How Farts Are Made…

And other stories that my inner child concocted

I am 50 years old. That’s five decades. Two score and ten years. I’m old enough to know better, and I do know better. But my inner child had — has — an incredible imagination. I say has because my inner child is still very much alive, and daily influences my life and understanding of the world, for better or worse.

Case in point: I awoke today channeling my mom. She would frequently wake up with a wild hair up her ass and decide to move all of the furniture around. It was nothing for me to wake up for school to the smell of lemon Pledge and our living room completely moved around. How she managed to tetris a heavy set of late-70s furniture — the kind with a large wooden couch and chair with the velour-covered cushions with various birds and grasses, and matching coffee table — into countless unique configurations is a mystery to this day. I sometimes drive by our old house and wonder at its smallness, how a family of four, sometimes more, all shared three bedrooms and one bathroom.

My inner child, on his birthday.

It was in that house that the ways of the world were left to my inner child for him to figure out for himself. Whether due to the lack of readily available information in the pre-internet era or just the daily chaos of our lives, not a lot of things were explained to me outside of school. And a public…