Sweet motherless goat-fucker, I really like profanity. I do. Cursing is practically a hobby for me. The foul poetry that falls off my tongue would at times make the Devil hisownself blanch, and were a nun to be in my presence, she might burst into flame from the power of my vileness.

(Er, warning! This post contains profanity.)

Once, I thought, maybe I shouldn’t be so foul. I mean, okay, it’s not like I’m inappropriately foul in mixed company. I don’t go to a job interview and start dropping f-bombs or c-rockets. “What’s my greatest weakness? It’s that I’m so fucking bad-ass. I’m like a goddamn hammer. You put a problem in front of me, I’m going to find the problem’s cock and balls, and hammer the shit out of them. That problem will vomit blood out of its face pussy! I don’t even know what that means! Shut up, Sugar Nipples, and give me the job! Bam!”

Then you hear that old chestnut about how profanity is the linguistic tool of the weak-minded, that people only punctuate their sentences with profanity because they’re too slow or unable to conjure the proper words. But, c’mon, fuck that. I just wrote, “conjure the proper words,” which doesn’t sound entirely stupid. If I pepper in there a “conjure the proper fuckin’ words,” or even, “fuckin’… conjure the proper words” (I like to move my profanity around, like rearranging furniture), then I’m still using the same smartness. I’m just giving the turn of phrase a little pizazz, you know? It’s like fresh-ground pepper. They put your salad in front of you, and they say, “You want fresh-ground pepper?”, and you say, “Fuck yes,” and then they twist a little of that shit on your salad. It’s delicious. It doesn’t change the flavor of the salad. It doesn’t ruin it. It just gives it a little kick. Just like a nice splash of profanity.

To be clear: this is one of the gifts from my father.

My father had a foul mouth. My mother does, too, but not to the same extent — nah, Dad, he could hang with the best of them when it came to slinging the profane tongue. I don’t know that he got really out-of-control-poetic with it; I never heard him call somebody a “fuckbasket” or a “shit sandwich” or anything. The man knew his profanity, though. But, “fuckin’ asshole,” yes. Lawds, yes. (Or, even better, “fuckin’ mummy,” as in, “That guy’s a fuckin’ mummy.” To this day, I can’t be entirely sure what it means, but since he used it to refer to people who are in some way useless or lazy or of questionable intelligence, I assume he actually means it in reference to the Universal monster–mummies, after all, are like zombies or the Sleestak; they’re slow-moving and not particularly bright.)

I remember one day, I was maybe around 12 or so, and the two of us were standing out back of my father’s big metal building (that’s what it was — just a big brown metal building where he would sandblast or work on tractors or set up targets for shooting). Now, by this point in my life, I had already been cursing a little bit. Just testing the waters now and again. Feeling the vicious thrill of saying a verboten word. But, the funny thing here was, I accidentally let slip a curse word for no good reason. I said “piss,” and I meant to say, I think, “lava.” I’m not making that up. We were talking about some show on TV, some PBS show about volcanoes, and I don’t know how my brain rewired at that one moment to let fly with a word meaning urine as opposed to a word meaning hot melty rock stuff, but that’s what happened.

And my heart seized, because I was sure my father was going to, I dunno, beat me to death.

Instead, he clapped me on the shoulder and squeezed (your Vulcan death-pinch can go and fuck its mother in the shower, my father had this secret technique of grabbing the muscle-meats between your neck and your shoulder and delivering unto pain and madness like you’ve never felt before–and he did this as a gesture of affection), and laughed, and told me that he was proud of me, and that I could curse in front of him any time I wanted.

I thought it was a ruse, of course, and so it took me a few years to really settle into it. But no, he meant it. He was proud. I had said a bad word. I had joined the tribe of men. Now it was time to kill animals and eat their flesh (and, since I was 12, that was literally next on the agenda).

Anyway, the point of all of this is, I’m about 22,000 words deep into a re-novelization of a script (which was itself a scriptization of a novel I’d written but not finished), and this novel is sodden with profanity. It oozes verbal sewage. A snippet:

[scrippet]

She hears a car coming up behind her. It slows.

A white Mustang. Shit.

It pulls up alongside of her, the passenger window down. Ashley leans over, one hand unsteady on the wheel, peering out.

“Get in,” he says.

“Suck my dick.”

“Nowhere to go.”

“I got my getaway sticks. They take me all kinds of places.”

“I know who you are. I know what you do.”

“You don’t know rat rubes from rum punch. Whatever you think you know damn sure isn’t the half of it. Keep driving. Get away from me.”

She keeps walking. He continues to ease the car alongside her.

“I’m not going to sit here and drive along like an asshole,” he says. “I’m done arguing. Just get in the car. Don’t be a twat.”

Miriam reaches in her bag, and with a quick pivot of her wrist, the butterfly knife is out; metal gleams, and the blade flies free of the split handle.

“Hey—“ he says.

She lags behind a second, and kneels. One thrust, and the knife punctures the back tire of the Mustang. Air hisses from the rubber; a silent, whispering fart.

“What the?” he yells out from the car. “Where are you—oh, Jesus Christ.”

By the time he’s done taking the Lord’s name in vain, she’s already at the opposite back tire, slicing a new mouth in the rubber. It too leaks a steady hiss.

The rubber flaps on asphalt with each turn of the tire: thup thup thup thup.

She passes by his driver’s side window while he’s still looking out the passenger side, and calls in: “See? Told you my getaway sticks will do the trick.”

Then she gives him the finger, and jogs away, leaving the hobbled Mustang behind.

[/scrippet]

Dick. Shit. Fart. Pubes. Middle fingers. Asshole. Damn. Twat. Blasphemy. You’re looking at about 10 words out of 300, which means that I’m probably working at about three percent of the entire draft comprising profanity. And that snippet might not even be the worst of it.

Profanity is awesome.

High-five, needless vulgarity!

…

Anyway. Just a quick reminder that my Contest With No Prize (And Everybody’s A Winner!) ends tomorrow — so, getcher entries into me by tomorrow night. See the previous post for the 411, writers.