So, I got about 7% into the book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim before just not being able to listen to it anymore. It, quite literally, was making me sick to listen to it. The main characters are shallow, "broken," and... well, the stuff of sitcom characters. They're (to me) sick, but "normal" which was making my head explode. I suppose, in a way, you could say that the book was "dark humor," which is pretty hit or miss to me.

The family really could have been spawned for Married With Children in the 70's. The mother was an alcoholic, the father was an uninterested has-been-Golden Boy who's now completely useless and disrespected by his family (maybe deservedly so, as he's the kind to offer up "promises" like "maybe we should take a cruise to the Greek Isles" and never living up to them.) And, that's only the beginning. The rest of the family is just as "bad."

Now, I realize that for a stereotype, this is the "normal American family," but... does this mean that we should accept it as so? Maybe that's the point of this book - to make us look at what's taken for granted as "normal" and have it be a wake up call. Maybe, where the funny lies in this "humor" is what Valentine Michael Smith would say "it hurts too much to cry about, so we laugh."

I don't want to cry about society. And, I can't honestly laugh at this, because it's too true. So, instead, I get this sick feeling - like looking at some car wreck. A car wreck that others think is funny. It just makes me wonder... am I broken, or is the rest of society?