OH ...FUDGE!!

Man oh man....

I totally blew off April Fool's Day yesterday.

I must be getting old.

Do I use that phrase in every entry?? "I must be getting old?"

It sure seems like I do. Then again...maybe I've just got Alzheimers and I THINK I say it all the time...

Anyway...I thought about doing the April Fool's "Goodbye everyone, Diaryland sucks" entry, but I figured everyone else would be doing that. And since I just did a faux "Goodbye" entry last month ... it didn't seem kosher to do two in less than a month's time.

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, I'll fuckin' beat yer goofy ass, you lying bastard.

...I think that's how that goes...

In other news .... I took the dog for her morning walk this a.m. and noticed some kids had been writing on the sidewalk with chalk.

It was kind of cute. Every 10-15 feet, there would be another word, so that as you walked, you read a story.

"Hi" "My" "Name" "Is" "Lindsay"

Is how it started out.

For about the length of a street, I read Lindsay's witless banter about her and her friends.

Then, as I turned the corner, the story got a bit ugly.

"Ass" "Bitch" "Shit" "Dam" "Slut"

...And then the granddaddy of them all...

..."Fuck".

I had to laugh. I could tell Lindsay was being all prim and proper on her street, but as she got farther and farther away from her house, the words got nastier and nastier.

Something tells me ol' Lindsay's gonna be on the receiving end of an ass whuppin' later on today.

It reminded me of my own discovery of the "F" word.

I was in the second grade. I don't remember who shared the word with me first. All I knew was ... it was the one word that you could NOT say in front of adults.

I thought it was a secret kid's word.

I had NO IDEA that adults knew what "fuck" meant.

No clue.

So ... I had this phonics workbook from school. One day, I wrote "fuck" real small on one of the pages in pencil and then hurried up and erased it.

Writing the word apparently gave me a little seven-year-old chubby.

One night at home, while the family was gathered around the TV, my dad happened to pick up that Phonics workbook and started leafing through it.

He stopped on a page. A page I had completely forgot about.

"Uncle Bobby," he said. "C'mere for a second."

I grudingly pulled myself away from "Julia" which was my favorite show at the time and dragged my heels over to where Dad was sitting.

"What is this," he asked, pointing at the erased smudge in the workbook.

Oh ... fuuuuuck ...

There it was in all its glory. The "F" word. Marking the first time my dad and I had shared the word.

I stood there for a second and tried to gather my seven-year-old wits about me. I couldn't come right out and TELL him the word, because it was a secret word, and if I shared it with him, he'd probably go to work and start using this word around his co-workers and then they'd like the word so much THEY'D start using it and then before you knew it all adults would be using the "fuck" word and all my peers would hate me because I took our secret word and just GAVE it to the adults.

Keep in mind...I had no idea what the word meant. Just that it was a secret bad word.

Like an olympic diver performing the perfect dive, I swiftly came up with an answer for Pops.

"That says 'Frank', dad. Frank Wilson. He's in my class. He must have wrote that there."

I smugly went and sat down in front of the TV, once again fooling Dad.

"Uncle Bobby, come back here," Dad said.

Luckily, "Julia" was on and the rest of the family was mesmerized in front of the television.

"Yeah Dad," I asked, nonchalantly.

"This doesn't say 'Frank'. Now...what does it say?" he asked pointing at the smudge.

Yikes.

Okay...Frank didn't work. My fat little brain was throttling through its built-in dictionary, trying to come up with one more word that started with F and ended with K.

I was lost. So I took the easy route.

"I dunno," I said quietly.

"I think you do know," Dad reassured me. "What does it say?"

Alright. I had a choice. I could either tell Dad the word and risk getting ostracized by children worldwide.

Or I could stand there and claim ignorance all night and end up missing "Julia".

Naturally, I blurted out the answer, being a huge "Julia" fan.

"I think it says fuck," I said quietly.

As it turns out, Dad was very familiar with the word, and apparently he even knew what it meant.

Obviously, some kid had ratted the word out to him before I came along.

Dad gave me a swat on the ass and told me to never use that word again.

...Like he knew what the fuck he was talking about...

I agreed that I would never use the word ever again. It was officially taken out of my vocabulary and there would never be another incident like this ever again, I promise swear to God.

The next day at school, I told the other kids about my experience and that apparently, the adults were already aware of this word.

"How'd they find out," Tim Welker wondered aloud.

"Fuck if I know," I shot back.

Some people never fuckin' learn.