Goin’ to the powder room

Alaska is a chilly place, which means that, sometimes, chamois cream just isn’t a pleasant option—even in summer. Like when you camp out the night before a ride. Northern nights are cold. As in see-your-breath cold.

Unless you happen to sleep with a tube of Chamois Butt’r in your bag, the pre-ride application can get gruesome. Stuffing a big gob of ice-cold goo up the ol’ eerie canal first thing in the morning is enough to make you curse your own ancestors, not to mention the friends who are standing around telling you to hurry your ass up.

And on longer winter rides, anything moist will eventually feel cold and clammy against your skin. Fortunately, I recently happened upon a solution: Anti Monkey Butt powder. Shoot some of this shit in your shorts, and you’ll be warm and fuzzy for hours.

Besides being a warm, dry alternative to creams, this stuff is flat-out manly. They sell it in six-packs for cryin’ out loud! And they market it to macho dudes like fat-ass truck drivers (and those are guys with posteriors that spend a lot of time in sweaty, pressure-filled situations). Check out this info from the company web site: “Anti Monkey Butt Powder is specially formulated to absorb excess sweat and reduce frictional skin irritation. It is ideal for butt-busting activities such as truck driving, motorcycling, bicycling, horseback riding, and extreme sports.”

If you’re not manly, you can even buy a version for babies, or Lady Anti Monkey Butt, a “satiny smooth powder to minimize the frictional discomfort that women often experience when using exercise equipment, running, driving, cycling or just walking.” They say it reduces friction on your inner thighs, but if those babies are rubbin’ up against each other when you try to walk, I don’t really want to know.

Either way, this stuff is cheap and easy to find. Apparently, it’s even sold in hardware stores—which is especially nice if you’re shy about buying butt products and want to discreetly slip some into a big pile of tools, drywall anchors and electrical tape when you go to the cash register.

This is good stuff. But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can read testimonials on the company web site. For example, there’s a woman who picked up a canister at Walmart and was thrilled to find that it “stops that awful sweaty feeling that comes along with living here in S.E. Texas.”

When you need an expert on assholes, you can always count on someone who lives in Texas.