Sedaratives: John Roderick

Dear Sedaratives,
How did railroads get to be so romanticized? Have you been on a train for any distance? It’s horrible. It’s an experience in bumpy patience, always overpriced, and always late. So why do people still love trains so much?
Cap’n Stan
St. Louis, Mo.

Dear Cap’n Stan,
The “romance” of train travel has almost nothing to do with the “slave-galley” experience of actually traveling by train. Like most American nostalgia-trips, railroad travel is a fantasy based entirely on the false belief that wearing a fedora makes a man look dashing, when in fact it makes most men look like someone hid a dildo under a felt diaper. I personally love to travel by train for a different reason, namely that I love sleeping sitting upright in a vibrating chair that smells like Virginia Slims and animal sex. It’s much cheaper to buy an Amtrak ticket than to explain the whole thing to a dominatrix. Still, you can’t fight the nostalgification of America without acknowledging that the only alternative is 150 million Slim Shadys in dirty white tracksuits practicing with their nunchucks while pregnant girls fry bologna. Modern life is so chintzy and dull that even the prospect of traveling across the Jim Crow South in an un-air-conditioned train, when chewing tobacco was commonplace and before the advent of deodorant, seems sophisticated by comparison. I’ve upped the ante by flying cross-country only on old, unpressurized DC-3s and Ford Trimotors, a trip that takes three days and results in deafness. God, it’s romantic, though.
John

Dear Sedaratives,

I like dressing up my doggies in costumes and taking their photos. My husband says this is emasculating, but I don’t think dogs can be emasculated, can they? Is he confusing dogs with people, or am I confused about the definition of emasculated?

Lucy Valdes
Newport Beach, Calif.

Dear Lucy,

Clearly, what your husband is trying to say is that dressing your doggies in costumes is emasculating him. He’s not just worried about enduring public ridicule, he’s emasculated in the more general sense that he has lost all ability to control the aesthetics of his world. Surely you also post those photos to your Facebook page and send them out in your Christ-mas cards? His high-school friends, his coworkers, and his relatives all have a mental picture of you talking like Charo while you dress your dog like JonBenét Ramsey, and they cannot stop laughing. Your husband has probably shaved his head by now, grown a goatee, gotten a tattoo of Bettie Page in a martini glass, and started listening to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, all in an attempt to regain some street credibility, but to...