Happy-Go-Lucky

by David Sedaris

Ban everything. Purify everything. Moral cleanse everything. Anything that was bad or is bad, destroy it. Especially in the forest, where you live your life as a tree, wielding an axe. —Sigmond C. Monster

One company makes boxer briefs with a holster in the back, which they call “Compression Concealment Shorts” but which I would call gunderpants.

“The first thing you need to know about firearm safety is that most people are stupid. I don’t mean you folks personally, but people in general. So I have a few rules. Number one: Always assume that every weapon is loaded.”

Who would I want to shoot? I asked myself, looking at the silhouette in front of me and wondering if there was also a female version. Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered who I imagined killing. The bullet I fired was so off the mark, my only hope was that my enemy would laugh themselves to death.

Where I live now, in the UK, it’s hard to get a rifle and next to impossible to secure a handgun. Yet somehow, against all odds, British people feel free. Is it that they don’t know what they’re missing? Or is the freedom they feel the freedom of not being shot to death in a classroom or shopping mall or movie theater?

Every school shooting is different but the same. We see the news footage, the crying children, the flowers and teddy bears in a pile getting rained on. There are reports that the community is “healing,” and then it’s on to the next one.

I’d said to Hugh after hanging up with Lisa, “When you’re ninety-five, and Father Time literally knocks you to the ground, don’t you think he’s maybe trying to tell you something?”

Two. Choose one thing to be terribly, terribly offended by—this as opposed to the dozens or possibly hundreds that many of you are currently juggling. Three. Stand up for what you believe in, as long as I believe in the same thing. Those of you who’d like to ban assault rifles, I am behind you 100 percent. Take to the front lines, give it your all, and don’t back down until you win. Do not, however, petition to have a Balthus painting removed from the Met because you can see the subject’s underpants. The goal is to have less in common with the Taliban, not more.

Four. Be yourself. Unless yourself is an asshole. How will I know if I’m an asshole? you’re probably wondering. Well, pay attention. Do people avoid you? Every time you park the car or do your laundry, do you wind up engaged in some sort of conflict?

Five. Always have a few jokes up your sleeve. They come in handy at casual get-togethers and probably don’t hurt at job interviews either, depending on what position you’re applying for.

It’s night, and a cop stops a car a couple of priests are riding in. “I’m looking for two child molesters,” he tells them. The priests think for a moment. “We’ll do it!” they say.

Six. This last bit of advice is one very few of you are going to take, which is unfortunate, as it’s just as important as what I told you about scented candles. And it’s this: write thank-you letters.

Florence, it was said, gave new meaning to the word namaste along the North Carolina coast. “Are you going to evacuate?” “Namaste.”

“It’s so unfair that things have to change because of lazy people.”

Seek approval from the one person you desperately want it from, and you’re guaranteed not to get it. As for my dad, I couldn’t tell if he meant “You won” as in “You won the game of life,” or “You won over me, your father, who told you—assured you when you were small and then kept reassuring you—that you were worthless.” Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them and, in doing so, throw down this lance I’ve been hoisting for the past sixty years. For I am old myself now, and it is so very, very heavy.

What’s the worst thing you can hear while you’re blowing Willie Nelson? “I’m not really Willie Nelson.” And: It’s late at night and a man is getting ready to go to bed when he hears a knock on his door. He opens it and looks down to see a snail. “Yes,” it says, “I’d like to talk to you about buying some magazine subscriptions.” Beside himself with rage, the man rears back, kicks the snail as hard as he can, and storms off to bed. Two years later there comes another knock. The man answers and again he finds the snail, who looks up at him and says, “What the fuck was that all about?”

But suddenly I didn’t see any, which, I mean, isn’t that always the way? When you just want to be left alone, they’re everywhere and super-aggressive. Portland, Oregon’s are the worst. They’re all tattooed there and are stretched out on the sidewalk. Eighteen, twenty years old, with pierced noses and ears with so many holes in them you could likely tear off the outer rims the way you’d separate a stamp from a sheet. “Asshole,” they spit as you walk by with your eyes averted. “Go fuck yourself.”

In America, the talk now is all about white privilege, but regardless of your race, there’s American privilege as well, or at least Western privilege. It means that when you’re in Dakar or Minsk your embassy is open and staffed, and you don’t need to hand out bribes in order to get what you need. That spark you feel when an idea comes to you—This could work. I can actually make this happen!—is Western privilege as well. It may not be certainty, but it’s hope, and if you think that’s worthless, try living in a place where nobody has it. Worse still, try getting a decent hotel room there.

With no traffic to stop me, the only time I’d paused was to read a sign someone had put in the window of a padlocked bar: I USED TO COUGH TO HIDE A FART. NOW I FART TO HIDE A COUGH.

The terrible shame about the pandemic in the United States is that more than nine hundred thousand people have died to date, and I didn’t get to choose a one of them. How unfair that we lost Terrence McNally but not the guy on the electric scooter who almost hit me while he was going the wrong way on Seventh Avenue one sweltering afternoon in the summer of 2021. Just as I turned to curse him, he ran into a woman on a bicycle who had sped through a red light while looking down at her phone. Both of them tumbled onto the street, the sound of screeching brakes all around them, and I remembered, the way you might recall a joyful dream you’d once had, that things aren’t as bad as they sometimes seem, and life can actually be beautiful.

Don’t people who feel vaguely unfulfilled in their relationships just have too much time on their hands? Decide that you need to discover your true, independent self, and the next thing you know you’ll be practicing Reiki or visiting an iridologist.

Neither of us had ever gone so long without shopping—close to a hundred days, it had been—and I wasn’t quite sure who I was anymore.

In this particular case I actually welcomed my mask, as it relieved some of the pressure of chanting, which is something I’ve never been comfortable with. It’s the same with prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. I even lip-synch “Happy Birthday,” so I was glad that my mouth was obscured and no one could see whether or not I was joining in.

I—who, of course, needed to pee—was wondering the same thing: How might I cross? How do I, how do all of us, get to the other side?

He hasn’t got Alzheimer’s, nothing that severe. Rather, he’s what used to be called “soft in the head.” Gaga.

The fabric was agreeable, but the straps, which were too tight, caused my ears to stick out and look like Pringles on hinges.

but I can’t look at my open mouth. It’s the only certified phobia I have.

When conversing, I tend to cover my mouth, especially if the other person has beautiful teeth, which are always the first thing I notice about someone.

Following my mother’s death, had a sorceress said, “I’ll bring her back, but—,” I’d have said, “Yes!” without even waiting for the rest of the sentence. And if Mom and I had twenty more years together, her being herself and me being, say, a deaf mouse who had to live in her underpants, I’d still have counted it as a fair exchange.

Saul Bellow wrote, “Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces.”

The man was right up in my face, his spittle flecking my glasses, and I thought, Seriously? I’m going to get my COVID from you? Why couldn’t it come from someone I like?

A month earlier, at a coffee shop in Springfield, Missouri, I saw a sign for an Almond Joy Latte. For all our talk about health and, worse still, “wellness,” the burning question in most of America is “How can we make this more fattening?” This has long been the case.