A quick warning: this essay contains profanity. Obviously.
TL;DR: I’m keeping profanity warnings where they help, especially with songs and lighter pieces. If we’re already discussing neurological decline and despair, I’m probably retiring the little sign about the vocabulary.
Yes, this very short announcement has a summary. Your time matters to me, apparently in theory.
The Warning Has Become a Thing
I’ve developed a small Open Doors habit. When an essay or accompanying Suno song contains a lot of profanity, I sometimes warn people.
This isn’t embarrassment. Some people dislike profanity. More practically, someone might be listening with kids nearby. With more audio and songs on the site, a sentence that once stayed politely on a screen can now announce itself across the kitchen.
A warning can help.
In “Four Buckets and a Folding Chair”, the third essay in that collection, I give one before explaining, with considerable irritation, why negative reinforcement is not punishment.
That warning can stay. The piece is funny, and the profanity is part of its comic temperature. Someone could reasonably think, “Perhaps I don’t need Kevin repeatedly yelling about a fucking quadrant through the kitchen speaker right now.”
Fair. Warning retained.
Then There Is the Pit
Compare that with The Pit Learns My Name: progressive disease, disability, pain, sadness, family, mortality, exhaustion, and the uglier places my mind can go while living through them.
Adding WARNING: THERE ARE SOME BAD WORDS starts to feel like a strange assessment of the situation.
If a nearby six-year-old shouldn’t hear fuck, that same six-year-old probably doesn’t need an extended meditation on physical decline, despair, and whether suffering can be useful.
The profanity is not exactly the content hazard.
That doesn’t make dark subjects a license for anything. It means context matters. A warning helps when otherwise casual listening takes an unexpectedly sweary turn. When the subject already announces difficult adult territory, the vocabulary notice can become redundant.
Worse, it changes the opening. A disclaimer isn’t invisible. It tells readers how to approach what follows before I’ve properly begun.
I don’t want to build an emotional doorway and then install a little yellow CAUTION: FUCK AHEAD sign in front of it.
If I’m writing about being scared of what my body is doing, shit is probably not where anyone needs protective equipment.
Why Use it Anyway?
First, because it’s fun.
This is a legitimate reason. Fuck is a damn good word. English offers many beautiful alternatives, and occasionally none of them can get the job done with quite that efficiency.
Second, I don’t want to dress a sentence up merely to make it respectable.
If the thought is “This fucking sucks,” changing it to “I find the circumstances rather discouraging” hasn’t necessarily improved the writing. It has made the sentence wear a little tie.
Sometimes a tie is appropriate. Sometimes I’m in pain and would like the sentence to stop interviewing for a job.
Open Doors is a record of what I think and experience. That doesn’t mean every thought gets dumped onto the page untouched. I revise constantly. I care enormously about language.
But, revision doesn’t require making my emotional life suitable for a dentist’s waiting room.
Sometimes profanity is the accurate register. Sometimes it supplies rhythm, emphasis, or a joke. Sometimes saying it is a little therapeutic.
Not everything needs to become fucking literature.
Although, once I put it here, I suppose that ship has sailed.
I still say please and thank you to Chat, as I explained in Why I Say Please to AI. I even said please when asking for more profanity in this essay. Apparently I want the language to be less polite, if it’s not too much trouble.
An Extremely Sophisticated Policy
I’m not abolishing profanity warnings. I’m becoming selectively lazy about them.
Songs with a lot of swearing will probably keep them. So will lighter essays where the language is stronger than the subject suggests, or anything where a quick heads-up genuinely helps someone decide when and where to listen.
Dark essays about disability, serious illness, pain, depression, or mortality probably won’t. Especially when the disclaimer interrupts the opening more than it prevents surprise.
That’s about as formal as this shit needs to get. I’m trying to remove unnecessary notices, not establish the Open Doors Fuck Classification System, Revision 1.2.
Tempting name, though. I could have a stamp.
This site has gradually become a record of family, illness, books, AI, consciousness, children, love, fear, irritation, and whatever else stays in my head long enough to become an essay. Part of the pleasure is that I don’t have to squeeze all of it into one respectable voice.
I can write sincerely and carefully. I can want a beautiful sentence. I can also say, “This fucking sucks.”
Those aren’t incompatible ambitions. Sometimes the rougher sentence is the one I mean.
So, I’ll keep the warnings when they seem helpful. Just not automatically.
Consider yourself warned. Or not, depending on the essay.
This one began with a warning, so the system is clearly functioning perfectly.
This damn stuff
You don’t need protection
More shit, please
