May 28, 2008

Pants

This is a thing that happened to me one morning a time I don't remember ago.

You're scanning the shelf at Wholefoods wondering which organ to sell so that you can have a sandwich. You're stood on the street corner waiting for the light to change, vying for pole position, preempting the white man so that you're first into the street. Win! You catch the eye of a stranger and before you can smile or sneer depending on whether you won afore mentioned race, their gaze drops to your shoes and travels slowly up the length of your body. They land on  your eyes, glance away, look back, and repeat an abridged version.

We've all experienced the 'body scan' from strangers. That unabashed dissecting of your outfit. The laying to waste of your confidence without even a whisper. The look that leaves you wondering whether you pooped your pants without realizing. "I would know...wouldn't I?" as you take a furtive look over your shoulder. When in twenty plus years have you ever been able to see your own backside without a mirror?

Imagine all that, and then imagine that from a hobo. That's right, a bona fide hobo. Dirty, white beard, shopping cart full of crap, everything that same gray-brown hue, the scent of unwashed folds of flesh, standing, waiting to cross the street with me...looking at me...like that.

"He knows that my pants are held up by safety pins. He knows that they're $20 Forever21 polyester crap that deliver a shock when I walk on carpet and bobble worse than a sheep in a dryer. I must go buy new pants."

So I did.

Hello Blogosphere!

I once tried starting a blog before, on my myspace page, and my first posting was about fart-clouds. I didn't post much after that.You might think that second time around I will aim to be a little more intellectual, a little more...is there an opposite to 'pointless'?* You are misguided. Any of you who know me (and I'm pretty sure you must, obligation is the only reason anyone will read this thing) know that a person who lists AFV as her favorite TV show is, alas, going to provide no greater insight into this world than her musings on bodily functions and weather patterns. Anyway, blogging about a blog is poin...oh, right...
It might be cheating but for those of you who missed the 'farts as clouds' slop the first time around, here it is again. What? Some hugely cliched and totally missable TV show is on. I am compelled to waste the next hour of my life watching it. Sheesh!

Fart Clouds. This term may not be in your vernacular yet but as you read the words you understood exactly what I meant didn't you? We have to live with such delights as 'eau de streets of San Francisco' or 'hobo cologne' all the time but fart clouds are something different, something special. To draw on actual clouds (no tenuous links here), they are the cumulus of the fart world, and if you don't know about cloud terminology don't worry I just this second googled it myself and shall share my new found knowledge. Cirrus clouds are the wispy, ethereal clouds that as farts are really not that obnoxious. Thin, moistureless, they tease the nostril for just a second before evaporating entirely. For these farts we can and should forgive people. These are not Fart Clouds, the cumulus brother to the cirrus. Fart Clouds are the type of fart that you walk into rather than drift upon you, and when I say walk I mean slam into as if it were a brick wall. The stench is so well contained that the cloud seems to have a skin, rather like a bubble, allowing the vapors to stew and steep within. If you imagine yourself as depicted in a cartoon, you would find yourself enveloped in a noxious, green cloud that hovers a foot above the ground. It would move with you, with you as its nucleus and, as it is a cartoon, could have evil eyes and fangs. Fart clouds are heavy with moisture that has an oil-like quality. Once you do manage to escape through the other side of the Fart Cloud you find that the odor, in it's oiliness, has actually clung to you and is now settled on your clothes and hair. Were a breeze at this point to gently lift your scent and carry it to the nose of a passerby, you would smell like what the creator of the Fart Cloud failed to properly digest two or even eight hours earlier.
You see I was plagued by the Fart Clouds of a former colleague for the entire time that we worked together. She stored up the gases of all her digested beans and cauliflower (for that must have been all she ate) and would strategically release them into a space that she knew I was soon to occupy, again and again and again. That is the reason I feel I can share my authority on the subject.

Now I have yet to find myself trapped by the Creator of a cumulonimbus Fart Cloud and if you google what one of these clouds entails, you will see that the capitalization of Creator is well-deserved and that these are people not to be sniffed at...sorry, I couldn't resist.

*Thesaurus.com fails to provide an antonym for 'pointless' therefore I move to coin 'pointy'...no, wait...pointual? Damn.