the aroma is always better on the other side
My dog is twelve now and I notice, as she ages, that her farts take on an added sickening pungency going well beyond descriptors such as ‘foul’, ‘malodourous’, ‘putrid’ or ‘rank’. The ones when she’s asleep are the most offensive. When she’s awake I like the way that she’ll get a fright when one sneaks out, each fart still seeming so new and startling to her. She’ll turn in a circle or stare at her arse with a ‘wtf’ look as she tries to figure it out. It’s amusing, and perhaps this amusement cuts through some of my abhorrence over the wafting decay stench emanating from her noxious butt. She was asleep and snoring next to me up until a minute ago when she let a stinky one rip. As I groaned expletives she just gave me that ‘what’s your problem?’ look and plonked her head back down, eyes closing once more (but she’s not asleep yet - there’s no snoring).
I sometimes think how fantastic it would be to live forever. Imagine all the time I’d have to read, travel, laugh, think deep expansive thoughts, learn new skills, explore a variety of strange and quirky leisure pursuits, become a cougar, go down an inexhaustible list of exciting career paths, grow my hair so long that Rapunzel’s would be considered short by comparison, and maybe I’d even be able to master how to walk in high high heels without falling flat on my bot-bot! The span of one normal life is just so miserly when I stop to ponder all the different things I’d enjoy doing with it.
But then I look at my sleeping dog and I smell the downside to eternity - she’s entered the last phase of her normal doggy lifespan and already her farts are extraordinarily bad. I’ve noticed the same correlation with people too - the older you get the more awful your bottom burps. It goes without saying then, that if I lived forever my farts would be so awful I’d wish for death just to get away from them.