Sent: Aug 2, 2011 11:25 PM
To: W_____
Subject: Maybe or Maybe Not
Dear W_____,
Seeing the other Cape & Tights Super Heroes strutting around in their best underwear at Comic-Con last week got me thinking:
Maybe my last email was a little offhand and dismissive, maybe on purpose, mabye because offhand and dismissive seemed better than fiery and furious--how I felt reading your email giving me grief about the haboob. I've been catching enough flack lately from everybody else, so it didn't help for you, my Very Own Alter Ego, to join in the potshots.
Doncha think I was listening when our Very Own Wife said to you the other day, "My Very Own Husband, sometimes I think I don't even know you at all any more"? She called it "the FartMan Nonsense." She asked you, "Why, of all the online personae you could have come up with, why FartMan? Why the FartMan Nonsense?"
You didn't answer, you didn't stick up for me, you only shrugged . . . .
You don't seem to understand: Just like you didn't ask for colon cancer, they didn't let me pick and choose my super powers either. It's not my fault mine happen to be what they are. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's a perfectly normal human function . . . intensified to an Astonishing degree, a provenance that gives my super powers a heckuvalot more credibility than the mutant, beastly, or alien powers certain other Cape & Tights Super Heroes claim to possess.
So doncha think ordinary folks, if they weren't all such 5FUing idiots, would be able to identify more close and intimate with an everyday Super Hero like me, whose every super power derives from that basic necessary bodily function cosmically and comically symbolic of an essential quality of our shared humanity, viz, that we are . . .
. . . for now . . . at least . . . in part . . . stuck . . .
. . . in that portion of reality where everything, ourselves included, is always coming into existence and passing out of existence, while we yearn for something more permanent and, awaiting something more permanent, yearn in this life to be understood well by at least one somebody? (I suppose it's the yearning that makes us human. And I suppose that same universal yearning is also kinda selfish, with its willingness to sacrifice almost anything, including itself, for its own satisfaction.) So we say, "Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust," which is merely a yearningly poetic way of saying, sighing, "Manure is a fundamental building block of life on earth, and our bodies are as ephemeral as a tiny little silent fart." Don't blame me. I didn't design things that way. If it were left up to me, maybe we'd all live forever, and maybe no one would ever get constipated. Maybe. Or maybe not.
So a lot of people say, "FartMan is such an egoist, calling himself Astonishing and trumpeting his superiority all over town." Well, let me ask you, if I'm so arrogant, how many other people have the humility to acknowledge their own FartManHood? That's not bragging, because I don't claim any special ability that everybody else doesn't have, just that mine has been extended (some would say "dragged out") to its furthest human limits, with an unexpected twist or punch at the end.
Unlike the SuperMan and SpiderMan types, who purport themselves to exercise powers that would belong more properly to a god or to an animal than to a fellow human being, I'm really just a very regular guy. (No pun intended.) Take flying for example. Didncha ever wonder how it is that SuperMan can fly? He has no discernable means of propulsion! His aerial locomotion violates the laws of physics! What? Like some god, he wills himself along through the air? But when I, The Astonishing One, take flight, the way I get where I'm going is as obvious as the nose on your face. (Again, no pun intended.)
When I chatted with SuperMan at Comic-Con, he wasn't hovering or levitating or floating in mid-air. He wasn't even suspended in a basket a few feet off the ground. Nope. He was walking around on his own two feet like the rest of us. And his outfit needed dry-cleaning. So that's all I'm going to say about it, except that, if you were wanting an apology, this will have to do.
I remain . . .
Your Melodious and Malodorous Super Hero,
T.A. FartMan
P.S. Some news you're not going to like, even though it's not entirely unexpected: Cappy has reappeared, back from the dead, so it seems. He was there at Comic-Con, lurking off to the side the way he always does. He's still looking sickly and greenish, and still trying to pass himself off as a seroma, when I'm betting he's of a deadlier species. He pretends to be innocuous, but then when you let your guard down, he puts a shiv through your kidney. We're working on finding a way to get rid of him permanently . . . again.
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