Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

by David Sedaris

In his work shirt and underpants, he looked powerful but also cartoonish, like a bear dressed up for a job interview.

Most of my ribbons were for good sportsmanship, a backhanded compliment if ever there was one.

The people I hung out with in my early twenties were middle-class and, at least to our minds, artistic. We’d all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it. No one wanted to call home asking for money, but we all knew that in a pinch our parents would come through for us. It was this, more than race, that set me apart from Delicia, for how could someone on the bottom rung of the ladder not be outraged by the unfairness of it all?

If you want a friend whose life is the economic opposite of your own, it seems your best bet is to find a pen pal, the type you normally get in grade school. This is someone who writes from afar to tell you that his dromedary escaped. You respond that your bike has a flat tire, and he answers that in his country August is a time for feasting. It’s all done through the mail, so he never sees your new suburban house, and you never see the hubcap his family uses to boil water in. Plus, you’re a kid, so your first thought isn’t Yuck, a dromedary, but Wow, a dromedary!

The thing about Hawaii, at least the part that is geared toward tourists, is that it’s exactly what it promises to be. Step off the plane, and someone places a lei around your neck, as if it were something you had earned—an Olympic medal for sitting on your ass. Raise a hand above your shoulder and, no matter where you are, a drink will appear: something served in a hollowed-out pineapple, or perhaps in a coconut that’s been sawed in half. Just like in the time before glasses! you think.

We were in Japan, walking through a national forest in a snowstorm, when a monkey the height of a bar stool brushed against us. His fur was a dull silver, the color of dishwater, but he had this beet-red face, set in a serious, almost solemn expression. We saw it full-on when he turned to briefly look at us. Then he shrugged and ambled off over a footbridge. “Jesus Christ!” I said. Because it was all too much: the forest, the snowstorm, and now this. Monkeys are an attraction in that part of the country. We expected to see them at some point, but I thought they’d be fenced in. As with the sea turtle, part of the thrill was the feeling of being accepted, which is to say, not feared. It allowed you to think that you and this creature had a special relationship, a juvenile thought but one that brings with it a definite comfort. Well, monkeys like me, I’d find myself thinking during the next few months, whenever I felt lonely or unappreciated.

Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.

In the subchapter “Getting Closer,” one learns to say, “I like you very much.” “You’re great.” “Do you want a massage?” On the following page, things heat up. “I want you.” “I want to make love to you.” “How about going to bed?” And, a line that might have been written especially for me, “Don’t worry, I’ll do it myself.” Oddly, the writers haven’t included “Leave the light on,” a must if you want to actually say any of these things. One pictures the vacationer naked on a bed and squinting into his or her little book to moan, “Oh yeah!” “Easy, tiger,” “Faster,” “Harder,” “Slower,” “Softer.” “That was… amazing/weird/wild.” “Can I stay over?”

There’s no discord in Pimsleur’s Japan, but its Germany is a moody and often savage place. In one of the exercises, you’re encouraged to argue with a bellhop who tries to cheat you out of your change and who ends up sneering, “You don’t understand German.” “Oh, but I do,” you learn to say. “I do understand German.”

It was Pat who had made the lunch reservation. The restaurant was attached to a hotel, and on arriving we were seated beside a picture window. The view was of a wooden deck and, immediately beyond it, a small lake. On a sunny day it was probably blinding, but the winter sky was like brushed aluminum. The water beneath it had the same dull sheen, and its surface reflected nothing. Even before the menus were handed out, you could see what sort of a place this was. Order the pork and it might resemble a rough-hewn raft, stranded by tides on a narrow beach of polenta. Fish might come with shredded turnips or a pabulum of coddled fruit. The younger an ingredient, the more highly it was valued, thus the baby chicken, the baby spinach, the newborn asparagus, each pale stalk as slender as a fang.

“Maybe it’s a grieving thing,” she offered. “Maybe she lost a baby in childbirth and this is helping her to work through it.” There’s a definite line between looking and staring, and after I was caught crossing it, I turned toward the window. On the highest rail of the deck was a wooden platform, and standing upon it, looking directly into my eyes, was what I knew to be a kookaburra. This thing was as big as a seagull but squatter, squarer, and all done up in earth tones, the complete spectrum from beige to dark walnut. When seen full on, the feathers atop his head looked like brush-cut hair, and that gave him a brutish, almost conservative look. If owls were the professors of the avian kingdom, then kookaburras, I thought, might well be the gym teachers. When the waitress arrived, I pointed out the window and asked her a half dozen questions, all of them fear-based. “Oh,” she said, “that bird’s not going to hurt anybody.” She took our orders and then she must have spoken to one of the waiters. He was a tall fellow, college age, and he approached our table with a covered bowl in his hands. I assumed it was an appetizer, but it seemed instead that it was for the kookaburra. “Would you like to step outside and feed him?” he asked. I wanted to say that between the wallaby and the baby doll, I was already overstimulated, but how often in life do you get such an offer? That’s how I found myself on the deck, holding a bowl of raw duck meat cut into slender strips. At the sight o...

At home I’d buy a bottle of Bufferin or ibuprofen and leave it at that, but when I’m on tour it’s packets I need—not for myself but to give as gifts to the people who’ve come to see me. Say it’s someone’s birthday or anniversary: I always offer the shampoos and conditioners taken from my hotels. But they provide only so many, and with a good-size crowd you’re empty-handed before you know it. Adults get something for special occasions, but the bulk of my presents go to teenagers, who qualify by virtue of their very existence. Real fun is right at their fingertips, but instead of taking bong hits in a stolen car or getting pregnant in a neighbor’s toolshed, they’ve come to a bookstore to hear a middle-aged man read out loud. And for that they deserve a token of my gratitude. The beauty of pain relievers is that they’re light and easy to pack. On top of that, they’re actually useful. “Here you are,” I’ll say to a sixteen-year-old. “Put this in your purse or glove compartment and think of me the next time you get a hangover.” In ’08, my gifts were pretty paltry. I’d bought eight dozen safety pins in Greece, and while they were foreign, they didn’t look much different from what you could get in the States. Ditto the German Band-Aids. So when Bob mentioned Costco I felt that all my problems had been solved.

This store didn’t have the lightbulbs Bob wanted, so we trudged on to the drug section, which proved equally disappointing. Pain relievers were in ten-gallon jars rather than packets, so I looked around for another gift that a teenager might appreciate. I wanted something light and individually wrapped, and settled, finally, upon a mess of condoms, which came in a box the size of a cinder block. It was a lot of protection but not a lot of weight, and I liked that. “All right,” I said to Bob. “I think these should do the trick.” Putting them in the cart, I thought nothing of it, but a moment later, walking down the aisle with my fifty-nine-year-old brother-in-law, I started feeling patently, almost titanically gay. Maybe I was imagining things, but it seemed as if people were staring at us—people in families, mostly, led by thrifty and disapproving parents who looked at what we were buying and narrowed their eyes in judgment. You homosexuals, their faces seemed to say. Is that all you ever think about? My brother-in-law is around my height, with thick, graying hair, a matching mustache, and squarish wire-rimmed glasses. I’d never imagined him as gay, much less as my boyfriend, but now I couldn’t stop. “We’ve got to get something else in this cart,” I told him. Bob disappeared into the acreage reserved for produce and returned a minute later with a four-pound box of strawberries. This somehow made us look even gayer. “After anal sex, we like shortcake!” read the cartoon bubb...

It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than the head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn’t consciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them.

There was an issue of the local paper in the backseat of the car, and leafing through it on our way there, I came upon a headline that read, “Dangerous Olives Could Be on Sale.” “Hmm,” I said, and I copied it into my little notebook. Tyler did the same but with less conviction. “Why are we doing this again?” “It’s for your diary,” I explained. “You jot things down during the day, then tomorrow morning you flesh them out.” “But why?” he asked. “What’s the point?” That’s a question I’ve asked myself every day since September 5, 1977. I hadn’t known on September 4 that the following afternoon I would start keeping a diary, or that it would consume me for the next thirty-five years and counting. It wasn’t something I’d been putting off, but once I began, I knew that I had to keep doing it. I knew as well that what I was writing was not a journal but an old-fashioned, girlish, Keep-Out-This-Means-You diary. Often the terms are used interchangeably, though I’ve never understood why. Both have the word “day” at their root, but a journal, in my opinion, is a repository of ideas—your brain on the page. A diary, by contrast, is your heart. As for “journaling,” a verb that cropped up at around the same time as “scrapbooking,” that just means you’re spooky and have way too much time on your hands.

Those first several years are hard to reread, not because they’re boring—a diary is fully licensed to be boring—but because the writing is so horribly affected. It’s poetry written by someone who’s never read any poetry but seems to think its key is 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.

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?”

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!”

When I awoke some time later, I was in a different location. Curtains surrounded me on four sides, and through a part in one of them I could see a woman folding papers and putting them into envelopes. I asked her, dreamily, if we had met, and when she told me that we had not, I gave her a little finger wave, the type a leprechaun might offer a pixie who was floating by on a maple leaf. “Well, hi there,” I whispered. Never had I experienced such an all-encompassing sense of well-being. Everything was soft-edged and lovely. Everyone was magnificent. Perhaps if I still drank and took drugs I might not have felt the effects so strongly, but except for some Dilaudid I’d been given for a kidney stone back in 2009, I had been cruelly sober for thirteen years. “Well, that’s propofol for you,” Dr. Holmes would later say. “It’s what Michael Jackson was injecting himself with when he died.” And who can blame him? I’d give anything to sleep so soundly, and to wake each morning on a cloud of such fuzzy love. “I’m going to need for you to pass some gas,” said the woman putting papers into envelopes. She spoke as if she were a teacher, and I was a second-grade student. “Do you think you can do that for me?” “For you, anything.” And as I did as I was instructed, I realized it was no different than playing a wind instrument. There were other musicians behind other curtains, and I swore I could hear them chiming in, the group of us forming God’s own horn section. I’m not sure how long I lay...