ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Quarantined father Chris Denny is struggling with his son’s 33-piece jigsaw puzzle after drinking almost an entire 12-pack of beer by himself, according to concerned and slightly ashamed sources in the Denny household.
“This tricky fucker,” Denny slurred, staring intently at a jumble of unsorted puzzle pieces and peanut shells while stroking his unkempt beard. “Must be for them gifted and talented little bastards. You want to do a damn puzzle nowadays, you gotta know coding or be a hacker or somethin’. I got this one corner finished, but I think maybe the pieces are just sticking together ‘cuz I spilled Heineken all over them.”
The 36-year-old father turned to his son’s puzzle out of desperate boredom, already exhausting nearly all Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu content during the quarantine.
“That puzzle is meant for ages 3 to 6,” confided Alison Denny, Chris’s distressed wife. “I get that the anxiety and disruption of the quarantine is getting to him, but this is making me question a lot of my own choices. Even for a very drunk person, this is a terrible showing — look, he’s just mashing pieces that don’t go together until they sort of fit. And I’m pretty sure he thinks it’s supposed to be van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night,’ but it’s just a Minion riding a surfboard.”
Even Chris’s son, 4-year-old Lucas Denny, was disappointed by his father’s pathetic performance, as Chris has reportedly been working on the puzzle for hours with little progress to show for it.
“This is utterly pitiful,” the child remarked while lining up his action figures for an epic battle. “He didn’t even start by doing all the edge pieces first. I lost a lot of respect for my father tonight. This is even worse than the sloppy, uninspired work he did yesterday in my ‘Frozen’ coloring book. I truly hope I get most of my cognitive ability from my mother… if not, I’m screwed.”
As of press time, Chris finally gave up on the puzzle, and was last seen nodding and smiling while reading a copy of “Goodnight Moon” held upside down.