Morgan loves my girlfriend, hates me.

I first became aware of Morgan during my senior year in high school. For half an hour a day, I sat in my homeroom class being bombarded by the mandatory youth advertising program called Channel One, and that's where I first encountered him. Morgan was a couple years younger than I was, so my homeroom couldn't have been his officially, but since he was good buddies with the teacher, he was in there every single day. Since it was an art room, Morgan would try to impress me with his low-quality artwork, expensive possessions, and various lies. I always found him to be obnoxious, but I was too nice to do anything other than listen to his incessant stream of bullshit.

"Check out my portfolio," he said one day, holding up a large, flat, leather case for carrying his artwork around. "It was almost two hundred dollars!"

"Nice," I said, not wanting to point out that owning an expensive case doesn't make one a decent artist.

Another time, he tried to feed me a completely absurd line of bullshit about how he was paid thousands of dollars, flown to California, and given a contract to "design surfboards" for many more thousands of dollars. I nodded, said "Wow," and pretended to believe him. I didn't see any real reason to shoot the poor guy down.

I tolerated Morgan's attempts at friendship for a few months. I never initiated conversation with him, but would humor him when he talked to me. He was a sycophant, and would act like everything I said or did was completely awesome, the only exception being the time he saw a 666 written in marker on the inside of my sweatshirt, and remarked, "That stuff is retarded." Morgan's attitude towards me changed abruptly when he found out I was involved with a girl who I later found out had rejected him.

"Hey, you know who likes you?" he said one day, laughing, "Sara Wiscowicz."

"I like her, too," I said.

Morgan's smile instantly faded and was replaced by a frown. He looked away from me and back down at his art project that he was working on.

"No comment," he uttered, as if I had asked him for a statement on the matter. He didn't talk to me for the rest of the homeroom period.

The very next day, a guy in my math class told me that Morgan, who rode his bus, had been talking about me on the way to school.

"He was going on and on about how much he hates your web page, saying you're retarded and stuff," the guy told me. Back then, I had a page that was virtually identical to this one, but with more boring day-to-day bits that nobody who didn't know me would be interested in, and more talk about smashing capitalism by means of excessive condiment procurement. It was a personal blog, though nobody called them that back then.

During homeroom, Morgan launched into a poorly-thought out tirade against me.

"Hey, I looked at your web page," he said.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah," he said, "It's retarded! It doesn't make any sense!"

"Why not?" I asked.

"You say there's capitalism in America! There's no capitalism in America! You should go to Europe! They're fighting wars over there over capitalism!"

Sitting at my table were three European foreign exchange students, whose mouths literally dropped open when Morgan said this.

"Are you serious?" I asked, shocked that somebody could have made it to tenth grade and still be dumb enough to say something like that. He was very serious, though, and for the next five minutes, he kept repeating the same points over and over: your web page is retarded; your web page makes no sense; and there is no capitalism in America, but they are fighting wars about it in Europe. I made some feeble attempts at correcting him, but he was getting so worked up that the teacher told him to calm down and just get the fuck away from me.

For the rest of the year, until I graduated, my friends and I were locked in a ridiculous cycle with Morgan. First, he'd make fun of or threaten one of us with his "fists of steel," then we'd make fun of him, then he'd tell on us and we'd be called to the office, where they told us not to bother him. And then he'd immediately start the cycle over again.

I don't know what ever happened to the guy, but I still have a promotional magnet with a picture of his mom on my refrigerator. I just think it's funny.

Solidarity, love, and unity.

Last night, when I was getting home from work, I noticed a group of people holding signs on sticks standing on the corner across the street from my place. It was nearly 1:00 in the morning, so I thought, Wow, it's pretty fucking late for a protest. I live directly across the street from a college, and though I haven't seen any protests at this particular college, I've seen enough of them at the bigger college one town over that it's not at all a new sight to me. I've taken part in completely useless protests before, and I like to imagine protesters are someow sticking it to The Man, whether they're rallying against something that sounds reasonable or something that sounds completely ridiculous. I didn't know what this protest was about, because I was only able to read one of their signs, and it read "NO PAY CUTS."

I went online and told Lew about it, and he said, "Maybe they're on strike." I guess I'm so used to seeing protests that the idea of a group of people with signs actually sticking it to The Man in a real way completely slipped my mind. A quick Google searched proved him correct.

I tend to support strikers pretty universally, even if I don't know exactly why they're striking. I figure that most people are getting fucked over by The Man, and I can really appreciate it when they're willing to take a stand. At my last job, I casually mentioned how a strike would totally shut the whole place down. The old ladies I worked with told the boss, who called a meeting to say we weren't allowed to talk about stuff like that.

It started to rain around 3:00 in the morning. The strikers left, and though I fully stood behind their cause, I was worried. As awesome as a strike is, I hoped The Man would cave in to their demands immediately, and that they wouldn't be back.

When I was woken up to the sound of car horns, I immediately knew why, but I got out of bed to check, anyway. Sure enough, the strikers were back. When I'm driving and I see people on strike, I do the solidarity honk, too, so I can understand. I went back to bed, and I ignored most of the honking, but I got up when I thought there might have been a car crash right in front of my house. A car horn had been going off insessantly for a solid 30 seconds, and there were sirens in the background. I got out of bed, walked to the front room, and peered out the window. I couldn't even tell who was blaring their horn, because the scene looked entirely normal, except for the noise: a bunch of cars were waiting at the light, and a guy with a sign was walking casually on the sidewalk.

It was at that point that solidarity started to piss me off.

Like the people with 15 yellow-ribbon and American flag magnets on their car to prove they support the troops more than you, some people seem to think supporting people on strike is contest. It's not. Blaring your horn for extended periods of time doesn't mean you're better than everybody else who thinks these folks should get what they want, it just means you're a douchebag.

I've been hearing this since I woke up. I really don't mind that people have been tooting their horns all day long. My girlfriend and I went out earlier, we honked, too. But there's just no fucking excuse for laying on the horn as if there was a small child in the road.

I'm tempted to active the Samuel L. Jackson Home Security System, but I won't. It's not their fault some people are just complete idiots. I just hope they get this shit settled soon.

You should go tell on us.

I was about 19 or 20 years old, eating at Burger King with my friends, Lew and Doug. At the time, we were still in the habit of taking too many condiments, so my tray and Lew's were both piled with mountains of ketchup packets, napkins, and whatever else they had to offer.

"Hey, Doug," I said, "You should go tell on us for taking too many condiments."

To my surprise, Doug got up and walked to the counter, coming back and sitting down a few moments later. Following shortly behind him was the manager, a middle aged woman. She stood at our table, staring at our condiments and looking angry, but not saying anything. She shook her head.

"That's a real waste," she said.

"Sorry," Lew said, "Do you want us to put it back?"

"No," she answered, "but when you're done eating you can leave!"

I was a teenage communist.

"Do you realize that the majority of the world's population lives in poverty?" I asked the girl pushing the broom at Taco Bell.

"No, I guess not," she said.

"Well, they do. And get this: while the majority of people are poor as hell, the richest people own the majority of everything. That is why capitalism must be smashed!"

"You're really good at preaching this stuff," she said.

Under the influence of radical zines, punk rock, and youthful idealism, I had embraced the ideals of communism in high school. I could trace all the ills of society back to the very structure of the capitalist system, which forced people to live shitty lives so that a handful of rich white men could own everything. I fought the powers that be day and night, organizing and mobilizing a powerful resistance movement, determined to make a better world for my working class comrades. By that I mean we took excessive amounts of condiments from fast food restaurants.

My friends and I were jobless high school students, so when we ate out it was invariably at a restaurant that was part of a large chain. The large chain joints were the perfect target, because their very existence signified everything that was wrong with the system. Mom and pop couldn't open a restaurant because they couldn't compete with the global empire that is McDonald's, and people in poor countries were starving because all of their farmland was owned by these same giant corporations. Every time we'd eat at one of these places, we'd walk out with our pockets stuffed with salt and pepper shakers, packs of ketchup, plastic silverware, and the like. This was our ultimate plan to create a worker's utopia, as we felt our theft of condiments would irreversibly weaken the fast food companies, and the capitalist system as a whole, to the point of defeat.

Being not just a commie, but a vegetarian commie, I always wanted to go to Taco Bell, so I could fill my belly with bean burritos before smashing the system. The acquisition of all of their Fire Sauce became our main goal. Every time we'd go to a Taco Bell, we'd completely empty the restaurant of all of the Fire Sauce they had out for their customers. We had so much of it that I ended up with a giant box of it at home, and my friend Radical Ryan had filled the vegetable drawer of his refrigerator with it. He was the only one of us who actually used the stuff outside of Taco Bell, and he had filled a ketchup bottle with it.

"This ketchup tastes weird," his mom said one night while they were eating hamburgers.

"That's not ketchup, Mom," Ryan said, "It's Fire Sauce!"

In the end, the plan to destroy capitalism by stealing their sauce didn't work. Our condiment heists began tapering off until we weren't doing it at all anymore, and then I grew up and realized people are too stupid and mean for communism to work, anyway.

Been caught stealing.

When I was 20, I picked up a young hitchhiker. He was only a couple years older than me, a college drop out, and an anarchist. He told me that in 1999, he had only spent $99, and he was incredibly proud of that. He had been on the road for a couple years, "mostly partying," but occasionally stopping to do activist work. The majority of his meals were shoplifted from grocery stores.

"It's all about being confident, man," he told me, "If you just walk in there like you're not doing anything wrong, and stick something in your pocket, nobody will know. I've never been caught. I've been doing this for years."

"Maybe I should try that."

"Yeah," he said, "It's a great way to say 'fuck you' to the system."

Encouraged by his words, I decided to give it a shot. I went to a grocery store, selected two fine avocados, and walked through the aisles with them. It took me a few minutes to gain the courage to stuff them in my pockets, and when I did, I could practically hear my heart thumping in my chest.

Be cool, I thought, be confident. Remember what the dude said.

I started walking out of the store, ears ringing from the high volume of blood being pumped through my body. I was sure somebody was going to stop me.

They didn't.

Shoplifting turned out to be an incredible thrill. After getting away with stealing avocados, I found myself stealing from grocery stores regularly. My friends and I would go into a store, swipe snack size bags of chip, box drinks, and other convenient items, and go have a picnic. Shoplifted food, even when not very good, was excellent because it was free. Soon, we began stealing other things. We didn't steal anything big or valuable, only silly little knick knacks and novelties. I liked to steal paperback books. I think the most expensive and large item I stole was a giant fighting robot model kit. My friends were sure I was going to get caught when I walked out of the toystore with it under my sweatshirt. The adrenaline rush from that heist was incredible.

We never felt bad about it because of the anarchist's smug rationalization: stealing from big chain stores is OK, because they are The Man, and they are always stealing from you and oppressing the working man. Filled with righteous (if not overly idealistic) indignation, my friends and I continued to steal stuff unabated for about a month after I picked up the hitchhiker.

And then I got busted.

I was on my way to visit a girl who lived a couple hours away from me. I was hungry, and had money, but knew there was free food at any grocery store. I picked a superstore in a chain that I had had luck with before.

I should have known they would be watching me. I was out in the middle of nowhere, and stuck out like a sore thumb. It was like being in the twilight zone, and every single person was whiter than myself and a little bit deformed. The first people I saw when I walked in were a pair of what I assume were brothers, because they shared one key feature. One was an incredibly obese man, the other was abnormally short and stumpy. Both had the exact same face.

I walked the aisles and picked up a can of pre-cooked macaroni and cheese with a pop-top lid, a pack of juice boxes, and a box of plastic silverware. The aisles of food were crowded, so I started perusing their other items. As I walked, I ripped open the silverware box and took out a fork, leaving the rest of the box in a pile of toys. I kept walking and removed one of the juice boxes from the pack, dropping the rest on a shelf. Going back to the toy section, I briefly considered stealing a yo-yo before I decided I didn't have enough time to work the package open. I stuffed the macaroni, juice box, and fork in my pockets and began to walk out.

As I headed for the door, I heard a numerical code announced on the intercom.

Fuck, I thought, I wonder if that's for me. Do they know? Should I put this stuff back?

I shook off my fear. They never know, I thought.

Seconds after I walked out of the store, I heard somebody behind me.

"Excuse me, sir, we need to talk to you about some merchandise that wasn't paid for."

Fuck.

I turned around and was escorted back inside by three large guys. They were very calm, and seemed to be making an effort to keep what was happening from being known to other customers.

"There's a hallway on the right," one of them told me as he walked a few feet behind me, "Go into the first door."

They took me into the security office and asked if I had any needles or anything. I told them I didn't, and they frisked me down, finding the stolen goods. They asked me if I had done anything like this before, and I told them that I hadn't. I told them I was a college student (which was true) and that I had a little money (which was true), but not enough that I wanted to spend it on food (also true). They ran a quick background check and found that I didn't have any kind of record.

"It's store policy that shoplifters will be charged ten times the cost of the stolen merchandise, but no less than $50 and no more than $250. The total cost of your items was $2.32, so we have to charge you the minimum, which is $50."

The guy explaining the situation to me didn't seem angry, and actually seemed kind of sad to be busting me for it.

"It's our option to call the police or not," he told me, "but given the understandability of the situation, we're not going to call them. However, if you get caught stealing in any of our stores again, it is our policy that the police will be called."

He wrote a number on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

"If you have any problems coming up with the $50, you can call this number and they can help you work out a payment plan."

They let me go, and I sent them a check about a week later. I never stole anything again.

Around the same time, one of my friends was caught stealing a toothbrush from Wal-Mart. They prosecuted her to the fullest extent of the law.