When You Are Engulfed in Flames

by David Sedaris

It seems crazy to cut smoking mothers out of textbooks, but within a few years they won’t be allowed in movies either. A woman can throw her newborn child from the roof of a high-rise building. She can then retrieve the body and stomp on it while shooting into the windows of a day care center, but to celebrate these murders by lighting a cigarette is to send a harmful message. There are, after all, young people watching, and we wouldn’t want them to get the wrong idea. We’re

The landscape is best described as “pedestrian hostile.” It’s pointless to try to take a walk, so I generally just stay in the room and think about shooting myself in the head. In a decent hotel there’s always a bath to look forward to, but here the tub is shallow and made of fiberglass. When the stopper is gone—and it usually is—I plug the drain with a balled-up plastic bag. The hot water runs out after three minutes or so, and then I just lie there, me and a bar of biscuit-sized soap that smells just like the carpet.

In Tokyo once I complimented a fellow Westerner on the gracefulness of his backstroke. “It’s like you were raised by otters,” I said, and the way he nodded and moved into the next lane suggested that I had overstepped some fundamental boundary. It’s the same in the locker room, apparently. Someone can have a leech stuck to his ass, but unless it’s a talking one, and unless it personally asks you a question, you should say nothing.