shoplifting PeeT and so there i was raking leaves, earbuds in place, listening to marc maron interview jillian lauren, when i see a woman walking down a one way alley talking so loud on her phone i can almost hear what she is saying. got to hear this i think and free my ears. of course now she goes silent. she must be listening, but i manage to capture one vitriolic word:"shoplifting." 111214 ... raze she told me she had this move she called the vacuum_cleaner. she would wear a sweater with sleeves that were long enough to swallow her fingers, and with her hidden hands she would suck up whatever she wanted. she didn't say what she stole. just that she never got caught. 240309 ... ancasa.reyn i delivered newspapers as a kid and next door to the substation where we picked up our papers was a family-run grocery store most days we had to wait for the delivery truck to arrive with our day's work so most days meant popping into the store for a snack one day possibly because i was impressed with others shoplifting goodies i slipped a package of slim jims down my pants suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere a hand reached down my pants to grab the ill-gotten bootie and suddenly i was in the back office at a desk where a telephone sat the manager asked me if he should call the police or my mom and i told him the police i have not tried to shoplift since although i did buy a shoplifted copy of the woodstock soundtrack from a fellow newspaper carrier 250728 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Josephine was an interesting character, but I was primed to think badly of her at the beginning of tenth grade, my first year at FACE school. She'd snapped at me for leading her up the wrong staircase - the long way around to wherever a group of us were going. Why didn't I take the shorter way? I was new in the school, that's why. I didn't know the shorter way. So I resented that. ... That was no doubt part of my moral dilemma about accepting her stolen mints. See, Josephine had shoplifted the roll of white Mentos from a dépanneur, or so she bragged. Now she was friendly to all at the table, offering mints freely, apparently forgiving or forgetting that I'd wasted a bit of her time by steering her wrong a few days earlier. Was I going down the wrong path now, tempted by the sweets of sin? Will ill-gotten Mentos explode if you mix them with conflicted feelings?? Nope. For a short time I savored the fast-dissolving thing. Then it was gone. No slippery slide to the depths of debauchery. No best-friending, either, but at least a cease of minor hostilities. 250801 ... ovenbird At eight years old I went to school on an actual yellow school bus. It picked up all the neighbourhood kids at our local corner store. On cold days we would go in and wander up and down the aisles. At some point I started smuggling my allowance out of the house and spending it all on candy and chocolate bars. I would then distribute my stash to the kids at school because I discovered this made me extremely popular. My babysitter, who also took the bus with us, told my parents what I was doing. I was told that I couldn’t blow all of my allowance on candy, so I did what I had to. I started stealing it. Having already set the social precedent of being an endless source of sugar for my classmates I didn’t feel like I had the option of cutting off the supply cold_turkey and I was horrified by the idea that I might disappoint them. This heist required distracting my younger brother so I gave him imaginary coins and he would take them and pretend to play the arcade games at the back of the store. It didn’t take me long to get caught. There was a morning when the owner of the corner store yelled at me just as I was putting a package of Reeses Peanut Butter Cups in my coat pocket. The shame burned a hole straight through me. I can still hear that voice, twisted in rage, screaming at me to leave and never come back. I avoided the store after that, choosing to stand outside and freeze in the winter. My mom eventually caught me out when she offered me a dollar to go buy candy and I didn’t want to go. She dragged me to the store to apologize and pay for what I had taken. It was a bit of a relief not to carry the secret of my delinquency anymore. I was clearly not cut out to be a criminal, but I did learn something about my desperation to have friends: I wasn’t above buying them. I was willing to wound myself with the sharpest edge of shame for the chance to have someone smile at me and call me friend. 250803 what's it to you? who go blather from