A Carnival of Snackery

In reading the eighteen years' worth of material that went into this second volume of my diaries, I noticed a few things. For starters, I have a lot of mice in my life. There must have been at least three hundred mentions of them, maybe more. I came across them in my home and in my yard. In restaurants and banks. I even ran into mice on vacation! (Mine, not theirs.) Then there are the ones described secondhand by friends or thrown to snakes and snapping turtles in YouTube videos. If combined, these entries would make for a whole separate book—an edge-of-your-seat thriller for cats. The only place I don't have a mouse problem is New York, where I have rats instead—not in my apartment, thank God, but surrounding it, trying to get in. One of the mentions I had to cut involved one I saw near Times Square at two a.m. with a Cheeto in its mouth. A few weeks later, while walking in West Sussex, I found a wounded rat in a paper bag. I swear, I could move to the moon and still find rodent droppings on my countertops.

There were also an inordinate number of entries that concerned travel of one sort or another. Why so many airport stories? I used to wonder as I watched comedians on TV back in the 1980s. Can't you talk about something else for a change? Then I started touring and realized just how much time those people spent getting from one place to another. Where there are cars and trains and buses and planes, there's going to be tension and ugliness. There's nothing I find more compelling, so of course my diary is filled with travel stories, many of which involve hired drivers. That makes me sound very grand, but I'm only ferried around when I'm on tour. Sometimes I'm taken from one city to the next, but more often I'm picked up from some airport or other and carried to my hotel. If I had a license I suppose I could rent a car and make the trips myself, but oh, the lovely encounters I would have missed, the hundreds of men and women I've fallen into conversation with and who have surprised and delighted me.

There are also a great many entries about litter. From 2010 on, I mentioned it every day, at least when I was in the UK—exhaustive reports on how many cans and bottles I'd picked up that afternoon, the bags of household trash I'd found dumped by the roadside, the toaster ovens and construction waste. Then I'd travel to another country and write about the litter I wasn't seeing. There's only so much of that a reader can take, I suppose.

Left out altogether are the countless quotes taken from books and magazine articles I've read, lines and paragraphs that struck me as beautiful or precise. I've transcribed great chunks of Mavis Gallant's diaries, for example, but none of them made this collection, as reprinting them would involve getting permission. The quotes made me look smart, so I hated to lose them. Likewise, I've left out reviews of the many books that have disappointed me over the years. I've always been excited by authors who disparage their contemporaries, the sort who forever have their dukes up, spoiling for a fight, but I don't want to be one of those people.

If a number of these entries seem overproduced, it's because they are. When something especially interesting happens—a monkey is spotted at the Cracker Barrel, a woman tells me that her cousin had his arms chewed off by pigs in Mexico—I take extra care when writing it up in my diary, knowing I'll likely be reading it onstage. These entries, by and large, have taglines. They wave little flags—Hey, look at me! Many of the ones that work well in front of an audience I wound up cutting just because they seemed too self-conscious, too eager to please. Others I kept because, come on, his arms chewed off by pigs?

As with the first volume, I've included a great many jokes in this book, ones I heard at parties and book signings. I wanted to put them all in—the good and the bad—but times being what they are, I don't know that my publisher could withstand the vast amounts of hate mail they would engender. Oh, offensive jokes…when, if ever, will your time come around again?

As in my first volume of diaries, Theft by Finding, I'll remind the reader that this is my edit, a tiny fraction of what I've written to myself over the past eighteen years. I haven't gone out of my way to appear thoughtful and virtuous but could easily look much, much worse than I do in these pages. Again, I chose entries that I thought were funny or startling in some way. Theft by Finding, which covered 1997 to 2002, had a narrative arc. "David Copperfield Sedaris," Hugh called it. If there's an arc to this book, I don't know what it is. The me that I was when the first volume ended has certainly grown older, though no wiser. It's a safe bet that I've become more spoiled and impatient. Often while rereading my source material, I've thought of Dorothy Parker's "From the Diary of a New York Lady During Days of Horror, Despair, and World Change." Here is war and calamity—natural disaster, mass migration, racial strife—and I'm complaining that the sale at Comme des Garçons starts the day after I leave Paris for Zurich, where I am to receive an award. Of all the rotten luck! In fairness to myself, I do mention politics and current events. I follow the news quite closely, as a matter of fact, though you wouldn't know it from reading this book. If I didn't include many of those entries, I guess it's because other people cover that sort of thing much better and with a lot more authority than I do. Plus, if I'm honest, given a choice between writing about the Arab Spring uprisings and a beggar calling out—as one recently did to a woman walking ahead of me—"Hey, you got a hole in your ass," I'll go with the latter.

Though I suspect you already knew that.

Drinks and dinner in Fulham with Jane's friends Allison and Ian. She's fifty-two, an American with thick, shoulder-length hair and the flat eyes of a chronic alcoholic. Allison had been drinking before we arrived, and her mouth was purpled with wine. "Hey," she said. "Guess what? I was walking down the hall and my tooth fell out! Dropped out just like that! Do you believe it? Now I've got a big hole." She picked the tooth off the mantel and offered it for our inspection. It was a molar capped with a heavy gold crown. "Don't ever, ever, ever move to England," she warned. Then, "Hey, you want it?"

The strange part was that it hadn't even bled. There was no pain or swelling, just a dry pit. Allison tended toward big, clownish gestures. In the middle of a sentence, she'd stop talking and point from one person to another, shrugging like a mime. She'd say the word damn or hell and then cover her mouth with both hands. Every story was interrupted by shenanigans. Ian, her Scottish husband, was a little older, and handsome. He'd been drinking as well, but held it better. "All right, old stick," he said as it neared the dinner hour. "It's time to go. These people are hungry." He took the bourbon from Allison's hands and she called him Bossy Boots.

"But Jane's here," she whined. "This is important!"

We ate at an Indian restaurant around the corner from their home. I sat next to Ian, who explained the intricacies of reward and punishment offered at the boarding school he'd gone to. If your rugby shirt fell off its hook more than twice a semester, you were roused out of bed and taken to the piffery, a high-ceilinged room that was empty but for a Ping-Pong table. Once there you'd remove your dressing gown and offer your buttocks to the cane. "I don't think it was bamboo," he said when I asked what sort of wood it was made of. "No, I believe it was hickory or perhaps birch."

While Ian talked to me and Hugh, Allison went from wine to brandy. By the time we left the restaurant she was staggering, partly due to alcohol and partly due to bad knees.

Last night I spoke with (my literary agent) Don, who seems to have forgotten the word page. "They want at least two hundred chapters, I mean, no, not chapters but…oh…"

This is happening more and more often, and I never know if, in trying to help, I'm like a French person breaking into English. "Two hundred pages?"

"That's it."

Hugh and I walked to Maida Vale yesterday. Close to Bayswater we found a tile shop and were looking at samples when a man entered. He was Jamaican and approached the counter to ask for directions to a particular street. "The next road over is one-way," the saleswoman told him. "So you need to go one up and take a hard left. It isn't far, really it isn't."

The man then asked if the woman would ride with him. "As a passenger, and point it out in person."

"Well," she said warily, "I can't really do that, you see, as my supervisor is on the phone and I'm the only one watching the floor."

"Fine," the man said. "We'll just wait until your supervisor gets off the phone."

It was an outlandish request, and I could see the woman begin to panic. "It's honestly not far at all," she said. "Anyone can find it. It's easy, really."

While walking to the Tesco on Sunday afternoon I felt something strike me in the middle of my back. It wasn't sharp, but flat, like the feeling of someone congratulating you a little too hard. I was wearing a Walkman and looking at the ground, so it took me a moment to realize I was being passed by a group of boys riding their bikes on the sidewalk. I'd just accepted the idea of them when a second kid came from behind and hit me against the side of the head. Wait a minute, I thought as they scattered. You can't do that. I'm a grown-up!

Further up the sidewalk they hit two other men and, beyond that, a woman walking her dog. I imagined what I'd do if I ever got my hands on them, but it was tricky, as they were children. The thought of punching a ten-year-old is rough, at best, and so I left the boys alone and concentrated on their bikes, mentally puncturing the tires and destroying the spokes with the heel of my shoe. Mainly I wondered if, a year from now, they'd remember hitting a small man upside the head. Would I stick out in their minds or might they have hit so many people that a single episode was impossible to recall?

In 1970, while riding bikes up Shelly Road, Dan Thompson and I gave a driver the finger. He'd crowded us, or at least we felt that he had, and the moment our gestures registered, he stopped the car and got out. The man didn't touch me personally but grabbed the bars of my bike. "Son," he said, "I ought to knock those braces right down your fucking throat." Had he simply continued on his way I would have forgotten about the whole thing, but instead he threatened me, thereby setting up permanent camp in my memory.

The boys were there when I reached the Tesco, the entire group of them. I thought of saying, Excuse me, but one of you accidentally hit me on the head, and now I'm guessing you'd like to apologize. They were kids. There would be no brawl, no switchblade pulled from a boot, but instead I chickened out and spent the rest of the day hating myself for being such a coward.

On my way home from Wandsworth, I saw an Indian man cut in front of a black passenger who was standing before the driver, paying for a bus ticket. "Fuck off," the Indian man said when the black man gave him a look. "Just fuck off." The Indian man was tall and slender. The crown of his head was bald, a barren field surrounded by shining, shoulder-length hair.

"No," the black man said, "you fuck off."

"You fuck off."

"No, you fuck off."

The two men moved toward the back of the bus and I thought for a moment that it would come to blows.

"Fucking n—," the Indian man said.

"Hey, if it weren't for me you wouldn't be here," the black man said. I guessed he was speaking of Africa as the cradle of civilization.

"Fuck you," the Indian man said. "If you want to know where you came from, ask your mother. I fucked her."

"No, I fucked your mother," the black man said.

"No, you didn't."

"Yes, I did. Just ask her."

"Your mother's a monkey."

"Your mother's the monkey, not mine."

"Fuck off."

"No, you fuck off."

The bus stopped to accept more passengers and the men fell silent. I wondered if, throughout the rest of the ride, they reflected upon the argument. Did either wonder what might happen next, or did they both accept that it was over? Had I been the black man I would have skipped that whole "I fucked your mother" business and gone straight for the bald spot, which was obviously the Indian man's Achilles' heel. The way he arranged his hair suggested that he was very sensitive about it, while who knows how he actually feels about his mother.

They've closed all the train lines running beneath the American embassy. A wall has been erected and police now line the Concorde. I arrived early for my periodontist appointment and watched a group of students march up rue Royale to the Madeleine. It was hard to make out but it sounded as if they were yelling "Boom Chaka Khan."

On my way home from Dr. Guig's, I saw the demonstrators again and realized they were chanting "Bush est un assassin." There were manifestations all over town and I sort of followed them throughout the day. If this is the reaction to France sitting out the war, I can't imagine what might have happened had Chirac committed troops.

Last week Hugh was interviewed by the Orne Combattante, which wanted his view on the Iraq War. Pierre brought a copy of the resulting article to dinner last night at a Vietnamese restaurant he likes in the sixth and tossed it on the table, saying that Hugh, who had trashed Bush, was a disgrace to his country. I wanted to hear what Pierre thought of Jacques Chirac, but he was too caught up in flirting with the young American woman at the next table. "Just so you will know how charming I am, my two favorite movies are Sleeping in Seattle and There Is Mail for You," he said.

While the International Herald Tribune follows American efforts to remove French words and products from their restaurant menus, the BBC reported that Jordanians are giving up their American cigarettes in exchange for harsh-tasting Gauloises, which is really much more of a sacrifice. In Thursday's paper there were pictures of angry Midwesterners emptying bottles of Bordeaux into the Mississippi River. On TV I watched a French news report on a handful of middle-aged anti-war demonstrators living in a small town in Massachusetts. It doesn't take much to join a crowd of thousands, but these people are basically alone, and their neighbors now despise them. The group was marching in front of city hall when a man ran up and started pushing them, shouting, "I hate the French. I want to kill them." It was a strange thing to see translated into French.

They cut the red carpet from this year's Academy Awards ceremony and as late as yesterday there was talk that certain stars would not be attending, some for security reasons, some because they were against the war, and some because they thought this a time for quiet reflection. In yesterday's Financial Times the president of the Academy was quoted as saying it was our patriotic duty to carry on with the Oscars. He didn't explain how, but then again, no one does. They just say it's your patriotic duty and everyone kind of goes along with it.

French's Mustard has issued a press release explaining that French is a family name and has nothing to do with France or the behavior of that country's president or UN ambassador. "We're baseball games and Fourth of July picnics," they say. "We are America in all its glory."

Our cabdriver from JFK was disappointed. It seemed he'd wanted a female passenger but instead he wound up with us. "I love the ladies," he said. "They remind me of my baby's mother. They remind me of Mommy."

Traffic was heavy and during the ride he listened to Hot 101. The afternoon show was hosted by Wendy Williams and between songs she accepted calls from listeners eager to tell her how great she was. We hadn't even left Queens and already Hugh was threatening to return to France. "I know how to drive the Iraqis from Baghdad," he said. "Forget the bombs, just make them listen to this goddamn radio station."

The smaller the airport the more horrible the security staff; take Madison, Wisconsin. I arrived yesterday morning and checked in to find the dreaded four Ss stamped along the bottom of my ticket. The agent said it was random, but I'm always singled out by American Airlines, most likely because of all the one-way tickets. A gray-haired man asked for my suitcase and after giving it to him I stepped outside for a cigarette. On returning I saw the guy and his associate pawing through my stuff. The German translation of Me Talk Pretty was pulled out and they flipped through the pages, scowling, as if they had discovered a secret document detailing tank positions. It was strange to stand unnoticed and watch people going through my things. They emptied my shaving kit and unwrapped the tin I'd gotten Ronnie as a housewarming gift. When they started inspecting my cigarettes I approached the two and asked them what they were doing. "We're going through your suitcase," the gray-haired man said. And then he continued.

Before leaving Austin I heard a radio report on an Englishman who's giving out awards for stupid security measures. First prize goes to an airport scanner who forced a female passenger to drink from three bottles of her own breast milk. She'd pumped it before boarding, and they wanted to make sure it wasn't poison. This explains why sperm donors are traveling Greyhound.

On Sunday Hugh attended a Mets game with his old friend Jeff Raven. He called yesterday to announce that he now loves baseball and tried to sound all butch about it. "Jeff's son had a soccer match so we had to leave in the sixth inning," he said. "I watched the rest of it on TV and then read the review in this morning's paper."

Review?

While touring in the United States I'd said time and time again that the French had a beef with George Bush but were able to distinguish between the American people and the American government. The audience would applaud, and I'd stand there thinking, If only it were true. Even Manuela has dropped the George Bush references and begun directing her criticism toward Americans in general. "I can't help it," she says. "It's just easier."

At Montparnasse yesterday morning I saw a poster for A Man Apart, the new Vin Diesel movie. Across the actor's face someone had written US go your fucking home.

Last night I watched a bit of the Miss Universe pageant. An American production, it was presented in English and translated into French by an off-screen couple, who made ruthless fun of the show's vacuous hosts. Five finalists stepped forward in their evening gowns, and poor Miss Serbia and Montenegro was asked the question "If given the choice, which would you rather be, fire or water?"

"That should solve the world's problems," the male translator said. The camera cut to Donald Trump, sitting in the audience with his hands to his chin.

"He's monstrous," the Frenchwoman said. "An ogre!"

Miss Serbia and Montenegro stared at the microphone for a moment, no doubt wondering if she'd misunderstood the question. "I am a human," she said. "A girl with feelings, so I do not understand what it is like to be an element that has nothing. I cannot make a choice like that, so I will prefer to stay myself."

She did not win.

I went to dinner last night with an Iranian woman named Marjane, who told the following joke:

A woman carries a large suitcase into the Bank of France and tells the president that she would like to deposit ten million euros. He looks at the money, impressed, and asks what she does for a living.

"Oh," she says. "I make bets with people. For instance, I'd be willing to bet a hundred thousand euros that your testicles are cube-shaped, like dice, but a little bigger."

The bank president agrees to the bet, and after the two shake hands, he lowers his pants, revealing that his testicles are not cube-shaped, but oval, like eggs.

"All right, you win," the woman says. "But if it's all right I'd like to wait and pay you tomorrow. My lawyer will come with me, and after he's verified that I've officially lost the bet, I'll give you your money."

The following afternoon the woman returns in the company of her lawyer. "If you don't mind," she says to the bank president, "I'd like you to show me your testicles one more time, just so my lawyer can see for himself."

The bank president lowers his pants.

"And if it's not asking too too much," she continues, "I would like to touch them, just to be absolutely sure they're not in any way cube-like."

"Fine," he says.

The woman bends forward, and just as she touches the man's testicles, her lawyer starts banging his head against the wall.