Short Stories From 10 Years Ago – March 14, 2004
The Fart
Short Stories From 10 Years Ago – March 14, 2004 – The fart is considered ‘vulgar’. A fart is simply the passing of intestinal gas from the body, but it has a nasty reputation. Fart could be an acronym for ‘fast acting rectal tremor’.
All of the body functions – from burping, sneezing, coughing and hacking to spitting, carry negative connotations, but none is as egregious as farting in public. As a teenager I wanted to write a book called “The Emancipation Of The Fart”. The fart has been unjustly tainted. There are worse things than public farting, but right now I’m pressed to think of one that has the power to cause such embarrassment.
Our pets routinely pass gas and we don’t blink an eye. However in a social setting, farting is just not acceptable. Think for a moment of a healthy fart at a dinner party, while making love – especially if it’s a relatively new relationship, while dancing, during a job interview, at church, in an elevator (especially if there are only two or three people present), in a business meeting, while making a speech, driving in a car with friends or business associates (especially in winter), on a bus or subway, meeting the new in-laws for the first time.
The list is endless. There isn’t a public setting where the fart is welcome. If a fart was silent and pleasantly perfumed then there would be no problems. The fart would be as welcome at the dinner table as a good belch – which is easily excused, and in some cultures, actually seen as an indication that the meal was exceptional – a compliment of sorts for the chef. Not so for the poor beleaguered fart.
Farting when one is alone is a perfectly expected and accepted procedure. There is nothing more unpleasant than gas build up in the abdomen. The answer is to lift a cheek and break wind. In the worst case, one might move from one side of the room to the other, wait for the air to clear and then resume one’s activities. Why is this not simply the case in public? Perhaps because the fart is an unpredictable little devil.
One can never be quite sure of the duration, power, smell or style of fart one is about to produce. If this were known ahead of time then the appropriate avoidance technique could be employed. Leaving the room, moving away from others, bilateral cheek tightening or excusing oneself for a visit to the powder room would all be appropriate anti-fart tactics.
Unfortunately a fart can be triggered during a laughing or coughing fit, or for no reason at all. Once unleashed, a fart is usually not controllable, no matter the degree to which one squeezes one’s cheeks together. In my experience, which is limited to my personal repertoire, farts seem to fall into the following categories. The silent non perfumed, the silent heavily perfumed, the machine gun, the sudden gusher, the sharp report, the whistler, the extended continuous fart and finally the little, almost imperceptible bubble fart.
I have to say that I am not a big farter, but as with most people I have a particular ‘fart memory’ that has stayed with me over the years. I was a ‘residence don’ in university at the time. I took myself and my responsibilities very seriously. I’d been extremely sick for three or four days with a severe stomach flu, and had only been back to eating a normal menu for a day or so. My body wasn’t behaving itself and I was still a bit nauseous from time to time. Our dorm was hosting a parents’ visiting day and I was standing outside my door with one of the young women on my floor and her mother and father. I started to feel a bit wobbly and was hoping that I could excuse myself in short order, but the parents had a lot of questions about our college and the university courses their daughter was taking.
I could feel an ‘unleashing’ in the making in my lower abdomen and was desperately trying to wrap up the chitchat when the father said something very funny about his daughter. My clenched cheeks relaxed with laughter and a fart of unprecedented proportions launched forth from the depths of my bowels. It stared life as a slow, perceptible perfumed whistler, then gained momentum as a rat-a-tat-tat machine gun fart.
That was followed by a gush of air so powerful it could have carried me down the length of the corridor, ricocheting off the walls as I went. A sharp retort fart and a couple of little bubble farts and I was done. The father was standing there biting his lip and the mother turned away to speak to her daughter about something inane.
Finally the dad couldn’t contain himself any longer and he burst out laughing. He howled until tears ran down his cheeks. Mommie and the daughter were more gentile, but not for long. My bowels were not yet ready to concede defeat and a final report issued forth followed by a slow whistle fart. My intestines had been purged. The four of us ended up sitting on the floor in the hallway, laughing ourselves silly and sharing fart stories. I saw those same parents a couple more times during the year, but the memory of that hilarious moment was never mentioned again. The fart was back in its rightful place – the social taboo firmly in place. But for one brief, shining moment in 1971 the fart had been emancipated.
The moral of the story, of course, is for us to lighten up and find the humour in our lives. I’ve never forgotten that day and those people and I sometimes wonder if they ever recall that afternoon and how much we laughed!
