Chapter Twelve
By this time in the story, most of Peter’s clock paintings had been relegated to the attic. All of the clocks he’d restored to their former beauty were similarly packed away.
Empty scotch bottles filled the recycling bin, which had not been moved for few weeks, and his shaving razor remained untouched for even longer.
Just two days prior to the events of which I am about to describe, Peter had been caught by a superior, intoxicated, having brought to work a bottle of Snapple Iced Tea filled to the brim with Dewar’s, while using his company issued computer to harass a particularly sensitive, yet scrappy quiz taker.
He was fired right there on the spot.
Then, while driving home with all his office supplies and clock paintings on the front and back seats of his car, he got a DUI.
He was fucked.
Not a single time traveler witnessed his arrest because no one thought it was worth it.
No one from Peter’s century came to post bail.
It was a really shitty day to spend in county. What made it even worse was the fact that he hadn’t even finished off that bottle of faux Snapple he’d smuggled to work, so it really sucked.
After all of that shits-skababadoodoo, Peter found himself sitting at the kitchen table, once again, but this time around it was on the fifth day of March during a spell of particularly inclement weather, and he was truly miserable at last.
He thought, ‘I’ve got enough cash to carry me through until I get my license back, so it’s not like I need to run out and find myself a new job. Hell, I should take advantage of this time and get on with my life’s work! I should Google some images of old clocks and paint myself up a storm!’ but he was too shitfaced.
‘What to do, what to do…’ He thought to himself. ‘Ah, maybe I’ll just masturbate.’
Then there came a faint but audible knocking at the door.
It was his neighbor’s absentee daughter stopping by to inform him that they’d put her nosey mother-in-law in a home and that the house adjacent to his was about to go up for sale. “Ah, small wonders never cease. We must thank God for each and every blessing,” but the woman had no idea to what he was referring.
He promptly shut the front door.
Afterwards, finding himself hungry for the first time in three days, (His hunger having stemmed from learning that the old bitch was getting shipped out) he fixed himself a plate of spaghetti and sat down, and for the first time in his life, he wished he’d owned a TV.
“Fucking shit is boring with nothing to watch.” He looked around at all his books and said, “Fuck you” directly at the bookcase.
He found his meal to be quite agreeable, far better than the poor excuse for pasta they’d ladled out to him in county jail.
Ugh, the memory made him shudder.
“I cannot believe I had to spend six hours in that hell hole. Never again, never again.”
After finishing the spaghetti, he opted for going online. It was his first venture into cyber space that day. What he discovered there made his jaw drop.
There in the upper left hand corner of his page he could see that only two people remained friends with him. One of them was his cousin, the fucked up one, and the other was an ex-girlfriend with whom he’d reconnected, but then he remembered that she was dead.
He could not believe what had transpired in his absence.
Heart racing, he checked his other fake profiles and found that similar travesties had taken place on all of those as well. There were even some private messages informing him that he was being defriended for being such a jerk.
“Yeah, but at least I don’t have to take a fucking quiz to figure out what constellation my heart cries out to, you weasel blowing fucktard.”
The game had been taken away.
There would be no more cheerful tomorrows for him.
Not only did Peter Durant have no friends, but even strangers no longer wanted to associate with him.
Peter Durant was all alone.