If I had to give up one word, it’d be “fuck.” But let me tell you, yanking that word out of my vocabulary would be like tearing the brakes out of a runaway Cadillac, flooring it through the desert with bats screaming overhead and Nixon’s ghost riding shotgun. It’s not just a word, it’s a primal howl, the grease on the gears of language, the one-size-fits-all bandage for a bleeding psyche in a world built on lies and overdue bills.

Strip it from me and what’s left? Hollow mutters. Limp syllables. The neutered chatter of respectable citizens sipping decaf and pretending their goddamn lawns mean something in the grand machine. Without “fuck,” there’s no rhythm in the rant, no bullet in the gun. I’d be stuck trying to fend off the collapsing madness of modern society with “golly” and “shoot,” like swatting at vultures with a child’s butterfly net.

And the sickness of it, the true horror, is that the world deserves that word. It demands it. Every traffic jam, every plastic-smiled politician, every credit card bill that slithers out of the mailbox dripping with interest and bad faith. It all begs for that volcanic expletive to come roaring out of your chest like a chainsaw. To give it up would be surrender, capitulation, a signed affidavit of spiritual castration.

But I know myself. If the fascist linguists barged in and confiscated “fuck” from my mental arsenal, I’d cook up something worse. A mutant word, jagged and obscene, syllables strung together like broken glass and nitroglycerin. A word so vile it would make priests vomit and children age ten years on the spot. Because when the machinery of reality grinds this loud and filthy, you need a weapon sharp enough to cut through the static.

And that’s the truth of it: you can strip the word from my tongue, but you can’t cage the howl. Language is a living beast, and I’ll always find another way to bite.