frank! do you like david sedaris? if so, do you have a favorite essay?
I've gotten a few David Sedaris texts on my Kindle recently, so I guess that's what my mind has been thinking about recently. This one was the first:
On this beautiful Sunday afternoon, in a moment of profound and sustained tranquility, I looked out my window at my beautiful neighborhood of white brick townhouses and went to the park to take a shit. A family was having a picnic there and it wasn't as secluded as I wanted it to be and they heard me and stared and I took the tiniest of shit, a microshit, the kind you can barely see with your naked eye, and I ran like hell. There was nowhere to hide. I don't believe in anything and I certainly didn't believe in God then but what if there was a guy in there? Some kind of big guy, and the more I ran from him the closer it got. But as soon as I stepped into the house I saw I had shit all over my hands, which were sticky, and I looked and there was shit on the floor everywhere, and I was scared, but all the more determined not to be in that park, and I ran upstairs and put some more, another microshit, on the toilet seat and flushed it and then flushed the whole toilet and put some more on the toilet seat and flushed it but now I couldn't see anything with my eye but could feel with my eye, and the door started to close and now I could see everything perfectly and there was a guy waiting for me in there. I looked down and shit was hanging on the floor in the toilet and everything was so sticky and everything was moving. I had to take it out to the park again. This time I shit into a paper bag, I used toilet paper because it was there in the house. I had just flushed the toilet and the shit was hanging there. I took the bag outside to the park but no one was there and it was hard to find a spot to put it down and I knew it was going to be a long afternoon. So I put it on the ground. A man, a guy, a big man in the park, was sitting on the bench and I took this bag and walked around the corner to a tree and stood there, a little guy, and then I took my pants off because there wasn't enough room to shit, but it had to be done, and I pulled up my pants. And then I heard someone coming. A man was coming in the same direction I had gone. And I didn't know if he was going to see me standing there or not. And I knew if he saw that I took my pants off, he'd be in there forever. And there was no time to run. I just stood there. The man was walking fast, but he was a little man, a little guy, and I held it together. I held it together and stood there on the bench. He stopped in the middle of the bench and I was holding it together and he was holding it together. Then he held his hand up and said, 'I'm going to hold your hand and you're going to let it go, and then you'll go outside and you'll let the bag go and you'll put your pants on, and you'll put your shoes on, and you'll be a normal size, you won't be a little guy anymore.' And I said, 'Listen, mister, you can just come over here and grab me if you want.' And he said, 'I won't do that. But we're going to be very normal and we're going to say a word.' And he said a word. And I said a word. Then I heard a little giggle, a little snicker, and I thought, well, that guy is definitely a little guy and I'm a little guy so we're going to say a word, too. He said 'the'. And I said 'the' and he said 'the' and I said 'the', but now we had something in common, we were two little guys. So we said it together. And he said, 'And now we can go outside, and you can put your pants on and your shoes on and go home to your wife and we can be a normal-size couple and I can put my pants on and you can put your shoes on. And I know we're really funny and no one has any idea what we're talking about when we talk with our normal size, but it's all there, it's really there, I mean if you've ever read one of our books, if you've ever been to one of our dinner parties, but it's all there, it's real, it's really real.' So I looked at him with my normal-size eyes, and he looked at me, and I said, 'Well, what is it?' 'You don't believe in anything, do you?' He said, 'You don't believe in God? You don't believe in Santa Claus? You don't believe that people are born from their mothers' wombs and they're born with bones, but we have the bones, we've seen our bones, it's like our bones are all on our bodies, and the eyes see our eyes and the ears hear our voices and we're a family, we're a couple, and we're real, and what's in the future? What do we do? Will we be able to find love? Will we find happiness? It's real. It's here and it's now and it's all here in front of you.' He was standing up now and he went through what he'd just said, and he said it with so much feeling, and I thought about the word 'family' as I looked at him, and it made me think of the family I had just made in the bathroom with the toilet paper, so I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'Me too. Me too.' And then I could see the rest of the city. And I thought of my family and I said, 'Me too.' And then he came toward me and reached up and pulled down my pants and I pushed him away and I said 'no.' So he said 'I don't have to wait for an answer.' So he went away and I went inside and took a shower. And I thought I would never see that man again. I would never see that man again. I would never go in the park again. When I woke up, it was late in the afternoon. I found a piece of toilet paper in the toilet paper holder and put it in my shorts pocket. I sat on the toilet and I wrote a letter home, in the house, on the toilet paper: 'Dear Dad and Mom, today when I went in the park I saw a man. A big man, a big guy, a very big guy. He came up to me and he gave me a bag and he said "I'm going to hold your hand, and you're going to let it go and you're going to go outside and you're going to put your pants on, and you're going to put your shoes on, and I want you to be a normal-size woman and not a little man anymore." And then he went back to his bench and he sat down on it and he said, "And now we can go outside, and you can put your pants on and put your shoes on and go home and we can both be normal-sized and go home and find love.' And I said, "Well, that sounds nice." And I thought about it. I thought about the word
