Monday, September 22, 2008

I'm reading When You Are Engulfed In Flames by the brilliant David Sedaris.

It's all greatness, especially "Monster Mash," where he talks about his obsession with death. This is my favorite part:

"As a young man, I saved up my dishwashing money and bought a seventy-five-dollar copy of Medicolegal Investigations of Death, a sort of bible for forensic pathologists. It shows what you might look like if you bit an extension cord while standing in a shallow pool of water, if you were crushed by a tractor, struck by lightning, strangled with a spiral or nonspiral telephone cord, hit with a claw hammer, burned, shot, drowned, stabbed, or feasted upon by wild or domestic animals. The captions read like really great poem titles, my favorite being "Extensive Mildew on the Face of a Recluse." I stared at that picture for hours on end, hoping it might inspire me, but I know nothing about poetry, and the best I came up with was pretty lame:

Behold the recluse looking pensive!

Mildew, though, is quite extensive
On his head, both aft and fore.

He maybe shoulda got out more.
"

And here he is on Letterman reading an essay about the stadium pal (which is also in the book):

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Brilliance. Pure brilliance. I must go wipe the tears from my cheeks now.