Chapter Five
Ever since that fatefully predetermined date on which Peter’s unyielding wife finally up and left him, his depth of sarcasm, his woefulness and his deeply seated wont to leap at any opportunity to snap at others had increased to a such a level that it began to affect his work.
Have you forgotten that he not only held a job, but also built clocks and painted portraits of clocks in his spare time? Well, he did. It’s a fact.
But like his alcoholic father before him, nothing really did it for him any longer aside from the pleasure he received from any opportunity that afforded him a quip. His fakebook page was foaming up and bristling with filthy and snide remarks.
However, unbeknownst to him at the time, ninety percent of his two hundred and thirty-four friends had already hid his posts from view. Most couldn’t take his brand of what they termed negativity, and so handled the situation by gracefully bowing out of the ring.
However, it was not often that he was denied their endless stream of what he considered malignant fucktardedness, so he was delighted to be afforded every chance to respond.
For the record though, he actually enjoyed a lot of what he saw in his news feed.
Some of his friends posted real articles about real things that really matter. Some posted fairly good recipes and very funny images and videos of cats and kittens as well. He loved those.
There was one guy he’d never met who always posted funny videos with commentary about what his children were doing. He enjoyed many of those posts terrifically.
Then there was that one highly charged young woman Allison St.-something-or-other, who always had something to say about politics. He loved her posts most of all.
Then, oh, and this is where it got ugly; there were the people who posted things they saw or read and reacted to without thinking…
…or fact checking!
Those sorts of posts were the ones that really got under Peter’s pale skin and twisted his knickers.
However, as time went by, people stopped ignoring him and went straight to deleting him. Being as it were that over half his friends had deleted him, he had to pick his words carefully in order to retain the few that still cyber-loved him.
Then, as one might expect, there came a time when he simply could not quell his wrath long enough to select his words appropriately and he paid for it by earning another deletion. The post was about the current president of the time.
Reading it boiled his tits.
It read, “Can you believe our president actually signed a bill into law that makes showing affection for your children in public illegal! And, he wasn’t born in the United States, we all know that.”
He couldn’t believe it was really happening.
Not only did he find it hard to believe that someone had taken the time to create a post [with very fine graphics] intended to spread such nonsense, but he could not fathom the possibility that a second human being would be daft enough to repost it, and yet there it was.
Beneath the meme (pronounced meem) was written the comment, “I hope all of you who voted for this socialist monster are happy now. You know he invented Ebola, right?”
By the time he finished reading her comment his nuts were on fire.
What he wrote in response to her insanity went something like this, “If I was in the same room with you right now, I would kick you so hard in your stubbly little baby maker that your mother, wherever she might be, would reel from the pain of my big-toe-driven shoe pinging off your vagazzled mons! Not to mention your beef-curtain vulva! I would then force you to wear Katy Perry’s flame ensemble from the Super Bowl and kick you so hard a second time, but this time in the buttocks, masterfully, so that even your father would hiccup, shit and then spit out his beer!”
“You curfew breaker!”
“You should be held underwater in a clear tank of hog’s piss in a public square beneath a canopy of pigeon droppings so that all might behold the gloriousness of your impassible stupidity! You are a walking, talking crime against humanity. Fucktidiot! Fucktard! Fucky-fuck!”
And he’d meant ever single word of it.
Unfortunately, the woman simply deleted him and then went about living her life merrily cherishing her own opinions as her spineless and ignorant husband continued to support her mode of thinking because, he too, was nothing more than a castrated fucktard and he didn’t want to spoil his chances of getting laid.
Ah, but for the inalienable rights of the fortune cookie crackers… Ah, but for the laws that protect them.
For a moment he was briefly reminded of a certain oddball from childhood – one whose name began with a V – then he blocked it out.
And so it went, day by day, that Peter’s inner child continued to be molested, battered and abused, dare I say bullied, by the vomitus, unfounded and empty expressions and the right to make those expressions that others held onto like so many a baby squirrel to its mothers back or belly, depending on the clemency of the weather.
Yet he could not look away!
Upon waking, he would invariably race to his desk to turn on his computer. Then, after smiling somewhat capriciously at the many videos of willy-nilly cats and kittens that he would find there, he would move on to more gregarious piques in the reading of work-centered memes, coffee drinking memes, the ever-so-humorous teacher-needs-a-cocktail memes, the ever-present mom needs a glass of wine memes, tee hee, and the slightly irritating posts from older, less attractive women that always seemed to mention large penises.
Skipping over the pages that were carefully selected for and suggested to him by the curators of Facebook, he would find himself on the verge of being let down, but then...
Then he would see it.
The fantastic frilly fucktardian fringe post!
It was the one type of post he found to be most repulsive of all: A picture of someone’s dinner!
He asked, “What type of human being stops before eating a meal to take a photo of their plate with their phone?”
Then he thought, ‘Besides that, what could possibly be their true intentions?’
Peter often imagined that the underlying sickness in our cultureless society; the need to outdo others, had grown so viral that people had, in their quit desperation, discovered a new avenue by which to make themselves feel superior to other human beings.
How would they set about to accomplish this feat? They would do this, not by posting a photo of their home, their new car, their furniture, their vacation, their new boob job or muscles, or, sadly enough, a new pair of shoes… some of the many normal and acceptable means by which to impress, but rather, by posting photos of how well they are eating during any given meal.
What sort of pillow sack would even allow such a thing to cross their mind? He would think this while drooling like one of your average trolls might.
Peter could see that it was no longer enough for people to be in a restaurant, well-dressed and apparently able to afford [the right] to mingle and dine alongside the other patrons, but had come to need other people, people who weren’t even present at the time, to know exactly how well they were eating.
He made a note of this in his little book.
Peter always jotted down notations regarding any human behavior that stirred within him the wont to poop in a pickle jar and mail said floating feces to the individual in question.
The sickness has reached such levels as to far exceed all previous tolerances. This modern diet of attention, this attention seeking drive, the banality of baseline competitiveness has finally torn down the last remaining boundaries to have survived the change. I fear for humanity. I fear the next step will be…
…Toilet bowl selfies!
Yes, it is my deepest fear and regret that soon, before the turn of the next decade, people will be posing and photographing themselves next to the products of defecation that have resulted from said meals.
Poop Selfies! Pelfies! Poofies! Smelfies!
He was mortified.
His pen stopped moving.
His eyesight became blurry.
What stopped his Peter’s pen from flowing; the thing that forced his writing implement to suddenly take on the avatar of the waning member of an flaccid elephant’s trunk stricken with bad case of erectile dysfunction was the sudden onset of delirium brought about by his immediate recollection of everything that had ever annoyed him during the course of his existence.
He could not refuse this specter’s knock at his mental door.
As if taking dictation from some ghastly ghost from within, he turned the page in his little notebook and wrote out a list:
Things that annoy the piss out of me.
1. People who move their mouths in sync with my own while I am speaking.
2. People who post photos of themselves holding a dog wherein the dog’s genitalia is blatantly visible.
3. People who think that pointing out the habits of others equates to small talk, i.e., “I see you like to take off your glasses and wipe them now and again. Durp durp.”
4. People who use assumed pronouns, such as, when someone walks into a room and abruptly announces, “Do you know what she did yesterday?” when the subject of the verb is not present. Who the fuck is this she?
5. People who order a beer and then immediately feel the need to inform you as to how good a cold beer tastes after a long day.
6. People who display offense when you blow your nose in public.
7. Dogs that fart and then blame it on their owner.
8. People who refuse to check facts before repeating what they’ve read or heard.
9. People who say they want to take you out for a juicy steak dinner and a martini at a steakhouse and then, on the way, change their mind and say, “Wait, I have a coupon for Applebees!”
10. Men who trim their facial hair to parameters of minuscule thinness, such as a narrow line that borders the face.
11. Women who wax their eyebrows into a hair-thin line. (It was Peter’s firm belief that no woman under the age of seventy-nine should ever do such a thing. He found it a horrid form of self-abuse, and even worse upon the eyes of the beholder.)
12. Women who use the word tinkle to describe anything other than the character from Peter Pan.
13. Pinto beans.
14. People who simply repeat the opinions their parents held instead of having original thoughts or developing an opinion for themselves.
15. People who use the phrase, “Everyone thinks…” when they are the only person they know that holds that opinion.
16. Parents who adopt their children’s hip lingo to try to sound young instead of raising the standards of speech within the home.
Then Peter lowered his hands. His hands were shaking. He then found himself shouting out, “But everyone is at a different stage in their mental, physical and spiritual development and no one is to blame!”
Then he vomited his supper onto the table and stared at the viscus and malodorous mass for a moment before wiping the splatter from the lenses of his eyewear.
Feeling quite uncomfortable, yet resolute, he got up to get some paper towels from the kitchen. Then, in turning back to view the resulting issue of his distress, he noticed something quite remarkable. The pattern his effluent had formed upon the table struck an insolent yet familiar chord deep within.
The effects of pareidolia were staring him in the eyes. Walking back without having retrieved any towels, he stared down at the table and thought, ‘My God… it’s in the shape of a heart.’