“I farted.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

She was right, but how could she have known that? Of course, it was unlikely I would blithely shit myself while sitting on the couch. I may be old, but I am not that old. Decades will pass before I am likely to shout “Gravy time!” and blast away, driving my hospice nurse to shove a pillow over my face faster than you can say “Do not resuscitate.”

But what about this bit of flatulence, the one on the couch today? If there is one thing life has taught me, it is that farting and shitting are on a spectrum like autism. There is a lot of real estate between endpoints f and s, and it up to the person in charge of bowel control (me) to make sure that any straying away from endpoint f is done on the toilet, or failing that, someone else’s couch.

All of this begs the question of how Becca, my partner and fellow traveler on Planet Couch, could tell exactly where this was on the f-s spectrum. The first thing that came to mind was the noise. Consider a really loud fart, the kind that comes from washing down Taco Bell with PBR. If it comes out dry, it sounds like someone twisting bubble wrap. With increased moisture, the sound is more akin to someone twisting bubble wrap that has been dipped in nacho cheese.

Unfortunately, this did not explain the current situation. Here the PBR did not wash down Taco Bell, but rather boiled cabbage. The resulting flatulence was as silent as it was deadly, though I cannot personally attest to the latter. My sense of smell had never been keen and thanks to past affinity for certain powders and a possible prodromal symptom of a future neurological disorder, it is almost nonexistent now.

Becca’s olfactory receptors work just fine so she did not need to rely on sound to know my anus was up to something. Fine, but did this answer my original question? It could, but only if one could accurately discern between the two odors. Becca might say that she could and I would have no reason to believe that she was lying.

That said, it is possible the difference was not in the essence of the smell, but in the duration of its potency. Let us not forget that a fart is euphemistically referred to as wind, and wind has a tendency to blow away. Shit is more permanent either collecting in the seat of one’s underwear or soaking into the sofa cushion. I suppose I could clear up the issue with a highly scientific, blindfolded, single-sniff test, but I concluded that she had suffered enough.

In the end, I decided to render this a moot point, or make the poot moot as one might say. As a senior, I no longer sound the trumpet with little regard for consequence as I did in my younger years. I ease it out, stopping myself before having an accident. This makes the fart last much longer. I figure that given time, the duration will extend all the way to the point where the next fart begins.

So when I am asked “Did you just fart?” I can honestly answer no because how can you apply a past tense to that which is eternal?