When You Are Engulfed in Flames

by David Sedaris

I’ve been around for nearly half a century, yet still I’m afraid of everything and everyone. A child sits beside me on a plane and I make conversation, thinking how stupid I must sound. The downstairs neighbors invite me to a party and, after claiming that I have a previous engagement, I spend the entire evening confined to my bed, afraid to walk around because they might hear my footsteps. I do not know how to turn up the heat, send an e-mail, call the answering machine for my messages, or do anything even remotely creative with a chicken.

it floored me that a ninth grader in Raleigh, North Carolina—on the street where I grew up—could comfortably identify himself as a homosexual. I felt like someone in a ten-pound leg brace meeting a beneficiary of the new polio vaccine.