Episode 7: Hi, I'm Skeerd

Shh. Don't tell a soul. Not a goddamn soul.

I might reckon I'm a fraud. Until two years ago I lived in the same state all my life. Twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years in Texas, since I was four just in central Texas, just outside Austin, never in Austin, ya got me? The hill country. Austin might be the Live Music Capital of the World, but I only ever saw two concerts. I'm not the cool, hip, Indie check-this-ink-ain't-I-the-!@#$ –

Look. I'm being a fraud right there. I don't like cussing if I don't have to. When I want to, when I need to, I'll sure enough cut'er loose. But otherwise, I aesthetically like those little relics of comic books, the !@#$ words. I'm not really a cusser by nature. I'm liberal with my damns and hells and I laugh when an God or Christ gets censored out of an expletive. For crissakes, the Almighty has better things to do than shove celestial soap down your throat. But I figure !@#$ and !@#$ and even @$$ when you hitch up to hole is a bit more than I want to get accustomed too.

There were times when, after a month working at a gas station with a part-time stripper, she was shocked to hear me yell “Hell!” one night when the ice machine door slamshut my finger. Yessir. I shocked a stripper, with little thing like that. “I never heard you cuss before!”

But I wander. Over yonder. A lot.

Speech, it's a funny thing, that there speech. How you talk. I'm a sittin' there with my mom in the car dealer. We're buying her a car. On her own money, with her own credit. For the first time in my lifetime, and it's only three, four years back. Yeah, those doin' the math let a low whistle o' disbelief. It's the first time my grampa ain't cosigned, as far as I know. Long time. So the guy, see I'm there to kind of counsel her and ask questions because I like finding the little things they're going to stick up your arse when they think you ain't readin' the whole real deal, so this guy, the car salesman, the used car saleseman you unnerstan', he says, “Are you from New York?”

Naw, I'm from a few miles thataway. All my life. But I watch ungodly amounts of Law & Order. Maybe that's it.

I went through a few years of peppering talk with Cajun stylin's. Still fun and I like chewing gator. Sure 'nuff.

You may have noticed an “arse.” BBC on the PBS raised me every Thursday and Saturday night on the intricacies of bloody proper English swearing, ya git. Not like I was going out and doing anything else.

Somewhere I mixed it all up. I can't fake a real accent, from anywhere. When I moved to Oregon, I hear often: “Wow, Texas? But you don't have an accent!” Except when I have the Louisiana sausage down at Monkey Deli. Dem's powerful spicy. And Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, I do love y'all and ain't.

I jumble and ah stumble over my words all the time. They don't know quite where they're from eeder. I spoonerism all the damn time. If I get riled up it's worse. And I like getting riled up and geared up for an intellectual fight, but I get distracted by narrowing down to one mighty fine point and controlling the flow into a certain channel. I never feel made clear and I don't know if its the words or the ideas that get in the way.

Or maybe there's nothing in the way. Naught at all. And it's all just window dressin' for emptiness.

And that leaves me, not scared, nor even skeerd.

Damn skeerd. Ain't no two ways about it. Skeers the fucking shiznit right out of moi.