Fuck the Cop

I remember one time in third grade I was talking to this kid on the playground about video games. During the conversation, he started telling me about a game he wanted to make some day, entitled "Bloody Shit." The premise of Bloody Shit was that the main character was a cop whose parents neglected him as a child, so much to the point that they didn't name him and allowed him to choose his own name when he was old enough. He named himself Fuck. I don't remember what else the game was about. The kid later grew up to become a redneck, which is weird, because he was pretty unsouthern growing up, and he was reared by staunchly unsouthern parents. Can cultural osmosis be that extreme?

The memory of Bloody Shit and its respective protagonist have gotten me thinking on a tangent: is there a yet unexplored way to use profanity experimentally in writing? Sure, the first person narrator can say "It was fuckin' crazy man," but what about a third person voice? No, I'm being serious. Could one effectively use phrases like "A storm had washed through I-75, and the sky was fucking dark." in the third person? I feel like there is a way in which it could be pulled off, the content would have to fit the voice though, somehow, so it wouldn't just be an interesting but unnecessary detail.

I started writing something this weekend that experiments in this department a little bit, although not with third person. It's a first person narration of a summer cookout, but all the characters' first names are swear words, the narrator is a guy who is pathologically uninvolved and hyperobservant of all social interraction, which ain't all that original. (Doesn't every writer feel they wear the orifice-like badge of social displacement/isolation?) But it's fun. I haven't laughed so hard working on a story since middle school, so who cares, maybe this piece is just for my leisure. Maybe not. Regardless, I hope the damn exploration of profanity in fiction turns out to be fucking worthwhile in some way.

What if I was remembered by that? Famously. "He's the guy who uses swear words in the third person." aw shiiiiiiiiit.