Proper Clipping

To shoplift a small can of freon, you wear a ten-gallon cowboy hat on Halloween into the store and deftly deposit your “miracle compound of CFCs” (to be inhaled only) on top of your head. Everything nice and neatly obscured by your costume. Walk out.
Rinse and repeat and repeat.
To shoplift anything, take off the tag and run it to the Lost and Found. Then come back a few days later and claim it. It’ll still be there.
I once shanked a rare coin collection from a friend, pawned it, then booked to Shakey’s and hit the all you can eat pizza buffet. Morals are my weak spot now. It used to be bad taste.
Happy Cruelty Day you.
The best remedy for being blocked is counting calories.
In my feeble attempt to leave behind The Story for The Agent for The Star for The Oscar for the TV Ratings for the Advertising Revenue for the Network Profits, what I’ve managed to do is de-construct everything to its nutrinos.
Weak force.
Gravitation.
Electrically neutral lepton.
When you strip something down to this elemental level, you can no longer see the big picture. Whatever that may be. That’s for my caseworker to decipher. She’s writing all this down, as I’m dictating it into the Grunding reel-to-reel.
She says, Jesus they make little pocket sized tape recorders nowadays.
I tell her to piss off and start shaking. Part of her job as my caseworker is to mix me a gin martini. She and I have become good friends.
But I promised you advice for elementary clipping.
Here we go.
Wear baggy clothing. Much easier in cooler climates. Make sure to choose a coat with inside pockets.
Pick the right store/merchandise. Hit the large chains. Mom-and-Pops defend their territory with a vengeance. Go small on the merchandise, but valuable. No one’s going to be impressed if you lift a head of garlic. Hit CD ROMs, cell phones, digi-cams, Ipods, memory chips.
Misdirect.
This is a magician’s skill that comes in handy when shoplifting. (Most professional magicians don’t pay for anything. The rest, are just plain bad. You can see the fishing wire in the lights.) What you want is to select the item you wish to take with you from the store. Position yourself near it, and then pick up a different item. Hold this second item up, look at it in the light, lick it if you want to, just so long as anybody watching you do this is observing your actions with this particular item. Meanwhile, your other hand is grabbing the object you actually want and slipping it into your coat pocket.
Fooling the sensors.
There are a great number of ways to get past the door sensors. Understand first that what the sensors are looking for are electronic tags on the merchandise. The first thing you should do before slipping your prize into your pocket is identify the security tag. Pulling it back out of your pocket to check is not recommended.
Subheadings:
The courtesy sensor.
This is when the sensor is not directly in front of the door, and customers are just expected to know to walk through it. Just don’t walk through it. Or, if you are under surveillance, start to walk through it, and then drop your keys on the outside of the sensor. Lean over to pick them up and then walk around.
The friendly counter-person.
Often, there is a pad near the register that deactivates security tags. Find a friendly counter-person, start up a conversation, and ask to see something behind him. Lean over to point at what you’re interested. When his back is turned, rub your pocket against the deactivation pad.
Security.
Things to know.
Shoplifting is against the law.
You’ll probably get zapped by six different cameras doing the above. The trick is figuring out which ones are real or fake. Most of those hideous-looking black orbs hanging from the ceiling are fake. Most stores have them. They’re props. Most working cameras are watching middle management making deposits in the office. Watching the safe. The watchers watching the watchers watching the watchers watching us. And think this. Cameras cannot catch you. Employees will. Tape is only used for proof.
You’ll probably be prosecuted if you’re clipping anything over two hundred. You’ll probably get sixty-five to one hundred hours of community service, but incur about two grand in lawyers’ fees and court expenses. You’ll probably need a third job to pay off all of those. Which doesn’t leave anything for anything. Not even enough bile. Which brings you back to clipping things.
How you feel is, squeezed to a fine powder in a giant vise.
EXODUS 20:15: “Thou shall not steal.”
I’m tired of the Bible.

Cutting Weight

As in wrestling. Not that kind—the entertaining kind. Not that one. Inflated pecs and overblown calves. Bleached blondes. Mullets. Shaved heads. Silicone tits. Accusations and inflammatory rhetoric in giant arenas. Not that one. Greco-Roman. Freestyle. 54 kilograms. 120 Ks. That kind. It’s the most excruciating sport. The oldest. Grueling training sessions punctuated always by demonic and frantic methods of losing weight. Making the right weight. I once had a job supervising an indoor, air-conditioned track in Skokie, Illinois. Mostly, it was used by geriatric patients trying to extend their lives a bit, walking around and around in an attempt at a healthier end. But peppered among the quickly dying were wrestlers running in tight, silver body suits, spitting into cups every lap, trying to drop those last 5 pounds before weigh-in. Cauliflower ear. To most amateur wrestlers, it’s like a tattoo. A rite of passage. An entrance into the club. Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is. You get cauliflower ear from constant rubbing. The cartilage separates from the skin and blood and fluid builds up. After a while it drains out, but the calcium will solidify on the cartilage. You have to drain it. Most guys use their own needles. The ear fills up with blood and you have to drain it before the blood hardens. A doctor can do it, but you have to go in there all the time, so guys just purchase their own needles and puncture themselves. I used to know a boy who would punch himself ten times just before bed, to get cauliflower ear. One of the guys sweating it out at the track had a massive injury from wrestling which required a re-built human valve for his heart. He decided against the pig valve, the better choice, because a re-built membrane allowed him to wrestle again. It’s membership into an exclusive club. No one comes to see wrestling. Guys do it for the high. It’s an addiction. Everything we do is an addiction. Living is an addiction. Dying is. Amateur wrestling is the ultimate analogy for the former. It’s a cult. A fraternity. Family. Wrestling is life. There are a million decisions to be made in seventeen minutes. Seventeen. 17. Do you hear that number? The mat is your life. I hate internal blood. Strike that. Blood from failure of internal organs. I can’t explain this. All blood is internal. All blood is equal. But some blood is more equal than other. I used to run. Once I ran eight miles per day for sixty-eight consecutive days. At the end, when I came inside to piss, blood came out instead of urine. Then it would coagulate and a little later I’d go to piss again, and a tiny sliver of red scab would come out of my urethra before the blood flowed again. Crimson. Beautiful life. The doctor couldn’t figure out anything. He gave me an antibiotic and I was off. But I knew what had happened. I had jarred loose the prostate from running. I never had the body for running. Internal organ blood. It’s different than cutting yourself with a blade. Some blood is more equal than other. Blood as product. Blood as cleanser of human waste. An old wrestling ritual to mark the last match of one’s career goes like this: you leave your shoes in the center of the mat and cover them up with a handkerchief. Then you kiss the mat and leave the shoes behind. The wrestler with the re-built valve, jogging around the indoor track, dated Walter Mondale’s daughter in Ceylon, Minnesota. She left him when he broke his sternum. When he herniated his disk between C5 and C6 of his spine. Hyperextended knee. Hyperextended elbow. Broken hand. Broken finger. Broken clavicle. Dislocated shoulder. Severe tear in the back muscle. She left him. He never left wrestling. It’s a fraternity of broken men. It’s Fight Club. The first rule of … But you know that. The pain is what keeps the fans away from the stands. No one comes. Just family. Wives. Brothers. No one comes to see wrestling. No one wants to see life played out on a mat. No one.