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A Serious Look at Language, with a Great Deal of Inadvertent Giggling and Smirking, etc.

The popular Scrabble-esque game Words With Friends

Permits many F-words,

But will not allow at least one.

Now, DILDO is obviously sexually connotative

But Words with Friends, as demonstrated above,

Allows its use.

I confess I blushed as I used it,

The more so since my opponent had a female name,

And I doubt if I have ever met or talked to her

In real life.

I have a real-life female friend

With whom I play WWF on a daily basis,

And sometimes our use of sexual words,

Though always strategic and never gratuitous,

Seems downright flirty.

The current President of the United States,

After having dropped bombs on faraway Iran

Without Congressional approval,

Dropped an F-Bomb while knowingly in view

Of recording devices, including video,

Because two countries were not doing

What he wanted them to do.

This may result in an increased proliferation

Of F-bombs amongst schoolchildren

For whom POTUS is, if not a role model, an excuse.

There is a book that permits me to call him

And his “Big, Beautiful Bill”

A thief

And his satchel of burglar tools.

The book is my Dictionary.

it’s never too late

to perpetrate

never too soon to scheme

if you lean alee

perpetrationally

as the subject of meme

play it strait

take the right-angle beam

on the bright angel trail

and extract from the fiefdom the fief

and a raging spring storm’ll

re-angle you normal

and the angel will wail

stop

that

thief

Two days ago a scoundrel or scoundrels took the rear wheel of my locked bicycle, thus:

1018151127-00

My reaction is only slightly burlesqued in the following regressive essay:

IMG_20151019_172008

And the two words were not Happy Birthday (tip of the hat to Stephen King, who made me laugh with this setup and punchline, which I cheerfully stole, this being an essay on The Transformative Power of Theft).

I don’t like not having the use of my bike, and I can’t immediately afford to get it fixed or replaced right now. But there’s an upside of several facets. Foremost is that I’m quite accident-prone when on two wheels, and I have permanent road rash on my left forearm to prove it. The theft also got me the title to this essay, which I think is apt and spiffy, and for which an Internet search conducted just prior to writing does not show a match. (How ironic would that be, if the very title were stolen?)

And, of course, it IS transformative, theft: our whole lives see us robbed of a day of life per day, and sooner or later our various sources of enjoyment go with them. (A friend my age called me up and we swapped infirmities. “But I still have orgasms,” he said in a Thank-God voice.)

Pablo Picasso and Bob Dylan are famous for ransacking their respective genres for source material. It may be argued that they bring enough of themselves to the table to justify their pillaging, just as Shakespeare did, though of the three dozen or more plays he is thought to have written, only ONE of them, The Tempest, has an original plot. (See Pyramus and Thisbe among MANY others for an equivalent to Romeo and Juliet, for instance.)

The great Theft Book includes stolen  thunder, stolen kisses, Pirates of the Caribbean and of Silicon Valley and many other elsewheres, ghost writing (a more cooperative and symbiotic form of theft), taking Shorty-Cuts in line, aggressive panhandling, purveyance of self-destruction aids such as cigarettes, and on and on. We are all thieves, by some stretch. Henceforth I’ll strive to be a good thief. I will steal to achieve more good than harm. I hope. Most of the time.

Hey, can you spare me a change? I’m Tapped . . .