I hope you duly delivered and got away with it, Max. What a joyous reminiscence and so well brought into the now. There is something particularly rapturous and guiltily enticing about farts to teenagers. My family also never used the f word. Burps they were, even though this failed to distinguish between bum emissions and throatsome spasms. Letting off is such a beautifully apposite description. There is something so abject about the process and it such an uncancellable action, as well as setting up all those attributional problems. Perhaps it draws attention to the now better than almost anything, sends a signal to all that you need re-focussing.
If you want to hear more on the range of let offs, the late George Carlin is always worth a listen still, for commentary on this subject and all manner of bodily functions.
Cheers,
Bill
> On 11 Sep 2014, at 3:18 am, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Who Let Off?
>
> ‘Did you let off?’ That’s what
> we boys would ask in class
>
> when a whiff of flatulence
> spread from someone’s short pants
>
> and merged with the pong -
> our roomful of teenage bodies
>
> in after lunch and a sweating
> half-hour chasing a ball
>
> over short-trimmed grass, or
> bouncing ball in the fives-courts.
>
> Flatulence? we didn’t know
> the word, nor do I recall
>
> the word fart at school.
> Some genteel inhibition
>
> from home censored the word.
> Dad, if he thought his fart
>
> had been overheard, muttered
> Pardon. A burp, and you’d
>
> hear Excuse me. Aunt Maria
> would say: eating that, dear,
>
> would only bring on wind. Yet,
> at school a prolonged burp
>
> was a comic accomplishment
> provoking rival attempts
>
> and claims to be champion.
> Before lunch, our room’s
>
> acoustics had us all over-hearing
> someone’s tummy-rumbling.
>
> How long till lunch-break, sir?
> Few of us had wrist-watches.
>
> Not till serving in the Army -
> eighteen-year-old conscripts -
>
> did I hear, after lights-out
> in our long dormitory sheds
>
> of parallel grey-blanketed beds,
> the art of prolonged farting.
>
> Who let off? someone with brothers
> or years away at school, boarding.
>
> I’m lying here in the dark room
> by my wife. Her quiet exhalation
>
> says she’s asleep; the dogs on their beds
> just beyond ours are quiet.
>
> Can I quietly let off? or if
> on her next inhalation a whiff
>
> from me reaches her, can I shift
> the blame to a dog, and be let off?
|