Yellow Glad Days

by Sam Bellotto Jr.

The Moralist Party has taken over the political reins of the country. A powerful coalition of minorities is demanding they be allowed to move to Alabama and secede from the United States. Former inmates of Oklahoma Federal Penitentiary are believed to possess the Bomb. Awakening from a nine year alternate reality, Astin W. Wench discovers that nothing has changed. With his two best friends, he attempts to get to the bottom of everything, put the nation back to rights, and find a really good cup of coffee. Part science fiction, part political satire, "Yellow Glad Days" dissects the meaning of happiness in an illogical world.

227 pages, Paperback

First published February 11, 2012

About the author

"Yellow Glad Days" is a science fiction, political satire, the latest work by Sam Bellotto Jr., who is normally known as an author of crossword and cryptogram puzzle books. Bellotto's company, Crossdown, also develops word puzzle computer games and software as well as the puzzles themselves. He operates out of the top floor of his home on Akron Street. Crossdown has garnered the top "People's Choice Award" from the Educational Software Cooperative (ESC) four times between 1998 and 2004. It also won the top award in its category from the Shareware Industry Conference in 2004. Bellotto has been making puzzles professionally since 1979, when he broke into the business by placing his first sale with the Sunday New York Times Magazine under then crossword puzzle editor, the legendary Eugene T. Maleska. According to Bellotto, "You could say I started at the top." Today Bellotto contributes regularly to all the major crossword puzzle markets including Simon & Schuster, The New York Times, and Random House. He also does a weekly crossword feature for a number of high-profile newspapers and has authored several crossword puzzle books. And he is in great demand as a specialist in making topical crosswords, having done individual projects for Xerox, AttorneyYellowPages, and the University of Rochester, to name just a few. Simon & Schuster has called Bellotto one of the top ten constructors in the country. Bellotto's affection for word game puzzles and fondness for science fiction began when he was a high school student in Syracuse, New York, where he grew up. "I was one of those science whiz kids," he recalls, "building rockets, mixing chemicals and peering through microscopes." Bellotto attended Long Island University where he studied journalism, with a minor in music theory. After graduation he took courses in film studies at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Currently, in addition to his regular crossword features and Internet-based word game software business, Bellotto is working on other puzzle books. He lives in Rochester, NY, in a modest two-bedroom house with his black labrador, Petra, and an impressive animated cartoon collection.

Reviews

[Richard Bunning · Rating 4 out of 5]

This intellectual, prose-cartoon, that might have grown out of some confusion between MAD magazine, speculative science fiction and Bellotto's weird mental contemplations about a near future North America, has spilled in a sort of semi-organised chaos into a very entertaining book. Medicated Yellow Glad Days are just around a future corner. This is a book for the college folks who never quite grow up, or never intend to grow up, to be really really serious people, well, except on work days of course. This is a romp through a futuristic politicised landscape, in the City of Bigapolis, which definitely isn't in Alabama. The would be hero, in a world that is content to be left alone, doesn't really know where he is going except that he wants to get there. What Astin does know is that he is against being tranquillised; probably!
Isn't persuading everyone to get a fix, wrong or something? It could be, and anyway isn't a journalist meant to be a bit of a rebel. This book mainlines on satire, wades through cynical, is mockingly indeterministic and weaves through several levels of funny ironic. The reader might agree with Astin Wench, if only Astin knew where he was going. This is a fun book for glad days, by Gad, which takes a swipe at, well, everything really. Not to be taken with too many very serious pills. The book is dedicated to Xanax and Paxil, pharmaceutical twins that fight against general anxiety disorders. They seem to work. But that doesn't mean we all want the same blissful relief, even from a decaying society. One has taken the trouble to read this, so then, if one has time then why not read the book? Anyway, we need to make society better, and not just have everyone taking stuff to make society seem better. Or do we?

[Carol Kean · Rating 4 out of 5]

From page one, I was hooked. A man is conscious but unsure he's alive or dead. "He'd misplaced his name but he could still do simple sums in his head...and it was nearly like an electrical light being switched on. Why had it been off in the first place?" Little things come back to him, but people surely didn't "hang around in space after death trying to visualize classic Ford Hawks westerns." Therefore, "He wasn't dead. He wasn't in New Jersey, either."

I love an author who doesn't take himself too seriously.

Gradually our disoriented hero finds his name, Astin W. Wench, but he also finds gray hair and wrinkles that weren't there before. Nine years have passed since his last conscious memory. Was he on life support all this time? What's been going on for the past near-decade? Wench, a journalist, will waste no time trying to find out.

"Yellow Glad Days" paints a future America in which freedom-loving, creative "Separatist" citizens oppose a new moral-minded Administration, and Alabama secedes from the Union. The Moralist Party has taken over American politics, and their revolutionary medical treatment BLISS turns stressed-out citizens into happy, church-going, TV-watching families. It's voluntary, of course, but if you refuse the treatment, you're exiled to Alabama and never again allowed back into the States.

How can the new president usher in an age of peace and prosperity if protesters go around opposing BLISS? Biopsychic Lavation for Intensified Stimulation of the Superego, BLISS, sounds like "crap" to the ever-cynical Wench. "People will never swallow this," he predicts, but his friend and boss Mars Gumbo rightly predicts they'll "wolf it down without even chewing." Eventually the lemon-yellow trucks drive through neighborhoods like ice cream vendors; men, women and children of all ages voluntarily wait in line to stick their heads under an electrified dome (like the hair dresser's), instantly going from stressed-out or depressed,or violent, or berserk, to happy citizens. Repeat visits to the truck just spread the joy, ushering in a new era that will be known as "yellow glad days."

Plot spoilers prevent me from saying too much, but Wench uncovers a big news story about a lab being shut down, along with members of the anti-BLISS Reform Freeyares being assassinated by the government. Before he can go public with incriminating evidence against the regime, Wench is tried for espionage and sentenced to Deep BLISS.

The story leaps back in time as Wench walks us through the events preceding his long hiatus from himself. With the younger Wench we listen to an audiotape of the deadly Haddon Heights Uprising, which marks the beginning of the end for Wench's America. What the Administration calls a glorious awakening of the mind and spirit, Wench calls 'the key to universal mindless euphoria.' Citizens stay home watching reality TV instead of concerning themselves with politics, global issues, philosophy or new forms of art. Loss of personal freedom? Who wouldn't give it up to be free, too, of anxiety, sexual dysfunction, high crime rates, warfare and civil unrest? Wench wouldn't. But his girlfriend does. She's more compliant now, and sex-crazed too, but Wench wants the original, grouchy Lowia back.

Will Wench ever see an end to BLISS? Will America regain its lost state of Alabama? I'm not telling, but I'll say this: I can't wait for the Zoomway (a much faster and better version of our interstate), and my own Turboboom coupe.

In all, this is a fun read, well written, witty and full of scary thoughts about future administrations run by Moralist politicians, but I feel morally obligated as a good U.S. citizen to start watching a reality show called "Duck Dynasty," so I'll put my thoughts on hold and save the cautionary message of "Yellow Glad Days" for another day.

[Tristan Yi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Watch the movie. Buy the record. Read the book. Wear the slacks. Eat the food.
Welcome to the future. This is an age of consumerism, greed, and complacence. People only want what's convenient and pleasant. They don't want to think, they want a big man with a smile and a suit to tell them what to think. That is the way of the masses.
Is something evil if everybody wanted it?
Sam Bellotto, Jr. brings us a strange vision of the failing world today set in the age of tomorrow. It is a place rampant with political separatism, riots, mass media consumption, and BLISS.
What happens when a government promising eternal joy actually delivers?
What happens when it works?
What happens when it turns the people into content sheep?
And what happens when the majority voted for it, voluntarily?
Yellow Glad Days is a journey into the heart of humanity, politics, consumerism, and also there's a ton of sex, drugs, and violence. So read it. It's pretty awesome.