'Come on, Tamara... We're leaving!'

Thrice in my life I’ve witnessed the social faux pas from which there is no recovery. Yes, friends, today we’re talking about unintentional and unmistakably loud public flatulence.

This subject came to mind this week because the eldest Junior Housefly has developed a habit - from his mother, to be sure - of audibly passing gas in public. He often tries to cover it in conversation, but he inevitably pauses just prior to the moment of pollution, glances furtively toward his audience to see if he was caught, then picks up the discussion where he left it as if nothing ever happened. He did this just last night, when the preacher came for a visit and Junior farted up a conversation about the preacher’s laptop computer. (“Is that the – BRONK! – mouse?”) Though he knows he just violated social norms, he is too stubborn to give in. He locks his eyes on some far off (possibly imaginary) object, poorly camouflages a sly grin, and tries to cover with many words the obvious sensory evidence of his foul deed.

It’s enough to bring tears to his old man’s eyes. Sometimes literally so.

This step-on-a-duck-and-cover routine starts early (nature or nurture?), but it apparently never leaves us. The three offenders in the aforementioned cases of boisterous, accidental and very public flatulence tried unsuccessfully to act as if nothing had happened. Remarkably, in all three situations, I managed to muster enough restraint to stifle my soon-to-be raucous laughter.

The first such situation occurred on a weeklong high-school trip, one of those affairs in which you’re eating a lot of fast food and/or potluck fare, then jumping on a bus and getting jiggled around for up to nine hours a day. The effects on the adolescent G/I tract are not unlike what happens when you drop a 2-liter soda down a flight of stairs. Something wicked this way comes.

(Holy cow. The guy in the office next to mine just did “gym teacher’s handkerchief” – covering one nostril and exhaling mightily through the other in a brazen attempt to launch some sort of mucus rocket into our work environment. I half expected to hear a dull THUD on the wall separating us. Nice. If somebody slips and falls in his office later, I’m going to have to testify.)

Back to our story. In this particular situation, the laughter was fairly easy to stifle. The flatulent party was a female buddy, the kind of girl who was sweet and funny and kind and had an aura that drew people to her. Bless her heart (literally), this young girl weighed well over two bills, a fact with which she was as comfortable as she could be. A small group of us had been sitting on a grassy knoll at a rest stop, enjoying some sunshine and fresh air while trying to shake the effects of four hours on a rickety school bus. Our buddy got up to go to the restroom, and… yeah. To her credit, she seemed to recover quickly. To ours, we never brought it up again, though we did laugh – but not in a mean way – once she was out of earshot.

The other two occurrences at butt crack bridge, however, did not involve someone for whom I cared. Rather, it was quite the opposite. The first instance happened at my wife’s company picnic at a nearby state park. This Neanderthal, the husband of one of the employees, showed up in plumber’s jeans and seemed to make it his business to keep his business within our purview all the livelong day. I kept offering to pay people to introduce themselves to this guy under an assumed name. “Hey, good to meet you. I’m Harry Trousercleavage.”

There’s really no story to tell here. The guy stood, didst clap a thunderous fart (second Chaucer reference this week, baby!), then hoisted his jeans, spit a stream of what I hope was tobacco juice, and turned and looked at us as if to say, “I know yew liked that, sweetcheeks!” As he turned and walked away, he dropped a couple of squeaky aftershocks that almost certainly registered on the Richter scale.

And isn’t this the best justice that could be meted out? Somebody whose obnoxiousity (I know, I know) is larger than life gets a little payback via public humiliation of his own doing. Which brings us, briefly, to the third installment of Methaneleak Theatre. Annoying college student is about one-fourth as intelligent as he thinks he is. Annoying college student drives most people away with his know-it-all personality and general vapidity. Annoying college student makes a less-than-salient point in class, peers knowingly over the rims of his eyeglasses (from the Skippy from Family Ties Collection, available at your nearest Woolworth’s), pauses to let the full depth of his stupidity manifest itself, then bends over to grab a book from the bag beside his desk.

Poetic justice, my friends.

(P.S. – Please note that there is one more episode that I chose not to mention today. It involves one of our loyal readers – who shall go unnamed – who once forgot that an attractive young woman was lying in the floor of his living room watching TV. He eased slowly out of his chair, lowered his buttocks toward the floor, and broke mighty wind just inches from this young lass’s head. Thus, today’s headline.)