20041218   

Michael considered fate at 14:59   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

The amount of cussing that's been going on here on this blog has been seriously dwindling down as time goes on. I'm not sure why but I think I should heed that as a warning not to get too complacent and sit on my ass too much. Cussing sorta implies a certain amount of passion, I think, and without it what do you have? A bunch of people grinding their teeth and being nice to eachother. Think of the dentists bills!

So I'm not going to just go out and start laying smack down everywhere just for the sake of uping my swear-count but I'm going to try to remember, more often, what we're all here for in the first place.

Okay?

It makes me wonder sometimes that we live in a society where local weeklies contain dangerous stuff like sexual content, swearing, and *gosh* liberal thinking, and you can pick them up at almost any store or restuarant in your downtown yet if we hear the word Fuck on tv well then christ, it better be cable and preferrably after 10pm! Double standards. Maybe the really uptight ones are the ones who are so dumb they don't bother to read.

It's hard to understand because teevee is as much an option as anything else in life - you don't have to choose to watch television any more than you have to choose to murder someone or get up in the morning. If you don't want to hear the word Fuck on the teevee I'm sure you could find enough shows to watch that don't have it. Would it kill you if *I* had the option to choose to hear the word Fuck on the television? Or are your feelings so much more important than mine that yours trumps the rest of us?

Fuck.

I'm not even trying to be a champion of swear words on prime time, either. It's not necessary to tell a good story. Swearing for the sake of swearing is childish and fills time slots easier than actually writing a story sometimes. But that doesn't make it invisible. That doesn't make swearing not exist. It's a part of our lives and who we are. Little toddlers spending time with their grandfather only to come back home to mom to say "Goddamn this is good food mom".. this is life. It's got swearing in it.

Hell, I dunno. Maybe they're only words. Maybe they mean nothing. There are so many words in the english language you'd almost think you could cut the whole thing in two and get by with just half of it. But we don't. We drive cars with leather interiors and heated seats. We make hollywood movies. Why would we want anything less from our language - excessive, over the top, and fucking flashy.

Language is great like that, a sort of instantaneous snapshot of english culture at any given moment. A whole society expressed in word counts. And I'm not even talking about grammar yet - the tools of a poet's art.

Most of the time I take my coffee black. It's dark, it's bitter, and it might burn me. But sometimes, every once in awhile, I want lotsa cream lotsa sugar, syrupy sweet, with a cherry on top. Okay, not the cherry. But you get the picture.

Fuck, sometimes I just like to swear.