From the beginning of time until, oh, let's say about a hundred years ago, a boy became a man when he reached the age of somewhere around twelve or thirteen. This transition usually coincided with puberty and was proudly displayed to the community through circumcision rituals, some light warfare, some heavy warfare, the first appearance of facial hair (which, even then, looked dumb on its first attempt), a father-son bonding trip to the local brothel, and/or maybe moving out of his childhood home. At first, the boy had to be literally yanked away from his mother by the collected men of the village. Later this process became ritualized and there were faint, largely-false protests by the mother. "No, please, don't take away the dirty, smelly kid who never helps me with the chores and won't stop masturbating." Adolescence is a new idea, a twentieth century American invention, like Silly Putty or wheely shoes. Like those two equally-pointless ideas, American adolescence has grown more and more expensive, has gotten longer and longer and is about as useful and important as Go-Gurt, the world's only yogurt that comes in a squeeze tube. Nowadays, we're stretching adolescence to the point of absurdity. If you really need proof, I wore cargo shorts, tube socks and tennis shoes to work today and I'm almost forty. Perry Duncan is a product of his age. He's twenty-eight years old. He works as a part-time school teacher and writes for an alternative weekly newspaper in his hometown of Alba, Georgia. Alba's a small town, but as the outward expansion of Atlanta continues unchecked like the waistline of a Mississippi carnie at a fried Oreo booth, it's on the verge of becoming a suburb. Alba's in that strange in between stage where it's clinging to its small-town identity, but trying not to show its fear of becoming as cookie-cutter dull and predictable as every suburb in American history while simultaneously rushing toward its suburban future with abandon. It's 2004. Perry's friend, Teddy Ruxpin, a magnetic wanderer who ventures out into the world and occasionally returns to Alba to visit his hobo father and regale his friends with exotic tales of the outside world, has just come home. After leaving his job as a security guard at a landfill outside of Savannah to come back to Alba, Teddy's sense of adventure knocks Perry and his friends off the normal course of their sad, Peter Pannish everyday existence. They accidentally stumble onto a clue or two which leads them to the path of discovery about who really ran the town of Alba in the past, and who might still run it to this day. The hubris of youth is a wonderful thing. Without it, we wouldn't have extreme sports, extreme sports drinks, and poorly-made, cheap, ridiculous-looking apparel endorsed by extreme sports "stars" (who, in previous eras we would have been called by their proper name, losers), but we also wouldn't have most of the great music we have and the only cell phone app that would exist would be an alarm telling you that cell phone apps are a waste of money. Follow Perry, Teddy and their friends as they dig up mysteries, get drunk, hit on inappropriate women and maybe, just maybe, discover a timeless truth or two on top of which our civilization is built. ______________________________________________________________________ Bowen Craig is the author of Keeping Away from the Joneses and A Look to the Future Through the Eyes of an Eighty-Year Old Pirate. He lives somewhere with his something and enjoys doing stuff.