i say "fuck" a lot these days.

this morning on the corner was just more of business as usual at the williston federated church.

it was sunny and cool and of course when i went to take off my coat i
had a handy coat stand to hang it on.

since i go there every day more or less to stand with the sign, i have a lot of time to reflect. i used to pray, but now i do this.

"pray" and "protest" both begin with "pr", so for the moment i will call them similar.

i think about a lot of things. i think about the leadership vacuum in which joan newton o'gorman, the pastor who should be fired, is much more in love with her authority than she is with her call. you know, if she actually has a calling at all.

i think sometimes about what it feels like to take the single worst thing that ever happened to me and make a public statement out of it every day. and no, i am not talking about the assault. while the assault was bad, what happened to me in the church as a consequence of it was far, far worse.

when i was still having the nightmares, they weren't about the filthy old pervert. they were about the church.

what maybe you need to know about me is that apart from a year or two during my college career when i learned to swear proficiently but before my junior year when we all cleaned up our language because, hey, the juniors go out student teaching and you want to break your swearing habit before you spend too much time in the classroom under stress-

anyway, i have always been the kind of person who says things like "this is all going to hackensack" or "goodness, gracious! WHAT in the name of all things kind and merciful is going on here?" or "jumpin' jiminy!" or "holy honkin' hounds of hades!" or "it was hotter 'n satan in longjohns".

but then during the time i was being thrown out of the church i started to say "fuck" a lot. not just "fucking this or that", or "those fuckers" or "little fuckaroos", but "fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck", and for no fucking apparent reason.

among my friends we would joke "is it time to say 'fuck' yet?"
"FUCK yes", they would say. "it's never too early in the day to say 'fuck'".

and i sort of wondered why the sudden change in my vocabulary, but i'm mostly a self-aware person and i mostly know why it is i do things. my operating theory is that this stunning change of language is an attempt to try to distance myself emotionally from my life in the church.

it was THAT painful.

maybe later i will clean up my language again. for now it's fucking fine insulation against that damaging clusterfuck, the williston federated church.

you should try it.

it's going to be a long afternoon stand tomorrow. see you on the corner.