A couple of days after NPR broadcast  the Supreme Court's ruling against the FCC's "indecency" rule, I was almost kicked off the show for saying, "Fuck."  Actually, it was Tomas Mondragon who said the f-word in the passage I was reading from The Ghost of Milagro Creek.  I think my character's word counts as a "fleeting expletive" because he says this before Mister puts a glock in his mouth.  Me and George Carlin, we just can't behave.

So what happens when you say a bad word on live radio?  Well, the guy across from you, who was like your best friend just a minute ago, in this case, my pal Lenny, drops his mouth open like your grandmother on a Sunday morning and waves his arm towards a glass partition.  Maybe it's because I'm from Georgia, or maybe because Leonard Lopate looks nothing like my granny, and it was a Thursday afternoon when I wasn't thinking about church at all, but I didn't get it.  I kept reading.  I really like this passage and it fit perfectly into our time segment. 

Looking back on it, I think if Leonard Lopate had looked straight at me and drawn his finger across his throat, I would have gotten the hint.  On further hindsight, someone might have mentioned the NO BAD WORDS s rule to me.  Anyway, I didn't get to read anymore.

We had to go back to talking about why all the people in Taos are alcoholic and poor and crazy and have I ever personally known a Jicarilla Apache curandera.  Leonard had been to Taos and never seen any of that.  Ese, you didn't go to the right barrio!  

The barrio portrayed in The Ghost of Milagro Creek  is my head.  The book is fiction.  These "enormous issues that (I) tackle" are life, in my opinion, but more importantly, they exist in the lives of this set of characters in this novel.  It's fiction, for fuck's sake.