The Great Fart in a Bag Incident

The past few weeks (or months) have been devoid of blog updates due to the chaos and turmoil commonly known as moving. After 10 years my husband and I made the decision to sell our house, the house we became a family in, to the person willing to throw the most money at us. I'm sure as I turn to leave for the last time, our boxes loaded into the U-Haul and the rooms scoured of our very existence I will shed a tear but at this moment with the memory of paint fumes still dancing in my nostrils and caulk still clinging to odd and surprising surfaces that I have no recollection of affixing it to I can say that I will not miss this bitch.

It took us a month. One month to pack up any item that personalized the place, to paint everything a grey-beige that popular redecorating sites are now cleverly calling "greige", to caulk all possible surfaces that join any other surfaces and to clean the place in a manner that would say to the average home buyer, "Hey you! We are very clean people! We commonly and with great frequency climb chairs to dust off the top of this refrigerator and make it a point to remove all spices and canned goods from the lazy susan on a weekly basis to divest its shelves of even a trace of dust. Do not be fooled! There has NEVER been a cobweb so impressive dancing from this bathroom light fixture that these here homeowners left it there just to see how long it could get and these window sills have ALWAYS been this immaculate. They were in no way deemed a "lost cause" and painted over in haste due to the impressive level of grime that had permanently marred their surfaces. Come and live here! This is the house where dirt fears to tread!"

(I'm aware that I quote Poltergeist too much. It's a sickness.)

The children were very confused. Questions ranged from, "Why are you cleaning my bathtub with a toothbrush?" to "Can I bring my princess cup to our new house?" My favorite question came one night, however, as I leaned across my daughter's toddler bed while I tucked her in. She was very concerned about the move. The conversation unfolded like this:

Julia: Well, can I take my bed with me to a new house?

Me: Of course baby. We can take all of our stuff, we just put it in a truck and take it somewhere else.

Julia: Can I bring the dogs?

Me: Yes, the dogs will come with us.

Julia: And can I bring Patrick?

Me: Yeah, Patrick is part of the package bud. He comes too.

Julia: (looking over my shoulder into the darkened room behind me) And can I bring him?

Me:(looks nonchalantly over my shoulder into the void of her opened closet and then back at her)...who baby?

Julia: (empatically gestures with her chin back over my shoulder) Him! I want him to come with us too!

Me: (All the hair on my body standing at military attention) Yeah baby. You can bring him too.

If you haven't read previous posts, I can only assume she is referring to Michael Taxenor. He's been established as the little boy who "lives in her room" and gets brought up an a regular basis, which serves to freak me the fuck out every single time and now he's been given the invite to imprint on us like that demon in Paranormal Activity. Neat!

It appears, however, that it may be awhile before we can actually load our earthly and unearthly possessions into a moving van for we have yet to find a house despite the fact that ours sold in two weeks. We put an offer in on the house of my dreams, it fell through and now we are fortunate enough to have sold our house to people who wanted to rent it out in the first place. Translation: we're renting our own house. It is weird to say the least, but beats the hell out of having to move twice, sign a long term lease somewhere or buy a place out of desperation. The right place will come along and in the meantime I intend to mine the rich vein of comedy gold that this situation has revealed, beginning with what I am calling either "Fart Bag-Gate" or "The Great Fart in a Bag Incident of 2013."

Almost immediately upon the house closing, I was sitting on the recliner, quietly reading a nuanced, well written and finely crafed novel about love and the human psyche while my husband caught a few afternoon z's to make up for a long night at the fire station the night before when I heard a ruckus at the front door.

(it is not well written)

Not wanting the dogs to bark and wake everyone up, thus ending a rare moment of afternoon quiet alone with a cup of coffee and a good book,

(it is not a good book)

I darted for the front door and opened it just before a pre-teen looking kid could ring my door bell. 

"Does Billy O'Shaunessy live here?"

He and the three kids standing behind him all regarded me with shit eating grins and I knew I was about to be pranked, but how? He didn't go with, "Is your refrigerator running?" or lead in with something that could be answered with "That's what she said!" so I was truly lost in figuring out where this was going. I could only surmise that this was going to terminate in such a way that involved a vague, mildly hostile epithet directed at my mother and so I pressed on, my eyes narrowing.

"Who?"

The kid's expression grew more excited and I knew he was getting ready to throw a zinger at me that I would never see coming. I was close in that, I never saw the fourth kid who'd been hiding around the corner coming as he jumped out at me and launched a foreign object at my face. It all happened so fast that I didn't have time to even freak out, I just kind of instinctively moved my head to the side so that whatever he'd just hurled at me hit the door and exploded behind my head instead of in my eyeballs. All I could think at the time was, "This is totally just like when George Bush dodged that shoe."

(Look at how perturbed the guy next to him is. Someone just hurled a shoe at the President of the United States and he's all, "Really now, must you be so childish?")

The smell hit me before I even saw it and I new it was a stink bomb. Now I was pissed. These little assholes didn't even have the creativity to set it off on a school bus with no possibility for escape or in the room with a substitute teacher when her back was turned like a civilized adolescent. Nooooo, THESE twats tried to blind a stranger and ended up dousing the front door of what has only recently become her rental property and then commenced to run down the street like a pack of giggling hyenas. If I had to paint that front door again, it was going to be with their virgin blood.

(How can you blame them? They were, like, 12.  I'm 35 and think this is hilarious.)

They tore off down my street and I calmly yelled for my husband to call the cops. I didn't really feel like this was a cop related situation, but I wanted the little shits to run home with the idea that cops were coming instead of stinking up anyone else. The idea that they might pee a little was not unwelcome either. However, when you rouse a man out of a sound sleep with the phrase, "Red, call the cops" no matter how calmly you utter it, said man is going to immediately get an adrenaline surge and leap from the couch like a ninja while yelling, "What? Why? What happened?"

Loudly enough for the punks benefit, who were still in ear shot, I exclaimed, "Some fucking kids just threw a stink bomb into our house." He tore through the house for his car as I stood out on the sidewalk watching them run for the corner. They were cackling their heads off, looking back over their shoulders periodically at the idiot chick they'd just pranked.

They started like this:

Then, upon looking back one last time to gloat only to see my pretty enormous husband run out like a serial killer and hop into his car, they were like this:

He chased them around the neighborhood a bit, obviously NEVER intending on catching them but wanting to scare the ever loving shit out of them as rightful punishment. Upon their second pass through a park to escape my husband and his big bad Sentra, a landscaper looked quizzically at the departing children and then back at their pursuer. My husband pulled over and let the guy know what was happening and the landscaper cracked up. "Mission accomplished, they're all bawling their eyes out!"


Which made me picture them like this:

If this entire story were an Aesop Fable, I believe the moral would read:

If you must revile your neighbor, make certain first that he cannot reach you...in his Nissan Sentra.

Now, you might be asking yourself, "Hey, where are the kids? Isn't this a blog about her kids and all the ways she screws up basic parenting skills?"

Do not dispare. You see, upon hearing the initial commotion at the front door, my daughter walked out of her room and was standing in the hallway during the entirety of Fart-bag-a-pa-loo-sa. She heard me tell my husband to call the cops and heard me tell him that "some fucking kids threw a stink bomb into our house." I was not aware of her presence until I walked back inside and saw her there. I didn't know how much of the entire scene she'd witnessed until she skipped through the kitchen later while singing, "Fucking, fucking, fucking!" with a big smile on her face. She's said it twice more since and we haven't heard it again. I'm sure she's saving it for ballet class.

And, as a parting gift, I leave you with a video of my son shoving me to the ground in front of the other preschool parents during my daughter's Halloween parade. I was crouching down with him on my knee in order to get a good video angle when my son spotted my daughter and became enraged that I wouldn't allow him to run over and join her in her parade. Shoving ensued. The other parents pretended that they didn't see it. I allowed them to keep up that ruse. Not a word has been spoken of it since.

Happy Friday!