Though no millennial metrosexual, I sleep next to my laptop, and this morning, an email came from a Japanese literary journal, Monkey, to ask me to name a short story I wish I had written. Editor Motoyuki Shibata also requested a one-hundred-word explanation, which I promptly knocked out while sipping Earl Grey at my kitchen table. Done, I had a breakfast of spaghetti with tomato sauce, SPAM, salami and chunks of cheddar cheese. You had to see it.

Though I immediately thought of Borges, Kafka, and even Walser, I decided on Hemingway’s “The Sea Change,” a rather obscure yet groundbreaking story about a man losing his girlfriend to a woman. It’s most pertinent to our time. As with “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “The End of Something,” “A Very Short Story” or The Sun Also Rises, etc., macho Hemingway is dealing with male impotence. “The Sea Change,” though, is his most succinct, radical, funny and prophetic treatment of the theme. Man Up!: 367 Classic S... Paul O'Donnell Best Price: $1.25 Buy New $2.99 (as of 09:25 UTC - Details)

The breaking up couple sit in a Parisian café. Exasperated, he bitches, “I don’t have it my own way. I wish to God I did.”

She replies, “You did for a long time.”

Later, he threatens violence towards his unseen, lesbian rival, “I’ll kill her.”

Calmly, she counsels, “Please don’t.”

As they argue, two men enter and fuss with the bartender overlooking well or gaining weight. Queer talk, basically. Joining them at the bar after his girlfriend has left, the protagonist declares, “I’m a different man.” The gay guys have to make room for him.

“The End of Something” is also about a couple breaking up. It begins with this description of a dead town:

“In the old days Hortons Bay was a lumbering town. No one who lived in it was out of sound of the big saws in the mill by the lake. Then one year there were no more logs to make lumber. The lumber schooners came into the bay and were loaded with the cut of the mill that stood stacked in the yard. All the piles of lumber were carried away. The big mill building had all its machinery that was removable taken out and hoisted on board one of the schooners by the men who had worked in the mill. The schooner moved out of the bay toward the open lake, carrying the two great saws, the travelling carriage that hurled the logs against the revolving, circular saws and all the rollers, wheels, belts and iron piled on a hull-deep load of lumber. Its open hold covered with canvas and lashed tight, the sails of the schooner filled and it moved out into the open lake, carrying with it everything that had made the mill a mill and Hortons Bay a town.”

When “The End of Something” was published in 1925, a post-productive town like Hortons Bay was an anomaly. Now, there are thousands across America. Deprived of a manly job, the story’s male protagonist, Nick, is also neutered. Out fishing with his girlfriend, he’s cranky and won’t even eat a lunch she’s packed for him. They fight. Stuff Every Man Should... Brett Cohen Best Price: $1.76 Buy New $7.41 (as of 11:50 UTC - Details)

“You know everything,” he snaps. “That’s the trouble. You know you do.” Then, even more tellingly, “I’ve taught you everything […] What don’t you know, anyway?”

Though Marjorie tells him to shut up, she never loses her composure. She’s much more woman than he is a man, for sure, and even more “man” than he is, if one indulges the entirely untrue stereotype of the female as prone to being irrational or hysterical. Nick is the bitch here.

With factories closing, farms mechanizing, families breaking up and communities disintegrating, men today are mostly tattooed husks, especially if they’re of the lower class where traditional sex roles had always been the bedrock. Many are too poor to start or maintain a family. Others are fathers only in the sense that they must send a child support check once a month. Already without authority and owning next to nothing, many can’t even use their muscles.

Manly virtue has become a quaint, snicker-provoking concept. In a world of constant flux and no memory, honor and dignity mean nothing, since just about any act, depraved or noble, is either unseen or quickly forgotten. Faceless and nameless, the feeble lash out at strangers online. Hopeless sons and failed dads, they hanker for an uber-daddy, be it some politician, the Pope or even a totalitarian state.

Though most powerless, blacks swagger the most, but we all know who have the real bling. Pale nerds push dark rappers.

Though day-to-day male virtues are nearly invisible yet steadfast, role models for young men are cocky singers, badass movie stars, and hypermasculine athletes. Outside the screens, ordinary men increasingly slouch and slump.

Consider 53-year-old Joe, a lifelong resident of Fishtown, a Philly post-industrial neighborhood made infamous by Charles Murray. Joe has been a junkie, off and on, for much of his adult life. For 7 1/2 years, Joe had a Vietnamese girlfriend, Tien, but he spent four of those years locked up for credit card fraud. Inside, Joe subscribed to Asian Girls and Forty Something, he said to me. When Joe got out in ‘84, Tien bought him a decent used car Progressivism: A Prime... James Ostrowski Best Price: $8.99 Buy New $10.95 (as of 08:30 UTC - Details) and a $1,000 Rolex watch, and she was just a nursing student. Her name means “fairy,” by the way.

“Tien was not just the best girlfriend I’ve ever had, she was also the best person I’ve ever known.”

Years after he had broken up with Tien, Joe saw her walking up the steps of an elevated train station, “I was with this prostitute but I said, ‘Go over to that park and wait for me,’ then I ran to catch up with Tien. I felt this small, man,” and he kept his hands about six inches apart. “I said to her that I was broke and really needed money, so she gave me a twenty. That was the last time I ever saw Tien.”

Consider 20-year-old Jay, an unemployed college dropout who lives with his divorced dad. Jay’s parents broke up mostly because his executive dad was jobless for three years. All day, Jay’s locked inside his room, surfing the internet or steering that joystick. Jay has no friends, much less a girlfriend. Not a bad looking kid, Jay was bright and confident enough in high school to win the California Speech Championship in thematic interpretation. Jay lives in a pleasant, well-landscaped Fremont neighborhood, which is nice, I suppose if you have somewhere to go each day. Otherwise, there’s nothing around to even be kicked out of. Even if Jay was old enough to drink, there’s no bar nearby. There’s Bombay Pizza, “Home Of The Curry Pizza,” but that’s no place to chill. In such a bedroom “community,” you’re lost if you’re not plugged into school or work. There are nothing and no one to resocialize you, so for a young man, this means that Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, and YouJizz will be your best companions. Since Jay already had a nervous breakdown, his dad doesn’t want to push him. “What should I do? What will he do when I die?”

A third of Americans under 35 now live with their parents, and half of them spend half of their incomes servicing debts. You’re not likely to get married if you’re living with mom and dad, that’s for sure, but soon enough, we will see three generations under one roof again, out of economic necessity. We will also see more couples with their kids all in one room. Poor people worldwide already live this way, and we are poor.

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