David Sedaris on his Duolingo obsession

Hugh and I were driving from Washington, DC, to the Sea Section when I noticed a dot with legs traversing the hem of my untucked shirt. “There’s a tick on me!” I said, and we tried to carry on despite an hour-long traffic jam that stretched our trip to almost eight hours.

The car radio stuck on a 70s station; when something terrible came on we’d hit the off button. We stopped twice, once to walk in the July heat at a wooded rest area and once at Bojangles beside a man eating biscuits and red beans while talking to someone named Crockett, surrounded by teenage baseball players with mullets.

Entering North Carolina we passed handpainted banners reading, “God Bless President Trump,” a support that felt as present as the “Resist!” signs we’d seen in New England. A week earlier in Portsmouth I’d walked past a dozen and a half “No Kings!” protesters, mostly retirement age, one man playing the accordion in a fleece-lined winter hat with ear flaps; they struck me as kooks, the worst possible advertisement for the Democratic Party.

david sedaris, duolingo, washington dc, sea section, tick, bojangles, north carolina, trump, protesters, portsmouth