Fartball, Anyone?

A very long time ago (almost two months!) Lime interviewed me. The questions were very Limelike (absurd, yet thought provoking) and my answers were very Suldoggian (abstract, yet banal.) Why, here's one now!

All sports as we know them have been banned. All sports equipment and factories for their manufacture have been destroyed. All the rulebooks have been burned. All professional, amateur, and children's leagues have been disbanded. Invent a new sport to capture the hearts of a nation. You cannot pay any professionals more than the average factory worker makes, men and women have to be able to compete in the same league, and children have to be the coaches and officials.

Well, as every child knows, the funniest thing in the world are farts. So, since children will be the coaches and officials, I'm inventing the NFL - the National Fartball League.

There isn't actually a "fartball", but it sounds funnier that way, so that's what I'm calling it. The rules are simple. The object of the game will be to advance from your end of the playing field to the opponent's goal. However, you can only run while you're farting. And it has to be a big blatting fart, too; no silent-but-deadlies. If, at any time, you move without emitting an audible blast of gas, then your opponents get to try to score.

Training regimens for the athletes will consist of eating huge buckets full of baked beans, cabbage, radishes, broccoli, and beer.

Before every game, the crowd will stand at attention and sing the league's theme song:

Beans, beans, the musical fruit
The more you eat, the more you toot
The more you toot, the better you feel
Let's eat beans at every meal!


You win a game of fartball by scoring more goals than your opponent, of course, but you can also get a TKO if they pass out from your stench. Most of the kids won't care who wins; they'll be laughing so hard they won't be able to keep score anyway. Oh, and you can ONLY fart. You get thrown out of the game if you actually poop yourself.

I know some people don't find farting to be hilariously funny, and they will not be amused. That's OK, though, because the folks who don't find farting to be hilariously funny usually don't much care for sports to begin with, so it doesn't matter if they like it or not.

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With the above in mind, I'd like you to read some correspondence from a friend of mine.

Hey, Jim - One of those random thoughts I kept forgetting to include in past e-mails, obviously brought to mind by your "invention" of Fartball. (Warning: the following is for immature audiences only)

OK, so I don't know if I mentioned it ever, but last year I was diagnosed with pretty severe sleep apnea. They estimated, based on my sleep study, that I would wake up approximately 450 times in 8 hrs. Yow. Anyway, I was given a cpap machine which works wonders. Though I don't find myself raving about all the energy I now have like the people in the instructional vid, I do notice I no longer fall asleep during the day and I'm down to maybe 3 cups of coffee from my former 3 pots.

If you don't know about cpap, it's basically an air pump and mask that blows relatively low-pressure air down your throat, thus keeping the airway open, stopping snoring and apneas, and ultimately, letting you get to deep-sleep stages.

So, the complication, known to those in the med-biz as aerophagia. Literally, "air eating". You see, I think, where this is going...

Some nights, for some reason, the esophagus opens a bit, and the machine can pump you full of air. And I mean full. Stem to stern. Really, I mean, you've just been inflated by an electric pump. You wake up with the worst imaginable bloating, like, walking bent double. Walking, though you really should be running as, more often than not, the pumped-in air has encountered, shall we say, a blockage, which is about to be jet propelled out, hopefully into a proper receptacle.

Nor is this the end of it. Once the blockage is removed, as it were, lots of pressure remains to be released, through one of the two available apertures. Or, more usually, both, often simultaneously. I'm talking Krakatoa meets Vesuvius here. Fortunately, since these gases don't result from fermentation, they are delightfully fragrance-free. It occurred to me that use of such machines would need to be banned in the sport of Fartball, as anyone who could belch the alphabet while at the same time performing the national anthem on rectal-kazoo would clearly have an unfair advantage.

Just thought I'd share.

Happy Thursday. Your swell pal,

Donatello

As with most things concerning rude noises and excrement, I found this to be supremely funny. I asked Donatello if I might use it in my blog. His reply:

Hi - Yeah, sure. Be my guest. Actually, despite the occasionally considerable pain, I find it kind of funny too. It's pretty dramatic... rocket-powered, um... movements that leave you checking the bowl for cracks, followed by an episode of gas that could lift you bodily off the seat. Fortunately, this doesn't happen too often, to me at least. Some folks have to discontinue the cpap because of it, which leaves them without great options.

The sleep study itself was a joy also, an overnight deal. It took them maybe 20 minutes to wire up pretty much everything but my balls, then they said, OK, just sleep normally. Huh? Well, normally, I don't have 20 or 30 wires attached to me with medical adhesive plus a strange electric girdle, for starters... Then, halfway through, they came in to try a cpap machine and gave me a nose-only mask, which is fine until you open your mouth. Then, the air comes in your nose and blows right out your mouth: a bizarre sensation to say the least which startles you awake. So I have the full-face mask, which fixes that problem but causes the aerophagia. Well, what can you do?

The sleep study people were actually very nice and all. If there was something they could do to make you comfortable, they would do it. It's just the nature of the beast. And the mattress on the bed was perhaps the best mattress I've ever slept on. The place was a weird combination of hospital and hotel. The whole thing started when one of MY WIFE's co-workers dropped dead. Which left her thinking that I'd be next, etc.

Hmmm... I guess I pretty much told that tale backwards, anyways, do what you like. Gotta run, later.

Your swell pal,

Donatello

The great thing about having funny friends like Lime and Donatello is that, some days, they do almost all of your writing for you.

Soon, with more better stuff.

(By the way, the image came from CPAP.com, who sell the things should you medically need one - or if you wish to be the Fartball equivalent of Bonds or Clemens.)