My dad told me that when he was in highschool they had to implement a one person in the bathroom at a time rule because kids kept having sex in the bathroom.
When you first said The Body, my mind first went to The Breathing Method. I dunno, given the context of what you mentioned, it seems like SK may have been working some of that accident out through that story as well.
I still hold to my theory on the real meaning behind Fight Club.
The last thing I stole was a bunch of desk organizers and other stuff from my office. Like a whole lot. They just don’t make steel bins and pen trays like they used to. Same with staplers, calculators, plant pots, etc. And my company didn’t need them since they laid off “an undisclosed number of employees with great regret…” [insert sad face emoji]
Oh and when I’m really stealing stuff now, I guess I don’t really steal because I’ve kinda lost my balls. I like to find a $100 jacket on the half price rack at Target and switch the tag to another jacket. I know, I know. So clever! So original!
When we were true degenerates my friends and I would stuff our pockets with Coricidin and Delsym. Usually just for fun, but also to build up stock in case we couldn’t get any real drugs at any given point.
I don’t shoplift anymore. (I think I told you the last thing i shoplifted was one of your books at borders when they still existed. I still owe you a dollar.) Eric however can make what would be a $200 grocery bill less than 100 at the self checkout. ;) Funny you should say this. The things you said I should keep close to my chest, I’ve written into an emotionally expensive book. Problem is it’s where all the risk is.
Illegal as in crawling over a wall in a bathhouse and stealing 175.00 (Canadian) from the live-in Philipino(or Thai?) attendant who left all those green, and purple, and blue bills out on his bed for me to take and hide under my towel before I opened the locked door( instead of scaling the wall in my towel) to a guy passing by the room who said to me “I thought you didn’t have a room” to which I responded “ it’s my friends” and then he kept on back to his room down the hall where previously (before I was crawling over bathhouse walls) he got me to take a hit of crystal meth from his pipe despite me refusing it for over a decade post highschool?
All of those are why I live in my parent’s basement.
Friends tell me that once you have a passel of ideas Adderall gives you the focus to assemble them. Have yet to indulge. Most of these friends are screenwriters.
Sometimes I can’t tell if Adderall is kinda a cop out or not. Like, shoudn’t the ideas kinda come through me with some force? Clearly this is me speaking with a lack of experience/slash possible romancing of ideas.
Once you've filled a notebook, the task of gleaning the best bits and keyboarding them... I see Adderall helping with that. My old go-to of white wine and long airplane flights is off the table for now.
The last thing I wanted to steal was from a library book sale a few weeks ago. In the Ephemera section (so I immediately thought of you, Chuck). I took a photo but realized I can't upload it here. It was a porcelain doll of Princess Diana, wedding edition. Priced a bit too high for my budget. But also secured in a locked glass case. I'm good but I'm not that good.
I never used to steal and then i worked at the highest grossing Goodwill in the world and saw how they exploited the disabled and paid the rest of us terribly with little to no raises while my rent tripled in six years, so at some point i started stealing daily and did so for almost 7 years. A back pack full every day.
Before this i lived out of a suitcase and didn’t own much. By the end i had over 500 cassettes, about 10,000 CDs and rooms full of random junk (a massive basement allowed me to do this).
I sent multiple packages a month of complete nonsense to friends all over the country.
I even stole a bike and an amp. I was briefly a hoarder at the peak of it.
i was broke but i felt rich - until i had to keep moving and got anxiety from trying to find and keep an affordable place, on a minimum wage salary, that was large enough to hold my mini museum of garbage.
I couldn’t just trash it or donate it, i obsessively had to find the right home for every item i had.
This took 14 years which is twice as long as it took me to steal it and by the end i regretted stealing any of it because it became too time consuming and too stressful.
Moral of the story? I don’t f-cking know…
I do still encourage stealing though.
My old roommate by the way used to steal from New Seasons every single week. We were all poor and eating gross food from Safeway, and he was poorer than all of us but ate delicious food every night while we drooled and begged him for a bite.
Besides his clothes he owned a skateboard and a mattress and two drum sticks (he was a drummer but didn’t own a kit, but needed the sticks for rehearsing with his band).
He would alternate and go to a different New Seasons each time (which i think at the time 20 years ago there was 3-4 of them, so about 1 per month) and fill his two bags with food and just walk out the door. They had two exits so it wasn’t uncommon for someone to purchase something on one side of the store and exit out the other, and no-one never questioned him while we were roommates - for years he did this, - the key he said was never act suspicious or hide things in your clothes - he openly put things in his shopping bags.
Although they say we all pay when someone shoplifts, with New Season’s prices, it’s hard to disagree with that sentiment.
I'm so embarrassed to put this out there (I've never told anyone before) but many years ago I once accidentally left a store with an item I hadn't paid for. When I realised the next day, I returned to the store and surreptitiously put it back on the shelf. I reverse shoplifted. My cheeks are burning with the shame of it right now. I don't belong here. Please feel free to banish me!
Just finished my first draft, and sneak most of my writing between air traffic control shifts. A friend went over the story with me, and he told me I was hiding. Now you wrote this and it's all making sense.
Homework Hotline, it must’ve been gone by the time I attended Oregon, but I did have an affair with a newscaster who I’d watch on TV most nights at six.
Since everyone else seems to be confessing, I'll share: in middle school, my friends and I used to shoplift quite a bit. We even figured out how to utilize racial profiling in stores (I'm in the South and often LP isn't even trying to hide who they're following around) to identify plain-clothes security and have them get distracted by a couple of our friends while the others actually went to business. Never got caught in stores and I don't do it as an adult. Weirdly though, I've noticed a LOT of women my age who don't need to shoplift openly talk about doing it most of the time they go to stores.
That is really interesting! I personally haven't, but then I guess I liked the thrill of potentially being arrested vs just embarrassment if I was caught.
How about sex and writing at work? I did both today.
I applaud you.
Well its easy when you work from home. It was a different experience when I was doing both at the hospital. Well i felt guiltier for it at least 🤣
Ah! My next story is about the shame of smashing a work of art accidentally and making new art. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/jeff-koons-balloon-dog-shattered-miami-180981671/
The manager and the assistant manager got caught fucking in the office at my old job two weeks after I quit.
Now that's a story!
She was engaged.
OOOOOOH!
The boss quit on the spot and the girl was relocated.
When I worked at Apple a couple of coworkers got fired for having sex in the workplace bathroom...the kind with multiple stalls.
My dad told me that when he was in highschool they had to implement a one person in the bathroom at a time rule because kids kept having sex in the bathroom.
HAHAHHA!!!
Excellent advice! This is my secret. I once stole a Stetson from Cutter Bill’s in Houston and I had just graduated from college. Don’t tell anyone.
When you first said The Body, my mind first went to The Breathing Method. I dunno, given the context of what you mentioned, it seems like SK may have been working some of that accident out through that story as well.
I still hold to my theory on the real meaning behind Fight Club.
The last thing I stole was a bunch of desk organizers and other stuff from my office. Like a whole lot. They just don’t make steel bins and pen trays like they used to. Same with staplers, calculators, plant pots, etc. And my company didn’t need them since they laid off “an undisclosed number of employees with great regret…” [insert sad face emoji]
Oh and when I’m really stealing stuff now, I guess I don’t really steal because I’ve kinda lost my balls. I like to find a $100 jacket on the half price rack at Target and switch the tag to another jacket. I know, I know. So clever! So original!
When we were true degenerates my friends and I would stuff our pockets with Coricidin and Delsym. Usually just for fun, but also to build up stock in case we couldn’t get any real drugs at any given point.
I don’t shoplift anymore. (I think I told you the last thing i shoplifted was one of your books at borders when they still existed. I still owe you a dollar.) Eric however can make what would be a $200 grocery bill less than 100 at the self checkout. ;) Funny you should say this. The things you said I should keep close to my chest, I’ve written into an emotionally expensive book. Problem is it’s where all the risk is.
Illegal as in crawling over a wall in a bathhouse and stealing 175.00 (Canadian) from the live-in Philipino(or Thai?) attendant who left all those green, and purple, and blue bills out on his bed for me to take and hide under my towel before I opened the locked door( instead of scaling the wall in my towel) to a guy passing by the room who said to me “I thought you didn’t have a room” to which I responded “ it’s my friends” and then he kept on back to his room down the hall where previously (before I was crawling over bathhouse walls) he got me to take a hit of crystal meth from his pipe despite me refusing it for over a decade post highschool?
All of those are why I live in my parent’s basement.
You scamp! Alas, drugs are a sure-fire way to keep the writing alive and risky.
Is that why so much literature seems to have been written in opium dens?
Opium’s probably the better choice for literature.
Friends tell me that once you have a passel of ideas Adderall gives you the focus to assemble them. Have yet to indulge. Most of these friends are screenwriters.
Sometimes I can’t tell if Adderall is kinda a cop out or not. Like, shoudn’t the ideas kinda come through me with some force? Clearly this is me speaking with a lack of experience/slash possible romancing of ideas.
Once you've filled a notebook, the task of gleaning the best bits and keyboarding them... I see Adderall helping with that. My old go-to of white wine and long airplane flights is off the table for now.
How do I get adderall?
Is evading train fare less scandalous if you didn't mean to? 😅🙃
Can you write a story/scene/book that gives you the thrill of evading train fare?
I can't belive you wrote that entire bit about math and live phone in public access, with out usage of words; en euendo...or...
Doubleontondra..
I can't belive you wrote that entire bit about math and live phone in public access, with out usage of words; en euendo...or...
Doubleontondra..
The last thing I wanted to steal was from a library book sale a few weeks ago. In the Ephemera section (so I immediately thought of you, Chuck). I took a photo but realized I can't upload it here. It was a porcelain doll of Princess Diana, wedding edition. Priced a bit too high for my budget. But also secured in a locked glass case. I'm good but I'm not that good.
I never used to steal and then i worked at the highest grossing Goodwill in the world and saw how they exploited the disabled and paid the rest of us terribly with little to no raises while my rent tripled in six years, so at some point i started stealing daily and did so for almost 7 years. A back pack full every day.
Before this i lived out of a suitcase and didn’t own much. By the end i had over 500 cassettes, about 10,000 CDs and rooms full of random junk (a massive basement allowed me to do this).
I sent multiple packages a month of complete nonsense to friends all over the country.
I even stole a bike and an amp. I was briefly a hoarder at the peak of it.
i was broke but i felt rich - until i had to keep moving and got anxiety from trying to find and keep an affordable place, on a minimum wage salary, that was large enough to hold my mini museum of garbage.
I couldn’t just trash it or donate it, i obsessively had to find the right home for every item i had.
This took 14 years which is twice as long as it took me to steal it and by the end i regretted stealing any of it because it became too time consuming and too stressful.
Moral of the story? I don’t f-cking know…
I do still encourage stealing though.
My old roommate by the way used to steal from New Seasons every single week. We were all poor and eating gross food from Safeway, and he was poorer than all of us but ate delicious food every night while we drooled and begged him for a bite.
Besides his clothes he owned a skateboard and a mattress and two drum sticks (he was a drummer but didn’t own a kit, but needed the sticks for rehearsing with his band).
He would alternate and go to a different New Seasons each time (which i think at the time 20 years ago there was 3-4 of them, so about 1 per month) and fill his two bags with food and just walk out the door. They had two exits so it wasn’t uncommon for someone to purchase something on one side of the store and exit out the other, and no-one never questioned him while we were roommates - for years he did this, - the key he said was never act suspicious or hide things in your clothes - he openly put things in his shopping bags.
Although they say we all pay when someone shoplifts, with New Season’s prices, it’s hard to disagree with that sentiment.
Still i condone, nay, ENCOURAGE, shoplifting…
I'm so embarrassed to put this out there (I've never told anyone before) but many years ago I once accidentally left a store with an item I hadn't paid for. When I realised the next day, I returned to the store and surreptitiously put it back on the shelf. I reverse shoplifted. My cheeks are burning with the shame of it right now. I don't belong here. Please feel free to banish me!
Just finished my first draft, and sneak most of my writing between air traffic control shifts. A friend went over the story with me, and he told me I was hiding. Now you wrote this and it's all making sense.
Pair that with a plane crashing on your shift, and you have good story.
I have a shop lifting story from 5th grade, sure. I also have a secret to write that would have fit well in Choke.
Homework Hotline, it must’ve been gone by the time I attended Oregon, but I did have an affair with a newscaster who I’d watch on TV most nights at six.
Was it Lars Larson? Your secret is safe here.
I failed to mention I met said newscaster at the bookstore on W. 6th near the freeway off-ramp. Lars didn’t frequent that bookstore.
Bravo! You will do well in the Animal House test.
Since everyone else seems to be confessing, I'll share: in middle school, my friends and I used to shoplift quite a bit. We even figured out how to utilize racial profiling in stores (I'm in the South and often LP isn't even trying to hide who they're following around) to identify plain-clothes security and have them get distracted by a couple of our friends while the others actually went to business. Never got caught in stores and I don't do it as an adult. Weirdly though, I've noticed a LOT of women my age who don't need to shoplift openly talk about doing it most of the time they go to stores.
Female friends often share stories about stealing from one another's homes. An interesting dynamic.
That is really interesting! I personally haven't, but then I guess I liked the thrill of potentially being arrested vs just embarrassment if I was caught.