SMELT IT DEALT IT

Post-COVID Farting Culture

Life ain’t sexy anymore

It’s been a long pandemic. You’re finally seeing your friends again.

You plucked the white sprigs out of your eyebrows that reminded you of your Russian grandfather. You moisturized the death mask that has been masquerading as your face.

You brushed on mascara, not to lengthen your lashes, but to resuscitate them. You shellacked lipgloss onto your dehydrated clamshells. You even painted your teeth with whiteout.

Making yourself presentable is triage. Your face is a crime scene, but you got this. You want to look alive, like one of those people who had a great pandemic — wrote a book, mastered the lotus, became a self-taught sommelier. You don’t want to look desperate. You are desperate.

You’ve got COMPANY coming over! Unfortunately, your ass didn’t get the re-entry instructions.

Your house is immaculate. It’s so sparkly, you’re wearing Joe Bidens to dim the bioluminescent glow of clean. You can see your face in your stainless steel refrigerator. Birds collide with your windows and concuss. You could shrink into a baby and bathe in your toilet.

But your ass, your stupid ass, must have been taking a nap during the re-entry training.

If you were in the military, and you had to bring soldiers back after a war, it might have occurred to you to assess how you’ve been living these past two years. Maybe you should have considered a more subtle re-entry.

Start with a walk. Then, meet at a cafe. Move back into the world slowly, carefully, not full throttle, not an entire dinner, wine, and dessert. Are you insane?

Pandemic re-entry is some PTSD shit, man. You can’t just let people in your house without thinking about what’s been going on in there for the past two years — how you’re different, how you’re broken.

You’re not the same. You used to eat pasta and meat and now your entire diet consists of beans, quinoa, apple cider vinegar, cruciferous veggies, and kombucha. In an effort to stay healthy in case the rona got you, you’re 90% gas.

Your living room is so pristine you could lick your rugs all afternoon and come up clean-tongued. Your table is so germfree, you could perform an autopsy on it. The dog’s breath is so minty fresh, if the guests pick her up, they’ll probably mistake her for a loofah doused in citrus and eucalyptus. Your floorboards are so hygienic, you could hang a tiny Picasso on them and the paintings would maintain their value.

You’ve only seen your family these past two years. You haven’t been concerned with impressing people. You don’t even close the bathroom door when you take a shit. You’re not ready for company.

During the pandemic, your family metamorphosized into monkeys in a cage at a zoo nobody visits. There’s someone farting all the time. You think nothing of it. Sometimes, someone opens a window. Some days, someone lights a match and lets the surlfer gobble up the stench.

When you invited people over, you never considered muscle memory, that your ass has been free-range for 700 plus days. Did you even send your butthole a memo? No farting around the guests. Can your ass even read?

Too late now. The company has arrived. Laughing, eating, drinking, spitting in each other's faces, hoping you invited over plague-free people. It’s heaven. You stand up at dinner to refill everyone’s wine and your ass reveals how you live now.

“THRRRRP”

Everyone pretends they don’t hear it, but the damn has been broken. It’s a fart symphony. First, you fart. Then your guests fart. Then your husband's fart busts through the social construct barrier blending them all into a cacophonous crescendo.

When the kids’ and dog’s farts swoop in, harmonizing the whole damn movement, it’s f’ing art. It’s more cathartic than weeping. Freedom is coming and it rode in on an ass.

It’s been a long pandemic. You’re finally seeing your friends again. You clean the wax out of your ears. You shave your lady mustache off with your husband’s rusty Bic razor. You loofah your toe jam out from between those craggy crevices. You trim your toenails with a weed wacker. Anything goes now.

You are desperate, but so is everyone else. Let’er rip!

Thank you Andrew Rodwin for knowing a good fart can be fine art.