First I got up, then I had a piece of toast…

There’s a stand up comedian who had a bit about how boring it is to hear about other peoples’ dreams, how the description is always surreal to the teller but just illogical to the listener; the punch line being “there’s a reason you were asleep for this.”

There’s a reason your books were inspired by rather than directly published from your diaries, sedaris.

It kind of hurt to write that. I love David Sedaris, I love his writing. I often say of writers I love that I’d read the phone book if it had their name on the cover, and this book felt like someone was calling that bluff.

Futurama had a bit about a woman boring her dates to tears by cataloguing her day in asinine detail “well, first I got up, then I had a piece of toast…” and as a surprising amount of the diary entries have something to do with IHOP, it was hard not to channel Bender’s “shut up already!”

Sedaris himself opens the book confessing he can’t imagine anyone reading more than a few at a time.  He’s not wrong.  The entries get better over time and more polished, but even the better ones just made me want to read an actual essay on the event instead of a few tossed off lines. Also, a ton of the entries are just snippets of people being racist or homophobic, which I can’t fault Sedaris for but boy is it hard to read over and over.

I’m going to have to reread Me Talk Pretty One Day or Naked as a palate cleanser