Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002

by David Sedaris

If nothing else, a diary teaches you what you’re interested in.

An entirely different book from the same source material could make me appear nothing but evil, selfish, generous, or even, dare I say, sensitive. On any given day I am all these things and more: stupid, cheerful, misanthropic, cruel, narrow-minded, open, petty—the list goes on and on.

You never know whose hand you’re going to shake.

That’s the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it.

I started the day with a ceramic pig but abandoned it after it got to be a drag to carry.

June 23, 1978 Chapel Hill I have $211 and it doesn’t make any sense.

We began the Bosc pears today, just me and Jesus.

My first ride was with a Catholic priest. He was in robes and had a rifle in the backseat. Later I found $14.50 worth of unwrapped gay-sex magazines in the woods when I hiked off the road to pee. What are the chances?

Sylvia from the employment office invited me to have dinner with her family. Everyone ate something different: her husband, meat loaf; her grandson, a pork chop; me, a hamburger; and her, cottage cheese. She played Fiddler on the Roof and danced around her kitchen. What a delight she is.

In a week I could be in Ohio, or I could still be here.

It’s humiliating to have to look busy.

It’s so hard to put things into focus right now. Maybe in a few years I can make sense of this fall in Oregon. These are just notes. By then, though, this time will be touched by sentiment.

Gas in four states is now selling for over $1 a gallon. I’d love to work in a service station just so I could hear people complain. Apartment life is good. I’m using my ironing board as a kitchen table.

I dropped my telephone again. Now it never rings and I have to guess if someone is trying to contact me.

Half the people I know have dead animals in their freezers: reptiles, birds, mammals. Is that normal?

Dad says, “A guy needs a place where he can gaze into the ocean and sort things out.”

I had a cheeseburger for breakfast and then plastered Daisy Leach’s hallway. On her refrigerator is posted a recipe for “Granny’s Bible Cake.” Ingredients include John chapters 12 through 18, Matthew chapter 3, and a pinch of Leviticus.

I didn’t apply because if they hired me, I’d have to miss All Things Considered every night.

1982

He has red hair, an ex-wife, and a three-year-old daughter.

Today I broke a rake, a shovel, and a hammer—every tool that was placed in my hands. I saw a lot of centipedes under the house. After I crawled through a pile of cat shit, I decided to call it a day and go home.

Chickens look bigger when they’re wrapped tighter.

Mrs. Ewing begins stories with the line “You won’t believe this, but one time…”

Ken said that school is one of the few places—perhaps the only place—where we’ll find people who are interested in what we have to say. He’s sort of a pessimist that way.

I can’t believe how good my apartment looks now. I’ve been sleeping in the big closet and will probably continue to do so. That way I can keep the living room completely empty, not a thing in it.

miserabilia.

The woman next door came, asking for a cigarette. Four minutes later she sent her daughter to ask for another one. The next time I just won’t answer. All day long I fend off people who want my cigarettes. It’s not right that I should lose the battle in my very own home.

I found a letter on the ground near the neighborhood McDonald’s. It reads: What I think about my mother My mother is a bitch. Motherfucker shitty ass. Haffer goddamn nigger sucker she raisin’ witch. Shit. signed Charlene Moore

When we dropped her off, Eunice told us that we should come back in the summertime and visit her. She pointed to a space in her dark yard and told us that in warm weather that’s where we could find her, sitting under the yum-yum tree.

My favorite couple sat not far away. They’re old, and it took me months to figure out if they were a man and a woman or two women. Now I know that they’re brother and sister. The two are very kind and always ask after Barbara’s health. Tonight the brother ordered chocolate chip pancakes. Then he picked up the syrup and asked if you pour it over the top, as if he’d never seen a pancake before.

Ted’s mother is in love with Lorne Greene and has watched all of his television programs, even Battlestar Galactica. Now she lives from one Alpo commercial to the next.

stayed up all night and worked on my new story. Unfortunately, I write like I paint, one corner at a time. I can never step back and see the whole picture.

October 26, 1985 Chicago In the park I bought dope. There was a bench nearby, so I sat down for a while and took in the perfect fall day. Then I came home and carved the word failure into a pumpkin.

Q. How did they know Christa McAuliffe had dandruff? A. They found her Head & Shoulders on the beach.

I mean that nothing in the dance world was happening for me, and it was very discouraging until I said to myself, Hey, what about the sculpture? And I knew then that art was really my first love. It was at the core of everything, so I said to myself, Better go back to school. So I moved back here and…yeah, the discipline thing is really important. Now I’m working in metal.” She delivered at least ten monologues this morning, all while smoking and rubbing at the blue circles under her eyes. I sort of love to hear her talk. She’s just burning up with her own thoughts. Tomorrow, she said, she’s driving to a place to buy aluminum.

He spends a lot of time telling you how smart he is, which is odd because, if you’re truly all that bright, people can usually figure it out on their own.

In the mail we received a video guide of new releases. One movie is called Never Too Young to Die. The copy reads, “A vicious hermaphrodite wants to control the country, and only two people stand in his way. [Only two?] The resulting ‘battle of the sexes’ will blow your mind with a heady mixture of powerful heavy-metal music, state-of-the-art weaponry, martial arts, and espionage that makes this exciting action flick a winner.” Times have changed when a hermaphrodite wants to control the country and only two people stand in his way. If he were a black or Hispanic hermaphrodite, he’d probably have a harder time of it.

I like the kind of man John is. He watches things closely and then does nothing with the information.

Last night I watched a made-for-TV movie called Consenting Adult. It was another of those programs about how people with station wagons solve problems.

There was a girl at school who had a weasel, though she called it a ferret. She said it was sweet and would burrow under the covers while she was sleeping. If there was a weasel in my house, I’d move.

February 16, 1988 Chicago Reasons to live: 1. Christmas 2. The family beach trip 3. Writing a published book 4. Seeing my name in a magazine 5. Watching C. grow bald 6. Ronnie Ruedrich 7. Seeing Amy on TV 8. Other people’s books 9. Outliving my enemies 10. Being interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air

I checked The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories out of the library. One of the entries in it is titled “The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts.”

On Thursday I need to fill out forms and order books. I can make people read things! I’m thinking I’ll assign Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Tobias Wolff’s In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, and an anthology called Sudden Fiction because everything in it is short and it’ll make writing seem possible. They’re all great books, but between now and the start of school, I have to figure out why they’re great.

September 22, 1988 Chicago I played my class a taped speech given by a woman named Nancy Sipes. It’s about selling Amway, and while (my sister) Amy and I think it’s just the best thing ever, one of my students thought differently and dropped the course during our fifteen-minute break. Then I was down to seven, but luckily two more students added the class, so now I’m up to nine.

January 19, 1989 Chicago This is the last day of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and on All Things Considered they asked a variety of people how he had affected their lives. The person I most identified with said that after the past eight years, she will never trust a Republican again.

Jackie Disler is a fountain of information. This morning she told me that Hungarians have the filthiest mouths in Europe and are known to say, “Get that cock out of my face that is covered with shit that you used to fuck Jesus.” According to her, fucking Jesus is a popular insult in that part of the world.

I read a story by a Chinese woman whose main character curses her husband by calling him a turtle and a salted egg.

In other news, I heard that a man’s waist should be twice as thick as his neck.

I went to Barbara’s Bookstore to hear Russell Banks talk about his new novel, Affliction. I’d read Continental Drift, Searching for Survivors, Success Stories, Trailerpark, and The New World and liked them all.

Paul enrolled in a technical college in Durham and has been assigned an English paper in which he needs to compare and contrast two things. The teacher said it might be good to compare the people of Raleigh to those who live in Durham. “In this town, folks are curious and will allow you to merge into their lane, while in Raleigh they’re all too busy and stuck-up,” she said. Paul is thinking that for his paper he’d like to compare mushrooms to acid.

I always stay at the IHOP long enough to smoke three cigarettes. I never have four. I love for things to stay exactly the same, but I can’t have this IHOP and New York.