There used to be a lot more profanity throughout these virtual pages. Part of writing in the present tense -- part of sending myself back to 1990 to sit with all of those feelings, to process through the events of that spring and summer -- has meant that I will feel a great deal of anger. I want to give a voice to all of those raw and blistering emotions. And as I've pieced this narrative together over the years, that anger had ebbed and flowed.
I don't want to discount that. Don't want to remove it. But I do want this to be a story that I can more readily share with family and friends without worrying about dropping one too many f-bombs.
So those, at least, are gone, either removed altogether or replaced with a freaking this or an effing that. Same with the "s-word," replaced with lousy, awful, or crappy alternatives. In some places, though, it's still the best fit, so I kept it. Shouldn't be anything worse than that. A sprinkling. A smattering of slightly-off-color language that isn't any worse than what you might hear being yelled at the oblivious driver of the dented-up Ford Taurus, blindly cutting in front of you on the highway.
Like I said, I don't want to diminish the truth of what I was feeling; hopefully the changes are minor, barely noticeable, really. Words matter. But I don't want a few choice words to distract from the heart of this story.
