And We Forgot The Taste Of Bread: Soylent, Day Three

(NOTE: Based on time elapsed since the posting of this entry, the BS-o-meter calculates this is 13.266% likely to be something that Ferrett now regrets.)

I’d like to talk to you about my anus.
…well, no, actually I wouldn’t, but that act puts me in a very small crowd. Because I really fucking hate fart jokes.
Because everybody farts.
Imagine a world where everyone around you burst into belly-clutching spasms of hi-lar-ity every time you sneezed.  Each sneeze would be met with, at best, someone smirking like you’d done something truly shameful but maybe just a little bit enjoyable, and at worst a sneeze would lead to a so-called “epic” story about that time – hee hee! – you remember that Aunt Sady?  Had a cold?  And she went to church?  And right in the middle of the pastor’s sermon, she – oh, yeah, she did – she let out a big wet sneeze right in the middle of the homily?
Then everyone around you would laugh for like ten, fifteen minutes while you sat there feeling vaguely embarrassed for everyone.
But no.  They loved sneezes so much they made fake sneezing noises and then giggled like this was the height of comedic technology.  Every comedy trailer featured, prominently, a scene where some dignified mayoral-type got sneezed on, spewing gallons of fake snot all over his monocle.   Down at the warehouse, it was considered the super-funniest of pranks to sneeze on the back of someone’s beck.  People would go out of their way to snort black pepper at declasse parties, because the biggest sneezes were naughty, but by God you secretly had to admire the loudness of Jackie-boy’s sneezes, amiright?
There you’d be, trapped in a world full of sneezeophiles, feeling like people were basically idiots for taking a vaguely unpleasant act and ritualizing it into the funniest of funnies.  Sneezes would be so hallowed, in fact, that if you said “Really, I think a little less of people who get off on sneeze humor” that you would be automatically seen as the sort of tight-nosed prude who deserved a good head-cold.
Then you hear about this new diet you can go on!  And it turns out that one of the side effects is rampant sneezing.  So you figure, “Okay, well, I don’t find sneezing funny, but at least writing about this diet will allow me to make a bunch of cheap nose jokes.  It’ll amuse somebody.”
But alas, though I’m supposed to have turned into a human whoopie cushion at this point, I am not a fart machine.
Gini claims to be windier, but frankly I haven’t noticed.  We were promised huge toxic clouds, and I anticipated being basically a gas giant at this point, surrounded by a ball of toxic miasma, perhaps even having acquired Saturn-like rings – but nothin’.  I mean, I do fart, but no more so than in the course of a normal day – which is totally hysterical, right?  Ferrett farts!  Oh my God, clutch your purses to your chests.
But what is happening is that Gini is starting to freak out.  Last night, she clutched my chest and said, “This stuff tastes like baby food.  My poop smells like baby food.  I smell like baby food.  I don’t know if I can do this.”  She wailed when characters ate food on The Big Bang Theory, pounding her armrest and demanding that someone give her nutrition with actual texture and taste.
I told her to hang on, but at this point my only hope of her making it to Day Seven is everyone on social media shaming her into not giving it up.  So I hope I can rally enough troops to provide psychological pressure on my wife.  Remember, she is a bad person if she cannot do this and then no one will ever love her again if she cannot drink silty artificial goop for seven straight days.
What is happening, however, is that my body is readjusting, much like Matthew Murdock after getting a canister of radioactive waste straight to the face.  My sense of smell has never been particularly keen, but yesterday I was in the basement writing…
(SIDE NOTE: What I am writing currently is the first draft of a novel which can best be described as “The Velvet Tango Room in space.”  It begins with a starving character turning up at a space station and being invited to dine at the finest cuisine in all the known worlds.  Much of what I am writing now is an uneducated boy learning how to eat well, in a different prose style than I’m used to – and if “authorial experience” colors a chapter, these early bits are going to be some of the strongest writing in my entire life.)
…yesterday I was in the basement writing, and the entire room was suffused with the buttery taste of popcorn and salt.  Like, so vivid I wondered whether a ghostly Orville Redenbacher was sitting next to me.  I actually put down the keyboard and walked upstairs to investigate, only to discover that my daughter had microwaved herself some popcorn and both Gini and I were circling around her, noses uplifted, as if we could live on scent alone.
Which I, personally, kinda could.  It was disappointing to follow that up with another glass of sludge – and that petri dish of crawling growth at the back of my throat gets worse with each glass – but the smell was almost like eating popcorn, at this point.  It was nebulous, but there was a weird ascetic satisfaction in going, “I can live on this odor” and then drinking my muck.  The same thing happened later when she heated up some Greek food – a burst of sensation in the nose, but my stomach was full.  What I craved was taste, but so much of taste was in the nose that I could alllllmost get there.
But not quite.
Because goddamn, writing this right now?  I want some fucking popcorn.
TOMORROW: Social Engagements and Soylent
 
 

4 Comments

  1. Jericka
    Nov 14, 2014

    Normally I like your stuff, your experiments, your vivid description. Today I got very hung up on you wanting all of us readers to shame your wife into sticking with this experiment.
    Not. Cool.
    Deprive yourself all you want, and write about it to your heart’s content. I will not be party to manipulating someone.
    No.
    Now, it may be that you meant this only as humor. I can see that. This is me reminding you of the failure mode of clever. I refuse to laugh at the idea of coercing someone using shame to stick with this diet for one second longer than she is actually ok with eating gloop.

    • TheFerrett
      Nov 14, 2014

      Considering my wife’s reaction this morning was to burst into laughter and give me a gigantic middle finger along with a fuck-you grin, I’m not too worried.
      If Gini doesn’t want to, shame ain’t gonna make her.

  2. Tracy
    Nov 14, 2014

    What I am finding surprising is that you drink it in big glasses all at once. I thought that I read in the article that started this all, that he kept his in a cold water bottle kind of thing and just sipped at it a little at a time? One bottle with cold water to drink, one to sip his goop?
    If my memory is correct, that would also help with the GL highs and lows, as it would mean a steady input of goop for the body to process, not one big huge body kick then drop then kick then drop.
    I also wondered if you couldn’t improve the flavor at all by puree’ing it in with some fruits and veggies, make kind of a smoothie. Not that you like fruit – but you DID go gung ho on smoothies for a while in an attempt to improve your health. Maybe if Gini just cant do this without taste, she can be the experimenter? Try mixing each glass with some other tasty edible?
    Also also….I am so not one of those ‘farts or bathroom humor is funny’ people. It makes me vaguely uncomfortable to downright horrified.

    • TheFerrett
      Nov 14, 2014

      The idea of silt and fruit pulp makes me heave, alas.

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