David Sedaris

He's as nutty as a vegan T-bone.

It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. "A bow tie announces to the world you can no longer get an erection.

The guilt applies only to those things that are being given away for free.

If some people are __uted,_ are other people __nned_? Can we say that someone has been __esided_ or __vered_?

Scream at the mangled leather carcass lying at the foot of the stairs, and my parents would roar with laughter. "That's what you get for leaving your wallet on the kitchen table.

Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something's gonna get you.

I would later discover it was a bad idea to gather more than two of these people in an enclosed area for any length of time. The stage was not only a physical place but also a state of mind, and the word audience was defined as anyone forced to suffer your company. We young actors were a string of lightbulbs left burning 24 hours a day, exhausting ourselves and others with our self-proclaimed brilliance.

My conscience is crosswired with my sweat glands, but there's a short in the system and I break out over things I didn't do, which only makes me look more suspect.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

Randall, the gay alcoholic in the house next door, boldly peeps through my windows. 'Boy, you sure rock in that chair a lot,' he said last week, his face pressed against my screen. This time I was lying on my bed with Katherine's cats. I'm watching them while she's out of town. I can be very mushy, and he watched me kissing them and saying that all the other cats in the neighborhood were jealous of their beauty.

On a busy day twenty-two thousand people come to visit Santa, and I was told that it is an elf's lot to remain merry in the face of torment and adversity. I promised to keep that in mind.

Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling.

My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering she has hatched a completely different species. 'I think it was very nice of Paul to give me this vase,' she once said, arranging a bouquet of wildflowers into the skull-shaped bong my brother had left on the kitchen table. 'It's nontraditional, but that's the Rooster's way. He's a free spirit, and we're lucky to have him.

The woman spoke with a heavy western North Carolina accent, which I used to discredit her authority. Here was a person for whom the word 'pen' had two syllables. He people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were ready-- so who was she to advise me on anything?

I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, "I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.

The landscape is best described as 'pedestrian hostile.' It's pointless to try to take a walk, so I generally just stay in the room and think about shooting myself in the head.

The walking tour guides one through the city's various landmarks, reciting bits of information the listener might find enlightening. I learned, for example, that in the late 1500s my little neighborhood square was a popular spot for burning people alive. Now lined with a row of small shops, the tradition continues, though in a figurative rather than literal sense.

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.