prompt: carry, title: cleaning up in misc. flash fiction

I’ve written before on the topic of my favorite curse word, ‘goddamned’. The way that its treated as a milder curse, a PG-13 cuss, yet is a way of saying ‘I want the Thing in charge of every-thing to punish you for eternity’ no other ‘dirtier’ curse could live up to. Nothing scatological or sexual could be half as harsh as wishing infinite torment unto something, yet here we are. I would say it fascinates me so goddamned much, if I were trying to be clever. Which I always goddamned am.

A propensity toward obnoxious Try-Hard Cleverness is certainly my personal goddamned curse.

But I don’t think I’ve written about my favorite non-vulgar entry in the English lexicon before. It is a seemingly humble word, but its greatness is carried forward in the way that its two most used definitions seem on the surface diametrically opposed to each other. Yet in that seeming paradox, there are deep wisdoms about the fundamentals of our human condition. The word is ‘custodian’.

Everywhere else in the world, ‘custodian’ is first and foremost used in its context as a care-taker, guardian, curator. An attendant, a watchdog, a protector! That is where ‘custody’ comes from, of course, the person in charge of a person who cannot fully advocate for themselves is a custodian. Governments have the nation in their temporary custody, they will say, but those nations are still actually owned by their people, collectively. It is the highest Calling a person can have out there.

In America, it is the guy who changes the trash. The woman who cleans the toilet. In America, it is considered the lowest position on America’s Earth, that person you tell your kids they need to take out seven hundred grand in student loans for a master’s degree, so they don’t become them.

All the false dichotomies, all the old Horatio Alger lies in our dark American hearts laid bare, in just one variation in word usage. The English language is so wise in what it has to tell us. There, the act of protecting and preserving is the noble word ‘custodian’. Here the humiliation of being caretaker is the class-conscious insult ‘custodian’. This is what we’re working with, psychically.

What do you value? Prestige or service? Largess or care? Are you the warden or the prisoner? What do you mean when you say, or write, ‘custodian’? Do you mean the high school janitor? Do you mean a steward of an uncertain future? Because that’s the joke: they’re the same thing. There’s a reason that in Starfleet Academy and Hogwarts and Peter Sellers in BEING THERE the wisest human around wasn’t the headmaster or admiral or senator, it was just the gardener.

My favorite non-swear word is ‘custodian’, not for contradictions, rather for the way it is not a paradox at all. The truest protectors of a society are the ones quietly guarding and tending. The custodians are the custodians are custodians. This English language is goddamned wise indeed.