Happy-Go-Lucky

by David Sedaris

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

There’s a lot I don’t like in this world. There’s plenty of stuff that makes me angry, but the only things I can think of that really offend me, that truly affront my sense of decency, are cartoons in which animals wear sunglasses and say “awesome” all the time. That, to me, is crossing the line. It’s not because the animal in question—some rabbit or bear or whatever—is being disrespected but because it’s training children to be mediocre.

Luckily the state’s lieutenant governor was casting blame on the number of exits and entrances the building had rather than on, say, Greece.

The war on doors has been a long time coming.

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.

I know that people are now taking pictures of themselves at funerals, because when I looked up “selfies at…,” “…funerals” was the third option Google gave me. I clicked on it, aghast to find mourners posing beside the caskets of their dead friends and relatives. Some people had their thumbs up, meaning…what exactly? Great embalming job? Great death?

Then I started asking around and learned that people were entertaining the same crazy thoughts I was: How long would it take me to eat all my clothes—not the zippers and buttons but just the fabric? If I had to do it in six months, could I? If you shredded a sport coat very finely and added half a cup to, say, stuffing, would your body even notice it?

Whenever I couldn’t bear it for another moment, I’d think of all the people who might have actually welcomed a mask—this woman I once read about in a book, for example. She was on a tour of Antarctica, and when she bent down on the ice to admire a baby leopard seal, it leapt up and bit her nose off. The whole thing. So a face mask, for her, would likely have been welcome.

“You know you’re in a place that’s inhospitable to liberals when you see fireworks stores,” Adam said in rural Indiana as we passed one powder keg after another. “Fireworks are guns for children,” I observed. “They’re the gateway drug,” Adam agreed.

In Des Moines I heard about a restaurant that served hamburgers on buns made from compressed macaroni and cheese.

Zombie Burger?