david sedaris

david sedaris is the funniest person who has ever existed. i have no hard evidence that this is the case, but by all indications, and based solely on my own life experience, it is most certainly true. i love him. i have read all of his books and i truly wait eagerly for the next to arrive on the shelves of my local B&N. before "dress your family" came out, there was a significant time period during which i had no new sedaris to experience. i first read his "holidays on ice" while in grad school and as soon as i finished it, i walked to the barnes and noble at lincoln center and bought two more of his books. i got another for christmas that year and devoured it as rapidly as the others. soon i found myself desperately pleading with the cosmos for another taste of sedaris! his wit and humor are so brilliant and precise that for a very long time i stopped writing entirely. everything i wrote down read like a 7th grade english class non-fiction exercise to me after i discovered what happens when a talented person writes. eventually, as is evidenced on this page, my need to purge irritations and memories overwhelmed my internal shame and i decided that since i am not a sedaris and have never thought myself to be anything like a real writer, i am once again free to jot.
i recently aquired the entire david sedaris library on cd. now i take the long way to work (with these gas prices!? YES!) just so i can hear a few more segments from the mouth of the master. i don't even feel self-conscious about laughing hysterically at a red light while i am clearly in the car alone. even stranger to outsiders, i am sure, is when i am in the car with just david and my little dog. people look at me and i know they have just assessed that i am a complete lunatic. this is ok with me. first, it is probably close to the truth. second, if they only knew...my spectacular display of eruptious laughter would be forgiven for sure. one time my lovely love "surprised" me with tickets to david at the Fitzgerald Theatre in st. paul. it couldn't have been better timing. it was november 3, 2004. the world was a dark and dismal place and ultimate destruction was imminent. rather than being forced to mope around my house lamenting every word coming from Paula Zahn's lips, i got to get into a car with my lover and two of our very best friends and drive to minneapolis. along the way we averted our eyes from every element of the news media and the car contained the numbing silence of a group of knowing mutual mourners. then we went to ikea. ikea rocks when you want the world to end. it is, in fact, one shining example of the earth's impending doom anyway, so why not roll up your sleeves and participate!? i bought some shit that i still haven't used to this day. don't care. we felt better for a few moments. then we went to a fantastic italian place downtown. the food was so good that i vowed to never again eat anything that was only sustenance, void of enjoyment and delight. for the most part i have maintained this vow. a couple of times i have gone to subway, but i was desperate. it was the best food ever. no hunger strike in my future. regardless of the gravity of the situation. our final act of the evening was to take in a live reading from the master himself. we were all in so much pain from having laughed ourselves insane. david sedaris is my god. is that wrong?