When You Are Engulfed in Flames

by David Sedaris

My sister knows the name and corresponding medication for every disease known to man, an impressive feat given that she’s completely self-taught. Congenital ichthyosis, myositis ossificans, spondylolisthesis, calling for Celebrex, Flexeril, oxycodone hydrochloride.

I can never get away lmao

From a distance, her hair looked white, but now I could see that it was streaked with yellow, almost randomly, like snow that had been peed on.

It wasn’t just the messages, but the writing itself that spooked me, the letters all jittery and butting up against one another. Some of his notes included diagrams, and flames rendered in red ink. When he started leaving them for Rosemary, she called him down to the parlor and told him he had to leave. For a minute or two, he seemed to take it well, but then he thought better of it and threatened to return as a vapor. “Did he say ‘viper’?” Sister Sykes asked.

Sounds like schizophrenia

Chaz’s parents came a week later and asked if any of us had seen him. “He’s schizophrenic, you see, and sometimes he goes off his medication.”

Maybe i will be a good doc :')

High school taught me a valuable lesson about glasses: don’t wear them. Contacts have always seemed like too much work, so instead I just squint, figuring that if something is more than six feet away I’ll just deal with it when I get there.

He didn’t understand that it’s all connected, that one subject leads to another and forms a kind of chain that raises its head and nods like a cobra when you’re sucking on a bong after three days of no sleep. On acid, it’s even wilder and appears to eat things.

The first time someone hit me up for a cigarette I was twenty years old and had been smoking for all of two days. This was in Vancouver, British Columbia. My friend Ronnie and I had spent the previous month picking apples in Oregon, and the trip to Canada was our way of rewarding ourselves.

Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren’t.

When New York banned smoking in restaurants, I stopped eating out. When they banned it in the workplace I quit working, and when they raised the price of cigarettes to seven dollars a pack, I gathered all my stuff together and went to France.

Uncle Dick died of lung cancer, and a few years later my mother developed a nearly identical cough. You’d think that being a woman, hers would be softer, a delicate lady’s hack, but no. I remember lying in bed and thinking with shame, My mom coughs like a man.

I answered with a line I’d gotten years ago from a German woman. Her name was Tini Haffmans, and though she often apologized for the state of her English, I wouldn’t have wanted it to be any better. When it came to verb conjugation she was beyond reproach, but every so often she’d get a word wrong. The effect was not a loss of meaning, but a heightening of it. I once asked if her neighbor smoked, and she thought for a moment before saying, “Karl has… finished with his smoking.” She meant, of course, that he had quit, but I much preferred her mistaken version. “Finished” made it sound as if he’d been allotted a certain number of cigarettes, three hundred thousand, say, delivered at the time of his birth. If he’d started a year later or smoked more slowly, he might still be at it, but as it stood he had worked his way to the last one, and then moved on with his life.

While groaning and panting, I gripped the edge of the pool and screwed my eyes shut, looking, I imagine, like a half-dead monkey. Out of everyone in that room, I was the only person with hair on his chest. This was bad enough, but to have it on my back as well—I could actually feel myself disgusting people.

Me

I quit smoking only six weeks ago, but already my skin looks different. It used to be gray, but now it’s gray with a little pink in it.

I’ve often heard cigarettes compared to friends. They can’t loan you money, but they are, in a sense, there for you, these mute little comfort merchants always ready to lift your spirits. It’s how I now feel about macadamia nuts, and these strange little crackers I’ve been buying lately. I can’t make out the list of ingredients, but they taste vaguely of penis.

Because of the electronic wand, I assumed the man had cancer of the larynx. I also assumed, perhaps unfairly, that it was prompted by smoking. What shocked me, standing in that ice-cold garage, was my certainty that the same thing will not happen to me. It’s so queer how that works. Two months without a cigarette, and I’m convinced that all the damage has reversed itself. I might get Hodgkin’s disease or renal cell carcinoma, but not anything related to smoking. The way I see it, my lungs are like sweatshirts in a detergent commercial, the before and after so fundamentally different that they constitute a miracle. I never truly thought that I would die the way my mother did, but now I really, really don’t think it. I’m middle-aged, and, for the first time in thirty years, I feel invincible.

It’s safe to assume that by 2025, guns will be sold in vending machines, but you won’t be able to smoke anywhere in America.

but at the time he was just this kid, slightly pudgy, with a stern haircut. It’s like he went to a barbershop with a picture of Hitler, that’s how severe it was.