Me Talk Pretty One Day

by David Sedaris

The word therapy suggested a profound failure on my part. Mental patients had therapy. Normal people did not.

I didn’t want to kill her, but hoped someone else might do the job

It’s not so much that I want to kill Lois. It’s that I want her to not be alive anymore.

I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.

This entire essay really reminded me of “Requiem for a Dream”

Speed heats the brain to a full boil, leaving the mouth to function as a fulminating exhaust pipe.

Speed’s breathtaking high is followed by a crushing, suicidal depression. You’re forced to pay tenfold for all the fun you thought you were having.

Thinking I must have dropped a grain or two, I vacuumed the entire apartment with a straw up my nose, sucking up dead skin cells, Comet residue, and pulverized cat litter.

The shame was nothing I ever could have conveyed with thimbles or squirt guns filled with mayonnaise.

“Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can’t kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up sometimes, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I’m saying?”

So I can’t help but think of Gob from Arrested Development every time I hear about this particular brother.

When shit brings you down, just say ‘fuck it,’ and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.”)

As Mr. Sedaris I lived in constant fear. There was the perfectly understandable fear of being exposed as a fraud, and then there was the deeper fear that my students might hate me.

I remember only that the laughter was so loud, so violent and prolonged that Mr. Sedaris had to run and close the door so that the real teachers could conduct their business in peace.

What I really want is a cigarette, and I’m always searching the menu in the hope that some courageous young chef has finally recognized tobacco as a vegetable.

That, to my mind, is only three ingredients and constitutes a refreshing change of pace.

Visiting Americans will find more warmth in Tehran than they will in New York, a city founded on the principle of Us versus Them.

I don’t speak Latin but have always assumed that the city motto translates to either Go Home or We Don’t Like You, Either.

The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it’s been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing.

When told I’m like the guy still pining for his eight-track tapes, I say, “You have eight-tracks? Where?” In reality I know nothing about them, yet I feel it’s important to express some solidarity with others who have had the rug pulled out from beneath them.

At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.

I know it sounds calculating, but if you’re not cute, you might as well be clever.

It’s not that the movies have gotten any more strenuous, it’s just that a lot of people are as lazy as I am, and together we’ve agreed to lower the bar.