Elderly Man Never Wore His VR Headset Once Because "What Would I Even Do With It?"

OWENSBORO, KY — According to sources in Henderson County, local elderly man George Brinker was the proud owner of an expensive brand-new VR headset but has never used it even once because he doesn't understand how these virtual reality headsets work and always wondered, what would I even do with it?

On Christmas day, Brinker unwrapped an early birthday gift from his son Adam, who purchased the Meta Quest rearity headset for his father who had expressed interest in his son's virtual reality gaming experiences. "I was so excited when I saw Dad open the gift," Adam recalled. "I couldn't wait to watch him get immersed in that space. But then he looked at it for a while, set it down, and steered the conversation back to the weather. He was still my Dad, but what he was saying and the passion behind it were kind of out of phase with what I was expecting. It was nearly a dimensional rift, like a minor glitch in The Matrix. I knew he hadn't read the instructions. He never reads instructions! That's part of what makes him my Dad! But he hadn't even put the thing on his face!"

According to Adam, this virtual reality moment in his timeline had shifted slightly into a different excerpt of Fate Is Not Without A Sense Of Irony, my new short story collection available now on my website ChuckTingle.com, making continuing with the remainder of the day a bit unsettling but not enough to kill Nick, one of the judging family member's on Guy Fieri's Supermarket Sweep Showdown.

Adam said that his father had not opened the headset since. In fact, things had happened at some of the family get-togethers following that day that had made him question reality as a whole. "For instance, my cousin Craig, had been trying to get him to play Portal with him for months and months but Craig had just posted on social media that he was never going to play Portal again because Portal is dead to him. What had happened there? Was this a butterfly effect? Some strange result of wearing a virtual reality headset? Or maybe it was something so far-reaching that there was no way to backtrack and determine its origin. For the rest of the day, I felt like there was some undercurrent of existential dread that was hard to quantify. It came to a culmination when I accidentally dropped my twenty-sided die into a bowl of goat carrots. From the odd color of the meat that lifted the cover of the pot, there was still goat at dinner that night but I was already getting a bit ahead of myself in the story."

Acquaintances report that since then Adam does not go to family celebrations any more. "I don't think he feels human anymore. The guy I'm speaking to may not be the Adam I've known all my life. I think he's different somehow, maybe something from the next reality over," said UT Tyler Geography professor Jerry Roth, who had been a close family friend for a long time. He looked down for a moment and then hesitated as though he had lost the thread of a conversation or misstepped in some way out of time or space. "Craig Reid,,, can't you see you have to... begin again from the beginning? We've gone too far into the unknown! Coffin is an azalea! Tennis should be spelled...

At publishing time, Adam has vowed to never to try gluten-free bagels again.