Sedaratives: Buck Henry

Dear Sedaratives, 

I just read Siddhartha to impress a girl, and I’m having trouble thinking of anything to say about it that would sound sufficiently deep but not too pretentious. Any ideas?

Joshua
Chicago, IL

Dear Joshua,

Be careful. A woman who would actually request that someone she ostensibly cares for should read “Siddhartha” is intellectually ruthless if not criminally insane. This is a trap. You must realize by now that there is nothing that you or anyone else can say about Hesse’s novel without seeming pretentious or, even worse, foreign. When I was very young, my great grandmother, who was old and ill, asked me to read her to sleep. I selected “Siddhartha” because I surmised that I was in her will. She passed away during chapter two. I was amazed that she lasted that long.

Buck

Dear Sedaratives,

I recently came out of the closet and am ready to have a healthy gay relationship for the first time in my life. But after so many years of living in denial, I’m a little unclear on how homosexual sex works. I understand the obvious stuff, but how do you figure out if you’re a top or a bottom? Do you talk about it first with your partner or just dive in and see what happens?

Anonymous
Los Angeles, CA

Dear Anonymous, 

The thing that you will soon learn is that homosexual sex doesn’t “work”. Like all sex and most card games, it simply passes the time. The terms “top” and “bottom” are basically meaningless unless there is obesity involved, in which case you will learn by trial and error what real horror is. The best system is to vary your positions – top one night, bottom the next, much as they do in the Navy.

Buck

Dear Sedaratives,

Here’s what I remember: I started watching a kung fu movie marathon in college, and the next thing I knew I was thirty-four and unemployed. Should I try to figure out what happened to that lost time, or just cut my losses and get on with my life?

Regards,

A dude in Atlanta, Ga.

Dear Dude in Atlanta,

That’s what you think you remember. We will probably never know what really happened. There is creditable scientific and medical proof that steady exposure to endless repetition—be it of strobe lights, religious chants, Jody cadence (a military training term with which I am sure you are unfamiliar), the music of Don McLean, or even an evening of reality TV—can cause fainting, hallucinations, petit and grand mal seizures, time and space dislocation, and even that old Abbott and Costello favorite, Mogo on the Gogogo. Kung fu marathons...