BREAKING NEWS: In conversations with my expected #1 Fan (Hello, Mother1
), I have learned that she is hesitant to visit my freshly launched site on account of not being able to unsee certain 4-letter words. This hearkens back to a conversation we had a few weeks before the launch date.
[Scene: the freezer section of a coastal NC Harris Teeter, ~9pm on an early August evening. A son and his beloved mother are getting supplies for their beach vacation, trying to decide which popsicles best qualify as “organic”, though none are explicitly labeled so. Frustration eventually sets in, and one of the two drop the F-bomb…]
Me: “Soooo…Mom, how exactly does your brain handle it when I swear?”
Mom: “What do you mean?”
Me: “Like, are you so numb to it now that you don’t even notice? Do you hear BLEEPS instead? Or…?”
Mom: ” Well, since you asked…”
Me: “Okay…am I going to regret asking?”
Mom: “Each time I think, ‘I can’t believe I raised this boy!'”
Me: …
Me: “Well, shit .”
Me: “You might want to stay away from my blog…”
For long-time readers of the blog (Hello, all 15 of you!), you will know that this is something I have already considered and hope to mitigate, a la The Alpine Stranger. Alas, I haven’t had time yet to reverse engineer any WordPress plugins for such purposes, so I figured I would try to implement a stop-gap2https://wordpress.org/plugins/censorship/ that would at least make it largely Safe For Mother to peruse my writings.
Unfortunately, it is not 100% perfect…apparently it has difficulty with adjacent punctuation (hence the egregious use of spaces in the title and elsewhere), and it is not well-suited for my penchant to use expletives when forming new and exciting compound words. Also, I have excluded “ass” from the list, because, apparently, that is my favorite word.
(Original source: 3
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKNsh4dUaKE)
(Original source: 4https://tenor.com/search/pee-wee-herman-secret-word-gifs)
The least favorite part of this temporary solution is that it is universal–i.e. the Dear Reader cannot selectively turn this on and off, so until I know it’s safe, all of y’all mother ----- are going to have to endure the M’FCC being five feet up my ass. Oops! I already forgot that my asses aren’t being censored. Sorry, Mom!
P.S. You’re welcome, Mom.
Bonus tale: Later that same trip we found ourselves outside in a lightning storm. At some point I cussed, but, realizing that it would be a prime opportunity for the Good Lord to strike me down for my errant ways, I had to think quick. I grabbed Mom’s arm and directly addressed the heavens. Looking ----- square in the [place where I presumed His] eyes [would be], I dared Him: “You take me out, I’m taking the pious old lady out with me!”
Footnotes & References:
Your mom sounds like a nice lady.
Just because you were in my wedding and I yours, doesn’t necessarily mean you will want to use your real name around here. May I suggest “Alex Lowe”? No one will ever know it’s you then!