Synopsis "Confessions of A Beta Male Orbiter"
A lust-filled, teenage Jesus freak is slowly driven to distraction by the hot babes that inhabit his evangelical, Texas youth group. Unable, due to his strict adherence to the rules of chastity, to have sex, and unable, due to his lack of financial status, to attract the top-shelf women he craves, he is forced into being a b-actor in romance. He awaits his lucky break in the lottery of love. There is more than one surprise as the wheel of fate turns.The book was intended to be a kind of counseling manual by a one Marvin Godwin Plinkers of Lake Compromise, Texas. In responding the pleas of a besieged youth counselor who cannot figure out how to deal with the beta male orbiters that come to him for help, Marvin decides to write a series of lectures which contain all of the suppressed truth about these lost souls. However, the book quickly becomes half-confessional, a text in which seemingly dry treatises are interspersed with true romantic confessions. The lines between genres become hopelessly tangled.Marvin refuses to agree with either left-wing propaganda or right-wing propaganda regarding romantically unsuccessful men. He had himself been one of those lovelorn Jesus freaks who, at least seemingly, could not quite make it in any area of life. And so he is quite certain he knows what he is talking about and decides to reveal everything, no matter how embarrassing the truth turns out to be.The book begins with a letter in which Marvin attempts to deal with the youth counselor who has contacted him, but the body of the book quickly degenerates into a series of dating failures and didactic mini-treatises. A recurring theme in the book is the slow loss of innocence, both theological and sexual. The book is situated in the very-transitional time of the late 1970s and early 1980s. And because every ideological group wants to conveniently explain-away the existence of beta-male orbiters, the book becomes ruthless in its refusal to let anyone's self-serving narrative prevail.The book's universal message is that all our social bedtime stories are false. Life cannot be controlled by them, but surges forward, unwilling to ever be tamed by our belief systems. Love and sex will never be bow to human attempts to manage it.
