On my next book tour the theme was monkeys, and on the latest one it was items men shove inside themselves and later have to go to the emergency room to have extracted. This started when an ER nurse told me about a patient she’d seen earlier in the week who had pushed a dildo too far up his ass. The door had shut behind it, so he’d tried fishing it out with a coat hanger. When that proved the wrong tool for the job, he’d snipped it with wire cutters, then gone after both the dildo and the cut-off hanger with a sturdier, fresh hanger. You hear this from doctors and nurses all the time: their patients shove light bulbs inside themselves, shampoo bottles, pool balls…and they always concoct some incredible story to explain their predicament. “I tripped” is a big one. And, OK, I’m pretty clumsy. I trip all the time, but never have I gotten back on my feet with a pepper grinder up my ass, not even a little bit. I’m pretty sure I could tumble down all the stairs in the Empire State Building—naked, with a greased-up rolling pin in each hand and a box of candles around my neck—and still end up in the lobby with an empty rectum. Another common excuse is “I accidentally sat on it.” Implied is that you were naked at the time and this can of air freshener that just happened to be coated with Vaseline went all the way up inside you. “I must have left it on the sofa when I came home from work and took a shower. Then I sat down to watch the news the way I usually do, and, well, you know the rest.” A week into my tour—again because I’d mentioned the story onstage—a nurse handed me an X-ray of a man’s pelvis with a set of hand weights in it. How on earth? I thought, imagining the work that must have taken. And to follow the first with a second? Who does that? Days later I saw an X-ray of a Bose speaker inside someone. “And it was still connected to Bluetooth,” the woman who showed it to me whispered...By the time a nurse told me about a patient who had inserted an electric toothbrush inside himself, and another who’d managed a two-liter bottle of Diet Mtn Dew, I was so inured that I said only, “Wait a minute. Diet?” ~ Happy Go Lucky, David Sedaris

I used to really laugh. Now I rarely smile.