Monday, December 22, 2008 (75 minutes)

Kangway may have been slightly startled when I arrested him in his doorway, grasped his shoulders, and screamed, "I can't stop farting!" His advice was to open a window, but I couldn't make the connection with how this would prevent my unwanted gas.

I left for the Gold Line station around 1:10am this morning, not having slept. There should have been two more trains that night, according to the schedule I found online. I spent three quarters an hour standing alone under the halogen lights, feeling the heat radiating from my newly-shaven head and trying to focus on the book hovering in front of my face. I turned the pages less-and-less nimbly as my unprotected fingers solidified. Finally I adopted a nervous pacing, all the time seeing no one but the fantom, unmoving person at the far end of the platform, which turned out, upon inspection, to be a coincidental juxtaposition of a pole and a head-high flesh-colored call box. That is, no one except the guy who started peeing in the bushes by CVS ten meters away when I had paced a bit too far and disappeared temporarily from his field of view. All this time I farted.

The Metro abandoned, I called a cab, and continued my pacing on the sidewalk outside our complex, trying to tease out the precise relationship between my flatulence rate and the vigor of my stride in the fifteen minutes past the set rendezvous time it took the cab to arrive.

Sitting in the airport before the security checkpoint opened, significantly poorer from the cab ride and increasingly exhausted from staying up all night, I resolved not to eat anything for the entire day of traveling, since if there's only a set amount of material in there for my intestines to work with, eventually they'll just have to give up when there's nothing left to gasify.

The plane itself was the worst, since, with farting, you're basically fine as long as you can keep moving (as Ian, I think it was, once pointed out to me). Ironic that I could move around the least while going the fastest.

By the time I arrived home in Baltimore, not having eaten in 15 hours, the farting attack that had lasted at least a day was puffing out its last gasps. Running on fumes.

Fine, but it wasn't running time. It was dinner time - the first time in a year the whole family had assembled. And in my honor, the entree was sauerbraten - my boyhood favorite. After not eating for fifteen hours, my mom is laying before my a pile of the thick, juicy, week-long marinated beef, with a taste and smell (I could smell!) so powerful it threatened to tip from flavor to pure pungency. The side dish, traditional for us, was dumplings fried in butter, along with sourdough bread, salad, peas, and wine. Dessert of cheesecake, ice cream, cookies. This was where I found myself an hour before I intended to run.

"I remember the way you used to be able to eat when you were a teenager," said my mom, when I somehow refused seconds on the huge gobs of beef and dumplings.

But I made it through. The food actually seemed to quell the gastric uprising inside me, and I went out for a solid 75 minutes through that biting, still layer of air between the crunching ground and the intermittent, flickering streetlights. It was pretty nice. Out here you can see the stars.

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