Chapter Six
Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that, well, not about himself of course, but that one of his characters had decided that the best way to die would be to write a stolid volume about the stupidity of human beings, climb a tall mountain somewhere in the Caribbean, and once atop its lofty peak overlooking the azure and often opalescent blue seas, use said written volume as a pillow on which to rest his head whilst committing suicide during the rebellious act of thumbing his nose up at God.
“Dream sweet dreams of hello, dream sweet dreams of goodbye… for my hopes for mankind have all died.”
Vonnegut was friggin’ hilarious. In Peter’s opinion, he always got it right.
Scrolling further down the news feed, he came across the inevitable; a fake missing child post from several years prior, that someone had received and reposted, without checking first, in order to do a good deed for mankind on this day.
Applause, applause! The armchair activists thrive!
It was a photo of a Canadian license plate and the meme read, “This man has over 300 children locked in the trunk of his car and has been seen driving recklessly throughout the mid-state. Please, if you see this car: a fluorescent green 1964 Volvo with Canadian plates, please alert the authorities! There may not be much time left for these kids!”
Yup.
Peter poured his self another glass of scotch and checked the time. It was four-thirty in the afternoon.
Then he saw the epitome of evil appear upon his screen. His first thought was that, after seeing such a thing, all other dastardly acts performed by the human animal could surely take a back seat.
Forget George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney blowing up the Twin Towers, forget Saddam Hussein… forget the day that Hostess proved we are a country of fucktards by pretending to end the sovereign snack cake reign of the Twinkie so that people would run out and buy them… forget all that. What he saw before him was the most evil thing anyone has ever created online.
It was a post that ended with the phrase, “Repost and your wish will come true; Ignore and all will go wrong!”
What kind of sociopathic, ungodly assoholic sits down at home and comes up with a post like that?
You know who does that? Some fat, fugly cuntard that volunteers at his or her home-church on weeknights and is so friggin’ needy that he or she can’t put the effort into creating something popular, so they threaten the reader in order to get them to spread their meme.
Despicable!
It is truly sick. That’s like being the Pol Pot of online media forums. What a fucking dicktard.
He had to quit for a while, so as not to pop a vein in one of his invaluable eyeballs.
He went back to daydreaming about his youth, and most of all, but just for a second, an old fossilized trilobite his grandpapa had given him for his birthday one year, a small precious gift he would never ever see again.
Chapter Seven
Peter’s father and mother used to beat one another for drunken sport. Well, not necessarily at the same time. It was more like they took turns now and again.
As Peter grew, bearing witness to all of this filthy cheek slapping, back talking and tossing about of one’s mate, he began to develop a theory.
His theory went a little something like this:
1. Human nature dictates that if you tell a person not to do something, the most immature of people will feel a compelling desire to do that thing. This aspect of human nature is often magnified within the confines of a relationship, so, if one or both parties are extremely immature, they will do the opposite of what they are asked not to do or what they are explicitly told not to do. (Peter knew this to be a fact because over 2,000 persons had defined this for him during his formative years of dating. 1,957 of them were females who had been told not to do something and then did it just to prove [passive-aggressively to the unseen forces] that no one should ever tell them what to do. Because no one is the boss of them. And you are certainly not their father. And just because.)
2. Young boys are told not to hit women. Young girls hear this and place it into the same negatively connoted category as, “You run like a girl. You throw like a girl. Don’t cry like a girl. Girls can’t be strong. You’re a girl.” And they fucking hate that shit more than yeast infections and UTIs.
3. The result: telling boys not to hit girls for the sole reasoning that they are girls establishes a subconscious desire in the male to actually hit a girl, or woman, and within the young minds of women, plants a seed that sprouts and grows into a tree of defiance, wherein the woman wants to prove that she is equal, and that she can hit just as well as any man, and so subconsciously creates situations in which she might strike or be stricken by a man. It’s a catch Twenty-two, because if she wins she is dominant, but if she loses she gets to play the victim’s card. She can’t lose.
4. The solution: stop telling boys not to hit girls because they are girls, or in other words: because they are weak. It is sexist, and far from chivalrous. Let all of humanity stand equal, unless, of course, you firmly believe we are not. You sexist fuck.
5. Peter felt that we should all begin a habit of saying, “People: Don’t hit one another.”
6. And that’s all.
Peter could distinctly recall the young girls on the playground and how they would taunt the boys and then use this social moray as a way to provoke without consequence. “You can’t hit me. Naa naa. I’m a girl.”
Peter found this mode of behavior to be particularly annoying after one young lady had upped her skirt and peed all over his turkey and cheese cube lunchables.
Just kidding. Parents gave their children real food back in the 1970’s. It was just a peanut butter/Fluff sandwich, but it still got pissed on by a girl and he wasn’t about to eat it.
Life is not a fair; it’s more like a carnival freak show.
So Peter, rightly dismayed by all he encountered back then and while reminiscing disdainfully, drifted onward through thoughts of days gone by. It was a form of self-torture he relished in.
But there were always the good memories, and he sought them.
He thought back to the one boy/girl party he’d been invited to as a teen. He showed up with hair combed and shirt pressed, and, duly aware that kissing might well be in store, he’d brushed his teeth twice for good measure.
That evening they played spin-the-bottle, two minutes in heaven, truth or dare and poke the piggy. However, one thing went drastically wrong.
You see, three days before the boy/girl birthday party he’d been invited to was due to be thrown, he’d been at a family party where an overly hormonal and aggressive, thick-calved female step-cousin had pinned him in a corner and kissed him with all of her might. It was her way of compensating for a lack of attention, and a want to be mischievous, and unbeknownst to young Peter, she’d deposited a healthy dose of Mononucleosis onto his lips, and hence, into his system.
Three days later, our young Peter found himself spinning a well-washed wine bottle on the basement floor of his eighth grade friend Meredith’s home, and after kissing just one girl, he’d begun spreading his horrible germ. By evening’s end, after the bottle had been spun countless times and the blushes of young ones were borne of the sweetest reward of first kisses, after dozens of classmates had spent time alone locked together within the confines of a summarily cleaned out closet of adolescent potential, and after two or three in attendance had actually poked the piggy, everyone that had R.S.V.P.’d was straightforwardly infected.
Later that month, after everyone who’d brought Meredith a finely wrapped present had been diagnosed; Peter was fingered as the dirty culprit.
One young girl’s mother nicknamed him Typhoid Peter.
Peter never lived it down, and throughout the course of his precollege learning, no one ever dared to kiss him again.
Chapter Eight
Peter’s parents had taught him that the bigger person always walks away from a fight, so, Peter spent a lot of his childhood getting punched in the back of the head.
Are you getting a clearer picture of our main character now?
Good.
One year, Peter tried his hand at sports in a brief attempt to create a legitimate diversion that would allow him to put off going home for a few hours after school. He joined the basketball team, but soon quit after becoming repulsed by the fact that all the boys were forced to shower in one smallish, white tiled room after each practice.
It seemed strange to him, looking back after so many years, that an institution of learning would establish a policy that generated an environment wherein a bunch of naked teens were all gathered together, all wet and soapy. It’s kind of perverted if you think about it, especially when one considers that the coach always seemed to find a reason to stop in for an inopportune pep talk.
And what about hygene? They all ended up with severe athlete’s foot.
Bromhidrosis, or even the less desirable: tinea pedis.
Worse off, there was but one young fellow who was so well endowed that his teammates all believed him deformed. They nicknamed him the anteater. An uncircumcised boy of Grecian decent, nobody wanted to stand next to him. When he turned, his overextended member would often slap the wall while all the other boys suffered shrinkage.
After quitting the basketball team, Peter was surreptitiously conscripted into the ranks of the stoners, for albeit a brief and disorienting period of time wherein he dabbled in a variety of substances.
He drank.
He smoked pot.
He tried LSD. Once.
His experience with tripping the electric Kool Aid, California Sunshine, blotter, the Zam, lysergic Acid or whatever you might choose to call it was a remarkable one. Not only did he trip mighty balls, but he was cause for a tremendous amount of amusement.
Here is what happened:
Peter was invited to go see a concert, a band many refer to as simply The Dead. He’d never before been exposed to their music or subculture.
Whilst in the parking lot, marauding about in his very first tie dye, one of his stoner friends asked him if he wanted to trip. Curious to try out new ventures, he summarily agreed. Then his good friend handed him a tiny square of paper.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a tab, man. Put it on your tongue.”
Sneering at the seemingly harmless bit of pressed wood pulp which displayed on its face a rudimentary rendition of our globe, Peter was unimpressed. He was even more unimpressed ten minutes after eating it.
“Give me another one. That one didn’t work.”
“No way dude. This shit is heavy. You don’t want to take two of these. No fuckin’ way.”
Peter pulled from his pocket three more dollar bills. “I’m not kidding. That stuff didn’t do anything. I want another one.”
“Alright. It’s your funeral.”
In hindsight, his friend should have never said the words, “It’s your funeral” after handing his friend a second tab of LSD at a concert given by a band called “The Dead.” You’ll find out why soon enough.
Did you ever get an erection on acid? Well, it’s not funny. It doesn’t go away. Acid can sometimes be like cosmic, rainbow Viagra with penis trails, and Peter found that out on this day, but more about that later.
So Peter, with two hits of blotter to his account, set out to purchase some kind-veggie-stir fry and to acquire a few cold, one dollar beers from the hippies.
Eating was not a very successful endeavor. The stir fry would not stop moving across his metallic tongue.
“WTF?”
Repeatedly spitting out alternative mouthfuls of foaming Old Milwaukee and Low Mein, Peter could not understand what was happening to him.
Staring at a young woman’s shirt that had morphed into the doorway to a place called Trompalompaland, the birthplace of all happy nipples, (why such a name, he could not say) he started laughing so hard he shit himself, but he failed to urinate simultaneously because he had been sporting an LSD boner.
But he’d only shit himself a little, so no one else really noticed, all except for the girl with the Trompalompaland t-shirt and she just made a face and walked away.
Peter had to wipe his ass and pee, but he had no idea where someone might accomplish such feats while walking on Shakedown Street.
He was fucked.
Strolling past barkers and purveyors of glassware, wooden pipes, alien burritos, love muffins, green cookies, t-shirts and tornadoes of whippets, he began to feel a little lost in the colorful haze.
Fuck…
After locating a portable toilet, he cleaned himself, and then, after managing to tuck away his psychedelic love boner, he went back to perusing the parking lot scene where a duck or a man dressed as a large yellow duck, or strictly a hallucination, asked him quite frankly if he was having fun yet. However, it sounded more like, “Quack, quack quack quack?”
“Quack!”
He ran away frightened of this.
About an hour later, as the sun began setting and his LSD hard-on deliquesced within reason as the acid had shortly before on his tongue, he found himself desperately in need of a restroom once again.
He looked around for the toilets.
The air was alive.
Spotting the blue and white towers that wavered in the psychedelic distance, he crossed the lot. Making his way swiftly through the crowd of fake hippies until he reached those plastic monoliths; only then was he able to breathe. However, to his utter dismay, the lines were quite long and there was no way he was capable of holding it in.
That having-to-piss-while-on-acid-feeling was more annoying than being introduced to a grown man who is wearing a shark’s tooth necklace choker.
He looked around.
He saw a forest!
Peter’s first thought was like that of a Boy Scout, purely survivalist in composition, and he made his way towards this large stand of trees with great haste. Once there, he felt the panic swelling within as the leaves and twigs on the ground started wrangling about like so many short toads and wiggly worms.
WTF?
Confused at this evolvement in his experiences, he turned to each side and said, “Uh, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
The music in his sphere of influence was abounding and rhythmic. The pressure was on.
A young woman twirled by in a tank top and long skirt of purple paisley and from the ground rose up fellow dancers to join her. Each dancer was formed from the spurious, transparently glutinous amalgam of fallen leaves and dry twigs, yet each appeared as realistically possible as the girl who’d just blown by on the winds of Bob Weir.
He could no longer tell what was a real person, what was a tree or where he was going. He felt like a babe in the woods.
Deeper he walked into this forest of confusion, leaning against tree after tree in a fevered attempt to find sanctuary, but no relief was in sight.
“I’m sorry if I am stepping on anyone. Sorry. I am just looking for a place to pee and I am tripping really hard so I don’t know which of you are real and which of you are…”
One tree smiled and pointed, “Go that way!” so he turned to the right and kept walking, apologizing profusely to anyone within earshot of his voice.
When he became nervous, his childhood impediment returned, “Mwaarh… I need to take a piss, see? But I am tripping on acid and I have no idea where I am going. I don’t want to pee on any people, mwah, so if you are real, please walk away so I don’t spray you with my rainbow pee-pee.” Then he stopped at a tree that appeared to be a really good choice, and as he pulled out his willy in preparation for release, he noticed something quite strange.
There was a heavy metal chain wrapped around the tree.
“Oh God, I am so sorry if I am peeing on anyone’s blanket.”
As he continued to relieve himself, he followed the chain around the trunk with his eyes until he noticed it was connected to a wire mesh garbage receptacle. That’s when all of the trees started throwing apples at him like in that scene from The Wizard of Oz, but he ignored them to the best of his ability.
Odd, he thought, as he dodged yet another shiny, sweet delicious; what would a garbage can be doing all the way out here in the woods?
He kept peeing while brushing away twirling dancers, praying he’d walked far enough away from the stadium to not be a nuisance.
It was the best piss he’d ever taken in his life.
And, it went on and on and on and on, and when he finally looked down at his thirty thousand foot long arm, he was quite sure that his penis lived at a different address from his and he began to worry that it would not be allowed into the show without its own ticket.
He continued to appease the world around him by pleading for forgiveness for his actions, “Please, if you are a real person, or if I peed on your blanket, I am so sorry.”
He was looking at the tree, whose true identity he could not be sure of, when the tree sprouted arms and asked if it could hold it for him and do the ‘shake’ part.
Face tingling with strychnine inspired silliness, he repeated, “I am so sorry if you are a person and I am peeing on your kind veggie stir-fry or your bodacious burritos. This is my first time tripping.”
However, the tree’s bark, which had taken the form of a long, spindly tree arm and was holding his wiener, felt quite real.
After about what felt like an hour, he finally finished urinating and completed the act by putting his gooseneck and giblets away.
Then, as if by some pharmacological miracle, he suddenly found himself sober and everything around him appeared as clear as day.