Terminal Velocity

At some point, I became fascinated with the speed of shit.

Well, that should scare off any new readers. I’ve been sitting here trying to think of delicate ways to put this, but I really doubt that’s possible. I’ve even considered not posting this at all, but then, I think by now, the readers of this blog know that I have a demented mind. Oh well, what the hell…

I can’t pinpoint how this curiosity began, but if I had to guess, I would have to say that it must have originated in Aitken House. In residence, I was always fascinated by my roommate Jeff’s tendency to go to the bathroom directly after eating. It was like a direct correlation between input and output, and with our cafeteria food it was literally garbage in, garbage out. As for me, my digestive system is about as predictable as the weather (storm’s a comin’... don’t know when). Anyway, I started to wonder just how fast things progress down there. I started to formulate an equation (you know for an artsaypunk, I really do have a lot of equations). I decided that the velocity of shit, would logically be a ratio of distance over time. Thus we can say that SV=d / t.

Now, distance we can determine by a little research into the human gastrointestinal system. The large intestine is nice and thick and about 1.8 meters long, and the small intestine is about 6.3 metres (this always makes the large intestine jealous…length vs. girth – the eternal debate). Add in another metre or so for the initial esophageal journey and all that fun acid-wash stuff in the stomach, and we’ve got a total distance of just over 9 metres (or about 30 feet).

Time is a bit more difficult to measure, but I hit on a solution. Beets. What you have to do is eat some pickled or steamed beets, or some other obvious fecal colouring agent. You have to have something that you can say, yup, there it is. That way you can clock the time between the beet ingestion, and the beet expulsion. The beet goes on, as they say.

So, let’s go with a mean-beet time of 8 hours (I wish). That would give us a velocity of 3.75 feet per hour. Incredible. And if your beets come through in only six hours, then that’s an average speed of 5 feet an hour. After leaving the pit-crew behind in the stomach, that stuff really takes off. But it happens inside us, so we don’t even think about it. Imagine if that shit was crawling across the floor… no wait, don’t.

Some day, I really should put this mind to use.