Watch Your Mouth...

Suddenly I’m swearing like there’s no tomorrow.
 

The Beastie Boys just released a new CD, The Hot Sauce Committee, Part Two.  

Mainly, I've been listening to nothing but that.  If you know the Beastie Boys’ style, you’ll know that they might inspire me to sling the F-word all over the place.  And I’ve been cutting it loose.  In public, during work, at home … you name it, I’ll MF it.

Believe that this is not standard-operating-procedure for me.  I was raised a good Southern Baptist boy.  I remember as a child one night my dad came home from work and pronounced that my mom’s cooking that evening tasted “like sh*t.”  I was mortified.

Swearing is one of the first rites of passage for many of us.  I could remember how odd the cuss words felt in my mouth as I first learned to say them.  But I got most of them out and into the air.  Even then, I didn't much enjoy the process.

My best friend loves the F-bomb.  But I think she is trying to wean herself from using it too much. I do have a tendency to agree with her that sometimes the word is necessary for accentuating a sentence properly.

Then I look at some of the great songs that have great swear lines:  “Long Shot” by Aimee Mann, “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” by Prince, “Play Guitar” by John Mellencamp, just to name a few.  (You’ll notice that each of these songs is quite a few years old.  Songs with swears were staggering back in the day.  Now they’re so commonplace, the swears are hardly noticed).

One of the funniest things that ever happened to me?  I worked in a record store back when I was in my late 20s / early 30s.  One day, I loaded the CD changer with five discs, selecting as one of them Whatever and Ever Amen by Ben Folds Five.  I play piano and enjoyed the arpeggios in the song, "Brick".  Randomly, "Song for the Dumped"  came up and into the second line of the lyric, Ben Folds yells “F*** YOU TOO!”  and then suddenly follows that up with “Give me my money back, you b*tch!”  Imagine store clerks and managers running in dead heats toward the sound system, stunned parents covering the ears of young children, teens snickering with hand-covered mouths.

I know that I’ll need to rein in my rogue mouth a bit.  I expect that I’ll be blessed with grandkids one day (only if my son is totally on board for that).  I don’t want to set a bad example.  As expressed many times before, my son is awesome.  I almost never swore in his presence when he was a child, and consequently I rarely hear him swear.

I’m especially frustrated at work right now.  I am not getting enough sleep.  So many things in life seem up in the air.  So I'm swearing casually and frequently right now.

I’ll not blame it on music.  I’ll not blame it on the media.  I’ll not blame it on my friends.

I’ll just try harder to control my mouth.

Life will get MFing better.