Duncan's Diary by Christopher C. Payne Read Free Book Online Page A

felt it was necessary for the end result. I slightly expanded the upstairs apartment, and I must say the finished product was something of a modern-day masterpiece. I had successfully added a room approximately 10 feet x 10 feet that was completely hidden—off from the rest of the house.
    On the outside of the newly built cube, I placed finishing strips along the seams of the wall that successfully hid the door from anyone who might be looking. The door was in the upstairs apartment in the back of a closet. I felt extremely confident that there would be no way that anyone would ever be able to find it. I had added a self-release lever that worked by pushing a button at the baseboard. This released the hook holding the door, allowing it to open in. It was perfect.
    The inside of the room held a tiled floor with rubberized, washable walls. The tiled floor had a drain in the center that vented out to the back yard. The entire room was all bright white. Tile, walls, ceiling, everything was bright white. The room simply contained a metal-framed twin-sized bed with a rubber mattress, a metal side table, and a metal table like you would find in a veterinarian clinic used for examining dogs or smaller pets.
    All in all, I felt very pleased with the finished product and all the possibilities it held. I took a boom box in the enclosure turned it up full blast with some rap song and firmly secured the door. As had been the case throughout the testing and building procedure, once the door was closed you could hear nothing at all from any part of the house. The final stage was now to paint the outside area to completely hide any remnants of the newly built studio. Nobody would ever know anything about this room, and it would be for me alone, save the few select people that I invited on special occasions.
    In between my weekends working on the project and the added dimensions of the house, I spent my days at work and my evenings on Match.com. I went through a trial-and-error process where I sent out eloquent e-mails telling ladies how our profiles agreed. I talked about their desires and how we shared common interests. In total I had sent out 71 e-mails, and I had received zero responses. Each of my e-mail attempts varied slightly until finally my realization came upon receiving a few responses at one time in one week. Women simply wanted a direct invitation, no small talk.
    They were desperate to begin with and had no desire to push out the process any longer than they had to. I should start my own dating site someday and call it “desperate woman over 35 who will do anything to get a date.” Okay, a little long in the title and redundant. I don’t think you have to say both “desperate” and “woman over 35.”
    Once I realized this, I had three dates set up almost instantly, one on Friday night, one on a Sunday afternoon, and the last one on the following Thursday evening. Jill was going to be my first shot at seeing how my plan would progress.
     

 
     
     
Preparation for My First Date
     
    I really needed to get some fashionable clothes that would afford me the luxury of dating a higher class of women. I had been married for 15 years and had fallen into the typical pattern of spending most of my money on my house, kids, wife, cars, and all of the typical crap that married men work so hard for that makes no sense. Buy a big house to have room to buy a bunch of shit that you will never use. Have a garage sale to get rid of all the shit to make room for more. My life was nothing more than a meaningless assembly line of factory-produced crap, but on a positive note, I was apparently efficient at it. I should put that on my business card: “Efficient Shit Producer.”
    So I embarked on an adventure to the mall with my oldest daughter. Even without talking to me she was always up for a trip to wander aimlessly from rack to rack, perusing any form of bodily coverings that were marked up 400 percent. As with all teenage girls, she