make it possible to talk to your attorney and listen to a Styx album and check the obituaries in the town where your parents continue to live and video tape a race riot and send a text message and stun someone into submission all at the same time?

Obama!!!!!

In the last month of the presidential campaign, I tuned in to conservative talk radio and listened as callers considered the unthinkable.  One after another, they all threatened the same thing: "If McCain doesn't win, I'm leaving the country."

"Oh, right," I'd say. "You're going to leave and go where?  Right-wing Europe?"  In the Netherlands now, I imagine it's legal to marry your own children.  Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church.  The doctor might be a woman who became a man and then became a woman again, all on taxpayers' dollars, but as long as she saves the stem cells, she'll have the nation's blessing.

Rubbish

"I say that any company whose products are found on the ground automatically has to go out of business," he said.  This is how we talk nowadays, as if our pronouncements hold actual weight and can be implemented at our discretion, like we're kins or warlocks.

"That wouldn't affect you any," I told him.  Hugh doesn't drink soda or eat Big Macs.  "But what if it was something you needed, like paint?  I find buckets of it in the woods all the time."

"Fine," he said.  "Get rid of it.  I'll make my own."

If anyone could make his own paint, it would be Hugh.

"What about brushes?"

"Please," he said, and he shifted into a higher gear. "I could make those in my sleep."

Day In, Day Out

Then I discovered crystal meth and took two giant steps backward.  The following six diaries amount to one jittery run-on sentence, a fever dream as humorless as it is self-important.  I tried rereading it recently and came away wondering, Who is this exhausting drug addict?

I want to deny him, but that's the terrible power of a diary: it not only calls forth the person you used to be but rubs your nose in him, reminding you that not all change is evolutionary.  More often than not, you didn't learn from your mistakes.  You didn't get wiser but simply older, growing from the twenty-five-year-old who got stoned and accidentally peed on his friend Katherine's kitten to the thirty-five-year-old who got drunk and peed in the sandbox at his old elementary school.  "The sandbox!" my sister Amy said at the time. "Don't you realize that children have to pee in there?"

A Cold Case

If Hugh and I were denied extensions of our visas, we would have returned to Paris or New York, while they'd have gone back to , what?  Beheadings? Clit-oridectomies?  What they had at stake was life-and-death.  What we had at stake was Yorkshire pudding.

The nuisance of visas and having them renewed was something I left to Hugh, who's a whiz at that sort of thing.  There was nothing the authorities demanded that he couldn't locate: our original birth certificates, a hank of his grandmother's hair, the shoes I wore when i was twelve.  People think it's easy to leave home and resettle in another country, but in fact it's exhausting, and purposefully so.  The government's hope is to weed out the lazy, though all it really eliminates are those who can't afford an immigration lawyer.