Dirtify
by Travis Rave — Age 25 — New York, NY
I’ll begin as I begin every day:
“My snake wants to investigate your saucy box.”
I write this from a desk in a closet. A closet of counterintuitive purity. Every day, from this desk in this closet, I protect our youth. Every day, I spend hours twisting innocent words to dirty ends:
“Do me in the as with your rusty pole.”
It’s not easy and it’s not pleasant, but it is entertaining. I can’t deny that. What’s really surprising though, is what you can only come to realize after spending eight hours a day writing dirty phrases: you are much dirtier, much nastier, much more perverted than you can possibly imagine.
“My hard lollipop is loaded and ready to loose.”
It’s a children’s entertainment company. I help manage a part of their website, which is funny, since I was a creative writing major in college and have only a basic understanding of computers, let alone websites. But here I am, scribbling away in the name of safety. At least the creative part has come in handy:
“Let’s go down to the southern grasslands ““ I’ll bring my walking stick.”
There’s a game on the website that allows actual people to interact with one another through actions and typed speech. For such interactions to take place, a dictionary was created. Now this is a website for children, so there are no curses, no blatantly offensive terms, just your normal everyday words. It is my job to go through this limited dictionary and dirtify seemingly innocuous words, like ‘glorious’ and ‘zucchini,’ so that related dirty phrases can be blocked within the game.
“I slipped my wet zucchini into her glorious opening.”
It’s not a bad job, really. I enjoy certain aspects of it. The comedic value is unprecedented, that’s for certain, but it does begin to wear on you. By the end of the day, you begin to question not only yourself, but words in general. What does it say about us as humans, the creators of language? Our words are capable of such beauty and grace, yet with a simple twist those very same words can be made foul and perverse. What does it say of me, the defouler?
“My lizard is loose and hungry for tacos.”
I think it says life is ironic, so enjoy it.
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