I don’t know where I got the idea. I don’t remember when I started. I don’t remember when I stopped. But, of all the weird things I did as a kid, this one still stands out in the Top 5.

My mother, being the artsy & craftsy lady she was, would drag me (and sometimes my sister) along with her to Michael’s (the arts & crafts store, not some fella named Michael) when she was stocking up on …whatever she was working on. For some reason, I would go up to their “wall of yarn” (see header image for a reference), walk up to one of the bins, pull out 3-4 bundles of yarn, stick my whole head in there to create a kind of “seal”, and then…

…I’d curse. Really loudly. Just sitting there with my head in a bin going “FUCK. MOTHERFUCK. SHIT. ASS”¹. Then, I’d put the yarn back in (to seal in the words, you see), walk over to the next bin, and do it again with a separate set of words. I remember thinking “these bins can only handle, like, 4 words at a time”. And I’d do it until I ran out of words.

No one ever caught me, or at least never told me they caught me. I’m sure they’d have alerted my mother if they saw me — “Ma’am.. your child was cursing into the yarn bins. 4 words at a time. That’s… probably against a rule of ours. Probably something about not harassing the merchandise.”. I know if I saw a 6 year old yelling into yarn bins, I’d say something to someone about it.

I guess I looked at it as a sort of “confessional”, since I always lied in confessionals – I figured those bastards would certainly tell my mom anything bad I did, so I’d make up some really small infraction and pretend to be sorry about it. But, the yarn bins? Man, they got the wrath. 4 words at a time. Not real confessions, just curse words. But, I feel like there was a lot of subtext that ol’ Yarn Bin would totally pick up on.

I got pretty comfortable with it to the point that I thought “maybe these words aren’t so bad”. One time, my mom dropped something at the store and looked upset, so I said “SHIT!” (y’know, helpin’ her out). She immediately knelt down, dropped my pants AND underwear, and spanked me twice. After that, I was like “yeah.. gonna just keep these words between me and the Yarn Bins from now on”.

1. I was the resident kid on the playground that taught all the dirty words to the other kids. I’m not sure how I knew them, but… man, I had a list! ↩