Swearing

I hadn't found my real keys in three days, meaning that the mail in the pigeonhole mailbox was building and maybe the mailman thought I was passed out on the bathroom floor. The duplicate key doesn't fit, and should be tossed, even though when I hold the two together, the teeth seem to match.

You know the routine. Dig through the pockets of the last clothing worn.  Excavate the bottom of the purse.  Shake the coats.  Toss blankets, lift cushions, clear papers.  Then, then in guilt because you left Catholicism over twenty years ago when religion became another fence to jump, you humbly say a prayer to St. Anthony, finder of lost things.  I have a medal of him hanging from the rearview mirror, for him to help me not lose my mind.  Serious.  One last plunge into the purse.

Nope, nope, nope; the three main pockets do not hold anything resembling the clunk of keys I want.  It hasn't been thirty seconds since asking St. Anthony for help that I then think a swear word.  Not the worst of them, but a damning one.  God damn it.  Goddamit!!  Where are those keys!? My hand goes into a little used back pocket of the purse and as my fingers coil around the errant cluster of keys, I feel my face redden for the swear, especially after my faithless request.  Brother.

I am happy and relieved to find them, and really, swearing is a great way to blow off steam; just not right after prayers.  How did "God damn it" get such a reputation?  God, the Cosmos, the Big Cheese is certainly not going to listen to some frustrated human and send down a lightning bolt of justice against whatever you're crabbing about.  Can you imagine?  No one would be left alive, for all the goddaming that goes on worldwide.

What about the other words, the derogatory, sexualized ones?  Personally, I don't care much for them and find them more insulting to the person using them, pointing out a weak vocabulary used as an excuse for brain.  Nah.  The stuff that gets me going has a name, blatherskate.

To blather comes from a root word, "bledh" that went to "bladder" and then to "blather" meaning "to blow" as in blowhard.  Skate, also found in the word cheapskate indicates a mean, contemptible person, related to the fish.  You can use the word as blatherskite, but they both mean nonsense, codswallop, taradiddle and tommyrot.

Here's an example, wonderful for when you drop a dish whereby you can cuss out the dish for being recalcitrant: "You bleeding horse's ass, if I were walking down the street and saw you coming, I'd cross before our paths met.  You thin-skulled fool thing, die and make the crows a pudding".  Then spout out a string of dammits, and you feel better.  Anyways, of course you realize that everything is transient, so a broken dish, even if it were grandma's bone china from before the Hungarian Wars, is just a broken dish.    Get rid of it, make art from the shards, or try gluing it back together.  

It's late, and I've been awake since 3:30 a.m., just couldn't get back to sleep.  Time to get to bed, enough of trying to stretch out the weekend; I'm getting dull and thickheaded.  Hey.  I heard that.  Tuck under covers and fall into Dreamville, where there are no monsters under the bed.  I'm here, things are fine.  Good night.