Mea culpa,

mea culpa,

mea maxima culpa

I thought of how many times I have tried to change my thoughts.

I was not one to go around swearing in my youth. It was not allowed in our house—at least not by the kids. The parents sprinkled some mild profanity here and there in the sparkle of frustration and little flashes of anger. So when I went to college, off on my own for the first time ever, free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I was free at last, I took up the habit of swearing. I say habit and I say took up, because things are conscious decisions, whether to start or stop, to do or not. So I drew the line at profaning Deity. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. I never did. I never have. But I tried the normal college-level swearing. Of course being in the novitiate of nugatory neologisms I overdid it, and that made me somewhat ridiculous. After a time I decided that it was morally offensive to myself and God, and probably everybody else who heard me trying it out. In the month of May, Anno Domini one thousand nine hundred and something, I said to myself, “No more.” Of course, some things lingered, and I would slip up and say a word here or there in my mind. That’s the trouble. Can you get that out of your mind? Especially when working construction, where every third word is a swear-word. It’s not “Hey stupid, hand me that wormdrive,” said in polite terms, actually, without the disrespect those who are not familiar with construction work might infer; it’s “Hey ****-fer-brains, hand me that ****ing piece-o’-**** wormdrive.” Can you say you quit swearing if you only quit letting the fricatives and sibilants pass over the tongue and out the lips? Well, yes, because who can know what goes on in your mind? Well isn’t the answer to that quite obvious? So it’s a total victory when you don’t even think to say the words, much less say them. Then the real total victory is when you stop and think, you have not even thought to say the words for so long now. But the test comes when you are caught off your guard, and in an intense moment you say something without thinking. The test came one day in the year nineteen 80something, when I was giving a friend a ride home, saving him the humiliation and agony of public transportation. I was on the ’66 Mustang GT, burgundy, with a 302 engine (the 289 blew a piston through the wall), and had not gone more than five or six blocks, long enough for the engine to reach maximum heat, when a loud pop started the engine missing, so bad that I pulled over and opened the hood. My friend got out and looked around inside like I was doing, but I found the problem first. A spark plug had worked its way out and blew out of its hole in the block. Fortunately, there it was hanging by the plug wire. Without thinking, I picked it up, thinking to pull off the wire and put it back in its hole. It was hot. Maybe 600° or more?? My first reaction was a sound that came out of my mouth without my filtration, without my thinking of what to say—you know, it just popped out: “Ow!” But stretched out and diphthongized, and rather loud. Not “****!” or “****!”, or “****!” And not, “Holy ****ing ****!#&#@$%^&^%#” or any expletives proscribed by my self-imposed covenant. My friend said, “I guess you weren’t lying.” And I said, “What do you mean by that?” And he said, “You said you didn’t swear.” I used to.