Dutch Oven

I farted in the sauna at my gym today. It was cloudy in there and uncomfortable. I couldn’t see the four other men sitting around me. I’m not sure if they heard me or not. Do you ever face the predicament of needing very badly to fart in public, so you try to do something to mask it? Like when I was in fifth grade and I knew, I just knew that whatever was about to come out of me, it was going to be loud, and my sweaty scalp itched in anxiety because my classmates surrounded me in their seats and I didn’t feel confident enough to approach the teacher and come up with any apocryphal explanations for needing to suddenly run out into the hallway? So instead I decided to time it so that I’d let one rip right as I was coughing and stomping my foot on the ground? And when it happened, everyone in the classroom just kind of stopped what they were doing and looked at me, and I’m not sure if it’s because they all heard me fart, or because they were confused about why I had coughed and stomped my foot so suddenly?

And I’ve gone nearly twenty years wondering what everyone exactly heard that day, if I had synched it correctly or what.

The difference between today in the sauna and that fifth grade incident, however, was this time I wasn’t so sure if my impending fart would actually make noise. Too bad it did. It sounded like a duck quacking. I covered my eyes with my hands and pressed my teeth against my bottom lip to angrily mouth the F-word. Do you ever recognize an event as a turning point in your life right as it is happening? Like it’s an out-of-body experience? Like you’ve done something so heinous that one day it will be studied in textbooks or repeated to others huddled inside a metallic bunker buried miles beneath a post-apocalyptic desert? “The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.” Like that? That’s what I was feeling today, like I was watching myself push a big red button, ultimately causing a chain of events that would lead to the destruction of the world as we knew it.

Rudely, my fart said, “AFLAC!”

There was silence, and then one of the four men that I couldn’t see in the room said something. He said, “Bless you,” which I thought was very strange because that is something people usually say to each other after a sneeze. But I took it, and I said thank you, and then there was more silence for another thirty seconds before someone gasped and walked out of the sauna. And that’s the story of today’s fart. A+++++++++ highly recommended.