David Sedaris - David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium

David Sedaris

One of the great things about keeping a diary is that there are absolutely no rules attached to it. You can write in it every day, or you can check in once a month. Entries can be brief and exciting, or they can run for fifty pages, each one duller than the last. They can be in code or all caps, typed onto cream-colored paper or scrawled onto plywood with a crayon held between your toes. Care to write the words on a wet beach with a car antenna? Knock yourself out. Its whatever you want, baby. The point is to express yourself.

The first diary I ever saw was one of those that locked, and came with a ridiculous little key. I call it ridiculous because anyone with access to scissors or a half-decent steak knife could easily have broken into it. It in fact begged to be broken into (Keep Out indeed). Another notable thing about this diary was its colorpink. There was not a corresponding blue version for boys. There was no need. Diaries were for those who were sensitive and had secrets, that is to say, girls and women.

Sensitive men had secrets too, of course, the first and most important being Im gay! A friend of mine once showed me an article that had run in a magazine in the late fifties. Warning Signs That Your Son Might Be Homosexual was the title.

Sign #1: He enjoys taking baths.

Sign #2: He keeps a diary.

Im guilty of both but didnt start the diary, unfor-tunately, until I was twenty. I was traveling through the Pacific Northwest with my best friend Ronnie at the time. Id been sending letters to my family back East but didnt have a fixed address where I could receive mail in return. And so I started writing to myself. Because I was broke and uncertain that this would last for any real amount of time, for the first few months I wrote on paper bags and the backs of restaurant place mats. When I realized that keeping a diary suited me, I moved on to hardcover sketchbooks and became that guy you see in the coffee shop, the one with the beret on, scratching out his feelings and groaning when someone asks, Whats that? or, worse still, Are you journaling? I used to do that but just dont have the time anymore.

How is that allowed to be a verb, journaling?

Those early diaries have drawings in themhorrible ones. As a young man I wanted to be a visual artist. I had brushes and oil pastels. I had the aforementioned beret but, alas, no natural talent. It was the great tragedy of my life, at least until I discovered Duchamp and realized that, as with keeping a diary, there are no rules for art. Some people move you to tears with their paintings, and others tape knock-knock jokes to refrigerators. It just has to be real, and come from an honest place inside you. My honest place had tons of debris piled on top of it. The excavation took years, but I had time, loads of it.

No. 3 June 17 December 31, 1978

Art, for me, has always been tied to the radio. For as long as I can remember Ive enjoyed listening to call-in showsthe nuttier the better. I cut my teeth on a Raleigh program called Open Line and never turned back. Even if the topic was something I didnt care about, like the college basketball play-offs, I would tune in just to hear the passion in peoples voices. But I couldnt just sit in a chair. I needed something to do with my hands as I listened, and so, in junior high school, I started tracing cartoons from the National Lampoon. That led to drawing and, once I discovered drugs, to making collages. A number of them are taped into my early diaries and are, I think, the best part of them, or at least the most honest part of them.

A person who made a big impression on me around this time was Peter Beard, an American living in Kenya. I saw pages of his diary in a magazine and loved how the words snaked around the pictures hed taped in, photos of dead elephants rotting in the sun and leopards standing around doing nothing. To me they were exotic, but I gathered that for him this was everyday lifewhat he saw when he stepped out the front door of his hut every morning. I dont know what they read like, his diaries, but seeing them reminded me that when I sat down at my desk, I could really do whatever the fuck I wanted.

Not all of my diary entries from the late seventies have pictures pasted in, but most do. For as long as I can remember Ive kept boxes of found photos, along with pages torn from magazines and bits of trash Ive collected off the street. At first Id just paste any old picture into my diary, thinking that twenty or thirty years down the line I might open it to whatever page this was and think,