Rediscovering the joy of farting

Still haven't sorted out the formatting issues since Doublewide walked over the keyboard a couple of weeks ago. I tried to get her to retrace her steps, to no avail. If you want to know where the paragraph breaks are, most of my posts are also on my Substack, which the cat hasn't managed to fuck up yet. The most stressful thing about my adventures in Celiac disease was I lost the ability to distinguish between a pending fart and something more substantial. I'm off the gluten for a full week now, and what a thrill it is to report that my confidence is coming back! The ability to make that distinction is a fundamental building block on the path to growing up. Usually, we're able to discern what's pending by the age of 3, and let's face it, once you get much beyond that, you're widely shunned in civilized society if you shit your pants when you think you're merely impressing your buddies by ripping one forth. So, from the age of 3 till a few months ago, I could confidently rip forth with the best of them. It's a guy thing. I recall when I used to shepherd the school soccer teams to away games on the bus. With the girls team, they didn't fart much, and when they did, it didn't stink much. The boys team was a different kettle of fish. When the boys team was heading to an away game, farting became a competetive sport in itself. If somebody dropped one, twenty other guys felt duty-bound to best it. I didn't know shit about soccer. In fact, when they made me a volunteer soccer coach, I had to get a book out of the school library to learn some basics - like how many players were allowed on what they call the "pitch." I'm pretty sure the only reason I gained a measure of respect from the kids was, thanks to the sardines and pickled eggs in my diet, my ability to hold my own in the competetive farting department. Don't think I'm ready to rip one forth on a bus full of teenagers just yet, but happy days are just around the corner!