The Sound of Silence
Where Do Unfarted Farts Go?
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
Not long ago Carol Lennox reawakened my brain to a curious claim, one I had not thought of in decades.
Women don’t fart.
I’ll have to scroll pretty far down my Medium notifications to find her response. Sorry, can’t find it now. The Cosmic Cat must have pushed it off the edge of the world.
When I was young a girlfriend told me the same thing.
Ladies don’t fart.
Regardless of the truth of that claim, what becomes of the farts those attempting to avoid fart driven embarrassment don’t fart? Where do they go?
Farts cannot be destroyed. Think about it. You hold in a fart, and it seems to disappear. But that can’t be. Whatever else a fart is, it’s a form of matter. As Mr. Thomas told us in seventh grade science class, matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but its form can be changed. Yes, I know. E=mc² and all that. As a junior nerd I walked up to him after class to discuss this but, choosing to dismiss me with flattery, he told me the other students would be lost if he started in upon that.
Image the fun if a fart were converted into pure energy! How much matter is there in a fart anyway? What if there is oh, I don’t know, .1 gram of matter in a fart? Maybe more if it’s — never mind. OK. That’s .0001 kilograms. The speed of light in SI units is 299,792,458 meters per second so E = .0001 * 299,792,458² = almost 9 quadrillion Joules.¹
If you do the math that’s enough to keep about 150 trillion 60 watt light bulbs going for one second, or almost 5,000 going for a year. In other words, you could light a shopping mall for a year with one fart. Isn’t that incredible? If only uncle Carl in Fanny and Alexander knew about that! He got only three candlepower out of his!
Supplying power for a shopping mall seems like a lot to ask of a single fart, but there’s no arguing with math, right? Imagine a whole farmload of farts. We could explore interstellar space with that kind of fartpower! What would happen if you farted in the direction of travel while traveling at the speed of light?
Where was I before that nerdgasm?
Ah yes.
What do held-in farts change into? Do they just leak out of the body silently, meaning that everyone who thinks they’re being so polite by not farting is actually distributing silent-but-deadlies everywhere they go, which join to become a kind of transparent fog, everywhere and nowhere, like the SARS-CoV-2 virus?
Once they are in the world, they must, like SARS-CoV-2, find their way to someone’s upper respiratory tract. Why doesn’t the entire world smell like farts? Maybe we are used to it, so we need farts on top of farts in order to smell them. Or maybe we all have COVID.
I’m so confused.
¹ As in kg * m²/s². The units work out, see? No? You don’t see? You will just have to trust me.
Learn all about creative farting and everything else worth knowing at MuddyUm Comedy Camp!
Special thanks to Rachael Ann Sand and Holly J See for their astute editing, to Toni Crowe and Gary Chapin for the fartpower of their imaginations, and to Sarah Paris for her prompt,