One might argue that all the best pranks indubitably involve, well, poo.
But it’s not nearly as funny when that sh*t is pulled on you…
“Hey, it’s getting close to dinner time, why don’t you text your mom and let her know what to fix for our babies?” My Beautiful Bride asked me, just as she had done a million other times when we had gone out and about later in the day while leaving our daughters at home with Grandma.
“Man oh man, this half-assed search for a new mini-van has drained the life out of me–I ain’t got no energy left for such decisions. How about corn dogs? Simple enough, right?” I lazily suggested.
“Good enough for me,” she replied. “You better send off that text before you forget though.”
I was so exhausted that I barely had enough in me to tap out the most basic of messages.
“You…can…fix…the..girls…corndogs…for…dinner….Thanks,” I mumbled along with the tapping of my fingers.
“Oh wait! I better sign off so she knows it’s really me and not someone who has kidnapped us and is just trying to lull her into thinking everything is alright on our end: ‘Xo’…and done!” I declared as I put the finishing touches on my masterpiece of a matriarchal missive.
Meanwhile, my life partner just stared straight ahead as she diligently drove us to the last car lot on our list before it closed for the day.
I sat there for a full 5 seconds trying to figure out why my subconscious was screaming at me that something was amiss.
“Wait, what?!? What did I just text my mom?!?”
I looked up from my phone to see My Beautiful Bride still looking straight ahead but desperately trying not to laugh.
l pulled my phone back out of my pocket and quickly flipped to my messages to find this:
“Fartypants?!? Why would I say such a horrible thing to my dear mother?? Especially since this beloved woman, as far as I know, never broke wind once before she was 50. (And those are laurels that no one is ever guaranteed to be able to rest upon in their golden years.)” I demurred in horror.
I turned to the person I was supposedly supposed to trust more than anyone else in the world.
“What do you know about this?? Hmm?? First, all my socks go missing out of my sock drawer this morning, then somehow the Saran Wrap I put on the toilet in the girls’ bathroom mysteriously goes AWOL before anyone used it, and now this?” I didn’t explicitly make any allegations, but I sure implied the hell out of them.
“Huh? Is something wrong? What are you going on about over there?” my personal Brutus did a poor job of feigning ignorance.
“My April Fool’s prank war with our older child has been abnormally tilted in her favor all day–methinks there’s a traitor–a spy! A mole!–in our midst!” I said as I glared at the Benedict Arnold in the car with me. “And let’s see…’Fartypants’? Oh, that’s definitely the work of a 10-year-old–but only you knew the fully story of the ultimate Oh Holy ----- prank I pulled on Mom a few years ago!”
My future first-wife howled in laughter and had to pull the car over because she couldn’t safely drive with all the tears of delight streaming down her face.
“Dammit, now I have to fix this!” I said as I tapped out an explanation to my poor mother.
“Oh, sh*t…literally! You just couldn’t stop at replacing ‘Xo’ with ‘Fartypants’? You had to go and let the kid have it automatically replace ‘and’ with ‘poopoo’? I caught it in time in the first text to Mom, but damned if it didn’t bite my ass on the second one!”
“What the crap are you talking about, Willis?” she quipped, obviously unable to resist the siren call of an excrement-based pun. “Welp! Looks like we’re here at the Toyota place–we better go look at vans we can’t afford before they shut their doors!”
I just shook my dang head in disgust as I got out of the car.
“I’ll deal with all y’all’s foolishness later…”
“We probably should get some food to-go for your mom–especially after you called her Fartypants,” snickered the butthead I was stuck with for the evening.
I sighed.
“Yes, we should show her some thanks for spending her Saturday afternoon with our little rascals. I’ll text her the menu and see what she wants.”
I face-palmed myself.
“Agggggh! Dammit I did it again!”
And Mom wasn’t slow to point that out.
To be fair to her though, this one was kinda on me for either not changing or omitting it.
But it was time to move on from all this non-sense. I was temporarily pausing my vegan moral code for some spit-roasted South American bird, and I by golly, I was going to focus on enjoying it!
I was so intent on savoring the moment, in fact, that I pulled the dagger out of my back, sat down at a restaurant table with the woman who had put it there, and acted like it had never happened. With that temporarily suspended disbelief, I truly felt like I was living in one of those “good food, good drink, good company” moments (also known as an “Olive Garden commercial”).
Unfortunately, we got so caught up in the moment that we lost track of time, necessitating me to send a quick text to our child care to let them know we would be late:
The point of the story is…you know, you should really be careful how you treat your parents. You’re just a ----- fool if you don’t think Laws of Karma won’t apply to you: everyone and their brother knows that your kids are bound to treat you in all the ways you exasperated your own parents.
No matter how clever you think you are, Fartypants…
Content created on: 6/7 April 2024 (Sat/Sun)
Leave a Reply