Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls

by David Sedaris

  lowercase letters

  and lots of

  empty

  spaces.

  I’d love to know how much it cost me to do a load of laundry—something, anything practical—but instead it’s all gibberish. I was living in places without locks on the doors, and perhaps I worried that if someone found my diary and discovered what I was actually like, they’d dismiss me as dull and middle-class, far from the artist I was making myself out to be. So instead of recounting my first day of work at the Carolina Coffee Shop, I wrote, “I did not see Star Wars,” one hundred times in red pen.

  After a few months of place mats, I switched to hardcover sketchbooks and began gluing things around my entries: rent receipts, ticket stubs—ephemera that ultimately tell me much more than the writing does. Then came an embarrassing drawing phase, which was followed by a slightly less embarrassing collage jag. In 1979, I began typing my diaries, jerkily, with one finger, and having the pages bound between hand-painted cardboard covers. This meant that rather than writing publicly, most often in pancake houses, sometimes with a beret atop my head, I did it at home, in a real apartment now, with a lock on the door.

  Perhaps it was this—the privacy—that allowed me to relax and settle into myself. In June of that year, I wrote that gas in four states had reached a dollar a gallon—“A dollar!” I wrote that after our German shepherd, Mädchen II, peed on my parents’ bed, my mother entered a new dimension of cursing by calling the dog, who was female, a “shitty motherfucker.” Finally I was recording my world and writing down things that seemed worth remembering. 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 wanted 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?”

  My diary regained its footing after I gave up speed. Writing-wise it was still clumsy, but at least the focus widened. I didn’t own a TV at the time but wrote a lot about the radio I was listening to. Occasionally I’d tune in to a music station, but I always preferred the sound of people talking, even if the subject was something I didn’t care about—sports, for instance, or the likelihood of Jesus returning within the next few hours.

  Radio played a bigger role in my diary when I moved to Chicago in 1984 and started listening to a weekly Sunday-night program called Getting Personal, hosted by a woman named Phyllis Levy. It’s easy to hear a sex therapist today, but this was not a podcast or a satellite program where you could use whatever language you wanted to. Phyllis Levy was on a commercial station. Both she and her callers had to watch their mouths, thus using words like “pleasuring” and “cavity,” which somehow sound much dirtier than their more common alternatives.

  I often wrote about how understanding this woman was, how accepting. The only time I recall her drawing the line was when a man wanted to have sex in his half-blind wife’s empty eye socket. Looking back, I think it must have been a joke. I mean, really, who does things like that? Phyllis, to her credit, took the call seriously, gently suggesting that with the wealth of other holes nature has provided us, perhaps this particular one was best left unexplored. Coming from North Carolina, I couldn’t believe that this was on the radio. And on a Sunday! I used to listen at the typewriter and copy down the questions and answers I found most compelling. Other people’s sex lives were great fun to write about. When it came to my own, however, I couldn’t have been more discreet. Early diaries mention that “B. came over and spent the night” or that “After dinner M. and I were romantic twice.” There are no details, much less full names. I think I worried that if someone ever read what I had written, the sex would be more embarrassing than, what, exactly? The whining about not having sex?

  While a student in Chicago, my worst fear was realized when someone I’d been seriously dating got his hands on my diary. I was out of town at the time, and later learned that he was hurt, not by what I’d written about him but by his almost complete absence. I’d actually devoted more space to my barber than I had to him, and of course to the goings-on at school. At the start of my second year, I signed up for a creative-writing class. The instructor, a woman named Lynn, demanded that we each keep a journal and that we surrender it twice during the course of the semester. This meant that I’d be writing two diaries, one for myself and a second, heavily edited one, for her.

  The entries I ultimately handed in are the sorts I read onstage sometimes, the .01 percent that might possibly qualify as entertaining: a joke I heard, a T-shirt slogan, a bit of inside information passed on by a waitress or cabdriver. To find these things, I turn to my diary index, which leaves out all the mumbly stuff and lists only items that might come in handy someday.

  Volume 87, 5/15: Lisa puts a used Kotex through the wash, and her husband mistakes it for a shoulder pad.

  Volume 128, 1/23: Told by saleswoman that the coat I’m trying on is waterproof “if it only rains a little.”

  Volume 129, 4/6: I write down my e-mail address for Ian, and after looking at it he says, “Oh my God. You have handwriting just like Hitler’s.” Note: what kind of person knows what Hitler’s handwriting looks like?

  Volume 132, 12/5: Sister Gretchen has her furnace serviced by a man named Mike Hunt.

  Over a given three-month period, there may be fifty bits worth noting, and six that, with a little work, I might consider reading out loud. Leafing through the index, which now numbers 280 pages, I note how my entries have changed over the years, becoming less reflective and more sketchlike. It’s five a.m. in the lobby of the La Valencia Hotel, and two employees are discussing parental advice. “I tell my sons they should always hold the door open for a woman,” says the desk clerk. He is a Hispanic man, portly, with a lot of silver in his mouth. A second man stands not far away, putting newspapers into bags, and he nods in agreement. “I tell them it doesn’t matter who the lady is. It could be a fat chick, but on the other side of the room, a pretty one might look over and notice, so even then it’s not wasted.”

  Here is a passenger on the Eurostar from Paris to London, an American woman in a sand-colored vest hitting her teenage granddaughter with a guidebook until the girl cries. “You are a very lazy, very selfish person,” she scolds. “Nothing like your sister.”

  If I sit down six months or a year or five years from now and decide to put this into an essay, I’ll no doubt berate myself for not adding more details. What sort of shoes was the granddaughter wearing? What was the name of the book the old woman was hitting her with? But if you added every detail of everything that struck you as curious or spectacular, you’d have no time for anything else. As it is, I seem to be pushing it. Hugh and I will go on a trip, and while he’s out, walking the streets of Manila or Reykjavík or wherever we happen to be, I’m back at the hotel, writing about an argument we’d overheard in the breakfast room. It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it. I’ve become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It’s not “Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece” but “Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!”

  Were I to leave the hotel without writing in my diary, though, I’d feel too antsy and incomplete to enjoy myself. Even if what I’m recording is of no consequence, I’ve got to
put it down on paper.

  “I think that what you have is a disorder,” Hugh likes to say. But who proves invaluable when he wants the name of that restaurant in Barcelona that served the Camembert ice cream? The brand of soap his mother likes? The punch line of that joke he never thought was funny? “Oh, you remember. Something about a woman donating plasma,” he says.

  Of course, the diary helps me as well. “That certainly wasn’t your position on July 7, 1991,” I’ll remind Hugh an hour after we’ve had a fight. I’d have loved to rebut him sooner, but it takes a while to look these things up.

  The diary also comes in handy with my family, though there it plays the same role as a long-lost photograph. “Remember that time in Greece when I fell asleep on the bus and you coated my eyelids with toothpaste?” I’ll say to my brother, Paul.

  To heavy pot smokers, reminders like these are a revelation. “Wait a minute, we went to Greece?”

  As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts. By this I meant that I would stop living in a fantasy world; that, while standing in line for a hamburger or my shot at the ATM, I would not daydream about befriending a gorilla or inventing a pill that would make hair waterproof. In this regard too, my diaries have proven me wrong. All I do is think up impossible situations: here I am milking a panda, then performing surgery, then clearing the state of Arizona with a tidal wave. In late November 2011, my most lurid fantasies involved catching the person who’d stolen my computer, the one I hadn’t backed up in almost a year. I’d printed out my diary through September 21, but the eight weeks that followed were gone forever. “Two months of my life, erased!” I said to Hugh.

  He reminded me that I had actually lived those two months. “The time wasn’t stolen,” he said, “just your record of it.” This was a distinction that, after thirty-four years of diary keeping, I was no longer able to recognize. Fortunately I still had my notebooks, and as soon as the police left, I bought a new laptop and sat down to recover my missing eight weeks.

  The first challenge was reading my handwriting, and the second was determining what the notes referred to. After making out “shaved stranger,” I thought for a while and recalled a woman in the Dallas airport. We were waiting to board a flight to San Antonio, and I overheard her talking about her cat. It was long-haired, a male, I think, and she had returned home one day the previous summer to find that he had been shaved.

  “Well, in that heat it was probably for the best,” the man she was talking to said.

  “But it wasn’t me who shaved it,” the woman said. “It was somebody else!”

  “A stranger shaved your cat?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” the woman said.

  I eventually re-created the missing two months, printed them out, and placed the finished diary in my locked cabinet beside the 136 others that are shelved there.

  “What should I do with these things when you die?” Hugh asks.

  The way I see it, my options are burial or cremation. “But save the covers,” I tell him. “The covers are nice.”

  As for seven-year-old Tyler, who knows if he’ll stick with it? A child’s diary, like a child’s drawing of a house, is a fairly simple affair. “We went to a castle. It was fun. Then we went to a little zoo. That was fun too.”

  I thought my account of August 11 would begin with an accident I’d had at the castle. We were in the formal gardens when I took a wrong step and fell down before a great number of people, one of whom shouted—making me feel not just stupid but stupid and old—“Don’t move him!”

  My face burned as I picked myself up off the ground.

  “That happened to me not long ago,” Pam said, trying to make me feel better.

  “It’s what you get for horsing around,” Hugh scolded.

  Tyler said simply and honestly, “That was really funny.”

  I pulled out my notebook and wrote—as if I would possibly forget about it by the following morning when I’d limp to my desk—“Fell down in garden.” I was mentally writing the diary entry, the embarrassment I felt, the stabbing pain in my knee, the sound of my body skidding on the gravel path, when we entered the castle’s petting zoo and I saw something that moved my fall from the front page to the category of “other news.” The place wasn’t much: some chickens, a family of meerkats, a pony or two. In one large cage lived a pair of ferrets and, next door, some long-haired guinea pigs. A woman and her two sons, aged maybe five and seven, spotted them at the same time I did and raced over to get a better look. The younger boy seemed pleased enough, but his brother went bananas. “Jesus!” he said, turning to look at his mother. “Jesus, will you look at those?”

  I pulled out my notebook.

  “What are you writing down?” Tyler asked.

  “Have you ever seen guinea pigs so big?” the boy asked. “I mean, Jesus!”

  The woman offered Tyler and me an embarrassed look. “You shouldn’t use the Lord’s name like that, Jerry. Some people might find it offensive.”

  “Christ Almighty,” the kid continued. “Someone should take a picture.”

  Writing about it the following morning, I’d recall how incredulous the boy had sounded. Yes, the guinea pigs were big—like furry slippers, sizes nine and ten and a half. They were hardly gargantuan, though. Had he possibly confused them with hamsters? The look on his face and his unexpected reaction—evoking Jesus as a weather-beaten adult would—were remarkable to me, and standing there in that dinky zoo, my knee throbbing, my little notebook firmly in hand, I knew I needed to keep the moment forever.

  Mind the Gap

  I said to my father yesterday afternoon, “Do you fancy my new jumper?”

  When he answered, “Huh?” I was like, “‘Jumper?’ It means ‘sweater’ in England.”

  “Right,” he said, adding that it was ninety-two degrees out and that if I didn’t take it off I was guaranteed to get heatstroke or at least a rash, and wasn’t that the last thing either of us needed at a time like this?

  “Ninety-two degrees or not, I still think it’s the most brilliant jumper I’ve ever seen,” I told him.

  My father made some joke about giving it an IQ test, but honestly, by that point, I’d stopped listening. We were in the driveway at the time. He was watering his dried-out hydrangeas, and I was sitting on the bonnet of the car, just waiting for him to call it the hood or some such thing. He’s so stupid, my father is. My mum wasn’t much brighter, but now that she’s dead I’m just trying to concentrate on the good things, like how she paid for me to go to England with my school’s history club. I’m not a member—it’s actually one of my worst subjects—but the adviser, Mrs. Carkeek, let me come anyway because she needed a minimum of twelve students and only had eleven after Kimberly Shank got a B in German and tried to kill herself. It was my first time out of the country, and it really opened my eyes to what stupid cunts the people are here in the United States.

  “How can I be a cunt when I’m a guy?” Braydon Hoyt asked when I saw him at the funeral on Tuesday. He didn’t know that the word means “idiot,” so the more times he asked, the more of a cunt he became. (And to think I once dated him!!!) The problem with Braydon, and with all American blokes, really, is that they’re so literal. And it’s not just me who thinks that way. Fiona, who’s my best mate in England, said that except for me she won’t go anywhere near an American because they don’t know what irony is. She and I met outside the Globe. Mrs. Carkeek had taken the group to see The Temptress, I think it was, but the play was so bloody boring I snuck out at intermission. In front of the theater is a walkway that faces the river, and that’s where I met Fiona. “Fag?” she asked.

  That’s how I got practically addicted to Mayfairs, which, unfortunately, you can’t get in the States. I ask everywhere, and people look at me like I’m crazy. “Blue box? Big picture of a diseased lung on it?” You can’t find Walkers Prawn Cocktail crisps here either, which is another thing Fiona turned me on to. She an
d I talked for almost ten minutes before she realized I wasn’t English. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You’re a Yank? Really? You?”

  At first she was thrown by the way I talk. I don’t notice it myself, but according to Dad and everyone at the funeral, I completely picked up an English accent during the week I spent there. “It’s not just that though,” Fiona said. “It’s your Union Jack jumper, your Doc Martens, your whole way of being.”

  By this she meant my attitude—the way I can look at something and automatically see that it’s complete bollocks. Fiona has that same ability, and we agreed that it’s a double-edged sword. “I mean, sometimes, McKenzie, don’t you look at all these stupid gits and just wish you could be that easily satisfied?”

  It was crazy how much the two of us had in common. Both of us love London, for a start. She wasn’t born there but moved from Coventry when she was fifteen to live with her granny in Barking. I think “granny” is absolutely the most brilliant thing ever to call your grandmother, but unfortunately it doesn’t work in the United States. My mum’s mother just wants me to call her T.J. “I’m sixty-two years old, for God’s sake,” she said on Tuesday when I saw her at the funeral. “I’m young and I’m active, and if you ever call me that again, I’ll wash your mouth out with soap.” I’ve never seen her so mad. “And don’t tell me that in England the soap is called ‘chuff’ or something, or I’ll wash it out twice.”

  My other grandmother—the one on my dad’s side—had a stroke last winter, so I honestly don’t know what she said when I called her granny, but she didn’t look too happy about it. She’s out of her wheelchair finally, but if it were up to me, I’d put her back in it. My God, was she slow—took her twenty minutes to get from our sofa to the loo. That means “bathroom” in England. Our ground-floor loo has an old person’s bar next to the toilet. Dad put it in at Easter when Mum got really bad, and I told him I’m not going back in there until he takes it out again.