Like the rest of America, I live in perpetual fear that terrorists will bomb me into extinction. My rural New England family wasted no time in pointing out to me that my frequent job hunt visits to New York and DC are as dangerous as playing stickball in a minefield.

Monday night, an employer in Washington called me with good news. Despite the fact I am a moron and surely the worst in my class, they still think I might bring an "interesting perspective" to corporate finance, and they invited me to come to their offices for an interview.

"We'll be happy to reimburse your hotel and transportation costs," the HR representative told me. "Just bring receipts when you come for the interview."

That Tuesday, I turned on the news after class to learn that the forces of evil are gathering like in a Tolkien book. So I booked a flight down on a propeller plane -- an unlikely missile in the event somebody wants to bash another building. I was about to confirm my ticket when the CNN reporter added one more detail. "Many security analysts believe attacks are more likely on Thursday and Friday as the Muslim religious holiday, the Hajj, comes to a close."

Oh, really?

John Madden hates planes. He takes buses everywhere because he's afraid of flying. For years, I made fun of Madden because planes are fast and easy. But lately planes are neither fast nor easy and airports are invasive and stressful and spooky. So I canceled my Expedia session, went to Amtrak.com, and booked passage between Boston and Washington on the train.

The great American railways offer more comfort, cleaner air, and working electrical outlets for laptop users. And trains deposit their passengers directly into the heart of the city -- no long commutes from LaGuardia or Dulles -- making them infinitely more convenient, if one doesn't mind eight hours from South Station to Union Station.

I arrived at night, stayed with friends, and went in for my interview feeling like a million bucks. The HR rep looked askance at my Amtrak receipt -- "Just saving your firm money," I told her. "At the taxpayer's expense," she harrumphed -- and then I was off and running. Did I think that the economic stimulus plan might work? Yes, I replied, referencing the logic of disbursing retained earnings to slow stupid corporate growth. Could I describe the various ways in which regulation affects the bond market? "Let me count the ways," I said, and folks across the desk from me smiled and nodded.

"We'll want to see you again for another round," one of the partners told me. "Thanks for coming in."

And what does a guy like me do in celebration of the good news? I called my girlfriend. "Honey, I'm going to take the three a.m. train home so I can spend Valentine's Day with you!" I told her.

Three a.m. was still a long time away. So I called some friends and invited them to celebrate my good fortune. We ate ribs in Georgetown at the bar where I used to pour pints for lawyers and senators. We stopped by the Brickskeller, where the menu features hundreds of varieties of microbrew and unfiltered hooch, and I tried almost a dozen. My train left from Union Station on Capitol Hill, so I closed down a microbrewery right across the street, all by myself except for a jumbo plate of wings and about a gallon of dark, heavy, mealy porter.

At two a.m., Union Station was deserted. I found my gate and sat down with three bags of Famous Amos cookies and a sticky blueberry muffin -- nothing makes a man hungry for vending machine food like a night of drinking.

At 2:50 I boarded the train: full, happy and brimming with confidence.

At 3:15, as the passengers around me slept, I started to fart out the last pages of the Book of Revelation: a gaseous, viscous paean to the evil that has poisoned and tempted mankind since Adam and Eve fell from grace.

Tongues of chocolate fire licked at my puckered bung, bilious little fingers of creeping death prying their way out of my womb of disease. The smell of wing sauce and malted barley -- impossibly permuted from their original savory fragrances -- clung around me like an airborne cylinder of sewage. At once I knew three things: my farts were horrible; my farts were going to get worse; and everybody in the car with me would be able to identify the source of the stench.

And yet there is a game so many of us play when it is late at night and we are drunk and happy -- a game with a certain conclusion, like picking a swordfight with Zorro or a round of horse with Michael Jordan. I call it The Squeeze. Sure, I knew that I could simply get up out of my seat and shuffle to the bathroom at the end of the railcar to begin the process of popfarts and mudslides that would evict Satan himself from my sphincter; but instead, I decided I would try to quell the unrest within me through force of will and gluteal compression. The successor farts to the original fusillade of noisome fury fought and twisted within me, but I simply smiled like a New Age Yoga cultist and Squeezed 'em back.

The Squeeze has a sort of formal and soothing regularity, like the call and response of a negro spiritual, or the way Robert Plant and Jimmy Page imitate one another in a Led Zeppelin song.

Rumble. RUMBLE. GROANNNNN!

Squeeze. Squeeze. SQUEEEZE!

Rumble. Squeeze.

RUMBLE! SQUEEZE!

But then the train hit a rough spot, and harmony and balance broke loose, and out came the Fart at the End of Time -- a ten second sputtering dungfunk that shook seismographs in California and knocked the Earth slightly off its axis. Even though I "dealt it", I coughed and wheezed as my hefty vapor clambered heavily into the air like an overloaded Army cargo plane.

This was bad. Sleeping passengers wrinkled their noses. The more wakeful swiveled their heads angrily, their faces masks of disgust and fear. I ended "The Squeeze" and I slid open the brushed aluminum door and I squatted my broad ass down above the narrow aperture of the stainless steel latrine and I grunted and I moaned and...

...nothing happened.

I'm no stranger to the reticent rectum, so I leaned forward and back, trying to chart a clear course through my colon so I could launch my payload. I rubbed my gut, kneading it like dough to force a peristalsis, pummeling and squeezing and massaging and...

...nothing happened.

I repeatedly stood, knelt, and sat -- a perverse recall of my Episcopalian upbringing -- but nothing could dislodge my tormentor.

So I shrugged, buckled my jeans and walked back to my seat. As soon as I got comfortable, my gut swelled up like helium balloon and the rumbling began anew. I Squeezed and then ended The Squeeze, letting another ass-blast escape. Even before it reached my nose I knew it would be worse than the last, so I lumbered back to the throne...

...nothing happened. Nary a tweet. Where did the pernicious stink go? Why did my stool and its fuel shy away from the invitingly industrial shitpot beneath my chunky bum? Cloistered in the fluorescent-lit comfort of the shitbox, I couldn't even pump out a single bubble of gas!

I began to wonder if this was some sort of Sisyphean fate. Had I died earlier in the day, and was this my bubbling torment in the hereafter? Brothers and sisters, there is no earthly substance that can stink like the tar-and-peanuts, stink-bomb-and-meat-rot, flesh-and-fish smell that kept coming out of me.

But no Mastercrap. And no relief.

As Train 190 rattled and roared northeast into the sunrise, I played one hundred games of The Squeeze and I lost one hundred times -- each round alerting Tom Ridge's airborne spectrometers that Amtrak had endured a chemical attack. The carpet between Seat 35 and the toilet wore as thin as the grass on an inner-city playground, but I never shat out the source of my stench.

When I got to Boston, I still couldn't shit; it wasn't until Saturday when I cranked out a grumpy start to the morn, and even then it was as clean and quiet as a bank on the weekend. Somehow Captain Darksnake had changed form -- all that wrath, all that food, all the multilayered excellence of a gruesome motherlode -- all of it had aerosolized.

Which brings us back to where I started this lengthy post: if you're planning to travel between Boston and Washington any time soon, you should weigh very carefully the risks of foreign aggression, and make your travel plans accordingly. But you should know for your reference: I will be taking the train.

-- Mastercrapper

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