Toward Spicier, Edgier Writing!

With the help of some of my fellow Substack, uh, contributors, I’ve hit upon a way of making my writing a lot more compelling.

I will say “fuck” a lot. An awful lot. In so doing, I will demonstrate that I am a fearless champion of free expression, and a resident of The Edge (the cutting one, that is, rather than the one who plays effects pedals in U2).

Only the other afternoon, a fellow Substackian noted in Notes that someone had tried to talk her out of saying “fuck” a lot. Free spirit and indefatigable enemy of suppression that she is, though, she declared that she would say “fuck” as many times as she liked! Come and get me, copper!

I was in a bad mood when I read her declaration of indomitable edginess, and wrote a reply to it in which I suggested that overusing “fuck”, a lá Jo Jo From Jerz, say, doesn’t make one look like anything so much as a rotten writer. The more. you say it, said I, the less of a wallop it packs. It’s childish and tiresome, Bad Writing 101.

A (small) number of readers vilified me. Danille Something went so far as to to call me a “mediocre white boy” Ouch! It was her impression that I objected to the use of obscenity. I tried to explain to her that I use “fuck” regularly in my own writing, but sparingly, and that what I objected to was rotten writing.

(I believe the only truly obscene words are those intended to demean one involuntarily imbued with a particular trait. Faggot. Kike. Spic. Nigger (excpet when intoned by a black person). Gook. MAGAt. (Fooled you for a second, innit. No one’s a MAGAt involuntarily, though I suspect that may be coming, as The Lion of Mar-a-Lago becomes ever more powerful and ever more deranged.)

I’m not so sure I made myself understood, but when have I ever?

The rote thing would be for me to end this little oration with an ingeniously deployed “fuck”. I will not. I have my, you know, scruples and shit.

It’s never too late to revisit The Lion of Mar-a-Lago’s wonderful birthday parade!