Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

by David Sedaris

“No!” screams McKinley or Madison, Kennedy or Lincoln or beet-faced baby Reagan. Looking on, I always want to intervene. “Listen,” I’d like to say, “I’m not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap that child across the face. It won’t stop its crying, but at least now it’ll be doing it for a good reason.”

In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: “Shut up.” That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off. Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognized it for what it was: crap. They did not live in a child’s house, we lived in theirs.

If you don’t think a mental patient has the right to bring a sawed-off shotgun to the church where his ex-girlfriend is getting married, you’re part of the problem.

We’d all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it.

And isn’t that the joy of foreign travel—there’s always something to scratch your head over. You don’t have to be fluent in order to wonder. Rather, you can sit there with your mouth open, not exactly dumb, just speechless.

I felt left out and remember asking my father why it never happened to me. “Well, think about it,” he said. “Exposing yourself to a girl is one thing. Doing it to a boy, though—the guy would have to be perverted.”

Does this make me racist, or simply race conscious? Either way, I’m more afraid of conservatives than I am of black people.

If you don’t want to marry a homosexual, then don’t. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor’s options? It’s like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.

Something’s said by a stranger I’ve been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, “Listen. I’m with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.”

I don’t know why this so disgusted me. If I was a vegetarian, okay, but if you’re a meat eater, why draw these arbitrary lines? “I’ll eat the thing that filters out toxins but not the thing that sits on top of the head, doing nothing.” And why agree to eat this animal and not that one?

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!”

There are problems everywhere, of course. It’s just that without my passport I can’t adequately appreciate them.