Chapter Four
What if Buddha had just up and quit his whole gig and said screw it to humanity? What if Martin Luther King Jr. had surrendered and given up the cause? What if Gandhi had withdraw his determination? What if George Washington had said, “Fuck off all you minute men, I am joining up with the Redcoaats!”
What if Colonel Sanders had never fried his chicken?
Those are just some of the many validating examples of why Peter Durant often acted the way in which he did. They were also the reasons for which he said the many things he had said, despite the personal suffering it caused him, which often manifested itself in the form of loneliness, something social outcasts tend to experience quite often.
Whatever.
Nevertheless, on that rainy Wednesday evening shortly before yuletide, Peter Durant bit the bullet and dealt with his circumstances solidly because he truly felt that certain things need to be said, whether they are popular ideas or not. However, Peter was no martyr by any means.
You see, Peter actually enjoyed pissing people off. But… in the bitter man’s defense, it’s not what you might be thinking.
Peter didn’t actually get off on hurting others. It was just that, well, he suffered from a seemingly never ending sense of befuddlement due to the fact that he found stupidity and ignorance to be indigestible, and in trying to swallow such an abundance of inanities, his innards were crippled and his mind became ultimately constipated.
He also knew that the truth hurts, and that getting a little pissed off by the truth once in a while is what mature individuals refer to as growing pains.
Peter did not own a TV because television commercials often caused him such visceral discomfort that he would physically vomit up his supper.
“Buy our product before your neighbor does or they will be better than you and then there will be no possible way that anyone will ever find you attractive! By the way, are you aware that you need to buy our corn chips or there will be no joy in your home? Your breath stinks, you have a mental disorder and need our drugs, which may cause rectal bleeding among other horrible side effects and you might want to call our attorneys now, because we will fight for you! Oh, and have you noticed the neighbor kids have better stuff than your kids? Doesn’t that make you want to BUY? Buhuhuwaahahahaaaaa.”
In short, Peter could not stomach the influx of mindless manipulation so pervasively tolerated by his earthly brothers and sisters.
However, he knew that none of it was as mindless as their appearances might imply.
What Peter knew was something most people do not. What he understood was that the somewhat softer science of psychology was no longer in its infancy. He also knew that when results are provable; when a theory can be proved by repeated experimentation which always yields the same results, that we indeed have real science, and hence forth: tools.
And he knew that others were plying these tools wantonly and without restraint, like a newly divorced woman with a brand new box of sex toys.
“We have learned that intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful form of reinforcement during conditioning. Therefore, we hold the right to conclude that we can make a mint off of gambling as long as the frequency of winnings remains random and unpredictable!”
“We can also start rumors of winnings! We can fudge the numbers by lying. They will fall for it. It’s proven!”
“Awesome-sauce!”
Through reading books, Peter knew that all the biggest piggy-wigs knew exactly what they were doing, but he was also quite convinced that the average idiot walking around did not.
His impression was that they were all lost in the corn chip infused fog of sophomoric daily wonders.
Peter, unlike his halfwit counterparts from the office party, could see it all clearly, and the fact that so many others could not disturbed him to the point at which he’d developed gastritis and hemorrhoids, IBS and a spastic colon, itchy scalp syndrome, sweaty feet and dry palms .
And so, despite his many ailments, Peter picked on them. The people around him, I mean.
But he didn’t bully them.
What he did was to merely sit back and wait, and then he would react to them, which is altogether different from bullying.
In many ways, he considered his mental musings and the soft abuse of others to be a form of self-defense.