What American is, to me, is a guy doesn't want to buy, you let him not buy, you respect his not buying. A guy has a crazy notion different from your crazy notion, you pat him on the back and say, Hey pal, nice crazy notion, let's go have a beer. America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamorous reasonable voice.
The words of Mr. Petrillo, the loving-but-concerned grandfather of Teddy who may or may not be gay—but he certainly does enjoy the singing and the dancing—expresses a very singular expression of a single character in a single story. That being said, the first-person narrative assertion of how one man views America in a philosophical sense could be applied to this collection. Within the pages of this volume are stories that features as wild and crazy a cross-section of idiosyncratic Americans as one could hope to find at any non-partisan gathering place. You’ve got paranoid neighbors, pet-killing mobs, angry writers of letters to the editor and even giant running Twinkies. Mr. Petrillo may not be necessarily be describing America accurately—though it seems pretty close—but he is most assuredly describing the book in which he is a character.
Because my feeling is, when God made man and woman He had something very specific in mind. It goes without saying that He didn’t want men marrying men, or women marrying women, but also what He did not want, in my view, was feminine men marrying masculine women.
Which is why I developed my Manlyy Scale of Absolute Gender.
Using my Scale, which assigns numerical values according to a set of masculine and feminine characteristics, it is now easy to determine how Manly a man is and how Fem a woman is, and therefore how close to a Samish-Sex Marriage a given marriage is.
Once upon a time there was an America where the writer of something like this and the creator of something like that scale would be dismissed as a loony without a second thought. This collection was published in 2006, but some of the stories initially appeared in periodicals as far back as 1999. That makes this book a really valuable work of sociology; what seemed to be outlandishly unlikely satire at the turn of the millennium has since come to seem…less so. That is quite an enormous leap in less than two decades. A politically proactive concept for introducing radical extremist policy into the discourse of mainstream conversation that would have been deemed suitable for perhaps an episode of Jerry Springer in 2006 has become something ten years later might actually be adopted in the halls of power in Washington, D.C.
A ten-day acute toxicity study was conducted using twenty male cynomolgous monkeys ranging in weight from 25 to 40 kg. These animals were divided into four groups of five monkeys each. Each of the four groups received a daily intravenous dose of Borazidine, delivered at a concentration of either 100, 250, 500, or 10,000 mg/kg/day.
The form, style and structure of this story sticks out from the rest like a sore thumb…except that it doesn’t. It is written in dry, scientific jargon and it is equivalent to reading a report from a pharmaceutical research investigation. No dialogue, no figurative language, no narrative whimsy. But the very first entry in the collection is written in the form of a letter from a sale representative responding to a customer complaint. And, of course, the reader only gets to now the lovely inventor Manly Scale of Absolute Gender because he has taken the time write to the editor of a small town newspaper in response to an article published earlier. So the experimentations with form is really not that different. As for content, well, the monkey who defies all normative expectations of the pharmaceutical researches comes to seem invincible and almost immortal. Until, that is, end of the story when he becomes just as subject to the external forces guiding American society as any human in the collection.
So whenever something’s changed around here, he’s tried to stay upbeat. When they got Buddy he didn’t question why Buddy was a puppet-dog and not a real dog. When Chief Wayne started coming around claiming to be his oldest friend in the world, he didn’t question why a Native America had red hair. When their backyard started morphing, he didn’t ask how it was physically impossible.
Then things started getting dumber.
The author stared into the face of Realty TV and saw the future. The impossibly ironically named reality television craze that fortunately seems to have peaked in the early part of the 21st century did not just change the landscape of television forever. Coming in concert with the rise of social media, the genre blazed a trail of destruction across all known conventions, expectations, borderlines and extremes of American society. Brad Carrigan is a reality TV—let’s say star for lack of a more appropriate word—who finally has had enough and decides to buck the system. Brad’s fate is quite predictive of the world that exists a decade or so later where anyone who doesn’t play the game and turn their life into a social media reality show simply fails to exist in the minds of tens of millions.
