The King Of Farts

“Eula-Beulah was prone to farts—the kind that are both loud and smelly. Sometimes when she was so afflicted, she would throw me on the couch, drop her wool-skirted butt on my face, and let loose. ‘Pow!’ she’d cry in high glee. It was like being buried in marsh-gas fireworks. I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible, it was also sort of funny. In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism.”

—Stephen King,
writing in his book On Writing
about being fourish-years old

In my day we reverently referred to that particular style of farting as The Dutch Oven: cover, gas, contain, laugh. When two people are laughing together, how can they not connect? Of course, building a good-humor bond depends somewhat on the intensity of odors passed down through the digestive tract to fog up the face. Friendship has a limit and it is fava beans.