I forgot my keys and wallet the first time I left the house this morning. I had to wake up John in order to get let back in. That doesn’t happen very often, in fact I don’t think it’s happened in the last several years. I’ve forgotten my keys at work before, but I normally don’t do so at home. I’m not sure what was going on that made me forget to check my pockets before going out the door, but it was obviously something.

Part of it is probably that I have a strange feeling of presence this morning. Of weight, transformation, difference. I feel kind of focused and aware today, moreso than usual.

I was thinking a lot about profanity yesterday. I don’t want to write too much about my thoughts, but a few people expressed interest so I’ll be brief. Much like my thoughts on the word faggot, I really dislike our cultural taboo on using certain words. Words like Fuck, Cunt, Shit, and Damn.

Fuck is one of my favorite words. I don’t think I use it excessively, but I do think I use it well and appropriately. My mother, of course, hates it when I use swear words. She says, “You’re so smart Theo, and it makes you sound unintelligent. I just don’t understand.”

I’ve heard variations of that from more people than I can count, and it’s bullshit. Perhaps using profanity sounds unintelligent to some people, but a persons choice of vocabulary doesn’t indicate their intelligence or lack there of. Nor does it imply that they’re uneducated or have an insufficient vocabulary to express themselves otherwise. Some of the greatest writers and minds have had extremely dirty mouths.

Ignoring that fact though, there is another reason why I keep profanity in my everyday vocabulary. As Belzebuzz and others have pointed out recently, words have power and cultural bias. Fuck is a dirty word primarily because of what it represents. Our culture has a mean sex taboo, and the word fuck raises all those feelings in people. Whether or not it means those things colloquially, our visceral response to it is based in societal norms that I believe need to go away.

Inuring people to the word fuck is one way that I work to inure them to the wider healthy spectrum of sexuality. In the same spirit I don’t censor myself when talking about sex. If we adhere to the taboo, it will never change.

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