 
Confessions of A Beta Male Orbiter

Mel C. Thompson

Copyright © 2019, Mel C. Thompson

Mel C. Thompson Publishing

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Table of Contents

Prologue

A Beta Male Orbiter Is Born

The Expansion of The Beta Male Orbiter Lifestyle

Beta Male Orbiter In The Experimental Mode

The Conclusion of A Beta Male Orbiter Phase

Epilogue

*

Prologue

Return To Table of Contents

Reverend August Wrathburn,

Youth Guidance Counselor,

Texas Apocalypse Ministries

333 All Apostles Boulevard

Lake Compromise, TX 76229

I received your letters with great interest. And if I understand your situation right, you are a youth counselor for troubled high school and college kids who, to put it delicately, are outcasts of the economic and social machinery of our fair Dallas metroplex.

You have been warned, no doubt, that I am an apostate and a heretic and that I no longer subscribe to the bulk of the dogma which, as you have been well appraised, I once held to be true.

But you have wisely continued to reach out to me regarding a certain difficult matter which seems to come up in your work time and time again. (I finally intend to address that matter fully). And furthermore, you have described an urgent enough situation among these youth which you are tasked with saving from homelessness, indigence and isolation. It seems that if one fails to become an economic star in the Lone Star State, all Hell breaks loose, (no pun intended).

Although we would normally be the fiercest of rivals, I will, in the spirit of ecumenicalism, at last give a full response to the questions you've been having about "the beta male orbiters," since the truth of their existence seems to cause both young men and young women to suffer inordinately.

I do truly send my sympathies regarding the fact that dealing with this all-but-forbidden topic falls to you, since anyone earning more money than you knows they must never discuss it unless they can squarely face society-wide censure. And I have told you, just out of concern for your future, to never seek out the information you have asked me to pass on to you, information that, once learned, cannot be unlearned. However, you have satisfactorily allayed my fears for your wellbeing by stating, from the outset, that you have inherited substantial funds which are held in a third party trust that can't even be taken in a lawsuit.

And you have further told me that this lowly work, (please forgive the insensitivity of that phrase), is your true calling and that you seek no public stature and no significant career advancement. Thus you are, by my lights, in an almost unassailable position, the only type of position one may be in if one is to survive hearing the actual facts of young men's lives after they fall from the upper-middle-class.

More pointedly, you have said that more and more young men are coming to you and saying that they have found out they are "beta male orbiters." You also note that the young women coming to your clinic, if I may call it that, are livid that, and I quote from your letters quoting them, "All the guys my age are beta male losers." And given that the parents of these children are not allowed to even broach this topic for fear of being exiled from all human contact, it falls to us, men who are almost unassailable, to finally confront the whole thing.

I can only apologize in advance that this latest and most detailed response to your letters is dozens of pages long, but I felt it necessary to tell the whole story of my high school and junior college years, the years during which I first became a beta male orbiter. (Some argue that I later became the most severe case of beta male orbiting that has ever been observed. But this is probably hyperbole.)

It was with no small hesitation that I included in this response to your letters many incidents and many opinions which stray far from what you call "The Word of God" and what others call "common human decency." And while this letter might not bring you any Christian edification, I can promise you this: After you're done reading this letter, an almost endless list of so-called "impenetrable mysteries" about the people you work with will now be solved with the utmost of ease. This in no way means that either you or the young adults in your charge will be saved from all discomfort or pain, but you will at least no longer feel like you're losing your minds, since you will know that at least one person on this earth is not afraid of what you're all going through.

And yes, the young women are right to say that beta male orbiters are terribly frustrating to deal with, and even more so when one considers that the percent of the population that could be described as beta male orbiters grows daily. And what can one say about the beta male orbiters themselves? Their role in life borders on impossibly hard and their road in life seems to lead to what you would call "certain perdition."

Still, it must be reasserted, that even when a sick person cannot be cured, it helps for them to finally know what disease they suffer from; and it helps to know that a doctor exists who believes the symptoms as reported and validates the patient's suspicion that all along something was very wrong. There is nothing more crazy-making that to be enmeshed in a whole set of circumstances about which one is unable to speak due to being shamed into silence. It is my guess that the symptoms that your patients report could be reduced by perhaps fifty percent by the mere possibility of them not being alone in their sufferings.

My only guess as to how to safely inform these young men about the malady they suffer from is to beg them not to tell their parents or teachers that it was you who awakened them to the true source of their suffering. It goes without saying that at least one of them, one fine day, will betray you and tell the public about what you know. That will surely be the end your career. But, as I understand your stance here, you've decided to let truth be your light, however ugly that truth might be, (and the truth about beta male orbiters is about as ugly as it gets), and that you've already accepted the loss of your career in advance.

I tip my hat to you in the spirit of brotherhood and sincerely hope that you will not interpret anything I've written as coming from a place of capricious malice.

Most Sincerely,

Marvin Godwin Plinkers.

*

A Beta Male Orbiter Is Born

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Hannah was hot. That's for sure. Also, quite obviously, she was way out of my league, not only because my scraggly, red beard looked disgusting, and my shoulder length hair was thin and stringy, but because she looked perfect in her form-fitting, sky-blue dress, and because she had an easy self-confidence about her that made my tragically insecure existence look laughably absurd.

Although my arms were so scrawny that I probably couldn't have defeated a person a half foot shorter than me in a wrestling match, and although my teeth were such a mess that I needed braces, crowns, extractions and gum surgery, still, I clung to the belief that Hannah would one day fall in love with me. This hallucinatory belief was made more intense by my love for that crisp, white collar that was attached to the top of that form-fitting, blue dress. That white collar beautifully accentuated her perfectly sculptured neck.

Now Hannah was simply the master of her realm. She held forth on her porch every day, coming out in the early evenings to receive her fellow high-school students. But her admirers also included people from groups older than her, such as college students, and even college graduates. She spoke with a confiding plainness that instantly won everyone over, regardless of their age or their station in life.

I, on the other hand, born a one Marvin Plinkers at the Dallas Regional Medical Center, now called, of all things, Charter Suburban Hospital, was in a far less enviable situation. On a subconscious level it seems clear to me that I realized that if I did not marry up, I would be doomed to the sort of life I actually had to live. Marrying up either did not happen, or, when it happened, it was a bigger disaster than the loneliness and poverty I sought to evade.

*

Upon reading this, the reader may object that I'm being superficial, elevating someone else merely due to their physical appearance and perfect poise. And the reader may further object that no one should put themselves down for the way they look, that such a thing is not conducive to proper self-respect. What the reader fails to grasp is that they are dealing with a person driven to madness, time and again, by codependency. This kind of superficiality is the cornerstone feature of the codependent, beta-male orbiter. Were the orbiter to love himself and others for transcendently excellent reasons, then his status as an orbiter would end.

A non-codependent, young man would have looked the situation over, read the body language of his interlocutor and noticed whether or not the possibility of romance existed. And he would, after realizing he was essentially being rejected, have immediately gone on to more realistic, and, most importantly, more reciprocal, prospects. The way you know a situation is potentially serious and healthy is by the general atmosphere of reciprocity of feeling. If one's feelings are far too strong compared to another person's, and if the actions and words of both parties make clear this is the case, a healthy or reasonable person will seek another situation rather than remaining in an emotionally non-reciprocal relationship.

The first clue you are trying to, as they say, "marry up," is that you reject the serious offers of love around you and tolerate an ocean of rejection in the hopes of "lucking out and scoring big." The beta male orbiter will endure years of second-class treatment in the hope of encountering an opportune moment to plead his case, usually when his beloved has been rebuffed by a more suitable candidate.

In the old world, before millennials and their helicopter parents upgraded, through word games, every degrading circumstance, we called beta male orbiters "guys looking for a chance to worm their way into the good graces of women they have no business being with." But in the insincere world of political correctness, where we imagine, as Iggy Pop says, "every stinking bum must have a crown," we delude everyone into thinking they're equal with everyone else, when such a proposition is sadly ridiculous on the face of it.

The beta male orbiter may be dishonest in many ways, but he'll never be as dishonest as a politically correct person. Unlike those infected with the disease of political correctness, the beta male orbiter both knows his place in the world and knows how he wants to advance his station, even while being arguably undeserving of such advancement.

The beta male orbiter also rejects the inherently-conservative notion of positive thinking. He has already tried to think, scheme, work and plan his way out of his situation, only to have been shot down enough times to know better than to try to win the games of life by overly-earnest diligence and unfounded optimism. Hence he enters into a kind of servitude, but not the innocent servitude of blind and sincere devotion, but rather one in which he works for a kind of emotional lottery ticket, a one-in-a-hundred chance at winning kinds of love he would not regularly be qualified for. The gamble usually doesn't pay off, but people given to gambling, with either their time or money, have usually exhausted all legitimate remedies and thus their losses are not losses in the ordinary sense, since it's not likely that there were brilliant investments with high payoffs that they just failed to notice. On the contrary, codependent people research and notice everything. If they tell you they're out of options and are choosing the lesser of evils, you should probably believe them.

*

It would be an understatement to say that the gods were unfair, in allotting such unequal assets and resources to Hannah and I. As evidence of the fundamental unfairness of the gods, I submit that it was just not right that the one I loved should be so good looking and also such an excellent student and devoted daughter too. Additionally, she was a talented singer and a fine athlete. She was diligent and competent in all other required subjects, and, on top of that, she was an ace Bible student. Meanwhile, my singing was off-key, my family life was a mess, and I had to take social-promotion classes to evade the real requirements of high school. To add insult to injury, I looked like a human billy goat and exuded neediness from every pore. The mismatch could have hardly been more pronounced. Why, I asked God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, did I appear so socially destitute compared to Hannah?

It may seem odd to the reader for me to have tacked on "Bible student" to the foregoing list, but it must be noted that without our common concern for the Bible, Hannah and I could have never met in the first place, and therefore my career as a beta male orbiter might not have gotten such a strong start. As things stood however, our interest in the scriptures and gospel music formed a fine basis for friendship, and all of that served as the perfect training ground for me to launch my career as a person whose profession, while many faceted, could really be narrowed down to that of "desperate man."

*

Hannah's brown eyes were sincere and penetrating, but not too penetrating. She was not trying to peer into your soul and overpower you. Rather she merely glanced lightly and gently at your heart, saw its contents easily and smiled, not with a gloating, wide grin, but in a most ordinary and open way. She was capable of being satisfied, and, having satisfaction, she was able to be a realist. Her dreams were substantial, but not manic. Hers was a situation characterized by hope, appropriateness and frankness.

She was a diligent worker, but was not workaholic. There was no need for her to stay up till midnight trying to write hit songs or epic novels. She had what she needed already and would get virtually everything she could ever want later. So why should she go to extraordinary lengths? Why should she get lost in the torturous labyrinth of trying to prove herself?

Time seemed to fly in Hannah's presence. One lost all self-consciousness of speaking or being spoken too. She never seemed to mind conversation, whether it was a five-minute chat or a marathon that lasted the whole evening. She was always pleased to meet with us, but had no shame in excusing herself when the demands of daily life intruded. The whole time with her seemed like one process of sharing and acceptance without any trace of drama.

If one arrived at her porch at 4PM, one might barely notice the clock striking 9PM, at which point a whisper would emerge from the silhouetted shape of her father from behind the screen door. The voice emerging from the darkened foyer would advise her that it was time to turn in for the night. But this advice came in the most diplomatic manner conceivable.

There was something so pleasant about her manner that it seemed to cause the sultry, exurban Texas nights to just melt around me like a warm embrace when we were together. At my high school we were big platonic huggers, and so it would have made sense to hug Hannah goodnight after our long discussions, but I think many times I left without hugging her simply because I was already bathing in so much closeness that I dared not ask for more. In fact, it was these nights that revealed to me, ever so slowly, the optional nature of sex.

I knew many people who were non-believers, and most of them were having sex. But I knew from my extensive confessional conversations with them that that they were coming away from their dalliances feeling less fulfilled than I was. (Don't get me wrong. I still thought trying to have a physical relationship was a worthy enough goal, and I still debased myself while angling for it, however I was not prepared, just yet, to be ruining good times in order to push the issue of romance in any unduly aggressive way.)

Incidentally, I spoke of my crush on Hannah to everyone we knew in the most earnest and guileless manner imaginable. And she freely told everyone that I was not her type but that we were very close friends.

People felt that I should stop investing so much time and energy into someone who would probably never have physical relations with me. That always bothered me because it seemed to trivialize non-sexual love, and I held my non-sexual friendships to be quite wonderful. It's not that I didn't pine away for a romance with Hannah, because I did, but I didn't think of our friendship as a failure simply because she preferred, to put it bluntly, really buff guys.

Hannah was not ashamed of my admiration of her, and never conveyed directly, or through others, that I must stop having my crush on her. The world, in short, objected to our arrangement way more than we did. To this day, perhaps some forty-five years later, I still have her picture in my room, an 8-by-10 with her in that form-fitting, blue dress with the crisp, white collar. And while I feel certain I must have written her love poems, I cannot, for the life of me, find any extant works of that sort regarding her. Who could count the number of poems I've lost?

And so it was that I remained in her orbit, from perhaps as early as fifteen years of age until I was almost twenty-one, (with some lapses in attention, to be sure). Our association only ended in earnest when she went away to the New Everglades Bible College in Florida.

*

Before I continue with our story, I would like to clear up a misconception about beta male orbiters. In spite of the generally accepted opinion of them, they are not usually recluses, asexuals, celibates or women-haters, not in any old-world sense of those words.

Beta male orbiters, in fact, generally have a lot of sex available to them, but they usually reject the women who are in their league, often rejecting good women for shallow reasons. Beta male orbiters could be likened to dissatisfied workers who, upon seeing what they believe to be a paltry wage, scheme to get paid more than their skills or qualifications would ordinarily allow. They are often shamed by their families and friends for being too picky and unrealistic. And it is often pointed out to them that to deserve the lofty situations they seek, they ought to work harder and longer and more diligently to improve themselves.

However, the beta male orbiter cannot accept what he is entitled to, especially if he has tried hard to improve either his social position or financial standing but has failed badly and repeatedly. He may, upon having an unexpected financial or sexual success, rise above the ranks of the beta male orbiters for a time. And for a time, he may seem to be thinking, and dating, realistically. But it is unusual for such successes to last for these types of people, hence they are likely to resume their old orbiting behavior before long.

The beta male orbiter spends his life at the margins of worlds above him, looking for any crack in the mile-high glass wall that separates him from the objects of his admiration. And yes, orbiters are guilty of objectifying people, including themselves; and no, it's not healthy. But consider them, if you will, the hopelessly-addicted chainsmokers of the romantic world. What they are doing is not good for them, and they are likely to be rewarded with a world of pain for all their efforts, but they continue on. It's nearly futile to attempt to reason with them. In Christian terminology, they would be seen as nearly-irredeemable reprobates.

It's also unlikely that most beta male orbiters are true women-haters in the classic sense. For one thing, they often have many platonic friends whom they sincerely love. They tend to hire female psychologists, select women doctors, and even vote for female political candidates. They frequently elect to work in environments where their supervisors are women. And it's not unusual for them to be devoted fans of dozens of female recording artists and actresses. It's also true that, having lost at many of the games of life, beta male orbiters may be given to fits of bitterness toward the opposite sex, but this is just ordinary human behavior and does not make them patriarchal ogres.

Most beta male orbiters will just never be the monsters that the journalistic world needs them to be. And it is important to note that the belief system of journalists tends to correspond to whatever outlook will sell the most advertising slots. Anti-beta-male-orbiter virtue signaling can almost always be traced back to some financial advantage for the signaler. Virtue for virtue's sake is a noble concept, but evidence supporting its widespread existence is scant.

The attempt to turn beta male orbiters into pariahs will fail in the long run in spite of any short-term satisfaction people may get from ostracizing them. For one thing, bate male orbiters make the world go around. They may seem annoying, but if they were removed from the social equation, society would become a social and financial desert. They are, as it were, the fuel that feeds the engine of insatiable acquisitiveness that runs our economy and animates our dreams. Without them, there is no competition for love, and without that competition, everything grinds to a halt immediately. Without that competitive element, the prizes our system offers become useless and lose their context. In short, you are all stuck with beta male orbiters. Exiling them only makes all of your current problems even worse later.

I've known many women who attempted to cut all of the orbiters out of their lives, but sadly, they mostly ended up living in rancorous, frustrated obscurity. Failing to land Prince Charming, they took out all of their displaced anger on the relatively defenseless betas. But after they banished them, they found out they could not hold forth over a room of alpha males for long, since alpha males, by definition, want to be the center of attention. It turns out that there must be groupies, fanboys and hangers-on or most of what we call life just isn't going to happen. Beta male orbiters are the audience that's been applauding the stars. A star can't do much in a universe where only other stars are allowed. And what is a star anyway, if there are no plebeians in the world to compare them to?

*

By sheer chance, Hannah had moved from another part of the world to the exurban town far outside of Dallas called Lake Compromise, Texas. Her father had been a missionary in Lima, Peru for many years and had brought his family with him to live there. But eventually the leaders of the denomination wanted him to help lead an important church back in the growing exurbs of Dallas, and so he came with his wife and his splendid daughter, Hannah, to our little town.

I, on the other hand, had grown up in a scattered bunch of nondescript suburbs outside of Dallas before my parents got a great deal on a better-than-average house in Lake Compromise. Because of the lucky timing of that purchase, and because of some fortuitous vehicle purchases, we were able to look far richer than we were. Holding up this facade wasn't easy, and my parents became obsessive penny-pinchers on the one hand and crazed over-spenders on the other. Strategic thinking was lacking at every turn. Hence, my parents ended up charging us kids rent while we went to college, and the rent we paid exceeded the mortgage on the house.

In the end, all of us kids ended up broke. All of us had mental health problems by the time we hit our teens and were not up to the stress of working thirty-two hours per week while juggling fifteen units in college. The other kids were too burnt out to finish college and only escaped poverty by marrying into more supportive families. I finally did get a degree, but emerged from college psychologically frail, unemployable and physically ailing.

Because of the stress caused by the rampant materialism we were expected to keep up with, all of us kids essentially lost our minds. My parents didn't believe in psychology, and so no one got any help unless they practically screamed for it. This left a binary choice for our our family, and families similarly situated in our area: 1. Turn to oceanic levels of drinking, or, 2. become Jesus freaks. I turned to Jesus and the rest of the family drank in volumes that I still can't comprehend.

The whole situation led to a tragic miscasting for all of us siblings, causing us to wander from one ill-advised career to the next, never quite making it. There is not ample space in this work to attempt to explain the sheer magnitude of my vocational failures, but you probably would not believe me if I attempted to tell you even the half of it. But if I am to become famous, it will probably be as a famous vocational failure. Such may have to pass for immortality for me.

Since my parents had a bunch of naive notions about the work ethic and carried a lot of other Great Depression baggage, they completely misjudged the method by which children gain social success within the Dallasphere. And so they watched me flounder at minimum wage jobs which, far from earning me success with women, simply made me the object of scorn and pity. Lacking the traditional Lake Compromise allowance, I ended up looking both weird and penniless. And things were only made worse by the fact that I still had the shallow tastes of other young men in Lake Compromise. In short, I was a sitting duck who was in way over his head and thus prey to any sort of wishful thinking.

*

Hannah had been born into the Church of Christ's Return, and I had converted into it. The Church of Christ's Return was a quickly growing, predacious denomination in those days. Our cornerstone teaching was: "Jesus is coming back to earth very, very soon, probably within five or six years." But, in the spirit of compromise, we all made plans to go to college anyway.

Both Hannah and I liked to go church hopping, and our pastors were very liberal about our people experimenting with going to any church they wanted to. They had confidence in the charisma of the movement and its capacity to retain members. And since we were both in choir and sang loudly, we were always welcome in any church that might be struggling to get its sing-a-longs to go well. If me and Hannah showed up, the singing would work out. Our intrepid nature would give courage to the weaker singers, causing them to raise their voices too.

*

The town of Lake Compromise got its name in a curious way. At the time the pioneers were expanding westward, they came across a mid-sized lake; and the land around it looked like prime real estate. But there was a catch. There was a particularly fierce band of Indians living there who were prepared to defend their land at any cost. This started a nasty war of attrition which made capturing the land around the lake more trouble than it was worth. Since the number of pioneers and the number of natives was about the same, and because they were both equally well-armed, it was decided that no one could achieve a decisive victory. At last both sides agreed to share the shoreline around the lake, with the tribe talking the northern half of it and the pioneers taking the southern half.

The two cultures, although maintaining separate territories, remained in close contact and relations became more and more amiable over time, so much so that when the Federal government attacked the other side of the lake in order to seize the Indian land there, the pioneers rose up and defended them. And on other occasions, when hostile tribes tried to take the land held by the pioneers, the local tribe rose up and helped defeat the invaders. To this day, when one crosses to the northern shore of Lake Compromise, one stumbles upon a sizable neighborhood comprised mostly of Native Americans. Apparently the treaty reached at Lake Compromise would be one of the few treaties with the natives that Americans ended up honoring, and it wasn't even an official one.

*

Hannah and I traveled with our high school choir to choral conventions and competitions around the state, and for several months we were even in the same gospel-rock band together. Many of us played several instruments, and several of us could play piano or guitar parts, or sing lead. (In a pinch, we could even fake it on bass or drums.) I couldn't sing harmony at all, which led to the odd situation of me singing lead even though I had the least polished singing voice in the group. Hence, my mediocre voice was often accompanied by a choir of angels, an odd injustice which people were kind enough to overlook.

Events pulled me and Hannah apart for a couple of the six years we knew each other. Those two years were not without contact, but the contact was sporadic, minimal and perhaps even distracted. Four things happened to bring this about:

Firstly, I actually got a real girlfriend for a few months. Our church allowed making out so long as it did not lead to overt sexual activity, and so I finally had a "real make-out relationship." This understandably changed me and probably took some of my innocent charm away. Additionally, I'd done the unthinkable and left the church, becoming something like a secular, existentialist philosopher. And tragically, I was hit by a pickup truck on my scooter and had to undergo a lot of rehabilitation.

But there was one thing no one had predicted. One of my platonic women-friends had confronted me about my looks and told me flatly what women found unattractive about me. She told me that my long hair looked weird for 1980. (It wasn't the hippie Jesus Freak era anymore.) Furthermore, she let me know that I was far too skinny and that I needed to gain at least twenty pounds in order to avoid looking emaciated. And, she added, if I could lift some weights and get some real muscles on my arms, it would probably help matters considerably.

Given how defensive I could be about criticism, it came as a shock to everyone when I took my friend's recommendations to heart and began to aggressively tackle the matter of my appearance. After cutting my hair, I got serious about my oral health and had oral surgeons, periodontists, dentists and orthodontists correct several problems with my teeth, jaws and gums. Then I started running several miles a day and lifting weights every other day, developing very strong arms and legs. And I began wearing tighter clothes instead of just adorning myself with any old loose rags. I also managed to force down enough protein powder to finally put some meat on my bones. The transformation was almost freakish in its efficacy.

During this transformational period, me and Hannah only talked on the phone, and we didn't talk often. She was, after all, preparing to leave for Bible college in Florida and I was already in junior college Philosophy courses. Our destinies seemed to be speeding in completely opposite directions.

*

Realizing that Hannah would be heading out of town to do her upper-division work, I stopped by that amazing front porch one more time to be the eternal hanger-on, the platonic, orbiting admirer. Having had so many good times there, I decided not to be prideful in my return. After all, this could have been, or so I thought, our last meeting for quite some time. "Why try to rustle anyone's feathers?" I mused. It was time to say goodbye and leave on good terms. Why change anything now? If I were to see her again, or so I thought, it would be with a husband and a flock of kids. I was under no illusion that she was going to that Bible college to become a professional Bible scholar, though, I confess, even in my new secular mode, I might have found that more compelling had it been true.

And so I was feeling all humble and ready to make it doubly clear that her friendship was enough and that I would not use this emotional time to wrangle some kind of romantic attention.

But as I drove up in my 1968 Chevy Malibu, I noted that Hannah's very handsome father was sitting on the porch, gracefully attired, relaxed, and, for a man of his age, looking rather sprightly and youthful. It was one of those seemingly-mystical, hot nights, and, still holding on to some of my former superstitions, I rather thought I saw the light of God glowing off of him, as if no porch light were necessary to illuminate his face.

Although he and I had zero theological agreement, I was still impressed by his religious zeal, a thing I'd only heard about from Hannah, but which I accepted implicitly and without the slightest doubt. All those nights that me and Hannah spoke till 9PM, I'd hear his soft footsteps come up to the screen door behind the porch; and though I could not see him in the darkness, I'd hear him whisper to her that it was starting to get late. He never spoke in a nagging, scolding or chiding way, but rather with a voice that was transcendently gentle, forbearing and modest. And by not addressing me personally, he seemed to give me the dignity of excusing myself without any loss of face. I often left there with the feeling that the whole house was permeated with trust, respect and awe. I would always be a richer person for having known these people, and I knew it.

As I approached the porch, he assured me that Hannah would be out in a moment. He teased me in the most non-confrontational way about the fact that my defection from the church was quite the talk in his circles, especially since I'd actually become a child-preacher at 17 before I left to become a worldly philosopher. Following his lead, I ribbed him with equal gentility for his stolidness in the old ways and for still believing in all the old teachings. There was not an ounce of acrimony in the air. In fact, just the opposite was true. He was there for a reason I could not have ever foreseen.

After a few moments, Hannah did indeed make an appearance, and, having no self-consciousness around her father, I began to speak of her plans to go away and probably marry out there in Florida. And I earnestly told her that I was rather jealous that she was getting to study the Bible in such a prestigious place while I lingered on in a nondescript junior college. But she rather halted me as I tried to speak further. She said she had to cut the evening short, and she gave some vague excuse that I knew could not possibly be true.

At this point her dad looked on seriously, but solicitously, as though he had no intention of interjecting himself into the conversation. It was clear he was prepared to let the inevitable happen. He was just aware, attentive, and caring.

I was not happy about being put off and asked Hannah when we would have a chance to talk over old times and talk about her future in Florida. If it were not to be tonight, when would it be?

"We're not going out tonight," she proclaimed. "We'd like to go out with you on Friday. There's still time to do that."

I looked at her father. He looked back attentively, studying my face, but saying nothing.

"Where would we be going?"

"On a date," she replied.

"But," I objected, "we've been on many outings together. We've been best of friends. Why would we do anything as formal-sounding as that?"

"It's not like those kinds of outings," she added as she reached out and grasped one of my now large biceps, smirking furtively at my arms.

"You mean, a real date?" I said squinting in confusion. "But you have never been attracted to me in that way."

"True," she acknowledged, "but you never looked like this before. Look at you. You're quite a man now, you know. Haven't the girls told you?"

Time slowed up, as it often does in such moments, and I withdrew into myself to ponder. Yes, of course it was all true, and people had hinted about it, but, even so, I had not really accepted the implications of my change in appearance. Of course I must have looked like a totally different person. Why shouldn't people notice? But still, it was all too much to take in at once. I had been too used to things the old way.

It turned out that Hannah had seen me jogging by her house every day for months. She had been peering from the lacy windows of her bedroom without my ever knowing. One of the easiest ways to get in and out of the neighborhood was to drive, walk or run right past her house. Somehow, since my life had undergone so many changes, I had taken to blocking out Hannah's home from my deliberations, even as I was continually passing it. Meanwhile she'd been studying the transformation of my life discreetly and had decided she liked it.

Since I could think of nothing else to say at that instant, I asked, "Where shall we go?"

"Everyone says you preach the theology in the Pantheistic Space Warriors movie now. They say you go back to see that movie over and over again. Well, my dad studies other religions too. He thinks other religions are false, you know, but he insists on studying them, if for no other reason than to warn his flock away from them."

I looked at the dad, and now he had a steady smile on his face and a gleam in his eye.

And although the man was sitting right there, I inquired, "But what would your father think about you going out with a well-known heretic who's preaching other religions?"

"I told him I wanted to go out on a date with you. He knows my taste in men very well, so he knew it would be no use to forbid it. And anyway, he wants to learn about your philosophy first hand. He didn't insist on coming. He would never do that. But I told him he was very welcome to come with us if that's what he wanted."

At this cue, the dad excused himself, wishing us both a good night, and adding he'd be looking forward to seeing me on Friday night.

After he left, I pressed further, "But you went on a lot of dates with other guys. I know your dad wasn't coming along on most of those."

"Yes, but those dates were just nothing, you know. Those ones didn't count. It would be no use bothering my dad about those guys. But this is one of those times where we both felt he should come along."

I shrugged in resignation. "Okay, then, we're going to see the Pantheistic Space Warriors on Friday?"

"Good!" she said, smiling slightly.

Then I stepped back and thought silently for a moment before adding, "A woman as good-looking as you, as intelligent as you are — wouldn't you have your choice of believers to go out with?"

She sighed heavily, as if somewhat exasperated, and looked me directly. "Church boys can be so boring sometimes. A gal has to have a change of pace once in a while. Don't you think?"

I crossed my arms and stared at the ground as if the answer she'd given wasn't quite right.

"Look," she said, "I try to follow God's laws as best I can, but there are some times where you just need to know that you're a human being. You have to make exceptions from time to time."

"But how can a heathen like me be courting a daughter of God like you? That would be wrong, wouldn't it?"

"Don't be so narrow minded. Don't try to think it all through like that. You never know what could happen."

"So what? You think I might come back to the church for love? You think you might leave the church for romance? What else? Your dad might become an apostate too? Are you nuts?"

"Don't be mad at me and don't overthink it all! Just let things happen naturally for once."

Later that night, as I lay in my bed, I realized why I was perturbed, and I said to the sky, since I didn't know who else to talk to, "Why didn't she love me when I was ugly, then the situation wouldn't be so complicated now?" I kept asking the question to the sky, but the sky had no answer. The only thing to do was to try to open my mind and heart and move forward.

*

The date could not have started out more pleasantly. Having not been on a chaperoned date in some time, I was surprised at how natural the whole thing felt. Had I known that such an arrangement would be so comfortable for me, I might have invited more girl's fathers along on dates.

I was in raptures watching the Pantheistic Space Warriors on the big screen, so much so that I rather forgot I was even on a date. We went out to a diner afterwards and continued to enjoy ourselves.

On the way home, we stopped the car and parked a couple of times to talk more about the situation.

Being ever the worried neurotic, I resumed my questioning. "So why have you changed your mind based on my looks?"

She looked at me silently until I realized the flaw in my reasoning.

I resumed, "Okay, so I've probably always loved you for your looks, so it's a bit hypocritical of me to bring that issue up. But still, you are going to be a theology student and I am already an amateur philosopher. If we dated more, wouldn't we argue all the time?"

"I have to have a man that attracts me," she replied. "I have certain needs. There's more to life than religion and all that philosophy talk."

"Oh wait, so you're saying physical chemistry is more important than theology to you?"

"I am a woman. What do you expect?"

"What does your dad think about this?"

The dad sat stoically in the back seat, silent as a piece of furniture, but as alive and alert as a panther in the jungle. And the whole time we were arguing, I was thinking, "If only I'd had a dad like Hannah's, I would have never been a lost soul. This kind of unconditional love he has — where do people even learn such a thing?"

"My dad knows," she said.

"He knows?"

"Yes, everything. He knows everything. He loves me."

I then looked to the father, waiting for him to speak. I needed his input somehow.

He explained his very predictable reservations about my secular pantheist philosophy, but in no way indicated that he was opposed to further dating between me and his daughter. And while he spoke very little, his body language indicated that he would issue no ultimatums for us to follow regarding this very sensitive situation. We would have to figure it out for ourselves.

Hannah explained that she was going to stay with her religion, but that feelings came first for her when it came to certain things. The rest could be worked out somehow.

After that evening I was frozen with indecision. It was clear that her attraction would fade quickly if I didn't act heroically soon. Decisiveness was precisely that kind of manly virtue that attracted her. In the days after, there were one or two awkward attempts at conversation, but the whole thing fizzled. Even now I am haunted by the feeling that there was surely some way to seize the day, but I could not grasp it.

The whole thing reminds me of the koan where the Zen master tells the student something like, "When you reach the top of ladder and have stepped on the very last rung, take one more step upward."

I can now feel in my bones that there was a bold move to make, even though each of the particulars of the situation seemed logically impossible to overcome. The move I needed to make would not have been logical, but would have been based on some irrational form of inspiration and intuition that I was just in no position to tap into at that time in my life.

Some years later I stopped by the old family home, and the mother was home at the time. She told me all about Hannah's graduation from the New Everglades Bible College, about her dashing, successful husband and their amazing kids. Everything had come off according to plan, and all the children were brought up in the faith. There was even a photo album to look at with photos commemorating all those milestones.

If only I'd had the flexibility of the great sages who founded Lake Compromise, who knows what might have happened? Maybe I'd be living in Florida today. Even as a non-believer, I admit I'd have liked to get that degree in Biblical studies. Maybe I'd have been the first Agnostic student to be accepted at the New Everglades Bible College.

*

The Expansion of The Beta Male Orbiter Lifestyle

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Luanne appeared one day at our local congregation of the Church of Christ's Return. After speaking with her on several occasions, I became convinced that she was in no way anticipating Christ's return. She was living her life in a way that made me think she never even thought about Jesus returning to earth. She seemed to be very comfortable with this earth the way it is and didn't seem to need any savior to appear on it. It had occurred to me more than once that if Luanne would ever become my girlfriend, I myself might not need a savior either.

*

Although I was only seventeen, I was running the church's public relations arm, preparing press releases and writing radio announcements. And while I was only an assistant youth minister, I was the one bringing new kids into the youth group. And it was those new kids who brought their parents to Sunday services. And those parents brought their checkbooks. All of nature is a food chain. Understand one part of it and you can leverage the whole thing. In any case, I viewed myself as essential ingredient to the economic wellbeing of the enterprise.

It helped that I had the phone numbers of many of the prominent gospel musicians in Texas and could sweet-talk them into coming and performing for ridiculously-small donations. Somehow, in spite of my lack of self-confidence with women, I seemed to attract money and glamor to our otherwise unknown congregation. And because I was always in some gospel band, often with young men and women far more handsome than me, it was natural that, with all that public exposure, I would have some romantic experiences while still preserving my vow to not cross the line into overt sexuality.

However, in this story I am not concentrating on the women who would have me, because realistic romances are not what the beta male orbiter's life is about. If he has a realistic romance, it's rather an accident and tends not to last too long. True, the beta male orbiter may not even see that he is cynically ladder-climbing or monkey-branching his way up the social ladder, but that is nonetheless what he is trying to do. In truth, a beta male orbiter almost never self-identifies as one but rather gives excuses as to why he can't be attracted to ordinarily-attainable girls. He is awash in social greed and cannot see it. Such was the case with me. I was a shameless self-promoter on steroids. (Of course the "steroids" mentioned here were of the poetic sort. Real steroids didn't come till much later in life.)

Thus, when Luanne appeared amongst us, I took to believing that "The Holy Ghost had chosen her to be my own," or some such nonsense. There is no accounting for how deeply in-denial avaricious people can be about their own self-nature. But suffice it to say that when Luanne first made her appearance in pants so tight and flesh-toned that they were indistinguishable from human skin, I was driven bonkers with lust, lust which I sold to myself as "divine inspiration." (But who knows? Maybe lust is the way the gods get us to do what I now believe is their infinitely-perverse will.)

*

Luanne dressed with no Christian modesty whatsoever. This had to do with the fact that it was the 1970s and many fundamentalist youth groups operated under separate rules than the main Sunday congregations. The youth groups were often separated off and met in facilities prudently tucked away from the prying eyes of the more rigorous elements of the church. Since the youth group was the church's future, and because non-believers were there checking us out, we put many of our strictest rules aside until not enforcing them became impractical. This repeatedly put church leadership in an awkward position. The general rule was that we did not try to enforce dress codes until youth group people expressed a desire to check out conventional Sunday services. At that point they were told to please try to dress as conservatively as they were able to without having some sort of nervous breakdown. (And in the semi-hippie era of the 1970s, folks could have style meltdowns more often than one might think.)

It was hot in the summer, and it didn't even occur to some women not to show up to a Bible study wearing only cut-off shorts, bikini tops and flipflops. And that part of Texas was a little more diverse than people thought it was, and so you had the occasional Dallas gangster kids showing up, along with religious bikers dressed in black leather. There were weed-smoking, beer-drinking fornicators who still wanted to hear evangelically-oriented sermons. We were at a crossroads in our culture, and those of us in church leadership were just winging it, figuring out what to do as we went along.

*

Luanne was boy-crazy and obviously dating many of the guys in the youth group. Because members of the Church of Christ's Return were still a minority in Lake Compromise, we had a limited dating pool. And so some rather unusual rules sprung up to deal with this.

It was a fundamentalist assumption that every guy would eventually need a wife and every girl would need a husband. And obviously not every attempted pairing would work out. What this meant was that ordinary jealousy was not really permitted.

An uncommitted guy or gal was free to try to date as many people as they wanted until they committed to someone. And even so, if the relationship soured, they were free to date whichever person of the opposite sex appealed to them, especially if they were in our congregation.

People had to get used to the idea that if someone broke up with you, you would see them with a close friend a week later. You couldn't ask them to date outside the religion, and that meant they'd essentially have to date one of your close friends after dating you. Amazingly, everyone handled this extremely well, and I don't ever recall hearing of any heated arguments over this. If you felt jealously, you just had to get over it and be civil. There was no other way.

In this environment, Luanne basically basked in continual adoration, and the longings of every man in the room were palpable. Because she was musically talented, she was often in front of the room. And too, if people who organized services, as I did, were short on talent, Luanne could always fill in with a sermonette or a song. She was not just a living doll, but a real asset to the church. I think she even spoke a few European languages and sometimes dated secular millionaires just for fun, even though, strictly speaking, those rich men were too old for her. She was a big fish in a small pond and relished every moment of it. How such a sophisticated creature — one who could recite poetry, rattle off Bible verses, travel the world and charm older men — ended up in our church was beyond me. I never really knew the story of how she came to be with us, though it was clear she would be moving on to bigger and better places. She was the type who one would picture settling in the south of France in some industrial magnate's villa on the Mediterranean. Frankly, compared to her, we were bumpkins, and we knew it.

Like the rest of us, Luanne was all around the music department at high school, playing several instruments and mastering every subject she studied. She was in college prep courses at the junior college and would likely have her Master's degree by the time she was twenty-two, leaving all of us mortals in the dust, struggling to get our sad B.A.s before getting nearly nowhere in the big games of the big world.

Her musical talent and general charm boosted our attendance. If she told all her secular friends she was playing music in one of our gospel programs, several people would come just to remain in her orbit, not caring that they were subjecting themselves to our dogma. And too, in the mid-sized villages of Texas, back then, there was not much live entertainment, meaning that secular people, if they liked live music, pretty much had to show up to church youth groups. Since we had one of the best music scenes in town, religious or secular, we attracted a fair number of adults. Sometimes the number of adults in the room equalled or exceeded the number of kids. And the adults, as previously mentioned, always seemed to like Luanne.

*

Since Luanne would not have me directly as a boyfriend, I reverted to the behavior I'd practiced with Hannah. I started orbiting again. This was, as it were, my second beta male orbiting gig, and I use the word "gig" to indicate that beta male orbiting is a kind of calling, a vocation, perhaps even a foreordained fate.

The reader must know that as a life-long religious person, (and I count Agnosticism as a religion too), I have vacillated as to whether human life is predestined or a matter of individual choice. But these days I'm rather siding with the predestination camp. The number of people avoiding what appears to be their obvious fate seems small to me, while those who fight with all their might but lose to fate seems to be beyond numbering.

One joy about Lake Compromise is that if you live in the right neighborhood, you are equidistant to many other neighborhoods, and so dozens of people you know are within walking distance. If you just go for a walk, you might run into a half dozen people you know, and if your house is convenient to get to, you can get a lot of spontaneous visitors. (In life and in love, location and convenience tend to outweigh heavenly values.) And so, on any given day, you could find me wandering over to Luanne's house to see if she wanted to practice music, have a long conversation or go for a drive. Even if Luanne wasn't home, her very kindly mother would likely invite me in and serve up some beverage or treat.

Anyone who was really lonely in Lake Compromise would have had to be a very unsociable or unimaginative person. Any effort at all would get you invited into any number of homes for dinner, socializing, or even a sleepover. If you stayed up late talking with their kids, parents would just ask you to stay the night; and in Texas, unlike San Francisco, houses have guest rooms. There is something to be said for living in a place where not every square inch is hotly contested.

Luanne was not as easy to get ahold of as Hannah was. Her parents were more liberal and busier than Hannah's. I'm not even sure if they were religious at all. They seemed to be more educated than the average exurban Texas family. I seem to recall them being professors or language teachers. There was an air of sophistication about the house, a sense that these people were a class or two above most of the other neighbors. Given her more cosmopolitan upbringing, it's odd that Luanne was attracted to a redneck faith like ours at the Church of Christ's Return.

While Luanne never dated me, she dated other guys in my bands. And because I was the church's unofficial hearer of confessions, they always came to me to complain when things weren't going well with them an Luanne. This made for tricky going when I was visiting her in order to remain in orbit, but, amazingly, I managed to keep a wall of separation intact between my religious duties and my personal discussions with Luanne. She had no way of knowing that I knew of all the problematic elements in her dating life, especially since nothing I knew about her deterred my ironclad crush on her. And while she was accomplished, disarming, entertaining and worldly, it was those skin-tight pants that kept me hypnotized.

Other than her skin-tight pants, I was also mesmerized by Luanne's face. It was a mystery to me. Although she was ostensibly Anglo, there were distinctly Mongolian or Siberian features to her cheekbones and eyes. Perhaps she was part Russian. I think there were people who knew the story of her racial makeup, and I think they even explained it all to me, but for some reason I could not retain the information and went back to being mystified by Luanne's appearance.

*

In addition to being avid huggers, our congregation, especially among the youth, retained the ancient tradition of giving fellow believers, upon greeting them or leaving them, a little, platonic kiss on the cheek. Even younger men would do this to each other, even if they were totally straight. And thus I thought nothing at all of Luanne's habit of kissing hello or kissing goodbye because it was done in such a plain and sisterly way. She rather deviated from our traditions, however, in that she kissed people she liked on the lips, very gently, of course, so as not to leave an impression that it was sensual. But, if the ostensibly-platonic friend was close, she might linger in that kiss just an instant longer than was polite, which could be a bit disconcerting when one was trying to avoid being overwhelmed by one's emotions and trying to keep a civil veneer.

Among other differences between Hannah and Luanne, there was the difference in how they dealt with beta male orbiters. Hannah told me, at least in the first years that we knew each other, that she would not tolerate romantic talk from me, or at least that I should try to keep such talk to a minimum. Luanne, on the other hand, made it clear that while she was not interested in me romantically at the time, she could not rule out future consideration of my overtures. Like me, she was admittedly a ladder climber, but unlike me, she had no harsh principles against settling for less if life became hard. While she might continue to experiment with boys and men from richer families than mine, and while she might like a hunkier fellow than me, she made it clear that she would in no wise regard me as a bad catch, imagining that, under the right circumstances, probably a relationship between us would be fine. While she noted that this was the time in life when folks had to do their very best to expand their options, there might be other times when such aspirational considerations were not so critical.

While some women are annoyed by their orbiters, Luanne did not show them any disdain. And it must be added that, since I was not the wealthiest kid in that part of the world, I appreciated the fact that she did not mind treating her orbiters to rides in her car and lunches about the outer perimeters of the county. Luanne, in fact, launched the second phase of my beta male orbiter career, that of the non-romantic financial dependent. I learned that while a woman might not be in love with you, she might still appreciate being loved, and her gratitude in this regard might help smooth out the financially rough edges of an otherwise hardscrabble life.

*

In certain quarters of the men's movement there are dogmas every bit as far out as one would find in 3rd Wave Feminism. One misguided doctrine some men's groups have put forward is that women always want to take advantage of men financially and that they always exploit beta male orbiters. And so for many bitter people in the men's movement, there is this sense of having been ripped off or played for a fool, or having been, overall, unrewarded for their efforts and offerings.

This has not been the case for me in any consistent way. Of course I have run across, in my journeys, many female exploiters just as I have met with countless alpha male predators. Sure, many women have taken advantage of me in almost every way imaginable; but, over and against that, many women have intervened on my behalf in life-saving ways. Without their going the extra mile for me, I surely would not have lived to tell these stories.

In any case, if a beta male is still in orbit, still cultivating the hope of romantic relationships with women, he is not generally accepted in the most extreme school of the men's movement known as MGTOW, (Men Going Their Own Way). And so while most men can't qualify as a MGTOW, MGTOW videos provide a great education as to the downsides of being a beta male orbiter. (The trick to watching those videos is to resist being totally drawn in to the absolutism they engage in.)

Specifically, the lowest rung of the beta male world, according to MGTOW, is a creature called "the beta male provider," but given my status as a certifiable indigent, I would be ruled out as a serious provider beta anyway. Even if someone wanted to take advantage of me, there would be no assets to seize; and this probably has provided me with more than a measure of safety in this wild and wooly world of dating.

Because of my many career failings, and because of my inability to keep up with the class of people I've aspired to imitate, one would think I would have been driven to despair. But it must be noted that many women were sympathetic to my plight and not only temporarily invited me into their upper class worlds, but financed my time there so that I might fit in comfortably. Additionally, in the medical, psychiatric and social services realms, women have saved my life so many times as to make the proposition of them being uniformly greedy completely untenable.

One might think that finally, in old age, women would abandon an over-the-hill, indigent man, but, even now, they are the difference between me living in squalor and me basically getting to eat and drink whatever I want. The neighborhoods I live in, the houses I go to, and the vacations I take — none of that would be possible if not for the generosity of women, many of whom I still have a crush on.

Unlike other men who support men's causes, I do not complain that my life as an orbiter came up empty. If I have been used, it was not in a profitless way. Overall, I'd say, the exchange rate has been, at the very least, quite fair, if not more than fair.

Another thing I owe to the women I orbited around is a life in the musical world that went way farther than it otherwise should have. While I never had a hit, my songs have been played on the radio many times and, throughout the decades, my songs got small cult followings. Part of the reason for this is that women who were far more musically talented than me lent their talents to my projects, giving me many boosts that several people argued were undeserved.

In light of all of this, I was never able to remain a committed bigot, because no group of people has ever been uniformly good or uniformly bad around me. I've met with kindness from people of almost every religion, race and gender that I encountered. Even in places where it seemed like I could find no protector, someone would emerge unexpectedly to take up my cause. And while I tolerate a lot of generalizing and inter-group complaining, I can never finally blame any one group, gender or race for all of my problems. And even when some stereotypes seem generally true, I have always found far too many exceptions to them to stay with such generalizations in a completely rigid way.

*

One day me and Luanne were alone together in one of our local Church of Christ's Return sanctuaries practicing some instrumental music, a classical-folk fusion session. At that time our high school was pretty much forcing classical music on all the folk and rock musicians. Many of us went along with the program and started playing Bach on our guitars, pianos, flutes and recorders. Me and Luanne had decided to take an afternoon off from our other duties to practice together and search, as so many of us did, for that perfect meeting place between the old musical world and the new one. Our classical jam session was very satisfying, and we enjoyed our hours of weaving ancient music rifts into pop and gospel songs. It was a very experimental and mind-expanding time. And, human beings being what they are, one form of experimentation often led to another.

Late afternoon had come and gone and night had fallen, but it was still quite a warm summer night. As our practice session wound down, I began to shut off the lights and pack my musical instruments.

Luanne came up to me and looked into my face. "I want you to kiss me," she said.

Having been her platonic friend for some years, and her Christian brother, so to speak, I thought nothing of giving her a peck on the lips and then returning to gather up my sheet music. And so I turned to do just that.

"No," she pressed. "I want you to give me a real kiss."

I was stunned at the thought of having a real make out session in the middle of a church; and knowing Luanne the way I did, I was afraid of what we might end up doing in there. That level of sacrilege was new to my mind, and it would take some years before such blasphemous thoughts became commonplace for me.

I had given up keeping track of who she was still dating and who she was no longer dating. But it seemed to me she was still seeing people I knew, people I wouldn't want to offend. And also, I had never had the power of her raw sensuality pointed in my direction, and it was overwhelming to confront without warning. I was way too hung up for the kind of spontaneity I was expected to have right then. And that hangup is a recurring theme in the lives of many beta male orbiters who, once called on their bluff, realize they've grown too comfortable in the friend zone to suddenly switch roles in an instant.

Managing to wriggle out of the situation, I drove home feeling a little bit shook up. When I later saw her dating other men, I knew I had blown what had turned out to be my one chance to get closer to her. But then again, perhaps my intuition had served me better than I thought.

About the time I started pulling away from Christianity and turning toward secular philosophy, I decided to attend a Sunday service at the Church of Christ's Return, just for old times' sake. I hadn't attended as many Sunday services as I should have over the years. This was because, throughout my time at the Church of Christ's Return, the youth group work I was doing — leading sing-alongs, writing sermons and doing fund-raising — left me too tired at the end of the week to get up early on Sunday too.

Even so, the congregation was bigger than it had ever been that Sunday, partly, I knew, because of my marketing efforts and because of the charisma of our new pastor. When they all sang together, it was pure bliss for me. And somehow the scripture passages and the homily were soothing also. But then something weird happened.

At one point the pastor asked Luanne to come up to the front of the room to give a presentation with visual aids, large posters she'd had printed up. Weirdly, Luanne started in on an anti-abortion tirade of the sort our church usually shied away from. One of our outgoing pastors, very much still an Evangelical, had just warned us that our denomination risked losing its spiritual roots to the tide of conservative politics that seemed to be sweeping over everything.

As the anti-abortion harangue continued, Luanne began holding up the large posters she'd brought up to the front of the room. They featured full-color images of aborted fetuses in bloody, gruesome detail.

After the service I confronted our new pastor about this and asserted that our church was unique in the Evangelical world in that we had stayed out of politics. "Why risk ruining everything to score some temporal political win?" However, our new pastor stood firmly behind Luanne's presentation and admitted he saw things becoming even more political in our congregation. Of course, for theological reasons, I was already on my way out, but, I must admit that Luanne's presentation hurried me out the door faster than I'd planned on going.

I would have been miserable dating a true cultural conservative. Our church members, up to that point, although we again kept this on the down low, were the kind of Evangelicals who voted for Jimmy Carter, who, at that time, was a real Baptist. (He has since turned his back on traditional religion, but that took decades to happen.)

Luanne's presentation had brought home the fact that I was an old-school feminist. This may seem impossible for the reader to believe given my earlier tirade against political correctness. However, I was raised to believe in legalized, early-term abortion The virtues of birth control were openly discussed in our home. And I was also raised to believe that women should be encouraged to pursue any career they want to. And yes, I even pined for the day that the U.S. would have a woman president. Therefore, if our church was to start emphasizing things like women's submission to men and the banning of birth control, I would not be able to tolerate it.

Perhaps now, having had some time to recover from the disorientation I underwent in those days, I could learn to live with dating a culturally conservative woman, but at that time such a thing was out of the question. As the reader might imagine, the current 3rd wave of feminism is alien to me; and for that reason I don't currently call myself a feminist. But if feminism ever returns to it's roots of egalitarianism and color-blind regard for all human beings, I will rejoin the movement happily.

The current flavor of feminism is awash in a kind of vengeful mercilessness and unforgiving hatefulness that make it simply unsupportable for me. But for the purposes of this story, the reader must know that in the 1970s, I was apparently way too feminist for the Church of Christ's Return, and thus way too feminist to be a good match for Luanne.

Oh, by the way, years later, when I came from Dallas to track down my old believer-friends from the Lake Compromise days, I did run into some old church mates who'd heard about Luanne's fortunes. It turned out, as one might have predicted, that she did marry a European multi-millionaire and have kids with him. She wasn't living in Texas anymore, but was apparently jet-setting around the world and starting her own businesses in the process. It turned out that the family she had married into wasn't even religious. Nothing was mentioned of any further involvement with the Church of Christ's Return.

*

Beta Male Orbiter In The Experimental Mode

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As Dallas continued to boom, both economically and socially, more and more multimillionaires began to filter into the distant exurb of Lake, Compromise, Texas. Not many of them were amenable to the kind of fundamentalism purveyed by the Church of Christ's Return, but a few were.

When the Purcell sisters showed up, no one knew what to make of it. We all thought that Hannah and Luanne were the most beautiful creatures on earth, and we were unprepared for these two Purcell valkyries to enter into our midst. They were so physically beautiful that it was actually freakish.

The older Purcell sister, Cheyenne, had proportions that looked like they were conceived by an animator, as though she were a collection of perfect parts that were assembled by the gods. Her clothing obviously cost more than almost anyone else's and she was very aware of her amazing appearance.

Cheyenne had an interesting feature to her personality that seemed incompatible with the overall tone of our faith. She was just plain mean; and she was mean in the old world sense. She issued real insults, not the kinds of things that pass for insults in the pathetic trigger-warning / safe-space world we live in now. When you were insulted by Cheyenne, it not only happened to hurt, but it was meant to hurt. Unlike certain passages of scripture, her words could not be successfully handled by apologetics of any sort. Her verbal abuse was as bad as it seemed, and there was no way to rationalize it away.

*

Given her bad temper and her lofty opinion of herself, it may seem odd to some readers that Cheyenne should follow our church members' tradition of mostly dating within the congregation, even if that meant marrying down dramatically. And it might seem even more remarkable that her parents blessed this choice, meaning they would eventually tolerate having a son-in-law with a much lower income than they might have otherwise hoped for. But such phenomena were not altogether unknown in the Church of Christ's Return.

Cheyenne, like most female newcomers to our congregation, would make the dating rounds among the scraggly bands of available men in our church and finally settle. Women in our midst had to settle. The women among us with long laundry lists of requirements usually hit the hard wall of village reality pretty quickly. It was 1979 and one could not just hop onto the World Wide Web and select between several million love-hungry men. The women whose laundry lists trumped their religious faith had to, so we typically said, "sell out to the world," which meant throwing in the towel on religious marriage and just latching onto a rich stud from Dallas. Since Cheyenne would not sell out in this way, she eventually married Olaf, one of our standby guys with no particular financial promise and a stunningly mediocre appearance.

At this point, the reader might wonder: Wouldn't the guys at the church be lured into infighting as some hot babe dated one guy, and then the next guy, all of those guys being long-term best friends? And when Cheyenne, or anyone as physically beautiful as her, entered the congregation, wouldn't the males enter into a friendship-destroying power struggle?

The answer to how we resolved these questions is curious.

Our church firmly preached against jealousy, but also advised people to marry within the church. To follow both of these injunctions, we just would have to put up with the fact that any unmarried female newcomer would basically be dating almost every single male there until she found the least objectionable option. I say "least objectionable" because, in spite of my pro-male stance in many disputes among the sexes, I must confess that most of us believer-guys were not really great catches.

And because we had more or less vowed not to begrudge the fact that the person we'd just been dating would soon be dating all our best friends, it worked out that almost everyone found the best match they could, given the oddly-limiting circumstances they faced.

These dating rules were successful enough at our church that even I ended up going steady with one of the locals for a few months. And, truth be told, it was a good enough match that I am often led to think that I should have married that girl. But alas, perhaps I finally ended up as one of those "worldly sellouts," or perhaps, as more than one person has accusingly said to me, I was just horrified of life-long commitment and sustained marital intimacy.

*

One way I got to study Cheyenne, and many other women, closely, was through the art of being the third wheel. Because of the comfort people in our town felt with either being the third wheel, or having a third wheel along, I was able to scope out most of the hot prospects in thorough detail. I often joked that many of the longest relationships I had were with couples.

If a couple got comfortable with a beta male orbiter, he might be invited along on half of their dates. Because we were a people who loved long drives, big day trips and spending hours together, it naturally followed that there was no way to hide the true nature of one's personality flaws. And thus, as a third wheel, one got to learn about everyone's temperament in relationships; and since these relationships often lasted years, you often knew quite a lot about the people you yourself might eventually end up dating.

In such situations, there was often no way to smooth over the rough edges of one's personality, no way to excuse one's self before one's true self emerged. You would eventually just have to let it all hang out and accept the world's verdict, whatever it may be. One might be afraid of intimacy, but if one stayed in the Church of Christ's Return for long, you would have to become somewhat intimate. Even if you lacked the capacity to sustain the intimacy of romantic life-partnerships, you would still come to know all about the people, and they would come to know all about you.

We all learned, through lengthy exposure to Cheyenne, that one would have to be a very forgiving person, or a very thick-skinned person, to be her boyfriend. But, true to the patterns within our church, Cheyenne eventually found that forgiving, thick-skinned husband and succeeded in having a life-long marriage with children and houses and cars and pets, and all the rest. Olaf turned out to be that heroically tolerant man.

The reader will be relieved to know that Cheyenne and I never even tried dating each other. We tolerated each other in third wheel situations, since it was considered rude in our culture to refuse the presence of a third wheel or to refuse invitations to be a third wheel. Olaf liked a lot of third wheels around. Cheyenne not so much. But Cheyenne knew, in spite of the strength of her will, not to attempt to disrupt that part of our culture; and so in that matter she had to defer to Olaf.

*

Now I take up the matter of the other Purcell sister, Candy. If one could accept it, Candy was even better looking than Cheyenne. In a way, she was so good looking that we sometimes forgot she was there. Since the existence of such a person seemed impossible, one could forget about them for a short time.

Unlike Cheyenne, Candy had no compunction about dating outside the church. She, like Hannah, admitted forthrightly that she liked buff guys, overtly studly guys, and, to make matters more difficult, she made it clear that would she would not settle for any low-income dating. While neither of the sisters would date me, there was a difference in how they turned me away. Cheyenne did so by insulting me often enough to make me lose any interest, but, in Candy's view, this was too tiresome and inefficient of a process. Candy handled rejecting men in a very different way.

"Look, you. I've seen you ogling me from across the room, and I know what your silly mind is thinking. So let me make this clear: It's not only that I'm just not attracted to you, but it's also that I'm very unimpressed with your lack of ambition. You're always driving around in some old car, dining at the cheapest diners and spending all your evenings hanging out and talking. You need to understand the kind of woman I am. It's not enough for a guy to be good looking, (and you're not half as good looking as you'd need to be to date me). I need a man who's going somewhere in this world. And I can just tell that you're not going anywhere in life. You look impressive now because you're a church leader and a very popular guy, but, beneath all that, I can tell you'll never have real money; and by real money I mean trips to Italy and dinners at really expensive restaurants and theaters; and I don't mean twice a year. I'm talking about a lifestyle; and I've seen your lifestyle enough to know it's not going to cut it, okay?"

The way Candy saw it, you could reject a guy once, and if you did it the right way, he'd never pester you again. Her sister, she felt, wasted everyone's time by driving people off with a long series of insults, insults which, in some cases, didn't address the heart of the matter.

Candy gleamed like a nordic sheet of platinum. She was tallish, athletic, confident, agile and alert. She was like a viking female god who did not suffer fools gladly, not for an instant.

Unlike Cheyenne, Candy made herself scarce at church. She made as if to agree with the teachings of the church so there would be no fallouts with her family, but she skipped a lot of youth group meetings. And since the youth group was seen as the heart and soul of the congregation, it was notable when someone came infrequently.

But when she did make it to the youth group meetings, she enjoyed our services well enough, although it was sometimes annoying to her that my preaching and singing were the main part of many youth group services. Even from stage, or from behind a lectern, or from behind my guitar, I could see her looking up at me thinking something like, "You can hog the stage all you want, but I won't be impressed with you."'

Before college, Candy was a bright high school student and piled up her required units quickly, meaning that by our senior year she barely had to take any classes and was off living a "real life" with "real men of substance." She was not hanging around in low-end coffee shops with Jesus freaks like me who lugged their acoustic guitars everywhere. That was for certain.

By the time I defected from the Church of Christ's Return, me and Candy were in different worlds, and there was no reason to believe our paths would ever cross. But, as fate would have it, one of the believers who accepted me as a friend, in spite of my apostasy, was on his way to getting engaged to Cheyenne. That friend was Olaf. This meant that whenever I went to go see my one of my best believer friends, not only was the hard-nosed Cheyenne around, but many times Candy was there visiting with her sister and future brother-in-law.

Candy had begun noting in me all the changes that Hannah had. Instead of looking like a lost puppy or a wimpy hippie, I now looked like a cropped-headed, weight lifter who'd finally gotten in shape. Since I was visiting Olaf, even two years after I left the church, my unavoidable presence began, I suppose, to wear her down just a bit. And too, when Candy wasn't there, Cheyenne was not shy about giving intelligence away as to how her sister was faring in the dating world with the "real men."

*

Before I continue discussing my specific delusions regarding Candy, I would like to further discuss the world of delusion that beta male orbiters live in and the place that bragging rights hold in such a ridiculous world.

It must be noted that in the spiritually-lost world of beta male orbiters, bragging rights, however masochistically earned, were the most precious currency we traded in. To be able to point at the most difficult woman in the world and claim to have made any progress with her, however minute that progress might have been, gave one indisputable street cred with other beta male orbiters.

Me and the other beta male orbiters would discuss not only possible and probable dating scenarios, but also improbable and nearly impossible dating scenarios. During these scheming sessions, each orbiter was encouraged to share what his most epic caper might be, could such a thing actually be pulled off. The caper, if attempted, would not be attempted for love, nor for money, but for the sheer glory of claiming to have gotten the universe to somehow go along with such an absurd gambit.

It would be analogous to a desperate salesman having landed a bigger than usual sale. In such a case he would just have to run back to his fellow desperate salesmen and boast of having pulled off a fleeting miracle. Never mind that the customer would not be buying the same product again once they found a better supplier. The very fact that one could say that such and such a prestige customer actually said yes, even once, would earn one a look of awe and envy from one's fellow soldiers in the trenches where desperate salesmen live.

The hope of a temporary elevation in status, however illusory, was the only thing that made the beta male orbiter's life worth living one more day. How the orbiter would survive future days was anybody's guess, but that problem was always judiciously left for the morrow. In the meantime, bragging rights remained the order of the day.

And among the beta male orbiters of that time and that subculture, no one disputed the fact that should any one of us local yokels manage to get even one official date — not just a coffee shop hang-out or a visit to the family home, but a "real" date — with Candy Purcell, that person would be like a superman among betas. True, there was probably no escaping the beta status, and probably no way to become a superman in the "really real" world, but, in our way of thinking, if we could achieve something great as measured by our own miniaturized grading scale, that would be something to talk about and remember. And thus it was agreed that any beta would be considered awesome if he were to pull off a date, even without any making out, with Candy Purcell.

Now we knew that "ultra-real" men who "kicked ass" in Dallas, the ones that Candy Purcell was probably seeing when she was absent from church, could make a mockery of us. But, by that time, we couldn't image becoming players on that scale, or rather, we could imagine it, but only in the way one imagines becoming a prince or a celebrity.

To millennials, journalists and academics, especially the ones now living in the era of outrage-induced social-justice mobs, such a description of dating life might seem anathema. But I will not attempt to go back and rewrite history. The values I speak of, however repugnant they may seem to some people now, were held by millions of people back then. And frankly, similar ideas are probably held by tens of millions more today. And while those countless numbers of souls may have been shamed or bullied into silence, they still exist after all; and I shall tell their story as long as it is humanly possible for me to do so.

There is, at this moment, an emerging culture of so-called "erasure" and "canceling," where activists seek to exile whole classes of human beings and to erase all record of previous cultures they now find offensive. I can no offer no comfort to such people, largely because they are more hideous than anyone they seek to censor.

If you live in the Bay Area or Los Angeles, and you know such people, you are, probably as we speak, seeking to flee from them as quickly as possible. Since such people are the most miserable people alive, you do yourself no wrong to attempt to escape them. If you have the money and logistical prowess to do it, you may have joined the hundreds of thousands of people now seeking a way out of the social and economic Hieronymus Bosch painting that the San Francisco and Los Angeles metroplexes have become. If you've lived in the Dallasphere this whole time, as most of us Lake Compromise people have, you're looking on in wonder at the West Coast, thanking God that you never moved there.

*

To understand the emerging scene in Dallas, and that scene's influence over life in all of the extended Dallas metroplex, it is necessary to talk about those people who were hipsters long before we all thought we knew what hipsters were. Or, rather, it is necessary to elucidate the fates of those who failed to be hipsters. And It goes practically without saying that I met such a fate, a fate marked by debilitating floundering and almost comical overcompensation. How I survived it, I'll never really know.

Failing to be a "trendy," especially when the local population seems to adore the trendies, creates more than just ego problems. It creates health problems, sometimes fatal ones. The human situation is always more fragile than most people want to admit; and the state of the beta male orbiter is perhaps one of the most fragile situations imaginable. Many of my fellow betas simply did not survive the situation. And while doctors and county officials might have listed the cause of their demises as suicide, overdose or the side effects of psychiatric medication, the real cause of death was downward mobility, a downward mobility made obvious by the contrast between their lives and the lives of the hipsters around them.

The whole enterprise of beta male orbiters wanting to become hipsters is laughable on the face of it. It's completely unworkable, but since when has unworkability ever stopped a desperate belief system?

Beta male orbiters aspiring to hipsterhood have had a common delusion that a bizarrely heroic effort could create some magical chain of events which, once set off by some daring do, would cause one's whole life to pivot. This delusion has created our addiction to the now-so-typical romantic-comedy sequence where the unsuitable suitor begins to plot "the big date" that will, through some voodoo-like efficacy, change everything.

This kind of overcompensation when it comes to dating, namely the desire to set up dating situations which one is unable to sustain for more than a few nights, is clearly madness. Beta male orbiters, however, believe that these few nights could be so curative that years of downward mobility could be compensated for, if only the dates required could be arranged. One beta told me point-blank that he thought certain one-night romances would literally cure all of his chronic problems. Consider, if you will, the prospector-pilgrim heading out to the California gold rush. Such a person often believes, though he has no personal experience with mining, the he is on the cusp of striking that vein of gold that will rewrite his destiny one instant.

The hipster families did things that put other upper-middle-class families to shame. Hipster dads would show up in front of their houses on their sons' birthdays and give them a brand new Camaro with insurance, registration and warranty already paid. So if Candy did take time off from dating the movers and shakers in Dallas in order to date the rustic people of Lake Compromise, she only dated the ones who pulled up in a brand new Camaro or perhaps a slightly-used Porsche. In such a situation, you can imagine how my $600 car went over.

*

In spite of my daily lack of a transportation status symbol, our family had one emergency backup measure, a thing only to be used in only the most pressing of circumstances.

Our parents were not keen on letting us drive their always-new, executive-style, maxed-out Oldsmobile, but if you did borrow it, the controversy was not a big one. But they were distinctly less keen on letting us drive their perfectly-reconditioned, vintage, e-type Jaguar.

My parents were nowhere near the richest people in town, but, due to a series of lucky breaks that had little to do with hard work or rigorous planning, which they seemed to do almost none of, they had very few debts and a very low mortgage. These quirks of fate meant that they could sometimes pull off some stunt that would make them look nearly as rich as their far-richer peers. The purchase of the Jaguar was indeed one of the more successful stunts of that sort. It came as a sweetheart deal through a wealthier friend who could not be bothered to sell it for its true value before going off to check out a Rolls or a Bentley.

The dirty secret that we hid from the world was that we could not afford to maintain the Jaguar. British car repairs back then were insanely expensive and could easily break a solvent person. My parents' method of prolonging their ownership of the car and saving face was to use the car very sparsely, which meant letting their kids use it even more sparsely than that. However, for all of my family's flaws, an ego emergency was a thing to be respected, and if one pleaded that some egotistical venture was necessary to preserve one's self-esteem, then, at last, the car would be granted for the evening. One dared not make this request even once a month, but once a year, or twice a year in an extreme pinch, was seen as fair enough.

*

There were all kinds of holes in my financial situation that prevented me from having regular use of a proper hipster car. Hence, my attempts to attract women who were out of my league were foiled at almost every turn.

Some people mistakenly thought I should have done better with the women due to the money my family was rumored to give us kids. I will now explain why that money went nowhere and got us no closer to being able to attract the "right" women.

My parents might give me a check for a hundred dollars at Christmas. But since we kids were more or less required to spend at least a hundred dollars on Christmas shopping, the gift essentially canceled itself out and didn't move our footballs down the football field of life. Additionally, we might get a hundred-dollar check for our birthdays, but then we might later be required to pay for an anniversary dinner for our parents at an upscale restaurant which would cancel out that gift too. We might get a couple hundred dollars to weather an emergency, but then end up being asked to spend that money to rent our childhood bedrooms from our parents. And so, as previously noted, we kids had to work and study continuously. In the end, the combined pressures did not build our characters, but just pushed us deeper and deeper into a desperation from which we really never recovered. Meanwhile, the kids all around us prospered wildly as we embarrassingly floundered as the years wore on. Suffice it to say, there was no way we kids were making a fortune off the alleged generosity of our family.

The hipsters in our village got ample walking-around money from their parents, thus ensuring that in all upscale social situations they were able to fend for themselves and not be seen as low-class mooches, sponges or bums. They came out of every situation with their dignity intact while I came out of far too many situations with people snickering as I made my exit.

A certain level of poverty was tolerated in a particular type of high-class parasite, the ones belonging to entourages; but I was apparently not proper entourage material while I was young. My successful parasitism came later in life when I did finally become a semi-professional hanger-on. And it must be added that the life-expectancy of beta male orbiters in entourages is far higher than those who insist on their dignity to the point or working themselves to death.

The point remained that I was just a vocational disaster, drifting from failed job to failed job, usually a mismatch, usually a bad fit. But even so, I kept taking jobs and refused to stop working no matter how ridiculous my continual job-hopping looked. My ego survival meant that I must keep being able to say, "I have a job. I work at such and such a place, and I earn this much."

Unemployment was so frowned upon in our village that it was essentially viewed as death, and anyone who stopped working voluntarily was viewed as committing social suicide. The situation was that stark for us, except for those in the aforementioned entourages or for those whose allowances were more or less treated like a social-capital investment.

Unemployment in our village meant either not working, not being rich or not qualifying as a high-end hanger-on. If you were rich, that was like being employed in terms of the social credits you got. But the wealthy have their burdens too. Rich kids often had to put out huge sums to keep their friendship orbiters living in style. And while friendship orbiting is a different art than romantic orbiting, they are related. And the dirty little secret is this: If you're wealthy and you want to have hangers-on, those hangers-on don't come for free. A charming, upscale mooch, one that a winner would be attached to, will drift away to a better entourage if his patron gets careless and doesn't feed his retinue properly.

But, as the late Tom Petty said, "Even the losers, get lucky sometimes." And so it was that occasionally I would pull out of my foggy, uncoordinated stupor and miraculously have a winning streak at work. There were some semesters where my brain and body would recover from their downward spiral and a surge of energy would suddenly catapult me, though only temporarily, into above-average status. While I rarely had whole years as a top economic performer, there were times when I could take 18 units at the junior college and somehow work thirty-two hours a week as a hotel desk clerk. And so, on rare occasions, I'd find myself several hundred dollars ahead.

So, let's see: What could a desperate schemer do with hundreds of dollars and temporary access to a Jaguar? Well, he couldn't buy a house anywhere near Dallas, nor could he effectively invest in the stock market. A few hundred dollars would only buy a dinner for two at the best restaurant in town. But wait! Having one's choice of any restaurant in town for one night, and having a Jaguar for one night, could make one eligible for one glorious, ephemeral date. And recall, beta male orbiters are living almost exclusively for their next glorious, glamorous, mirage.

*

When I went to confront my parents about the need for the Jaguar, they were typically skeptical, wondering, and perhaps quite reasonably, what sudden thing had come up that necessitated such an extreme measure.

"I'm going to take Candy Purcell on a date."

Familiar as my mother was with all the gossip about town, she waved away my request as if to say, "Approach us when you have something serious to propose."

Then I said to them, "You've been to almost every high-end restaurant around Dallas, so you're experts on this: If you had only one night with Candy Purcell, and you had three hundred dollars to spend, where would you take her? I've got to get this exactly right."

"You have three hundred dollars?"

"Yes, I pulled a double overnighter at the hotel. That's forty-eight hours of pay. And all my other bills are paid off. I already had over a hundred in the bank, so, put together, that's over three hundred."

My mother turned to my dad and said, "He's serious. He's really going to do this."

My dad shrugged as if to say, "The impossible sometimes happens. What can you do?"

"Okay," my mother said. "Me and your dad will talk about where you should go. We need to think about this for a bit."

The next evening when I got home, my mother said, "We figured it out. You know what you should do? You should take her to King Louis The Fourteenth's in Dallas. It's a kind of dinner show, a restaurant and theater all in one. Other than flying out to California and going to a french restaurant in Napa Valley, we can't think of anything better."

I'd never heard of King Louis The Fourteenth, the king or the restaurant, but my parents were never wrong about these things and their recommendations had never failed me in matters of travel or dining. And so I agreed to the suggestion immediately.

Then they asked, "So what night do you need the car?"

"I'm not sure. You see, I haven't asked her yet."

My parents broke out in laughter, as if they thought I was just plain crazy, and, in truth, I was often on the verge of going mad back then, so I couldn't really blame them. In any case, I felt confident that if I ever did land a date with Candy Purcell, I would not only have the car of my dreams, but I'd have the venue to top all venues. Although I didn't know what King Louis The Fourteenth was, I was confident that a hipster like Candy would know all about it. Her opinion was all that mattered, hers and my my fellow beta male orbiters.

The matter of attempting to ask out one of the mercurial Purcell sisters was beyond delicate. It seemed akin to me asking Queen Elizabeth to give up her throne. One would not generally do such a thing ever, and if one did it, I suppose one would not do it without much counsel, deliberation and caution.

*

I pulled up to the old believer friend's house. Parking discreetly on the other side of the street a few doors down. I put my palm on my forehead and sweated things out for a bit. Now my parents were watching, and they'd no doubt tell this story to their friends. A few of the beta male orbiters had heard me hatch this scheme more than once. I had painted myself in a corner for no good reason, but then again, when was a beta male orbiter really ever a saint, a christ or a buddha? Hardly ever, I supposed. If I was no better than a gambler, then, in the end, I'd have to face looking absurd, have to face being discredited. It just went with the territory. There was no other way but to go forward.

Everyone knew my old believer friend would not be home from work for at least an hour. This would give me time alone with Cheyenne, as if any sane human could really seek time alone with Cheyenne.

I tapped lightly on the door. There was no answer. I tapped lightly again. Still no answer. I began to flush red in the cheeks. What a mess. A bit of panic set in. I turned to go, thinking the better of the whole enterprise.

Suddenly the front door opened and Cheyenne's head peeked out from behind it. "What the hell are you doing standing out there like an idiot? Why didn't you just knock?"

I shrugged stupidly.

"Get your ass in here if you're coming in. I'm not going to just stand here all day trying to figure out what you're up to. Olaf isn't here, you know. He doesn't get home for another hour. Everyone knows that. Just sit over at the bar counter and I'll bring you a beer, but I only have a minute to chat. There's no time to be entertaining you. I have to get this house in order."

Cheyenne knew that I didn't like beer back then, but she set one down angrily in front of me and popped the cap off. Even though I was no longer in the church, it still seemed wrong to me that Christians should drink alcohol, and sometimes I told them so. But lately everyone seemed to be hooked on Coors, so I decided to be compliant and try to learn to like beer. The results of these experiments were mixed.

I was also annoyed that other people I knew were now smoking weed every day but still going to the Church of Christ's Return. And some were even having premarital sex and bringing their lovers to Sunday services. "Where would the madness end?"

Well, it was no to time to be punctilious or judgmental, since I was the petitioner coming to beg for information I didn't deserve. So I sadly drank my unhappy beer while Cheyenne stood there impatiently holding a dishrag and looking at me like I was a complete idiot who was wasting her valuable time on a whim.

"Well?"

"Um."

"Um what?"

"Um, so, how is Candy doing these days?"

At this question, suddenly Cheyenne's face softened in a way I'd never seen before. She took her dishrag over to the sink and turned on the tap. She began gently washing a few dishes and looking distractedly out the window toward the lowering sun.

After a moment she said, in the most compassionate tone I'd ever heard, "She's not quite been herself lately."

"Why, what's the matter?"

"So, you know, she was head over heels for this bigshot in Dallas. It was a whirlwind romance kind of thing. They flew to New York for the weekend. He was going to be 'the one,' but . . ."

"But?"

She returned to washing a few more small plates and drying them as I resumed sipping on my beer, glad for the distraction of an adult beverage in this tricky situation which was leading places I didn't know about and wasn't sure I wanted to know about.

"She took a kind of fall this time. With her — well, you know how it is. She doesn't go for all that crazy sentimentality over guys. Guys come and go, and she's happy to drop them like flies if they turn out to be losers. Come to think of it, she's always the one that drops them, so this is the first time, you see . . ."

". . . the first time she ever got her heart broken?"

Cheyenne sighed heavily. "Oh look, what am I telling you this for? You don't need to be dragged down with all our family problems. Why don't I open you another beer. You can watch t.v. till Olaf gets home. I've got to do some cleaning in the back room before he gets here. Now if you'll excuse me . . ."

"Wait," I said, rather urgently.

"What?"

"I have one more question."

"Okay, what?"

"Do you know if she's planning to come over here next week?"

"Why would you want to know? What have you got in mind?"

"Nothing really. But I just thought, since she's going through a hard time right now . . ."

"And why is that any business of yours?"

"Hey, I wouldn't mention to her any of the things you told me, but I'm just saying that sometimes it's good to have an extra friend or two around during a rough patch."

"Since when were you Candy's friend?"

"We hung out a few times."

"That's bullshit. That's not what she told me. She used to see you once or twice a month at church, and only because you were the preacher and the singer half the time, so there was no way around having to see your face. But that's not friendship. She steers clear of you every chance she gets once she's outside the church doors."

"You know I quit the church, right?"

"Nice, so you want to get together with her and try to preach heresy to her while trying to get your filthy paws all over her? Screw that. That's all bullshit."

I said nothing and sat there red and ashamed and staring down at my lonely second beer, not high enough to dull the pain, but not sober enough to outwit the likes of Cheyenne.

"So, is this all you have to say for yourself?" she pressed.

I looked up into her face so as not to seem rude or cowardly, and I even opened my mouth to speak, but not a word came out.

Cheyenne crossed her arms and stamped a foot.

I still said nothing.

Finally, heaving out another sigh, exclaimed, "Okay, dammit! Okay. She's coming over on Wednesday, after Bible study, the Bible study you don't go to anymore on account that you're a pervert and an apostate. Good God, what is this world coming to? Okay, just be here a half hour before dinner, 5:30 at the latest. I'll nag Olaf into getting a few more people over here so as not to put Candy on the spot. Oh, good Lord, wait till I have to explain this shit to poor Olaf."

And with that Cheyenne left the room to do whatever it is housewives do.

As the true buzz of the second beer hit me, I kept anxiously pondering how things were going at the Church of Christ's Return lately. It was slowly becoming okay for unmarried couples to live together if they were both "saved," whatever the fuck "saved" even meant anymore. But who was I to judge? And anyway, I've always needed Christians in my life whether or not I was one, so I would have to tolerate the twists and turns of their institutions as best I could. Besides, I was now no longer a paid preacher, so I had no standing to comment on any of these things.

As these inconclusive musings were leading nowhere, I finally decided I better get out of there before Olaf got home, so I got up and headed to the front door.

As I went to leave, Olaf was just coming in.

"Where are you going?" said Olaf. "I'm just getting here."

Olaf could smell the alcohol on my breath and added, "So you get buzzed in my own kitchen without me and then just bail out when I arrive?"

"Oh," I said nervously. "I just now realized I had to pick up some shirts for work tomorrow. It's almost six, and the dry cleaners close at 6PM sharp."

Olaf regarded me gravely. He could spot a lie a mile off. He was far too kind to belabor the point any further. Instead he stared at me for an instant in resigned disappointment and then softly said, "Whatever," as he proceeded to duck his head down in indignation and continue on into his house.

Just as he crossed the threshold, Cheyenne shouted from the other end of the house, "He came here to worm his way into a conversation with Candy! Could you believe that shit, Olaf!"

Olaf turned back toward the street to see me hurrying to my car. I saw him stare at me for a moment and shake his head in the sad disbelief, as if to say, "Do you see what kind of trouble apostasy gets you into?"

I said nothing but turned back to my car. Olaf would just have to pity me or hate me as he saw fit. There was no way I was going to back to my parents or the other beta male orbiters empty handed. The world would just have to be miserable with me because my plan was moving forward, and everyone else could just go get screwed. Slamming the door shut and turning the key in the ignition impatiently, I said to myself, "Fuck all those people anyway."

*

It was a muggy night with an oppressively long twilight that seemed intent on wringing every bit of melancholy it could out of any heart that was even slightly doubtful, anxious or lonely. An intermittent wind off of Lake Compromise blew at about five miles per hour, just enough to stir up a bit of hope in the lovelorn expanses. I didn't trust any of it.

When I approached Olaf and Cheyenne's house, the door was open. Some trendy gospel artists were in from Dallas, jamming with Olaf on their acoustic guitars in the living room. Occasionally the music would stop and a burst of laughter would ensue. People with real talent can afford to joke around with music. I was always too mediocre to ever fully relax anywhere, except around my own congregation, since they already knew all of my artistic flaws and had more or less learned to live with them.

I stepped through the threshold just as Cheyenne was making her way back to the kitchen to bring out more hors d'oeuvres to her and Olaf's guests, one of whom was Candy Purcell. Cheyenne buzzed by wearing an apron which covered up a summer dress. And, looking at me for a second, she turned away and continued toward the kitchen, saying, "Oh, it's you."

Obviously I was to go to the main parlor where everyone else was. But most of the people there made as if not to notice me as I came into the far end of the room. For one thing, they were buzzed on mimosas, and besides, they were having too much fun to want to acknowledge that lowbrow desperation was intruding on their amusements. I had to cough slightly to announce my arrival and force the issue of my being present.

Everyone having to turn my way and acknowledge my entrance seemed to suck all the energy out of the room. No one greeted me at first. The gospel singers from Dallas wandered off to the patio, feigning unconvincingly that the move was spontaneous.

Olaf had to summon all the Christian charity within him in order to pretend to be happy to see me. While he was usually happy to see me, in spite of all of my problems, tonight he could not be genuinely enthusiastic. The whole evening was a pretext for a formal setup, and he hated all manner of formal setups, even though things were common in our culture. All he could do was make some small talk and force a half-sincere-looking smile to his face before the people on the patio made an excuse to summon him, acting as if they had some sort of urgent question to ask.

The other person in the room, Candy, sat leaning forward with her hands folded in silence. I avoided her eyes at first, although I was seated right across the coffee table from her. At that moment Cheyenne buzzed in to deliver an excellent array of finger foods that would have cost a lot if one had attempted to order it all at a restaurant. After setting the tray down between me and Candy, she looked down at me, puffed some disapproving air from her nostrils and turned away coldly, taking a seat at the other end of the room where she crossed her arms and legs in an impatient way and turned her head to the side as if the whole scene were beneath her dignity.

I raised my eyes to meet Candy's and said, "This was supposed to be a subtle affair, but it looks like we put you on the spot anyway. Sorry about that."

"It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. Did my sister tell you everything?"

I looked over at Cheyenne but her face was still turned away from us, although one of her crossed legs was bouncing slightly with impatience.

"What can I say?"

"Of course she told you everything. She has a big mouth. But never mind that. At least she's honest and straightforward unlike certain social butterflies in our midst. But listen, just because I got dumped, don't you go thinking that I'm so desperate that I would resort to going on a date with you. You need to get that nonsense out of your head."

"But I got my parents to loan me the Jaguar."

"You're borrowing a Jaguar to go out with me? Do you know how desperate that sounds? What will you do next, rent a Ferrari to try to impress me?"

"Yes, I would. I would go into Dallas and rent one."

Candy shook her head in disbelief and leaned back in her chair as if she already needed a break from the conversation.

Cheyenne chimed in from the other end of the room, "Do you see what I mean? He's a trouble-maker, he and his circle of girl-chasers. All he wants is bragging rights, just to date you so he could say he did it. He probably doesn't like you any better than he likes me."

I turned to Cheyenne. "Who said I didn't like you?"

"Are you kidding. You've been half running that church for two years and everybody repeats every little thing you say. You can't hold a position like that in this town and keep any secrets. Didn't you know that word would get around about how you disapprove of me?"

It was all true. I had been angry at her. She was probably the only person I had ever referred to as a bitch. And part of my anger was due to the fact that she had managed to score Olaf, and Olaf was such a nice guy that it seemed unfair that he should commit his life to a shrew like that. I was caught red-handed. I was again reduced to blushing in shame.

"Oh don't be all guilty about it," Cheyenne said. "Don't you think I've ever been called a bitch before? If that kind of insult wounded me, I'd be dead by now. Don't you think? So, just you never mind that and finish off with what you got to say."

Cheyenne again turned her face away from us, crossed her arms again and resumed the light bouncing of one of her crossed legs.

I said to Candy, "But has any of those players from Dallas ever taken you to King Louis The Fourteenth?"

"No, stupid. You don't do that unless it's a wedding anniversary or maybe the night you propose to someone. Even rich people don't just take anyone there. That's a big deal."

"So then you've never been able to brag to your girlfriends that someone took you to King Louis The Fourteenth?"

"No, no, of course not. Besides, you're expected to rent a limousine or show up in some amazing car."

"But that's the point. I have the amazing car, an e-type Jaguar."

"Wait, so you're claiming that you're going to take me to King Louis The Fourteenth's in a Jaguar?"

"Exactly, I have the $300 for the whole dinner and show. I made the reservations for Saturday night, already put the $100 reservation deposit down."

"You're lying. You did no such thing. Nobody's going to do all that just to get a single date with no sex."

"I already did."

Candy turned to Cheyenne. Cheyenne stared back in disbelief.

"Okay! Okay," Candy said. "You can pick me up at my parent's place on Saturday night at 6PM. But, believe me, I'll strangle you if you try to show up in your Chevy and take me to some coffee shop. And if you lay a finger on me, so help me God, I'll slap you a good one. Got it?"

I stood up and said, "Ladies, I have all the information I need." I turned to Candy and said, "I will see you at your house at 6PM on Saturday." Then I turned to Cheyenne and added, "I thank you for your assistance in this matter."

With nothing more to say, I slid out of the room before any of my hostility or excitement could show. And as I reached the threshold of the front door, I overheard Cheyenne say to her guests, "He actually did it. Can you believe that shit?"

*

It was still early and I hadn't eaten anything, plus I needed a caffeine fix to replenish my energy after the stress I'd undergone. I was compelled to go to the new "it" hangout. The "it" place was always the latest and best place that low-income orbiters could go to find food, beverages and service that were priced below their true market value. To real beta male orbiters, cost-per-benefit ratio is everything. They want women better than they deserve, and they want coffee better than they deserve. There is no talking them out of such a value system.

Three of the other beta male orbiters were waiting to meet me at the quirky Lutheran coffee shop and comfort food joint, a place that had started out as a refuge for old Christian ladies to gather at after Bible study. Somehow it was taken over by the subculture of punkers and glam rockers who had begun to occupy the fringes of Lake Compromise after having been chased out of Dallas due to the rising rents there. But word got out to the hipsters that the Lutherans charged almost nothing for perfect coffee, friendly service and flawless meat and potatoes, and so some of the customers were actually well-off, even if they didn't look like it. "It" places were like that.

Because I never stop wandering and searching and inquiring, it stood to reason that someone would eventually tip me off to this location. And, as I often say, any location I frequent will eventually be overrun by customers because I preach the virtues of every business that treats me right to everyone I know. And though I often complain of loneliness and isolation, I apparently know a lot of people.

After work one night I decided to try this place out. Because I'd planned to stay up all night writing, I asked the waitress to "load me up" with coffee. The coffee she served was so rich and plentiful that I was in near ecstasy as I gulped down cup after cup. When I went to pay the bill, it was only $1.50. And when I went to leave a dollar tip, the waitress pushed the money back and said, "You don't have to do that, honey." Within a week, I'd already reported back to the other beta males, and soon several orbiters were there every night. Sometimes refusing a dollar earns you a thousand.

After the beta males began to tell their patrons, their platonic sugar mamas and their artistic friends all about the "it" place, it wasn't long before some of the rappers found out. And while rap was not yet a dominant art form, it had an emerging following; and so a rap continent now appeared among the lutherans and pre-grunge rockers.

Since some of the unsavory creatures that came there now included semi-wealthy semi-celebrities, the hapless Lutheran ladies were all but forced to get an expensive beer and wine license that they really couldn't afford. A local rap producer who'd heard of this problem, Texas Z, magnanimously funded the entire cost of the alcohol license because he "believed in the cause" of the Lutheran coffee shop.

I sat in the parking lot of the Lutheran coffee shop for a moment savoring the anticipation of telling the other betas what had happened. At last I went in and spilled the beans. My memory was amazing back then, and so I was able to recall almost everything that had been said since the day I'd hatched the Jaguar-date scheme, much of it word-for-word. The betas all burst into laughter several times and high-fived me, saying, "Dude! You rock! That is just sick." And as I concluded my story, Texas Z, who'd been seated behind us, got up to leave. He had overheard all the talk at our table and came over to shake my hand and said, "Man, you are one fuckin' gangster. Good job, brother."

Beta male orbiters have their sympathizers in every class of people, and one never knows where aid and comfort will come from. While beta male orbiters may disgust you personally, you must know that the true orbiter is never without a protector or a believer.

*

By this point in the story, or long before this point, some readers would object. They might ask, "Why would any man with any self-respect allow themselves be treated in such ways? Why would they seek out situations in which they are being regarded in such an undignified fashion?"

What such objectors don't see is that if people were born with, or had acquired, proper levels of self-respect, most of what we call human existence could not have happened. For instance, we could ask: "Why would a man join an army in which most of the soldiers die within months of their induction? Why would a fellow join a cult in which he ends up a debased servant? Why would a guy take a job which will destroy his health or leave him disabled?"

The answer to all of the foregoing questions is that there is no single reason, and no overtly good reason, for people to take part in romances, jobs, religions, wars, or economic systems, which will leave them impoverished, neglected, humiliated, debased, injured or sickened. But we know, factually, that millions of people stay in abusive relationships. Furthermore, hundreds of millions of people stay in abusive jobs or abusive schools. And perhaps billions of unfortunate souls stay in abusive abusive religious systems, abusive political systems and abusive ideologies of all sorts.

There are, as we all know, vast tomes which speculate, in every conceivable way, how it could be that a person ends up being similar to a beta male orbiter. Psychologists, even now, en masse, are pondering how the objectification of the self, and of others, could become so pronounced and exaggerated. How is it, people have wondered for decades, do people become so neurotic and feckless that they fall into such lifestyles? And the varied life-stories and assorted mishaps that result in anyone becoming a beta male orbiter are beyond numbering. Perhaps only the gods know them all.

Because we do not have a hundred thousand pages in this short book to adequately cover these topics, the author proposes that the reader accept three axions of faith that make this story possible:

1. Twisted life stories lead to twisted results. One of those results, among many thousands of possible results, is the overwhelming compulsion to become a beta male orbiter. 2. The protagonist really became one of those people, realizes the insanity of having become that way, and is telling others precisely how it looks when one is that way. 3. There is no fine day in which people wake up and consciously say to themselves, "I know what would be good. It would be good to volunteer for a life of continual subjugation."

In our time of positive thinking dogma and the prosperity gospel, we are all but required to believe that people living neurotic lifestyles chose those lifestyles as a kind of aesthetic decision. And we are further required to believe that their suffering only comes from the fact that they somehow just enjoy making horrid choices.

But, sadly, the prosperity gospel and positive thinking dogma are simply, factually, finally and forever false. Saying so seems to preclude one from becoming a wealthy author. But if that is the case, I shall pass on commercial success due to my addiction to a thing called "the actual real world in which we currently live." This actual world, or real world, is deeply unpopular among popular people. And the company of those popular people means everything to the committed hipster.

My cross-examination of the reader will consist in these two questions. Firstly: How much help have those popular people ever given you? If the answer is, "Nearly no help at all," then, (speaking of abusive situations), I might ask you, additionally, why do you continually side with their point of view?

*

The incomprehensibly-vast Dallas / Fort Worth Metroplex: a sprawling urban, suburban and exurban behemoth of 7.6 million people; metropolitan heir to cattle-ranching fortunes, oil fortunes, real estate fortunes and athletic fortunes; home of the Dallas Cowboys, the Dallas Mavericks, the Texas Rangers and the Dallas Stars; megachurch incubator of the Fellowship Church (20,000 members), The Potter's House, (30,000 members), the Gateway Church (38,000 members) and the Prestonwood Baptist Chruch (40,000 members); educational giant featuring the University of Dallas, the University of Texas, the Southern Methodist University and the Dallas Baptist University; artistic mecca with the largest urban cultural district in the country, hosting such phenomena as the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Texas Ballet Theater, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens, the Dallas Aquarium, the Kimball Art Museum, the Museum of The American Railroad, the African American Museum, the Women's Museum, the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art; foodie paradise featuring countless outlets for the world-famous Texas barbecue; magnet for Fortune 500 companies with global corporate headquarters for such companies as Exxon Mobil, American Airlines, Fluor Corporation, Texas Instruments, Kimberly-Clark, Southwest Airlines, Tenet Healthcare, AT&T, McKesson and J.C. Penny; mass transit giant featuring 93 miles of light rail track, more than any other U.S. city, including rail service to the Dallas / Fort Worth International Airport, an airpot that services 66 million passengers a year. Very few cities in the world can compete with it. You need to be strong to make it there. The battle for survival is fierce. A beta male orbiter in Dallas trying to impress a woman several social circles above him? Such a thing could only be regarded by sensible people as being purely masochistic nonsense.

*

As the sun set, the glittering skyline of Dallas came into view from the elevated highway upon which the e-type Jaguar was perched. Candy and I were, surrealistically, in that e-type Jaguar together. The darkening sky was crystal clear and the Dallas skyline was madly vibrant, it's metallic glass towers shining like the reflections of angelic warriors' shields. There is no mistaking the fact that when one goes there, one is choosing to enter a world dripping with excessive wealth and crazed materialism.

But why try resist the full force of the situation? Why to try rationalize it all away? Sometimes it's okay to acknowledge that there are times and places where no display of self-conscious humility can erase the fundamental facts of the crudely competitive nature of animal and human existence. Who knows, but maybe the gods themselves are even sanctioning this seemingly pointless, mutually-destructive economic combat? And anyway, sometimes there is no turning back. Having gone a certain distance down a certain road, you are bound by the rules inherent in the quest you've started out on. There is no redemption to be gained by turning back as if wisdom is a thing that can be used like the phone number of a half-loved lover.

Oddly, during this drive, there was almost no hostility and almost no reference to the past. By taking a risk, no matter how self-debasing that risk might seem, I was a changed person. By accepting an invitation to go on an adventure with a desperate madman, Candy was also changed. Having set out on an adventure that was outside of either of our comfort zones, we bonded, insofar as we could, given the vast differences in our daily lives. And so the drive into Dallas was not only nice, but it was soothing, mutually enjoyable. And because of the intimacy brought about by moving outside of our usual spheres, we begun to talk openly about our lives, our dreams, our values and our obvious incompatibilities. It was a lovely drive. Most of the way we were bathed in the light of the city which is visible from miles away.

*

When I successfully navigated my way to the ugly, little strip mall where King Louis The Fourteenth's was located, we were both a little crestfallen. There was a liquor store, a thrift store, a cheap fried-rice joint and a massage parlor. The facade of the entire strip mall was typically uninspired and minimalistic, as was the fashion in the 70s and 80s. But when we pulled up to the exact address we were directed to, two men appeared from out of the shadows in tuxedos and asked if they might park our car and check our coats.

As the men took the keys, we stepped out of the car, give the two men a five-dollar bill and gently stepped forward onto the tacky, soot-stained sidewalk in front of King Louis The Fourteenth's dinner theater. A few seconds later a padded, black door flew open and two women dressed in classic European attire heartily welcomed us in, expressively announcing our arrival, per the information on the reservation. The room erupted in applause as each couple came in, since each were announced a counts, barons, lords, princes, princesses, or some such thing as was typical in the eras where the French and English worlds were alternately intermingled or at war.

The room was so insanely ornate such that one would never have imagined, from the street view, what on earth was going on inside. Elaborate coats of arms covered the walls and represented the glory of various noble families of Europe. The flags of various provinces and territories hung from the ceiling. The other men and women who'd come to see the show, all couples, were dressed far more formally and elaborately than we were. Clearly our outfits were the bare minimum for a place of such regality.

Although we were clearly not prepared for such a scene, everyone was courteous enough to us and, weirdly, began treating us as if we were august persons around whom one should have an extreme amount of humility and toward whom one should show profound deference. To be honest, I was a bit confused at all the fuss being made over our presence, and the presence of the other couples, since it was doubtful that any of us could be seriously descended from any royal lineage. And though I was becoming more disoriented by the moment, a kind of knowing smirk came over Candy's face, as if she'd suddenly caught on to the essence of this whole elaborate charade.

Oddly, behind each couple's table was a throne-like chair. Was there someone who would occupy each of these thrones? What was the meaning of servants in ancient European attire rushing back and forth as if any dereliction of duty could result in a beheading? Water was brought forth in oversized pewter chalices and bread and butter were served on ornate silver trays. The rest of the couples, and Candy, seemed enthralled by it all, but I was becoming a bit uneasy. After some time, without a warning, all those people dressed as menial servants seemed to suddenly withdraw.

A moment of anxious silence later ensued in which everyone but me appeared to be on the edge of their seats in some wild expectation that I could not fathom the meaning of. After this moment of silence there was a loud roar of animated conversation as all of the other diners began to chatter in the most exited manner. It all seemed a bit much to me, and I could not imagine what on earth they were hoping for.

A shout then came from the back of the room from a herald dressed as a Knight in armor. "Silence!" he said. "I will have silence in His Majesty's court! Silence!"

As he was shouting this, another knight banged on a metal plate that pierced one's ears. In short order, all of the otherwise rambunctious couples stared on in muted reverence as the announcement continued, "All shall rise!"

We all stood, the others in rapt attention and me in disconcerted uncertainty. For some reason Candy, who by her own admission had never been there before, followed along as though nothing unnatural was happening, as though life were now finally being lived as it ought to be.

The armored herald continued, "May God bless the appearance of His Excellency, The King of France, the rightful ruler of all of the kingdoms surrounding his realm, our lord and ruler, King Louis The Fourteenth!"

The room burst into a fervent cheering, applauding and hooting that I regarded as very over-the-top. It was, after all, just a dinner theater, albeit an upscale one. And so there could be no justification for this level of revelry, or so I thought. And although I was a bit put off by this overly-masculine display of shared insanity, I went along with it all because Candy appeared to be having the time of her life, which, after all, was the whole point of the evening.

After drum rolls, and trumpet blasts and cheers, at last a heavy curtain at the left corner of the back of the room was thrust aside and out stepped the actor portraying King Louis The Fourteenth.

*

The appearance of this giant of a man, a man who was both rotund and tall, and covered from head to toe in layer after layer of regal adornments, quickly seemed to become a rather somber thing. The audience quickly went from wild cheering, hooting and clapping to tense and silent anticipation. But there was something more than anticipation in the air. A feeling came over the room that we were all in some sort of severe trouble.

Louis The Fourteenth strode heavily to the front of the room, seemingly weighed down by the copious layers of headgear, cloaks, robes and metallic accessories all over him. Everyone glared at him tensely. He glared back as if on the verge of being angry, as if he were going to issue some decree of punishment against us. The whole room seemed to become quite serious. I began to wonder if there was some cultish aspect to this establishment for which an outsider would not be prepared. This entertainer seemed to have more authority than a mere dinner-theater actor, and that was a bit disconcerting.

As he took his seat on a throne which sat on an elevated platform, both male and female servants began buzzing about him, making a fuss as to the exact placement of the King's drinks and hors d'oeuvres. Various adjustments were made to his raiment. Assorted requests were made for his opinion on all of the details of the environment we were in, and everything was done to make sure the King took no offense to anything in the room. After this show of extremely obsequious behavior was complete, during which the room had again begun to erupt into chatter, the king stood up again, looking like a giant, not only because he was tall and portly, but because he was on an elevated platform. He gazed about the room looking almost furious. The room them fell into an even deeper silence than before.

*

"All of you noble princes will rise!" proclaimed King Louis The Fourteenth. But I sat there dumbly.

Candy nudged me, "That's you, dummy. Stand up."

"What?" I replied.

"He's talking to all the men in the room," she said. "You are a prince in his court."

Not used to such silly public role-play, I awkwardly stood. Everyone in the room was staring at me because all of the other men were already standing and at attention. Why, I wondered, did everyone in the room understand what was going on but me?

Then King Louis The Fourteenth added, "You princes are to turn around to the small thrones located behind your tables and occupy them. We can't have you chatting to your wives as if they're casual friends of yours. They, like everyone woman of our realm, are servants of princes and must be made to understand that!"

Not a single person questioned this sexist outburst which offended my rather tepid form of semi-Christian semi-feminism. Not only were all the men happy to be occupying thrones that their dates could not share with them, but all of the women seemed perfectly thrilled with this.

I apologized to Candy for such an embarrassing scene and told her I'd be happy to drive her back to Lake Compromise if she was offended. And, for an instant, I attempted to get out of the throne to lead her out of there. But as I tried to rise up, she rushed over and pushed me back into the seat, saying, "No, we're not going back now. You went to all this trouble and expense to get us here, and I'm not letting you ruin this by taking everything so seriously. Just relax! This is fun."

Now the room was humming, as the men chatted to their dates from their absurd thrones. The King thundered out more commands, seeming to become more authoritarian and worked up as went. Beads of sweat were coming off of his forehead, but the undue exertion didn't seem to trouble him. He was in his element, as if he'd been born to do this.

"All you princesses must be put in your place so that none of these newfangled ideas about women's equality get lodged in your silly, little heads. The women are all commanded to rise!"

All of the women stood up, giggling, pinching each other and whispering naughty comments of some sort to each other.

"I will have silence in this room. Silence!" cried out the King.

The room again went silent, albeit only temporarily.

"Maids! The maids shall come forth. The maids shall bring the serving wenches' aprons and bonnets and shall fit one of each on every princess here. It is only by donning the apparel of servants that these prideful princesses can be properly submitted to their lords. Maids! Hurry forth and bring the aprons and bonnets out."

I stared on in disbelief as Candy not only stood up, but laughed out loud as two of the King's servant-women fitted her with her servant's apron and laced it up in the back. For some reason, instead of one simple apron string, these aprons had four rows of strings. As the awkwardness of attempting to put such a garment on another person became more pronounced, Candy snickered and chuckled all the more. After the maids put on her bonnet, they headed over to service the next dating pair, Candy turned toward me, spread her arms out and said, "Do I look beautiful?"

I was about to tell her, in all sincerity, that she had always looked beautiful, (not knowing any other chivalrous thing to say under such unprecedented circumstances), but the King then pointed to her and said, "That one has the spirit of rebellion in her! She has misbehaved."

Candy could barely contain her excitement and knelt on the floor before the King. "What can I do, My Sovereign, to redeem myself?"

"You must tell your lord and master that you promise to be more obedient in the future, and you must wear a red ribbon in your bonnet to show that you have been sinful."

Still on her knees, she turned to me, her lips quivering with delight, "Please forgive me, lord and master, for I have been a wicked servant." And just then two maids ran up and tied a long, red ribbon into her bonnet.

"Very good! Very good, indeed! You are forgiven," howled the King.

The whole room applauded excitedly.

At last the king ordered each of the women to kneel before the thrones their princes were in and to say to them, "How may I more fully serve you, oh Master?"

I panicked and said, "We've got to go. I can't be a part of treating a woman like this. I believe in women's rights and treating women with respect!"

With baneful reproach in her eyes, still kneeling, she whispered harshly, this time with true impatience, as if she could get very angry, "Don't fuck this up for me. Do you hear me. Do your job!"

Since we were near the front, the King overheard her, but he just winked at me and smiled a very firm smile.

I was defeated. I was not brave enough to refuse both Candy and the King. There was no way forward but to play this game, a game which I didn't understand, a game which was clearly very popular and somehow deeply understood by everyone there. The only way I could deal with the situation was to think to myself that the world had gone completely bonkers.

The original group of maids now stuck to the back of the room. It was now their job to hand food, beverages and table settings to all the princesses as they went back and forth in order to fetch the men their dinners and drinks. As all of this went on, the women were continually innovating subservient phrases and improvising more obsequious mannerisms.

*

Toward the end of the evening, the King, who had been seated on his throne, eating and drinking to his heart's content, again stood up.

"And now it is my solemn duty to beseech each true man to enforce discipline in his home. There must be some corporeal punishment or a household soon degenerates into disarray. Each of you serving wenches who have dared call yourselves princesses, must lay yourselves over the lap of your lord and master in order to receive the spankings you so richly deserve. Men! You are to do your duty! I will not have any cowards in my court. Do I make myself clear?"

Before I could begin to object, Candy had already draped herself over my lap so that her perfect, muscular, athletic ass, in tight, black pants was staring me right in the face.

I looked down at her in alarm. She looked up with one very expectant arched eyebrow and smirked. "Just do it."

I made a few tepid attempts at a phony paddling, but she looked up at me and said, this time with a serious and earnest look on her face, "Harder!" I attempted to comply, but she said, "Again! Don't stop!" My head was spinning, but I tried my best. Then came the rejoinder, "Harder! You can do it!" My efforts must have improved because she then exhaled deeply and smiled as though relieved of some chronic pain.

The whole room was in the throes of ecstasy and making a whole range of sounds I was not used to. King Louis The Fourteenth strode forward to the middle of the room, put his hands on his hips and surveyed his kingdom in all its glory. If there was a happier man on earth, I could not have imagined who it was.

Suddenly, in this midst of this, an uncontrollable erection came bursting forth from my otherwise suppressed body. It rose quite distinctly into Candy's left thigh. Feeling this, she looked up at me and laughed, "Ha! So, there's more to the former preacher than we church girls knew about, eh!"

As we were leaving, King Louis The Fourteenth sauntered over and put his hand on my shoulder warmly and said, "Hey, kid, not bad for your first time out. You just need some more practice and you'll turn out fine."

*

As the Jaguar climbed onto the elevated freeway and roared down into the blissfully empty Texas night, I went to turn on the radio to dilute the strangeness of the two of us incompatible people having been through such an intimate experience.

"Turn it off," she said. "I just want to think for a while."

I turned the radio back off and just drove on rather nervously.

After several minutes on the road, it occurred to me to say something diplomatic that made it clear that there were no further expectations on my side, but she cut me off and said, "Don't. Please don't ruin it. Don't say anything right now. Just let me sit over here and think."

Much to my surprise, I was finally able to calm down enough to let the hum of the Jaguar engine and the scattered lights over the Texas flatlands work their Valium-like magic on my nerves. Meanwhile, Candy sat, leaning against the window, looking out over the silence of the landscape thoughtfully, every so often glancing over at me and smirking. The smirk seemed to express something precisely halfway between a bemused melancholy and a peaceful pensiveness.

A beta male orbiter might not be able to know true happiness, but the ride back home that night might be as close as a person like me could ever get to it. I felt something like contented satiation. It wasn't nirvana or salvation, but it would have to do.

As we pulled into the driveway of her parents' house, she turned to me and said, "Kiss me."

I gave her my usual Christian-platonic kiss on the cheek, but she said, "No. On the lips. Just once."

So I gave her a gentlemanly smack on the lips, a kind of a mid-level kiss. It wasn't the kind of crazy french kiss that was all in vogue at the time, but it wasn't a wimpy kiss either.

She leaned back and said, "That's it. That was just perfect."

Then she got out of the car. But before she closed the car door to go inside, she leaned part of the way in and said, "You know what? All those years I hated you . . . ?"

"Yes?" I said.

"I don't hate you anymore."

"Interesting," I said with some surprise.

"And you know what?"

"What?"

"You can tell all the other betas everything. You've earned your bragging rights. I'll even tell my sister to be nicer to you when you come over to visit Olaf. If anyone asks me about our night out, I'll admit to it all."

"But tell me one thing."

"What?" she said, becoming a little impatient to go.

"If my ship ever came in. If I could ever be as rich as the guys from Dallas that you date . . . ?"

"Go ahead. Say it."

"If I ever had real money, not just for one night, but enough to live the lifestyle your family lives, would you go out with me again?"

She blinked her eyes a moment, thought for a second, then replied, "Yeah, I would."

"So do you like me now?"

"I don't really 'like' guys that way. I can't be pals with them the way you're pals with women. So 'like' wouldn't be the word. But, let's put it this way: If you could ever afford to take me to more places where they do things the way King Louis The Fourteenth does, and if you could do that on a regular basis, then yeah, I'm sure we could work something out."

She smirked again in a half-amused, half-melancholy way and turned to go into her family's very large house.

The reader can easily imagine how the other beta male orbiters reacted to the details of my illustrious evening as a prince.

*

The Conclusion of A Beta Male Orbiter Phase

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My orbiting project around Jamie was the last in the approximately six-year phase of beta mail orbiting which, as formerly stated, lasted approximately between the ages of 15 and 21.

By the age of 19, just as I was leaving the Church of Christ's Return, real sex intruded upon my life due to the efforts of the rather unwanted matchmaking of another orbiter. Like me, he was leaving orthodoxy and was what I call a Liberal Seimi-Christian whose overall beliefs were similar to mine. Once he said to me, "God loves you and wants you to have sex. Don't worry about it never happening. God will find a way." And, wouldn't you know it, God seemingly chose to use him to bring that woman to my doorstep and all but insist that I date her. Sometimes the gift of prophecy corresponds to plans folks already have in the works.

But, like most of my "real" romantic adventures, this one was relatively short. Except for the two cases in which I had "real" relationships resulting in marriage or cohabitation, my outer limits for tolerating "actual" relationships has traditionally been about a year. My orbiting projects, on the other hand, have sometimes lasted decades. And while there has been a lot of physical contact in my life, (and some people would say there has been too much of it), my day to day life has been dominated by orbiting.

One pronounced exception would have been the period of my life that began when I turned 21. Between the ages of 21 and 25, I was at the prime of my "real worlder" powers, and my physical appearance was overtly attractive by almost any standard. This meant I had cars, corporate jobs, new clothes and money to spend on dates. Also, I had a lot of physical stamina and nearly boundless energy. The reverberations of the disco era were still strong in our part of Texas, (at least in Dallas anyway), and so I could go to clubs and dance for hours until some woman or other gave me her phone number or even agreed to go home with me that very night. It would not have been honest to call me a real beta orbiter during those four years, since there was too much "disqualifyingly real" action going on.

Orbiting did resume for me after I turned 25, left Dallas and moved to Austin. But it was an evenly mixed period of time where I alternated between orbiting and "real dating" for about three years. And though I had long "really romantic" affairs there, those relationships were openly non-monogamous and not usually my main focus, nor the women's main focus either.

Some of those women were beta female orbiters who were dating me until the alpha males finally came through for them; and yes, despite what men's movement guys say, there are female betas also. Some people in the men's movement think of men as so downtrodden that orbiting is strictly found in the male domain. I highly disagree and believe I have seen precisely the same behavior in women who had social or economic "issues."

The foregoing is meant to outline the fact that I don't believe people qualify as orbiters once their "real world" dating activity exceeds their orbiting activity. And while I always had some orbiting going on, I don't count my years between 21 and 25 as orbiting years.

For a few months, when I was 25, I was legally married and living with a wife, so I feel it would be antithetical to this project to cover that period in any detail. This book, then, shall more or less wrap up around, give or take some months, my 21st birthday. And I shall conclude the work with the story of me and Jamie and the Reverend Billy-John Rackets.

*

In order to more fully explain the orbiting that went on around Jamie and I, I must first explain some of the obscure dating traditions around the Church of Christ's Return, specifically as it applied to current members and former members still socializing among that community.

As I mentioned earlier, jealously was all but forbidden, except in cases of physical infidelity. And sometimes, even in cases of polyamory, there was little in the way of the type of jealousy real-worlders have. Wife-swapping and wife-sharing is not unheard of in the higher echelons of the Church of Christ's Return, and if you have any prestige at all in the movement, you will eventually be approached and asked to participate in just such activity, whether you're married or single.

Unlike certain fundamentalist sects, the Church of Christ's Return never really shunned it's former members; and even the worst sinners and apostates were often considered permanent members of the extended family. And thus, even after I left the church, I still socialized with church members and sometimes still dated in the old ways, still asking members out from time to time, and getting crushes on them.

One of the odd features regarding the lack of jealousy among Church of Christ's Return members is their acceptance of what I call the third-wheel-in-waiting. In the real world, a third wheel is often seen as both an annoying interloper and as possible competition. Hence, real worlders tend to try to keep third wheel activities to a minimum and focus very highly on one-on-one dating.

In the Church of Christ's Return though, it was common to bring a third wheel along on half the dates even though the third wheel had overtly professed his undying love for the woman in the couple. The way they saw it was that you want your woman to have a good backup husband ready in case something happens to you. Having a good man in reserve meant that your wife or fiance would be taken care of if things ever fell apart between you and your beloved. In many cases it was openly discussed: "If my car ever goes off a cliff, or if we ever break up, be sure my gal isn't left alone to fend for herself. It's a rough world out there. If I ever leave her, I don't want her wandering around lost looking for love. I know I can count on you."

Closet bisexuality was tacitly tolerated in that religion, so long as you never officially came out as such. Thus, a completely straight third wheel had to be careful on such dates when the woman started flirting too strongly because you never knew what she had in mind. Hence it was I who often discouraged excessively racy talk directed at me from the woman in a couple.

Sometimes, when the woman in question would get a bit high, possibly from smoking some combination of cigarettes and weed, she would overtly make a pass at the third wheel. In such circumstances it was not unheard of for the husband or boyfriend to turn toward a male third wheel and say, "She's hot, dude. Go for it."

But aside from the part-time closet bisexuals who were mostly straight in their day-to-day lives, there were lots of truly gay people, some flamingly so. These gay people almost never renounced fundamentalism, but kept showing up to church. This is because the Church of Christ's Return was not just a religion. It was a whole culture. And a lot of people liked the hospitality, the affection and the safety of remaining with the culture they grew up in. The key for them was to just ignore the anti-gay parts of the dogma and keep focused on the music and the social life our faith offered.

To see how much safety the Church of Christ's Return brought to one's life, consider that I never knew a truly homeless member of the church, since even the most egregious economic failures were always offered a semi-free bedroom to stay in. And church members were first in line to get odd jobs and fill-in work as it became available at the small businesses run by our congregants. For any marginal person, there is almost no material security more reliable than just remaining in the presence of Church of Christ's Return believers. As such, many of the gay believers never even considered coming out of the closet officially.

The older I get, the more I think that the various sexualities of the Church of Christ's Return were miracles of adaptation or evolution in an otherwise precarious and dangerous world. While I could never embrace the teaching now, I must admit I miss the security and abundance of those times in the church.

Suffice it to say, when Jamie began dating the Reverend Billy-John Rackets, I easily became a comfortable third wheel. And it was tacitly agreed that if Billy-John ever dumped Jamie, or if death or mental incapacity ever made it impossible for their relationship to proceed, I would be seen as a fine candidate for Jamie's next dating partner. And even when they officially married, no one even considered changing my third wheel status. And thus did I hang out with both of them separately or together, several times a week. Everyone knew everything about the situation, and no one minded, so long as a certain amount of discretion was observed.

*

Jamie was one of those slender, no-makeup tomboys with a bob that drives everyone crazy. Even so, she found me quite handsome and would have considered dating me officially had she not already gotten engaged to, and married, the Reverend Billy-John Rackets. Just like Hannah, Jamie could talk and listen for hours. But unlike me and Hannah, me and Jamie were at liberty to talk till dawn if we felt like it. This level of communication was carried on effortlessly without anyone feeling imposed upon, overwhelmed or inconvenienced.

Billy-John, who was really one of my best friends on this earth while I was in college, explained to me in no uncertain terms that being married to Jamie was not as breezy as being friends with her. In fact, he asserted, he and Jamie's relationship was a harrowing roller coaster ride. Apparently, he rarely saw the same sweet, trusting disposition that I did, which should make the reader question my sanity, since I was gladly playing the role of husband-in-waiting.

Jamie always just felt like your best friend, whoever you were, assuming you weren't her husband. When I was a crazed Jesus freak, she was completely respectful and validating. When I became a notorious heretic, she was supportive and non-judgmental. I'm not sure how she got involved with the Church of Christ's Return, but she seemed like a hanger-on who was there for the music, the friendship and the cultural connection. She never seemed to have a truly orthodoxy disposition. Jamie seemed more like a real-worlder who was just passing through, biding her time, or waiting for something else to come along.

Jamie was a whiz at art and could paint and draw. She could do photography back when there were no smartphones, back when photography was brutally difficult. Having had to work a challenging job or two in photography in those primitive times, I know how hard it was for her to sustain that hobby.

And, by the way, the Reverend Billy-John Rackets was also a hotshot photographer with even more natural talent than Jamie. But what wasn't Billy-John talented at? I can't think of a thing he didn't master almost magically, except perhaps the art of balancing a checkbook and paying his bills on time.

Billy-John could write prose as easily as one might turn over in one's sleep. He could sit down at a piano and sight-read, play by ear, improvise or play by memory. He knew electronics and computers before I could have even predicted they would go mainstream. And being a Reverend in our sect, it went without saying that he'd mastered the Bible and theology. And he had no difficulty drinking a pot of coffee, smoking a pack of cigarettes or drinking a bottle of wine, all without any seeming side-effects. Whether his activities were legal or illegal, moral or immoral — it all made no difference, since he simply learned, adapted, mastered and moved on. To this day I am jealous of the man.

And there was a curious thing about both Jamie and Billy-John that didn't make sense till much later. Early on they were both avid travelers to the Bay Area. They had been to Oakland and Berkeley and San Francisco by the time they were 18. I knew that according to the Church of Christ's Return, the Bay Area was evil and sinful beyond comprehension, but Billy-John and Jamie never complained about it at all.

I never had any dramatic escapades, confrontations or capers with either Jamie or Billy-John, and so my time being both the third-wheel and an orbiter around them was about as peaceful and absent of conflict as is humanly imaginable. The end of our association came about strangely. The breakup between Jamie and Billy-John was harsh, sudden and shocking.

It turned out that the young reverend, while blessed with every skill imaginable, both scientific and theological, was having trouble with the law because he was having to do extreme things in order to make ends meet. Jamie was allowed to work part-time and thus pursue her artistic dreams full-time. But both Jamie and Billy-John were horrible at financial planning. And even though Billy-John was doing well as a technical worker and as an itinerant circuit preacher, it wasn't enough. Together they made more money than anyone else our age, but they could not sustain their apartment or their lifestyle.

Because Billy-John's father was a popular preacher in Texas, all his father had to do to get his son out of serving any jail time was to go and have a long talk with the prosecutor who, most fortunately, was also a member of the Church of Christ's Return. It took about six arrests over three years before Billy-John even got a minor charge that stuck onto his record. Even then, there was an almost unlimited amount of forgiveness in the world of Texas politics for a charismatic, young man of God who just had a little lapse in judgment now and then.

Still, no matter how hard Billy-John and Jamie tried, there was no way to stop the stream of evictions, collections calls and threatening letters from credit card companies and car repossessors. At last Jamie had finally had enough and broke off the marriage. And, much to Billy-John's dismay, Jamie's tomboyish charm had landed her a new lover almost immediately after the breakup, and that lover was a woman. And together Jamie and her wife-to-be moved up to San Francisco, to Noe Valley to be exact, making us wonder exactly what Billy-John knew when he took her on trips to San Francisco before their marriage.

The spectacular split between Billy John and Jamie was all too much of scene for the little town of Lake Compromise, and so both of them moved away to bigger cities where, long before the Internet, anonymity and a fresh-start could be purchased with only a modicum of creativity and flexibility.

As for me, I eventually moved to Austin in search of a fresh start. I'd heard that there were some hippie women in Austin who did not insist on their man being a traditional breadwinner. This may have been more fiction than fact, but the lure of some other culture where I might possibly be viewed more favorably was impossible to resist.

The results in Austin were predictably mixed. There were some good love affairs, maybe even some healthy ones; but it goes without saying that most of them were obviously a bad idea. There was still a lot of beta male orbiting to do, but all of that will be fodder for another diary, another autobiographical epistle, as it were.

It was true that before I left the Dallas area, I had actually managed to keep the same girlfriend for over a year and even managed to enter into a legal marriage. For a few months me and my wife lived in a very trendy suburb of Dallas and sported two cars and a fancy loft apartment. But I quickly realized I was not stable enough or strong enough to handle being a father, and agreeing to be a father was a precondition to getting my insane marriage proposal accepted. The marriage was an exercise in madness, and everyone knew that and tried to warn us beforehand.

When confronted by my wife about the fact that I was not intending to go through with my promise to have children with her, I had no reasonable or believable reply. We only lived together for four months before initiating divorce proceedings. About six months after that, it was off to Austin for me where it would be time to orbit other stars in other galaxies.

*

Some thoughts on beta male orbiters as playboys: On more than one occasion, it was pointed out that I was orbiting several of these women at once, and according to more conservative lights, this constituted a type of playboy-ism. I don't dispute this, but have some general observations on the topic.

One of the advantages to not crossing the line into sex is that people tend not to make any claims on you and tend not to be jealous if you have the same type of relationship with other people. There is no hiding the fact that later in life I played this loophole to an absurd degree. I found out what things women believed "didn't count" as romance, even if those things were still physical. And I punctiliously tried to live just within the boundaries of "the law," so to speak. Thus my later beta male orbiting was far more physical than the beta male orbiting described in this volume.

It had been true, since way back, that most women did not regard such innocent things as hand-holding, back rubs, pecks on the cheek, hugging, etc., as "counting" as romance. Hence, a platonic friend would not generally say, "I saw you give a hug and a back rub to another girl. How could you betray me like that?" And the reason they could not say such a thing is because they'd be in a double-bind if they did. Expressing that a relationship had been violated would, by necessity, involve declaring that a relationship exists; and a gal who enjoys having a harem of orbiters knows that the first rule of business is to always insist that, "We're just friends." This "only friends" theory sometimes extended into sexual acts which were, after the fact, or even during the fact, ruled as "not counting as sex." Who are mere men to question this?

Furthermore, I don't recall anyone entering into a state of friendship monogamy. Monogamy is only reserved for things that "count" as romantic. Generally, no one has anything to say to a beta orbiter about all the people he doesn't have sex with. Once the orbiter knows what isn't considered sex, he has a license to do as much of that as he is permitted to do. The only way to stop him from seeing several people at once would be to declare the thing a romance, which no player-woman would ever do with an orbiter she's been cultivating. And yes, women do collect "non-sexual" admirers just like men collect bragging rights. Everyone is greedy to make their claims to power.

Most strangely, upon further questioning, many harem-holding women admit to overtly sleeping with several of their harem members but go so far as to say that even sexual intercourse itself might not "count" if the guys involved were losers. If loserhood reverses sexual experience, then there might be far more virgins in the world, male and female, than we previously imagined. The priests, rabbis and imams of old would be astounded to note how many people would qualify as virgins under these new definitions of sex.

And while these issues are all a matter of debatable judgment calls, one thing perhaps is not, the truth that, in their heart of hearts, whether they admit it or not, many beta male orbiters may have crossed into the actual ranks of playboys without knowing it. I can say with some certainty that there were times in my life when I was a true beta male orbiter, and there were times in my life when I was certainly a playboy. But the gray area in between is vast, and it will probably be left to others to decide how to categorize the phases of my life, since the number of variables involved seems currently beyond my ability to calculate.

*

Epilogue

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Reverend Jonathan Workman,

Senior Supervising Pastor,

Texas Apocalypse Ministries

333 All Apostles Boulevard

Lake Compromise, TX 76229

I have seen portions of my extensive letter to the erstewhile Reverend August Wrathburn circulating around the coffee shops and underground music clubs of the Dallas Metroplex. While this is quite flattering, I'm rather taken aback by this development. Yes, I talked a big game to people, but then when my ideas began to take hold, I admit I entertained some doubts as to the wisdom of making them broadly known. But regardless of those considerations, the die has been cast and there is no turning back.

Wanting to the set the record straight, I'm writing to inquire if the rumors are true that Reverend Wrathburn has abandoned his post and, most shockingly, abandoned his wife. It is said that he has lost his Christian faith. And while I too have become an apostate, I'm rather concerned when I hear of any person changing their whole lives suddenly like that. Such moves can set off a whole avalanche of destabilizing factors. Such wholesale transformations are not generally to be undertaken without much circumspection.

It is further rumored, by sources that are admittedly quite unreliable, that the good reverend has shaved his head and has begun devoting himself to the composition of punk rock lyrics. One very odd rumor has him wandering around bad neighborhoods in Dallas wearing a spiked, leather dog collar around his neck and metal studs in his now-pierced ears. It's even said that he now drinks and cusses and has essentially become a completely other person.

If any of this, or all of this, turns out to be true, then I ought to have been more careful about what I write and who I circulate my works to. The true nature of relations between men and women has traditionally been hidden from beta males but revealed to women. Women, with the help of their alpha male partners, have enforced this information blockade on beta males in an attempt to prevent what they all believe would be thoroughgoing social chaos. And I believe that I now understand the extent of their concern regarding these matters.

Please let me know if you get more authoritative information than I have about what became of the Reverend August Wrathburn. He suddenly stopped corresponding with me after my last book-length letter. Were he to merely have thought that my gigantic missive was overwrought or misguided in some way, I'm sure he would have felt free to tell me so. But seemingly a crises ensued when he came to believe the depiction I gave of my early dating years, a testimony which I had all but taken for granted that no one would believe.

There was a strange character wandering around Los Angeles some years ago, a nondescript individual named "e." It was the contention of "e," so I am told, that nature had designed beta males to be the sacrificial lambs of the human species. "e" was said to have warned people that if beta males ever found out what nature was using them for, they would abandon their tragic role en masse. And should that happen, so "e" was rumored to teach, human society would be unable to function.

"e" seems to have preached that the truth may be far too damaging to men's egos for it to be allowed to be circulated willy nilly. But, given how many people are xeroxing the contents of my last letter to the erstwhile Reverend Wrathburn, perhaps it's too late for me to stop a cataclysm of my own making. Only time will tell if I have unwittingly "pushed the red button."

In any case, if you should hear from the former Reverend August Wrathburn, please tell him to contact me. I am worried about him.

Most Sincerely,

Marvin Godwin Plinkers.

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