Chronic Advice Farts

I awoke this morning with a tremendous pressure on my brain. It was as though something needed to escape… an embolism of good intent swelling against my better judgement. It was insight that had to be shared. It was a Chronic Advice Fart.

We’ve all been in the situation where you see some misguided individual and know, just KNOW that you could solve their life’s problems in a few simple steps. The solution is so simple. So elementary. If only they would realize that YOU have the answer to all life’s conundrums.

The problem arises by people’s failure to ask you for the answers. It’s not their fault. They do not realize the wealth of good advice that languishes in your psyche just waiting for the opportunity to leap to their rescue. They see you and your mundane life and conclude that if you were that wise, your life would be considerably better than the discount beer and microwave dinner existence you currently occupy.

I try my best to stifle the urge to offer unsolicited advice to those in need. How? I simply look in the mirror. I can see my own reality and know I am in no position to tell people how to act, react, or lead their lives. I said I try my best. I didn’t say I succeeded. This is because I suffer from Chronic Advice Farts. I’m anticipating the day when the same pharmacologists who solved Restless Leg Syndrome develop a treatment for Chronic Advice Farts.

 Chronic Advice Farts are caused by the accumulation of really great advice that has no place to go.

No one wants your advice. You see your kids, your friends, your political representatives, idiot drivers on the freeway, and not one of them asks for your insight. You travel to another country and tell the indigenous people just how you do it at home!  Your unused advice swells like a Taco Bell burrito that lays in your gut and builds layer upon layer of noxious gasses until the inevitable blue skank of doom erupts. A taco fart always picks the worst time and place to escape. It blows in an elevator or while making that critical presentation to the board. You know it’s coming. You tell yourself you’ll run off to the privacy of the bathroom. But you wait a little to long and so it’s a methane fiesta.

Chronic Advice Farts build the same way. You feel a pressure to inform and tell yourself you will let your well intended counsel escape safely. You’ll just share with someone at the bus stop who you’ll never see again. You’ll call Rush Limbaugh’s show to blend in with the other sufferers who are Advice Farting all over the airwaves. You tell yourself it’ll be like farting in a locker room. No one can tell who did it. It should be simple and safe. But it’s not. You’ve waited too long and you have lost control of your mental sphincter. All of the brilliance comes pouring out in a shower of, “You know what you should do??? You should…..”

So here’s a note to Merck and Pfizer and Eli Lilly.

“Hey Big Pharma, you know what you should do? You should focus your research dollars on those of us that suffer from the scourge of Chronic Advice Farts (CAF). Really! You’d make a ton of money and solve so many problems and make everyone’s life better, even those who don’t suffer from it because then we’d shut the fuck up and people wouldn’t keep walking away from us and avoiding us and maybe we’d get invited to party once in a while and maybe our kids would call us sometime and talk for more than about 3 minutes before they suddenly remember they’ve got something really important to do and my boss wouldn’t think I was creepy and even the greeter at Wal-Mart wouldn’t run from me and that cute girl that runs the checkout line wouldn’t move to another line whenever I showed up or………”

Phew! Thanks, I needed that.

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