Chapter Seventeen
Sitting in front of his laptop, Peter contemplated the young stranger’s words as he continued to try and find a way to booby trap the world of online quizzes and all quiz-like things. But then, as he folded up the letter and placed it back into the pages of his used and tattered copy of Flittering Bugnuts by Richard Winsley, he looked into the computer’s screen and got another brilliant idea.
What if he were to take advantage of all the available websites through which one might generate a free online quiz, and in following their rules and guidelines, find a way to get people to laugh at themselves, as opposed to feeling insulted?
What if he decided to give up, and to throw his hat into the crowd, and where he found that he could not beat them, join them?
The feelings that came over him were odd ones. He took a much needed moment to think.
He thought, ‘If they want stupid, I’ll give them stupid, alright. I’ll come up with shit that is so horribly inconceivable and benignly absurd that those slippery fucktards won’t be able to get enough!’
Yay!
Then he tried to come up with his very first quiz.
At first, it wasn’t easy.
He looked around the room for inspiration, some suggestion offered up by the universe perhaps, but the room seemed to offer nothing. Then, there on the side of a small jar of non-GMO roasted peanuts he saw the logo for The Peanut Corporation!
‘That’s it!’ he thought.
Like orgasmic and tickly moths dancing around the flickering flame of a smallish candle, gleeful thoughts tumbled about inside his head like so many overweight fucktards in a three-legged race, all wearing white, of course, ‘cause they are supposed to represent moths in this instance.
His first quiz would invariably be, “What kind of peanut are you?”
The thought of it alone made him laugh, and for the first time in many years, his laughter was derived from pleasant thoughts as opposed to maleficent and treacherous ones.
Peter found a piece of scrap paper and started a list.
What kind of peanut are you?
With the voracity of a gambling addict filling out race cards at an off-track betting outlet with only four minutes to the gate, he scribbled; Happy Peanut, Silly Peanut, Confident Peanut, Life of the Party Peanut, Buttery Peanut, Brittle Peanut and a whole bunch more.
Then it was time to visit the website and learn how to generate a quiz.
What he learned there was that the templates the websites provide make the process quite easy, but that coming up with original and unique questions and answers does not follow suit.
By the time he was done, three hours later, he had a brand new quiz that no one had ever seen before, and then he took the quiz himself.
The experience caused him to laugh out loud as he answered each question.
Then, as he began to imagine millions of lonely people sitting at home or at work laughing and smiling along with him, he began to experience something he had not felt in years.
It was joy.