Filthy, censorship free writing
The nice thing about writing on your own blog is that no one is going to stop you from saying boink and poop.
These days I wake up at 4 in the morning, and by 5.30, I’m at the lake in our neighbourhood, where I meet my friend for our morning walk. We talk about everything and nothing at all, and a couple of days ago, we spoke about writing on social media.
I asked my friend to write on his own blog because, it’s nice to own your words, but what is important to me is that no faceless algorithm or sanctimonious moderator will censor my writing.
If I want to express myself with the word fuck, I can do so with impunity. Fuck-fuck-fuckity-fuck1! If I want to pair shit, with it, I will do that too, as in—_fuck that shit—_and I really can go as far as I want. I can write fucking irresponsibly. I can write shit. I can draw parallels to shitting AND writing if I like, and no one is going to call me a fuck-head for it2. I’ll do it right now.
“The similarities between writing and taking a dump continue to surprise me. The first four paragraphs are always shit, and then somewhere between the 5th and the 8th, there is a loosening in my vowels. I keep what works and flush the rest. The same goes for drawing. Getting the first sketch onto my sketchbook is like squatting on my porcelain stool, grappling with constipation, but a few sketches later – I unclench, and it all just flows…“
See? Write a scatacoitic word salad, and it’s fine when it’s on your own blog. The only one who will censure you, is you, and solely because, it pays to fit in3 now and again.
Notes
While I did say It’s nice to not have my posts moderated by someone other than me, I forgot to mention that my writing environment has a say in it too. Proselint, which I use to check my writing, reprimanded me saying “Nobody ever tells you this as a kid, but you’re supposed to avoid this word.” 🙂 I could disable checks for cursing by modifying Proselint’s config.json file and flagging
(cursing.filth) I’m going to keep it. I guess we all need a schoolmarm in our lives, and I’d rather it is Proselint and Emacs than some tech bro’s social network. ↩︎In the words of the enduring George Carlin – “…yeah you never know what’s going to be on the list. Cause it’s always somebody else’s list.” ↩︎
See the section, Identity as Signalling in my piece – The Ingredients of Identity ↩︎