Sedaratives: Richard Herring

Dear Sedaratives,

How many cardigans is it acceptable for a straight man to own?

Anonymous
Queens, N.Y.

Dear Anonymous,

You were wise to hide your identity after such an incendiary question. I am from the United Kingdom, and no doubt we do things differently, but here the cardigan is pretty much exclusively the knitwear of choice for gentlemen in the age bracket of seventy or above, and is rarely, if ever, an indication of what sexuality they might have favored back in the 1950s. In London, you can usually spot the gay men because they will be the ones walking around with nothing on their torso whatsoever. Though, confusingly, as you head farther north, going out at night with little or no upper-body clothing indicates extreme heterosexuality. One always suspects that those overly concerned with exhibiting their straightness are the ones who are secretly the most gay, just waiting to come down south into the arms of their more honest and self-aware shirtless brothers.

There are many other cultural differences between our nations. For example, if there was an area called Queens in London, I would assume it was populated entirely by gay men.

Richard

Dear Sedaratives,

I’ve been having a lot of anxiety attacks lately. Or a series of heart attacks, I’m not sure. How do you tell the difference, again?

Eric
Sioux Falls, S.Dak.

Dear Eric,

Oh god, me, too. Awful, isn’t it? Waking up in the middle of night with this pervading sense that your mind is on the verge of plummeting into the abyss, realizing that life is meaningless and you are mortal and that one day, hopefully not too soon, you will totally cease to exist. You try to imagine it, but realize that in your imagination you are still hovering in the corner of the nothingness, but when it comes you won’t actually be there at all. In the second of your demise you will realize that, from your perspective, everyone and everything in the world is about to be lost. Whilst everyone else will have to mourn only you, you are saying goodbye to everything you ever loved. After half an hour or so, everything gets back into some kind of perspective, and you feel sane and safe again. But what if those moments of utter terror and impotence are the only times in our lives that we are lucid and fully conscious, and the rest of the time we’re living in a self-deluding dream? Think about that next time it’s happening. I’m sure it will help.

I think the difference between a heart attack and a panic attack is that the former actually physically hurts like hell in your...