Ritual shoplifting
From Plastic Tub
Ritual Shoplifting rn. 1. The clandestine extraction of material goods, usually items seen as particularly representative of Pooban grotesquerie or otherwise considered bothersome. The items thus five-fingered from vendors under this most secret of circumstances served to elucidate reactionary AA political or philosophical protestations. 2. Slang phrase used to describe date-rape among sorority cows and poetical He-Men.
Extrapolation
The taking of random items was used for objectomancy and voodoo purposes but was used predominantly as a key magical source for found-object altars similar to the one found in the flophouse room Stimes Addisson shared with a couple of large rodents and the occasional Mazzistow Carrington (often with gorgeous white women who contrasted with the ghetto environs of the flophouse decor).
Although not as extreme as Ritual Murder, Ritual shoplifting is employed by many different radical groups for many different purposes. The League of Gnomes for instance, has an initiaton rite involving the shoplifting of a broom, three lobsters, two one-pound bags each of brown and white sugar, and a dozen French vanilla flavored tea-lites.
Dreaming Thievery
When Easton W. Wunderkidd was arrested at the tender age of seven for boosting the New York Times Book Review, he was quoted, rather precociously, as telling both the mayor and the chief of police that "I did so as an act of rebellion against the existential plight that my hometown refuses to face or is not smart enough to recognize . . . And also I have to say to the universe, concerning only the facts at my disposal, that I am through with religion and all that God stuff. I am prepared, gentlemen, to laugh in face of Karma. Oh, and also, I wanted to check out the new Vidal piece."
Wunderkidd later told this story endlessly, regaling his friends with a significantly "sexed-up" version where he arm-wrestled a gorilla and inscribed an elaborate refutation of Zionism on the walls of his holding cell.
Deep Sleep
Although Mazzistow Carrington could appreciate the idea and the bounties of Ritual Shoplifting, he did not participate for fear his grandmother would find out -- he confessed as much to Stimso Adid, explaining he feared nothing more than the wrath of this most overbearing of matriarchs. It was just this fear of letting her down, Adid mused, that could be the impetus of Carrington's massive literary output. It could also be the reason he was so good with the ladies. That and the fact he was a Negro. And could cook.
Supper In the Pyrenees
In her later years Verna Cable could conceal a mighty brunch beneath her Chanel raincoat and often suprised her many hosts with huge culinary masterpieces as if from thin air. She attributed this skill to a lifetime of Ritual Shoplifting, where she had learned to contort her body into the formation of a kind of storage bin in her abdomen into which could be stuffed boatloads of Pooban consumables.
Exit Stage Center
Wilhemina Forkes engaged in the Ritual one crazy summer when, costumed in nothing more than a bikini, she lifted two cantaloupes from a grocery store. Dacusse, who was witness to the event, described it as "profoundly inspiring." Alas, she met her match when she tried to smuggle a cucumber in her shorts out of a Piggly Wiggly in Macon, Ga. The cashier was alerted to the fact because he'd "never seen no manly bulge such as that on a woman."
