swearing raze children teach themselves how to speak when no one else will. they listen to the noises made by the adults around them and try to make some sense of it. when they don't have a word for what they want to say, they invent one. before you knew words like "took" and "went", you created your own past tense. "we take'd it," you would say. "we go'd there." i never corrected you. there was a strange, fierce beauty to those words that belonged only to you before the overgrown children who thought they knew better took them all away. you'd heard an f_bomb or two. you knew what "bitch" meant. but you didn't know "asshole" or "shithead" yet. when your parents weren't around and you needed a stronger word for "jerk", you built your own insult from the ground up, using the worst word you knew. "you're a fucky head," you said. not to me. to your sister. all she could do was laugh, because she knew it was true. 220104 ... tender_square grandma gets upset about urinating, how it's always coming out of her now. she doesn't bitch about the diapers anymore but still hates how when she readies herself to use the washroom, the pee is streaming out of her before she even sits on the toilet. the muscles are atrophied and there's a disc in her spine putting pressure on her bladder as she bends. "but you still have the mobility to get yourself to the bathroom and to clean yourself up," mom offered. "this is what happens as you age." i tried to reaffirm grandma. "imagine if you had a catheter and had to walk around with your pee all the time!" grandma didn't know what the medical word was. "it's what dad used to have," mom explained. "you helped him pee into the bag when he was in the wheelchair." grandma closed her eyes and nodded. "you should hear me swear," she said. "it happens every time i go now. and i say to god, 'please remember me.'" the three of us laughed; she's worried her maker is going to send her to hell for venting that her body won't work the way she wants it to. 230807 what's it to you? who go blather from