Clean language: so 10 years ago

Sometimes I wish I wasn’t me. I don’t mean that I want to be some guy with achingly white… Sometimes I wish I wasn’t me. I don’t mean that I want to be some guy with achingly white teeth and a sweater tied around his neck with an affinity for stocks and a talent for back-slapping who’s named Trevor. I just mean that there are certain things about me that I wish could be removed, like the way they take out appendices in surgeries or the devil in exorcisms.

My difficulty is that I drive myself insane occasionally with my inability to deal with things. Things that most people seem to take fairly well frequently leave me a blithering wreck. It would be fine if I could just shake it off once in a while, get back in the game, hit my foul shots, play tough zone – oh, sorry. I’ve been a little preoccupied with basketball recently; it tends to break into my thought patterns obsessively and repeatedly.

I just need to not worry about things that are out of my control is where I was going before my mind was consumed with images of somebody pulling up for a 3-pointer on a three-on-one break. Things that are unable to be influenced by my actions need to be thought of in that manner by me.

Imagine all the free time I waste worrying about stuff I can’t affect. Think about all the things I could do with that time instead. I could build that robot with voice recognition technology that I’ve always been meaning to build, for instance. And then I could dress the robot up like a pirate, and it and I could sail the seas, having adventures and constantly boarding cruise ships, stealing wallets and getting weird diseases.

Instead, I worry and let my robot schematics gather dust. And what do I worry about? The state of language on the radio.

I know that I’m a prude, but really, is there any need for so many songs to feature the word “ass” so prominently? That new Eminem track, with Obie Trice and Nate Dogg that’s called “Shake That” features the chorus of “Shake that (reference to body part deleted) for me/shake that (same word deleted) for me/come on girl” and that word is not deleted on the pop radio station my girlfriend and I have been recently listening to in a strange mix of irony and pleasure.

As an aside, congratulations on still getting a paycheck, Nate Dogg. You’ve been inexplicably relevant since ’93 when you and Warren G had “Regulate,” and it’s about time somebody gave you a pat on the back. Maybe Trevor could handle that?

Notwithstanding my praise of Nate Dogg, I find that chorus a little, well, offensive. Maybe I just sound freaking ancient and lame here, but why is that type of language on the radio? Do you remember that episode of “The Simpsons” where Reverend Lovejoy’s wife shouts “Won’t someone think of the children?” Well? Is anyone thinking of the children?

You don’t have to resort to slightly racy language to make a point about loving certain parts of people’s anatomy, after all. Does the name Sir Mix-A-Lot ring any bells? He managed to write an anthem and mission statement to describe, in amazingly detailed language, his love of women’s butts. And that’s what he called it, like 800 times in one four-minute pop song. Butt, not ass. Mix-A-Lot kept it clean.

I know there’s a tendency we have when we talk about the past, be it 10 years ago or 100, to act as if things were invariably better back then and pretty soon our culture is going to collapse under the weight of its own degradations as if it were Rome. When you look at that theory, though, it sort of seems fishy. Are we saying there are never advancements? Do we really think things are always only getting worse no matter what? Obviously, that isn’t true. Some stuff gets better, and some things don’t, but most things wind up being about the same. Besides, T.S. Eliot thought civilization was on a hopeless downward spiral, and do we really want to agree with the man who was partially responsible for the musical “Cats?”

With all that said, I do think “ass” wasn’t used as casually as it is now, and I think that was a good thing. Our society is consumed with sex and the turning of people into sexual commodities. I was watching “Melrose Place” the other night, season one, and in it one of the characters freaks out because she has to do a topless scene for a movie in which she is appearing. It bothers her so much that she refuses and loses the part.

As I watched that, I thought of the pop songs that are so sexually explicit they actually make me blush as I sing along. I thought of the panty-less, cesarean-scar-exposing flashes stars have done for the paparazzi recently. I thought of Pete Wentz and his leaked crotch shot. I thought of sex tapes of famous people for sale and Web sites devoted to the inadvertent or intentional exposure of breasts on red carpets.

So perhaps T.S. Eliot was right after all. Maybe it doesn’t end with a bang, but with a nipple.

E-mail kjs34@pitt.edu while driving a Honda, playing workout tapes by Fonda.