Tag: David Sedaris

Saturday

I painted my nails this morning; something totally out of character and a likely sign of the apocalypse. You should probably stock up on your food rations. I have an aversion to nails; mine, yours and everyone else’s. They seem like an evolutionary mistake. My typical manicure consists of cutting my nails down to the quick and when they start to grow back cutting them again, ensuring that they will never protrude past the ends of my fingers and, god forbid, bend while I’m washing my hair. The thought of bending finger nails sends me straight to the fetal position, clenched hands covering my face. The fact that some women waste countless hours of their lives sitting in a salon while actually paying someone to make their nails longer is completely beyond my comprehension. I can’t be reasoned with; no nails, no bending, simple as that. Today I decided to add nail polish to my nubs in an attempt to make them look happier. While waiting for the sparkly purple polish to dry I’ve been carrying on a conversation via text message with Dean. He’s been away, I’ve been missing him. In between messages I’m treating myself to some tales of Christmas dementia by David Sedaris. I love that there is a review on the back of Holidays On Ice that reads “not remotely politically correct or heart warming”. See there, we are twinsies.

It is Saturday morning and it’s one of those unusual Saturday’s when I don’t have to work. On days like this I like to sit on my bed drinking coffee and enjoy being left alone in my private little world of books and text messages. Therefore I find it jarring and irritating when I accidentally look at my inbox and see an email from an associate with a subject line that reads “did you get my last email???” Yeah, I think to myself, I fucking got it, I just didn’t read it because the unsolicited advice you hammered me with during our last meeting at your day care center, when you made me sit with your children on miniature plastic chairs and eat fucking tepid cheese pizza from Costco while you and your business partner rambled on like lunatic shut ins, made me think you’ve been blasting the Freedom Rock and getting high in your basement for the last three years. It was a confidence shaker, I gotta say. I know you didn’t mean to insult me by inviting me to lunch and then ambushing me with this daycare charade but suggesting that I should change the name of my business to something “more obvious” is pushing it and assuming that little carrots and a juice box were a fine supplement to the cold pizza entree is really testing the limits of my benefit of the doubt . The crown jewel though was when you got all huffy saying that you were so sick of business owners (such as myself say for instance) complaining that we cannot do your silly little trade shows on Saturdays because we have the audacity to be conducting real business on that particular day of the week. Haughty words from a woman holding a juice box.

There is always a point during my day off when I realize that I’ve drank 5 cups of coffee, eaten nothing and it’s well past noon. The sun is shining on the world and life is happening out there while I am doing nothing in here. Anxiety creeps in, reminding me of all the things I should be doing coupled with a resentment that I can’t even enjoy one day off without this mind fuck coming along and raining on my parade. Can’t I just relax? Aren’t I entitled to not see belligerent subject lines in my inbox, can’t their problems wait till Monday? I’m gonna go re-teach myself to play guitar until I forget that I ought to be doing something more important.

Whose Hair Is That?

I was sitting on the toilet at Motel 6; going pee and wondering whose hair is that? There, stuck to the wall, right in front of my face; whose. hair. is.
THAT? Gross. Oh look, there’s another one stuck to the door. Normally this would be a rhetorical question because my own hair is always stuck to everything but I just got there so it can’t be mine. I was, of course, waiting for Dean. We’ve been coming to this same Motel 6 for about 8 months now and I’m pretty sure we’ve stayed in every room. More often than not there is something amiss: wet soap in the tub, hair tangled up in the bath towels, Dean pulling the towel rack right out the of the wall because it wasn’t attached, the room phone ringing incessantly, dysfunctional wall lamps and space heaters but I know I can always count on the housekeeper to fold the toilet paper over into a little point because this is, after all, a respectable establishment. The ladies at the front desk must either have me pegged for an exceptionally well spoken hooker or else they’re on to me. I mean no one stays at a motel in the same city they live in this frequently. Right? To wit, if I were one of them, I would be curious about this women who checks in roughly once a week with has a local driver’s license, always pays with cash, says please and thank you and is long gone before check out at 11:00. Seriously, I would send a housekeeper to watch the room and see what else transpired and we would have an ongoing bet as to the various possible scenarios which, naturally, I would win because my mind is predisposed to conjuring evil theories.

I always arrive first so this gives me an opportunity to get caught up on my reading before Dean shows up. Lately I’ve been enjoying some selected works
by David Sedaris. I feel a kinship with him and the dead pan style of his self effacing narrative. If I were a gay man, we would be twinsies. He, like me, is
one of those people who, lucky for us, is really skilled at one thing, two at the most, and otherwise inept at living like a responsible adult. We both need baby sitters because we can’t cook, clean, organize, fix things, figure out what to wear, open the mail, navigate the road or deal with the public at large yet we are both the primary breadwinner in our household and, of course, we both like men. There is one major difference though and that is our views regarding monogamy. David is a homebody; remaining faithful to Hugh, not only because he fears group sex, AIDS and nipple rings but also because he thinks more than one man is just too much trouble. By comparison, I’ve rarely been without more than one man; Dean usually being one of them. I just imagine David reading my blog, holding on to the sins he hasn’t yet committed and jotting down conversation topics to bring up over dinner the next time Hugh drags him out to a restaurant; “I read the most bothersome blog today. The author is a long winded paranoiac who thinks we’re twinsies.”

As I’m writing this, I notice that my hair still smells like Dean, chances are the inside of my knees do too. I also hear his voice “who the fuck are you DATING???” That’s him, mocking me in his endearing way for spontaneously hammering him with this question; pointing out the obvious inconsistency he inferred from my tone, but that’s not exactly what I said. Ok, it kind of is, but I wasn’t indignant about it, well maybe just a little. Yes, it’s true that I
don’t view hypocrisy as a handicap and if that makes me a good ole’ boy then so be it, go fetch me a cigar. Some people are just born with certain things. Eddie Van Halen was born with the name of a band and I was born with the fragile heart of a hypocrite. What I really meant was is this going to be a problem? More than once in the recent past I have written about things that have coincidentally and magically transpired, like, the next day. So I had just posted that Ernesto story to the blog when, let’s just say, there was a disturbance on my radar. Naturally, being a paranoid, self indulgent type, I thought to myself “there is no fucking way I’m going to relive this story that I just wrote!” Yep, that’s exactly what I thought, that the wind changes direction based on my musings. Well doesn’t it? Dean, to his credit, thought this was funny and suggested that “out of sensitivity to the married woman that I’m banging, I shall refrain from making reference to my other social interactions.” That’s why I love him; he’s the only person I know capable of being both thoughtful and sarcastic simultaneously. A little later, while trying to save face, like I hadn’t just gone a little bit fucknutz crazy and had a thinly masked paranoid break, I said “for the record, I don’t care as long as we’re cool.” To which he replied ” Why wouldn’t we be cool? I’m always cool, you’re the one who disappears and shit. I’m consistent.” Admittedly, that did make me feel better though I was loath to say it at the time as that would mean admitting he was right.