Home Is Where the Fart Is

I’m a person with a lot of questions, and one of them is, Why would anyone fart in the C-Train?

I’m stressed out. I have 2674 things to do. I have to figure out a way to orchestrate a move on a budget of $3.57. The move will take place in the dead of winter during what is, for most people, the Christmas break. Upon arriving at my destination, I will be unemployed and broke. There is no way in hell I’ll be able to afford to rent an apartment, and there will be no apartments for rent in my price range ($9.50/month) anyway, because of Olympic Fever. My cat is going to freak out, and that’s going to make me freak out even more than I’m already freaking out. She is, as I type, obsessively scent-marking the coffee table that I use as a combination dining table and footstool. Although now legally hers, it will not be coming with us to Vancouver. She’s never going to see her coffee table again, or the couch that we both sit on for 18 hours every day. There are arguments like “She’s just a cat” and “She’ll get over it,” but they don’t help. I can see that she’s a cat. That’s one of my favourite things about her. And she never gets over anything. Even if that weren’t the case, the idea of a return to the usual domestic routine at some vague point in the future is no comfort to a person who’s trying to extract her terrified little friend from a mesh carrier at airport security.

There’s the cat and the timing of everything and the cost of everything and the big chasm of uncertainty that awaits. Any reasonable person would be unsettled. Of course it’s all going to work out. I completely trust Gertrude Stein on this. It’s going to be a formative year. It’s going to change everything. It’s going to push my ambitions out of the realm of potentially disastrous crapshoots and into the sphere of possibility. It’s going to let me earn the right to talk about wanting to be a writer without adding a bunch of shit afterward about how I don’t know if it’s going to work out and maybe I’m not good enough and maybe I should have stayed in Washington and finished my PhD because who knows if I’ll ever be able to afford groceries again, for all I know I’ll never make a living at writing, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha not funny.

I spend a lot of time on public transit. In general I don’t mind it, as long as everything’s running on time and the weather isn’t obscene. I try my hardest to zone out on the train that takes me to the bus that takes me to my workplace. Between my iPod and whatever novel I’m currently reading, I’m usually successful. (BUSINESS IDEA: Create a series of hip, fun advertisements in which iPods are marketed to the mildly-to-moderately autistic. I am probably not kidding.)

But there are days when one isn’t 100% stoked about going to work, and the train isn’t 100% on time, and the weather isn’t 100% clement, and one’s iPod, which is totally janked despite being very young and well-treated, freezes in mid-song. (If anyone who’s reading this blog is still around when I die, I’d like to request that someone check my iPod and if there’s a song that’s paused or frozen in the middle, whatever song it is, please restart the track and play it all the way through. I can’t stand a half-played song.) I’m having more days like that than usual lately, for various reasons (see above), one of which, last week, was compounded by the totally unnecessary occurrence of C-Train flatulence. Some individual whose mama obviously didn’t teach him (or her? No, him) anything just couldn’t fucking wait the three minutes it would have taken the train to reach the 6th Street stop so he or she could get the fuck out and let it rip in the crisp morning air on his or her way to whichever downtown business tower he or she calls home for 40 hours per week.

Goddamn it, people. Goddamn it! What is wrong with you? Why am I spending my Tuesday evening asking your rude asses to please not fart in the C-Train? There are about a hundred other things I could be doing. Fart in your own homes. And nowhere else. Especially not on public em-effing transit. The square-footage that you are renting or owning is your personal fart wonderland. You can do whatever you like wherever you like in there. Go to town. Be creative. But when you’re out in society, you have to get a grip. Figuratively and literally. Other humans are entitled to depend on you to treat a C-Train car like your own personal Bum Stink Village.

I’m just shaking my head over here.