One fine summer's day, I was to perform a feat of which I never knew I was capable.
Up in the morning, oatmeal for breakfast, and off to class on my bike. It did not yet register that something was amiss even as I battled my way up one particularly big hill -- the last one before campus -- yet my stomach was giving me grief as I labored at the pedals. When I stopped and de-biked, a certain bloated feeling was noticed. With no time to think about it, I locked up my bike and went straight into class.
Introduction to Differential Equations was not to occupy my full attention that hour. I could barely focus on keeping up with my note-taking as the prof scrawled equations on the board. I was instead quite concerned with the frequent sets of staccato shockwaves created by the burbling and gurgling of my angry innards as toxic pockets of wet gas forced sections of my intestines to assume balloon-animal shapes, kinking the bends, then were peristaltically forced through said bends into the next sections, all to my utter agony. Soon it was all too painfully clear that an entire squadron of farts was being put on full alert.
In emergencies, I can usually bleed a few off without making a sound. Unless someone notices me lifting myself slightly up off my chair, I leave no visible or audible clues as to what is taking place. Of course, in the very worst of circumstances, said bleed-offs come out as searing acid hot, leaving a sour miasma of putrid the-human-nose-was-never-designed-to-sample-anything-that-foul stench which everyone within the affected zone somehow knows was a "hot" one; but nonetheless I can keep them quiet when I have to. Well, most times.
But definitely NOT on this day. What I was dealing with here was a build-up of compressed particle energy charges straight from the engine, essentially turning my lower abdomen into a giant cannon. I knew as surely as I was alive that there was no way in the world that I was going to crack open the butt bay door without making sound. There was just too much pressure, too much intestinal gas volume built up for me to risk it. Without lifting myself completely off the chair seat, the reverb between my small thermal exhaust port and the seat upon which it was perched would have been quite audible to everyone in the room.
As I saw it, I had three choices before me. Let it out now (not an option), go find the restroom and discharge the weapon right now (tempting), or stay and get all the notes so I wouldn't have to copy them off someone else later. I went for the third option. So I would have to clamp down on my gas-charged nether-regions for the sake of my own stubborn pride. Through force of will I met each repeated cramp with renewed determination and forced each wave back up the pipeworks from whence it came. After a while, several cramp-driven gas pockets to which I denied an exit each did a one-eighty and united with their more upstream brethren, merging everything into a few giant super-pockets. To confirm my fears and further justify my decision not to attempt a bleed-off, internal sensors detected the presence of a non-gaseous garnish located just inside the door of my aft torpedo tube.
My guts twisted, churned, raged, cramped, bubbled, frothed, and seared, and still I held my silence. But wait! Class was about to end! I gathered my books into my bag; by the time the lecture was over, I was one of the first to leave. I had the restroom already picked out: it was the small one-cubicle men's room sandwiched between the faculty offices of the Department of Mathematics and a small study area. When I got there, the restroom was empty. I wasted no time getting locked and loaded, and as I dropped trou and put the bull's-eye in the ring, what happened next was...
...absolutely nothing. No fart, no splatters, nothing. I pushed -- nothing. So I sat and waited. With a spare block I had over an hour of blessed toilet-time to myself, and as I was in a single-cubicle, single-urinal restroom I had no audience to perform to. Thus I could relax. But what had happened to the agonizing output of the gaseous fart-bomb assembly line which I had spent the previous hour managing? But wait... a faint rumbling... a cramp wave, a buildup of searing pain so nasty I thought my intestines would rupture... and then it happened. My fart-port opened up and sounded a throaty 'brrRAWrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!' which lasted what seemed like a full ten seconds before petering out. It sounded like someone had started a chainsaw. Then, nothing... nothing for what seemed like five minutes, and then another round of the same loud, sustained roar! I could not believe how one continuous fart could last so long, and yet I was living it live -- twice. How that much gas could have occupied my intestines all at once I was incapable of comprehending. Nor was my poor stunned asshole capable of comprehending the right royal rattling that had befallen it; for it was subject to a jackhammer buffeting blowout of an amplitude and duration that surely did beat the water's surface as does a helicopter which hovers low over the ocean.
I checked my faithful commode for contents and glimpsed what would have happened to me had I released this feral fartstrosity in class, ere I elected to play that ill-advised game of Russian Roulette in my shorts: translucent blobs of yellow-beige fart-froth were afloat in the bowl. I sat, gazing in utter astonishment at this alien aberration while reeling from the thoroughly traumatized condition in which my poor leather cheerio, having just survived its first oscillating harmonic resonance cascade, had now found itself.
I waited about a half an hour in recovery mode and in anticipation of a follow-through -- a veritable march of the turds -- but nothing of the sort was on the program. I wiped and checked the paper (doesn't everyone?) to be rewarded with the sight of a broad yellowish stain flecked with grains of something rather like Dijon mustard spread extra thin.
I tried to stand to dress, but as I had been leaning forward with my elbows placed just above my knees for so long, I had cut all feeling to my lower legs and could barely stand; and so I waited another minute or two before the numbness cleared. Eventually I emerged from the restroom and looked around. Nobody looked in my direction, so I can only assume that my symphonic soundscape had not been broadcast beyond the confines of the restroom where, on that fateful day, my guts pushed the frontier of physics and nearly blew my ass apart.