When I went through a juvenile bought of constant swearing my Dad, no doubt at the suggestion of my Mother, took me aside and gave me this advice. Sometimes you need to get people’s attention that’s when you swear. If you do it all the time it loses its shock value and no one will lift an eyebrow when you do it.
It was advice along the boy who cries wolf vein.
Although my wife thinks I do it all the time in public I try not to. But there are times I am so provoked or wish to draw attention to something that I dip into the crude. Such was the time when I wrote a column for the Reader titled Sittin on the shitter. The editor of the Reader, no prude, told me he’d be damned to put such a crude title in his publication. His prerogative. He changed it to Sitting and Thinking then put the image of the Thinker with it.
I failed my initial years as a teacher but success was often measured the way the jerk principal who kicked in the door to the bathroom stall on me got it done. For Trump today dismantling the Constitution with a “flood the defense” strategy is the same damn thing. In water management flooding a farm field prevents too much pressure from building up in a more developed areas like a city and threatening a break in levees that will cause untold damage to infrastructure. Trump is flooding the cities by tearing the Constitution to shreds so that hundreds of little dutch boy democrats are busy sticking there fingers in dikes everywhere while Republican Eunuchs applaud on the sidelines because GOD FORBID Trump voters kick them out for something as trivial as our constitution.
My editor replaced the image of Athena of Ephesus the same way he changed the old “shitter” headline.
Today I think I will write a column to cleanse my brain of RFK’s brainworm. It was a cold ten degrees at Ten AM half an hour ago but there is no wind. I have put four bins of snow in my basement to melt. Yesterday I piled up more snow in front of the rainbow and moved the monkey army and the Don-witch to my back driveway and thought of a potential way to dismantle my old rainbow into snowbricks like the Eskimos to build up snow where my new sculpture will need it using only the small amount of snow in the basement which in the next few hours will become a decent cement. I’m using every trick from almost forty years at this to make a sculpture for President’s Day with a man worthy of the title and of the nation. I still have to write a column and of the several bashing Trump next week I’d like to step off the low but honest road to remind my city that we are a better nation even if Trump is doing his damndest to smother all traces of our supposed “exceptionalism.”
