Chapter Fifteen
Peter, busied with his efforts, which all revolved around playing Agatha, soon found that things can get complicated when impersonating a sexagenarian grandmother of twelve on Facebook.
It was not always easy.
Sure, she’d liked a few knitting pages, became a fan of many cruise lines, and made her presence known on Pinterest as well. All things said and done, she was doing quite well for herself with regard to friendships and expected protocol. However, many a stray or abandoned young woman had taken to viewing her as sort of a trusted figure, a grandmotherly figure, someone they could turn to, and that was all well and good until one of them started asking her vagina questions and shit like, “What’s the best way to get blood stains out of your panties or jizz stains out of a bra?”
What the fuck is all that about?
Thank God you can Google that shit.
And then one day, a young man put up a post that changed Agatha’s, or should I say Peter’s, outlook considerably.
His name was Philip Rosenberg, and this is what it said:
“For once in my life I would like to read a horoscope that doesn’t only have good things to say, or a quiz result that reads something like, ‘You’re not any one of The Spice Girls. In fact, you’re a fool for even being curious. And you’re fat!’
When Peter read those words it was as if an angel, a very soft and beautiful, large breasted and glowing, and very naked angel, had touched his long unattended penis with one of her magical feathers.
(The feather that looked like a hand.)
In that brief moment, he’d felt a stroke of brilliance come upon him that remained unsurpassed for many days to come. With waves of inspiration flowing through him, he grabbed a pen and notepad and began to frantically scratch down his ideas. His new goal in life, the legacy he would one day leave behind, would be to create online quizzes that would ultimately rattle and insult anyone who dared to waste the precious gift of time by taking them.
His plan was to cleverly disguise each of these explosive devices as innocent quizzes, but despite the odds, each and every person’s fate would be the same; they would each be slapped in the proverbial face for being a fucktard.
Slapped really fucking hard, like so it stings quite a bit but doesn’t leave a mark.
He was tickled pink and giggling like a schoolgirl with glitter toenails as his deviant thoughts grew within. He, like that young female student of fine art living six thousand years in the future, whose name he would never know, but one who would ultimately change his life, could hardly contain the thoughts his mind was brewing.
Then he hit a roadblock.
It was something he’d forgotten to factor in, something that, once acknowledged, flipped his lid and sent him smashing just about everything in sight.
This is how it all started:
First he did a search for free quiz sites. Then he read the terms and conditions, which he would have to agree with in order to generate an original quiz, and found that each and every site demanded the very same thing: None of your quiz results can in any way be considered offensive.
WTF? Who came up with that rule?
Peter felt undone.
He felt as if the angel of heavenly hand-jobs had suddenly morphed into a devil wearing sandpaper gloves instead of Prada.
Peter entered a blind and drunken rage and leapt about smashing glassware and picture frames and a row of potted plants whose occupants had long since withered.
He smashed those in succession to the floor.
But it wasn’t until his rage took him into the kitchen that any truly abhorrent and unnatural devastation occurred.
An hour earlier, Peter had set a pot of chicken cacciatore on his gas stove, and after slamming the pot and its piping hot contents to the smooth tiled floor, where it clanged with a clank and a bang and a pitter, he kicked at the stove until he heard an unmistakable, a horrid and nasty, unforgiving hiss. His tantrum had led to breaking the gas line, and before he could do a thing to stop it, the kitchen was ablaze.
His first thought was that he was far too intoxicated to deal with a house fire.
The second thing to cross his mind was that he was about to lose his home and all of its contents.
Thirdly, he would probably be deemed negligent and not collect a dime from his insurance!
Then finally, his sense of self-preservation took over and his last thought was to get the hell out of the house and to call the damn fire department.
In his manic attempt to gather his thoughts and to collect himself, he managed to grab his laptop computer and the only box of his artwork that had not made the trip to the attic, and that one box, the one that contained the painting of the fucked up beginner’s drum set, the one he loathed, were the only two things to make it out to the curb with him when at last the roiling curls of smoke forced him out into the air.
In quiet desperation, he watched as his house nearly burned to the ground.
Everything in the attic was lost.
All he had left to prove that he had ever been an artist were eighteen paintings of clocks he could hardly bear to look upon because they were all ugly and out of proportion and he didn’t like the colors he’d chosen.
That box contained nothing more than what Peter considered his life’s greatest failures and that’s all he was left with.