*When You Are Engulfed in Flames*
By David Sedaris. A little list of funny parts.
Listened to this on walks in Almaty in 2022. Sedaris reads this very well. I think the best reading experience is: printed book while listening to the author narrating it. It’s just slower, and you need to have your hand on a dial that precisely adjusts the audio speed.
Okay, favorite jokes (that don’t require pages of prelude):
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I hear. “Can we please just try to have a good time?” This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn’t work. I’ve tried it.
For most of my youth our furniture was chosen for its durability rather than for its beauty. The one exception was the dining room set my parents bought shortly after they were married. Should a guest eye the buffet for longer than a second, my mother would jump in to prompt a compliment. “You like it?” she’d ask. “It’s from Scandinavia!” This, we learned, was the name of a region, a cold and forsaken place where people stayed indoors and plotted the death of knobs.
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.
“But you’re old. Your job is to be happy for me.”
Helen knocked on January 1, just as I was leaving for a cleaning job. “Work on New Year’s Day, and you’ll work every day of the year,” she told me. “It’s the truth. You can ask anybody.” I wondered for a moment if she was right, and then I considered the last little truism she had passed my way: you won’t get a hangover if you sleep with the TV on.
I headed straight for a vase of wildflowers. Hugh had picked them the previous day, and it broke my heart to think of him marching across a muddy field with a bouquet in his hand. He does these things that are somehow beyond faggy and seem better suited to some hardscrabble pioneer wife: making jam, say, or sewing bedroom curtains out of burlap. Once I caught him down at the riverbank, beating our dirty clothes against a rock.
The birds were at it again the following morning. “What do we do now?” I asked. Hugh told me to ignore them. “They just want attention.” This is his explanation for everything from rowdy children to low-flying planes. “Turn the other way and they’ll leave,” he told me.
In preparing myself to quit, I started looking at this or that individual cigarette, wondering why I’d lit it in the first place. Some you just flat-out need — the ones you reach for after leaving the dentist’s office or the movie theater — but others were smoked as a kind of hedge. “Only if I light this will my bus appear,” I’d tell myself. “Only if I light this will the ATM give me small bills.”
In the months preceding our trip to Tokyo, I spoke to quite a few people who had either quit smoking or tried to. A number of them had stopped for years. Then their stepgrandmother died or their dog grew a crooked tooth, and they picked up where they’d left off.
I took the train to Yokohama yesterday and was at Shinagawa Station when a couple got on with their young son, who was maybe a year and a half old. For the first few minutes the boy sat on his mother’s lap. Then he started fussing and made it clear that he wanted to look out the window. The father said something that sounded, in tone, like, “You just looked out the window two days ago.”
