No need to blow up

Check on your friends who aren’t getting their full 8 hours of sleep.

Not me though. No need to check :) I’m always tired.

Let’s get into it:

[disciplined]

My kid said fuck today.

She was just standing there, next to me in the kitchen. The kindest soul, my best friend, just helping me with dinner. But her little hands betrayed her.
And, there it was.

My kid said fuck today.

Sure, I could choose my voice over reason. Scare her into being perfect and perfectly obedient. Let her fight off those demons on her own when she’s 33. It’d probably buy me a few more years of saying, “You know… we’re not so different, you and me.”

So, okay. Yea. My kid said fuck.

And just as I was calculating how to react, I suddenly heard myself saying that I wasn’t mad,
because it’s not what I felt.
I was scared of the shrinking distance between her world and
everything else.

So we talked a bit about words. About how well people listen. How one thing can mean many things. How other’s might hear them different.
How words
alone
can harm.
I’ve seen words
put even the best of men
unnecessarily up in arms.

How do you explain to a child
that words can blind someone
from listening?

listen.
listen.
fuck.

They call it “plosives”,
the way we touch our tongues to our mouth.
The way it stops our breath
fu - now hold it - ck
only to let it burst right out.
If you travel far enough, it’s just a sound.

my kid said fuck today.

And what I couldn’t bring myself to explain,
is how good it feels
to speak words
that end with an explosion.

because oh,
I fear
she already knows it.

Sometimes a friend suggests you listen to an album. Sometimes, they tell you more than once. Then, weeks later, maybe you find yourself in the car, unable to hit ‘skip’.

So now, you turn the volume up and pay it forward:

^{Thanks, Dave.}

speak in explosions.
until next time. - cd