On Mute

As a woman with the ability to fart.

I was 19 having had returned home from an, uhhh… escapade? in Blacksburg, Virginia that had required my father having to pick me up at St. Alban’s.

They had me on something, I think it was Respidol. But it didn’t have any effect on my behavioral tendency to not want to speak. I developed that “genetic defect” somewhere around the summer before my Senior Year of high school.

I was probably thinner than I had ever been my entire life. Because when I remember sitting at a table with a St. Alban’s employee weeks before she had asked the other three of us a question. It was like: What is One Good Characteristic about Yourself?

My mute button was on lock because I was thinking, and searching and trying to really think about one defining characteristic of me that society as I knew it could find value or appreciation in. And I didn’t want to say my answer, but it was the only thing that interpreted my thoughts correctly.

But I remember saying aloud in a murmur, “That I’m pretty.”

Because THAT was the most black-hearted BASELESS random degrading shit that I believe others thought was true. At that moment in time, I weighed like 135, maybe… less, but not more.

I was also unabashedly coming to grips with the fact that my stank ass farts could be explained as a “lactose intolerance.”

However, the truth of the English is that y’all don’t have TOLERANCE for MY ABILITY to drink milk. Because I chugged the school lunch (1 cup) carton of milk St. Alban’s provided during my detention there because the commercial told me, “Milk does a body good.”

And when I knew I was ready to rip one, and it was gonna be a baddy, I just let it out when it was ready despite having been in a crowded elevator.

Some kind of spontaneous facial features and gestures and gasps of having had inhaled what my mom would say was “expelled air” was causing some kind of silent mime activity that everybody else in the elevator was participating in or appeared to want to talk about i their attempts to make eye contact but I really didn’t feel the need.

People were grasping their oxygenating holes like they’ve just been gassed! But not like the Nazi’s did to the jews naked in the shower, nor like Saddam Hussein or whoever said he or some other foreign name I’m misremembering chemically gassed their people which I never confirmed or said I knew the truth about. All I knew was that I farted and there ain’t NOTHING you can do about it after it happens.

I had full control of my mute button walked out of the elevator perfectly healthy, I might add. No words. No irregular facial expression. I already KNEW that was my New Normal, see?

But I sat down to write a different story entirely. That was actually quite poignant, I just have a few too many side notes…

I was at the kitchen table, with my mom. I was mute for so long (in my mind) at that point in time that I was just taking in the image, her being, seeing my mom’s eyes look into mine and I guess being so elated to be there that I couldn’t ALSO take in the fact that she was talking to me. I knew she was saying something of utmost importance IN ENGLISH, the only language she taught me for my father’s sake (her second language) and I didn’t, I couldn’t, hear a single word.

Stupidly, I just had to interrupt her and say something like, “Mom, do you know how beautiful you are?” Only to regret it to not have had ask her about it again for going on 20 some years.

I just wanted to say, “Could you repeat that?” Because In all honestly, growing up during school, I was really never home. I was only in her audience for breakfast, dinner and cheuffer hours.

She died of Lymphoma in 2006. I’ve had one memorable dream of her with all of the other brothers and cousins of hers that at that time some were dead some were still alive, but they were on a cruise having a boisterous jibber-jabber party that looked so fun. Only they were all speaking Tagalog, and I couldn’t understand anything they were saying.

Somewhere along the years, I did awake suddenly to my mother’s voice. Two words: “Quit Smoking.”

And like an ungrateful tyrant I get fucking angry. I have always had a natural tendency to NOT LIKE people telling me what to do. And like a fucking brat, because I KNOW you don’t have to tell me why…but I don’t like to do something I DON’T want to do for someone else’s approval.

I will ALWAYS have an unexplained devotion to revere my mom because she is the person who illlustrated through her life during my entire memory of her being what love really is. To agree to die for it in obedience, “because you said so.” But if ANY Italian wench CUNT says one motherfucking lie

about who my mother is or was, SHE BETTER FUCKING TELL IT TO MY FACE!

Or at least allow me to open my mouth during Sunday dinner to make things exciting. Not just spend more time filling the minds of my children with your monetary dominance and eatery selection trying to outnumber the only dick in the room you should care should have a hard on with your Democrat views on genorosity where NO OPEN discussion ALLOWED means a quiet civility that shrivels the dick to the usefulness of a cold vienna sausage.

But just to circle back to 3 separate events in my childhood that I believe describe an example of how I understood and respected my parents even though I was less than obedient.

Breakfast Before School

My mom shouted me awake a few minutes in the morning to ensure I come to eat pancakes and drink my milk, because in America, it was the understanding that “milk is good for you and makes children stronger.”

My mom would dole out school lunch money in ones on the table for the four us every morning. (I’d use it to buy a $.25 Grandma’s Chocolate Chip Cookie and save the rest to buy clothes I liked.)

And there was one memory of something my mom said while cooking the pancakes about not relying on the recipe on the box.

I didn’t really like pancakes. But she made them for all of us. In those days, if I had time to eat what I wanted that was available, I’d slowly munch on half a box of Frosted Flakes with minimal milk just staring blankly at the back of the box. Or like, 3 Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies (hmmm, also half a box). Be like, “sorry you sibling bitches, but I LIKE IT” and go back outside.

My Eldest Brother

I remember that one time I made him mad, I tried to phjysically stop him, but he held my pillow tight to his butt and farted into it and let it soak in. And I was BESIDE MYSELF WITH RAGE.

A Poster I Bought

As a lover of all things silently and visually comedic, I really liked an iconographic NO FARTING poster  that I bought in the 90s with my own money and taped to the wall above my bed. I didn’t buy it because it necessarily dictated “The Rules of My Bedroom.” I bought it because it visually displayed the iconographic pedestrian sign standing with one leg lifted and a little cloud coming out with an obvious circle with a line over it symbol for “NO.”

I thought it was hilarious. That’s all.

Because I understood my father’s disdain for extra signs, curbs, painted crosswalks and a flashing signs at every corner of the street to “let you know” where your extra tax dollars are deliniated to define public obedience as tolerance for overpriced eyesores.

Yeah, like I’m gonna wait for some inanimate object that don’t care shit for me to “TELL ME” when it’s “safe” to cross?

I mean, common…..! I’m fuckin’ Italian. Good luck.

And I’m sure a collective hatred can be shared amongst ALL of humanity for new laws that apply to us all but remain JUST an inanimate object for people with no sense of morality or instinctive common sense because no one SAW the license plate of some car that just drove off perhaps not even noticing he killed someone crossing the street.

The end result of the senseless murder people may have created a public outcry about DIDN’T capture and punish the perpetrator of a civilian crime via investigative police work, it bought you a fucking electricity required timer to help you as a defenseless pedestrian reason better.

So laws and lawyers don’t govern, those are the people you have to be able to afford to be able to approach a judge and expect to be delivered to justice. If you really BUY that shit.

In the land of the free, you’re supposed to be god-like enough to govern yourselves.

But our current reality of “what is it I’m supposed to read to know what is good and what is bad?” needs a fuckin cliffnotes because we as human slaves don’t have TIME in our lives to learn what bullshit methodology a judge will buy if anyone ever accuses us of a crime, or fit for unemployment.

This nonsensical “non-fiction” must have been created with AI to have been produced in such a quick amount of time that no one knew it was being voted on as a best seller. I haven’t read it either.

Tell me? Is it like a Christmas List for Greedy Bureaucrats? I bet people with no concept of work or money can compile a wishlist in no time.

LOL!

Because there’ NO ACCOUNTABILITY either. LOL!

Ideologies decreed as law in response to the public outcry caused by the negative repercussions for every thing a stupid or immoral person gets away with are not laws that govern.

Because it appears that now in 2024, we may have to explore the history and linguistic origins of what defines stupid again. And let it sink in.

I understood my fathers fire-y logic because it most likely stemmed from being amongst very verbose and proliferating NO PARKING sign in Yonkers, NY.

So the minute my father smelled a fart coming from my room that he knew I dealt myself, he came right in and ripped the art I bought that I taped to HIS wall in MY room right in half.

I understood why did he it. But did you understand why I bought it? WITH MY OWN MONEY?

Get it? Lactose intolerant? My dad thought I was posting rules and unabashedly breaking them MYSELF with no guilt whatsoever in HIS house.

He wanted me to go to UVA. I told him I didn’t want to.

I didn’t want to meet any more stuck up people. I also didn’t believe “ART” was a money-making commodity that an average person like me could INVENT worth using a bullshit reason or explanation in order to make a living and didn’t think the idea of finding/reading or memorizing a smidgen of exemplified correlated justice rulings in law books in order to be considered a lawyer to pass some test.

Pink Eye

At the age of 46, having had witnessed a news visual at some point in my life of an African American woman filled with needles debilitated in bed at the hospital getting treatment for AIDS, I’m pretty sure there’s a possilibity of getting pink eye from a farted on pillow, if you let it soak in.

Didn’t Confucious say, “He who goes to sleep with itchy butt, wakes up with smelly finger?”

But to again vindicate my mother, did my rage trigger a demand from me upon my mother to wash my pillowcase immediately? No. I hadn't been taught how to do the laundry myself, and I didn't demand my offending brother to rectify the situation that way. I probably just yelled "something!"

My father hid a tape recorder unther the dinner table one night and the only thing I remember hearing over and over again was, "______."

Oops! I'm sorry, I forgot that I normally edit myself now voluntarily to avoid unwanted verbal conflict, and maintain anonymity/diplomatic immunity of the forgiven so my witnesses do not appear related to a kook.

(Did you know there's a line in the Bible printed this way?)

Follow me on Twitter/X if you want to. You can find me as @BeIntriguedbyMJ

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