Gas.
Gut punching, your butthole is Alcatraz and it wants to escape on a handmade raft, hurdy gurdy gas that puts you in a panic because you live in a small house with another human being. A person with whom you still hope to share a little mystery in life. Someone you don’t have an interest in subjecting to your private emanations.
An example. It’s bedtime. You’re tired. But there’s a bit of a rumble, and you’d like to settle things down before getting horizontal. Your significant other is in the bathroom brushing his teeth when you have a brilliant idea: a quick pop into the bedroom closet. It has a little window that’s always open, thanks to the high humidity of living near water, and neither of you ever goes in there right before bed. It’s foolproof.
Only it isn’t. Your peppermint-breath partner comes into the bedroom, pulls back the covers, then remembers something he needs to get out of the closet. If he senses a disturbance while in there, he doesn’t say anything, but you’re glad the light is off so he can’t see your flushed face.
You wonder how people who live in those tiny houses do it. Each story you read follows a similar format. A (usually white) couple gets tired of the citified rat race, cashes in their big fat 401(k)s and buys/builds a 150 sq ft home on wheels. They talk about simplifying, getting back to the land, rising and falling with the sun. But they never mention the gas.
You do a little medi-googling to see if perhaps there’s something you can do to address this issue, which wasn’t such a big deal when you lived in a bigger house. You find that gas is the natural byproduct of a healthy digestive system. In fact, the average person farts between 10 and 20 times a day. Then you read about a poor soul, a 32 year old with excessive gas.
The patient maintained a meticulous recording of each passage of rectal gas over a period of months, which showed a frequency that usually exceeded 50 times/day and occasionally reached values of 129 times/day (see Fig. 1).
Suddenly you don’t feel so bad about things. It could be worse. You could be recording every fart in a spreadsheet.
