It has been a month now since the dust settled after the final, frantic charge of millions to get their clammy hands on the concluding installment of the bifocaled boy-wizard’s adventures. As the last of the particularly slow readers lay down Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the realization that life has been forever changed slaps the bepimpled Potter fans across the face like the hand of a spurned transvestite.
The multitudes of fans that have relied on J.K. Rowling’s series for so long are currently in a state of bewilderment. This generation of socially inept virgins, with a young-adult reading level, and a preoccupation with fantasy novels and Magic the Gathering, has become a prevalent and worrying issue.
Francis Richardson, founder of the “Get Kids Back On the Street” organization, has headed up the opening of rehabilitation clinics all over the US and UK for these lost souls.
“We try to teach these young men and woman the skills that they have missed out on as they were growing up,” said Richardson. “We encourage them to spend one weekend a month away from Dungeons and Dragons for example, and attempt to go to dinner with someone of the opposite sex. We also try to explain to the young men that not all women will measure up to Hermione, not all women will dress up like Hermione, and not all women will call you Harry and insist that you have the biggest wand they’ve ever seen.
“Another important part of the program is to move the patients onto other genres and levels of reading. Children’s fantasy novels are all fine and well, even if they are a world-wide success, but we like to think that a well-rounded human being might also read some literature, poetry, or even some drama.”
These Rowling-coddled patients are gradually pushed outside of their four-syllable reading range, with the eventual goal of reading some prose with substance. Richardson’s most promising rehab patients are even beginning to look into Renaissance drama, Romantic poetry, and Modernist fiction. But it’s a long road ahead for these damaged young people.
Rowling could not be reached for comment on the destruction she has caused to these people’s lives. The author is working on her new “adult book” from a 545 million pound deep money pit where she likes to spend most of her free time.
I dig it.