THE BATTLE

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Decided to go to war,

For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

Had made him really sore!

Each intent on wreaking woe

They bravely fumed and sassed,

But Tweedledee had dined on beans

And Tweedledum got gassed!

(With sincere apologies to Lewis Carroll)

My present occupational hoop-jumping finds me working for an unnamed state’s Treasurer’s Office as a securities analyst (probably quite appropriate, since the work is excruciatingly “anal” and really the “last” thing I’d willingly do to earn a bean, if fate had any normal sense of ironic humor at all (alas, she doesn’t) since I can’t even balance my own bank account!). It’s pretty stultifying work and the fact that I manage this state’s major investment account—a portfolio that usually runs around 60 billion (yes, that’s billion with a capital ‘B’) US dollars—is usually an absolutely meaningless bit of information, because once you start to think about figures with more than 6 zeros, the ordinary mind starts to bog down in little circular cycles of spasmodic mind-farting that make rational understanding a completely futile exercise in the impossible.

My life wasn’t always so inexorably boring, nor was it as mind-numbing as pushing securities and trading stocks and bonds now tends to make it. Time was, once upon a time, when I was doing REALLY interesting things, like researching chemical and biological defense subjects, working with foreign governments to protect entire populations against chemical and biological attacks, attending international symposiums in Europe and the Far East, and other fun stuff like that. However, all that has now come to a screeching halt and since I returned to the US from abroad, I elected to bail out of the medical arena and take up more prosaic occupational responsibilities (hence the present job as a Treasury Agent, or ‘T-man’, as we like to humorously regard ourselves). The state treasury I work for is a huge old colonnaded affair, built in 1932 out of reinforced concrete, but very cleverly made to appear quite similar to a neo-classical Roman temple (with external friezes of the ancient Greek/Roman deities, Dorian columns, porticos, et all—the whole architectural shtick—but almost completely fabricated out of Portland Cement, which has a long history of association with the Underworld).

The division my work is takes place in is housed in two huge rooms on the ground floor, separated from each other by the central atrium of the building’s southern wing; an unfortunate arrangement, certainly, since my duties require me to constantly cross the cavernous empty atrium to get from one area to the other. Now, imagine if you will the acoustic characteristics of a huge, empty edificial atrium built out of concrete, but lined with marble and granite (from the local mountain range mountains): it amounts to a huge, empty, hollow echo chamber in which even the slightest whisper synergistically grows in volume with each reflective bounce off the rock interior. Undoubtedly rivaling some of the most ‘Believe It or Don’t’ examples of buildings that are world-renown for their incredibly sensitive acoustic properties, the echo chamber that is the treasury building has to be experienced to be believed.

Entombed as I am in the drab midst of one of the Holiest of Holy sanctum sanctoriums of the state’s civil service (I like to refer to it as the ‘staid civet cervix’), suffering the daily onslaught of moribund business conventions that are slowly sucking the life out of me into a morass of bureaucratic mediocrity, and subject to the brain-cell corrosion that only mindless cogs in the ponderous Machine of State are subject to, not a day goes by that the latent anarchist within screams for symbolic release. Fortunately, my native Celtic genius usually finds a way to offset the monumental torpidity that my work entails.

Imagine then, if you can, my initial interest in discovering the colossal, stupendously profound acoustic characteristics of this inner atrium I must cross so many times each day, coincidentally compounded by the floridly effusive effects that a monstrous meal of colonial-style Mexican food typically has on the human digestive system approximately a day after being ingested. If you are thinking BORBORYGMUS, you definitely win the crocheted bath-tub!

One day, as I was crossing the atrium, I felt an uncommon pressure building up internally that just would not release itself unremarkably. In fact, half-way across the chamber I practically deafened myself by emitting one of the noisiest, juiciest, most melodiously complex FARTS you could ever hope to never hear! Yes, there I was, halfway between the rooms when suddenly: BRAAACCCKKKKsmggggooomm! Out it came with all the splendid thunder of the 25-howitzer battery of field artillery that accompanies a full production of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. I almost caught myself looking around to see if any of the atrium’s interior marble sheathing had been melted, such was the colossal physical energy that a fusillade of hydrogen and methane gas like that releases.

After a few seconds of stark embarrassment, I quickly suppressed these feelings that somehow I had transgressed against the silent inherent grandeur of the atrium’s gloomy moodiness, and somehow blasphemed against whatever laws and regulations must exist in the state’s codicil canons that prescribe ‘properly respectful demeanor’ in public monuments (we are directly across from the State Capitol, of course, and only a few hundred yards from a certain celebrity governor’s office). In that same instant, however, I knew that I had found the perfect mechanism of putting a Yang/Yin balance back into the dreary routine that my life often tends to follow these days. Now, every time I have to make the trek across this perfect echo chamber to the other side, I first carefully check to make sure no other person is in eyeshot, then…as I saunter innocently across the atrium, I take almost fiendish delight in breaking wind in full glory! Ah! The satisfaction! The glow of pride that defiling pedestrian convention in this manner confers! It’s really hard to explain but suffice it to say it’s my small way of symbolically displaying the middle digit to all this bourgeois crap and social protocol we human beings needlessly surround ourselves with in our ostensibly ‘normal’ lives. It never ceases to amaze me that such an inconsequential thing as the pressurised release of gaseous byproducts of the normal human digestive process can be so monumentally fulfilling!

The delicate subject of farting (for that is what borborygmus is, in the vernacular) is a curious thing, really, since it is without a doubt one of the most common effects of normal bodily function we all experience each and every day of our lives. And yet, an equally curious sense of utmost taboo has grown up around everything associated with farting, amounting almost to a complete denial of the fact that ‘proper’ people could ever do such a thing! An analogy might be thought of in terms of the notion many young kids (like myself) of my generation had in our pre-puberty years (or even post-puberty) regarding the impossibility of mom and dad ever possibly having engaged in something as basic and animalistic as sexual intercourse. There was something almost antithetical about such a prospect, seen from my tender, juvenile perspective. The thought of my dignified dad stuffing ma on the bed like a couple of dogs going at it on a street corner simply transcended my childish ability to conceive of this sort of thing. Yuk! Nasty! Dirty! Awful! General Protection Fault! Etc.! Ditto for our amusing modern notion that polite people simply do NOT fart. The same is true of the thought of a desirable woman sitting there on the loo and defecating merrily away: the two images are exclusively and mutually incompatible, they simply do not compute with each other. Beautiful women don’t shit and beloved mums and dads simply do NOT attack each other with mad sexual abandon! That’s all there is to it…apparently.

Fact is, that all of these things are part of real, everyday life and the sooner we all accept that and resolve whatever symbolic disparities and/or inconsistencies, the better our mental health will be. Or at least such is my take on the matter.

OK. Try to imagine (back in the 80s) my shock to find, in a packet of books sent in a ‘care package’ to me (at my USAF airbase) by my own elderly, prim and proper Presbyterian mother, a slim volume of reflections on breaking wind by none other than American founding father Benjamin Franklin, titled ‘FART PROUDLY’. I had never in my wildest dreams imagined such a topic could be the subject of a whole book by this brilliant 18th Century renaissance man, fer crissakes! Yet there it was, none other than the subject of some of Ben’s most profound ruminating on the very natural human act of breaking wind That was a double ‘enlightenment whammy’, for not only did it prove to me that there were things out there I didn’t yet know much about, it also revealed that my prim, proper, and elderly, church-going, school teaching mother was far MORE broad minded than I had ever given her credit for. At any rate, that seminal moment was a rather significant ‘peak moment’ for me in my gaining greater understanding of exactly what life was all about and what it was not.

Later in my youth, when I found myself in the US Air Force medical service as a flight physiologist, I was more than a bit bemused to learn of the effects of altitude and corresponding changes of ambient pressure on the human body’s gastrointestinal physiology—one of which was an enhanced tendency to break wind (“fart”—OK, there’s the word that really needs to be used here) as altitude increased and air pressure was accordingly reduced. In fact, so common was farting at altitude (due to these same pressure gradients) that the term ‘one cheek sneak’ came into vogue to describe the technique used by pilots to break wind, despite being tightly strapped into an aircraft ejection seat. The term described the process of un-weighting one cheek by shifting one’s mass on the seat’s survival kit slightly to one side, so as to allow the gas to pass with less restriction and it was almost a mandatory maneuver if one was to relieve the intense internal pressure build-up that rising rapidly to high altitude typically produced. Of course, numerous jokes grew up around this fascinating facet of high-altitude flight. One of them in particular concerned a particularly spicy commercial burrito sold by the ‘Copper Carts’ that brought snacks and junk food out to the ADC airbase flightlines (they provided a sort of last chance to inhale some sustenance before a pending prolonged mission or extended flight operation). This particular commercially mass-produced bean burrito in reference was such a notable gas producer that it became known as the ‘Neutron Burrito’. At the time, the Neutron Bomb was the latest, most-feared form of nuclear weapons development that surfaced during the ‘Cold War’ era. This ingenious hydrogen fusion weapon was designed so as to release a relatively small burst of explosive nuclear energy, while simultaneously releasing a greatly amplified amount of highly deadly neutron radiation that saturated the target’s blast zone. The result of this weapon’s detonation was such that very little physical damage was actually done to the target—houses remained intact, ground objects were no substantially damaged, etc.—but all biological life within the actual ‘kill zone’ was completely exterminated, as surely as if it had been totally disintegrated, for such are the effects of dense bursts of highly concentrated neutron radiation on living organic matter. So, with all this in mind, the infamous Copper Cart bean burrito became known to aircrews as the formidable ‘Neuron Burrito’ (reportedly capable of releasing no less than 30 cubic feet of flatus at 30,000 feet altitude). [Note: Copper Carts were a familiar sight on the ADC Alert Ramp, back in Air Defense Command days, and frequently availed by hungry pilots and ground crews on alert.]

Still later in life, when I wrote my book on chemical and biological defense systems, this background all tied in so perfectly with the subject of defense against poisonous gas and toxins that I sometimes found myself greatly bemused by the perfect congruency of it all. In fact, one of the chapters of my book that dealt with poison gases of with the first world war started off with a joke about an Imperial Bavarian Army field recipe for beans and sausage (Bayerische Weisswurst). Surprisingly, the anecdote worked well for the book and it reads no less credible for this reference than if I had stuck to a more straight-laced (read: stodgy, boring, and strictly factual) opening paragraph.

By the way, I suppose this is as good a place as any to mention the special effect that hairy human asses have on farting. As you might well guess, many men are excessively hairy. This is a genetic characteristic, of course, but aside from being a pre-programmed genetic nuance of human life, the quantity of hair in the cleft of a human ass (call it the ‘butt crack’ if it humors you to do so) does indeed have a profound effect on the sonorous amplification of flatulent sounds. Specifically, my research on the subject found that hair in that part of the nether anatomy has notable anechoic effects that tends to diffuse volume characteristics of farts such that men with hairy asses aren’t as easily able to pass juicy and noisy farts as are men with relatively hairless asses. In theory, therefore, men with less testosterone tend to be better farters (or at least more melodic and sonorous pooters), while men with high levels of testosterone (and genetic predispositions towards excessive bodily hair) are far less successful at it.

Tangentially, hairless asses make for cleaner bowel evacuations, too, since hair follicles in the ass tends to mess things up a bit, back there. In fact (as a confirmed, non-conventionally religious person), I personally suspect that hairy asses are direct and positively demonstrable proof that God has an arcane, if highly ironic, sense of Heavenly humor, ne c’est pas? Why else would She so vastly complicate the already difficult and not slightly indelicate act of passing excrement from the human body by this means? Fortunately, most women are spared this indignity, since estrogen and typical genetic balances favor minimal bodily hair in the ‘fair sex’ (but it must be mentioned in all fairness that for this very same reason, women are probably a lot better at farting with less effort than are most hairy-assed men). Pity they don’t think it to be as funny as most of us XY people!

OK, there’s everything (just about...) you were always afraid to ask about these discrete human bodily functions, but I throw it out here as a sort of asymmetrical preface to the blog entry that follows this tomorrow, which deals with chemical and biological warfare—a closely related and allied subject to the spread of noxious gases by humans with indigestion. Press on, gentle reader, and tune in again tomorrow! It only gets better (and less graphically lurid, I promise).

(Note: Originally dated 2006)