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"Hey, Sard, can I use the stuff you wrote about me?" asks Joe T.
The Sardine's dilemma: do I ask for which "stuff" or take Joe to task for wanting to plagiarize my work?
Which stuff?
"Actually, all of it."
Again, the Sardine should be reprimanding him. . . .
Both the published and unpublished material?
"I forgot about the unpublished material."
That was the whole point, Joe. The unpublished columns about you were stuff you couldn't remember. Like your honeymoon.
"There's more than that?"
Not much.
"Then I could use that."
Can't you come up with anything on your own?
"I write a page or two, but it takes so long. To be honest, it's not very interesting."
You mean you were trying to write about yourself in a non-tragic mode.
"Yes," he confesses.
Whatever you write ultimately veers into the tragic.
"Into humiliation. So I might as well use your stuff. Like when I climbed up the flagpole to get the attention of an old flame and threw stones at her window."
And she wasn't home. "Love's tropism." Who would want to read about it from your point of view?
"There's a market for all kinds of stuff."
There's another alternative. I advised this earlier. DON'T WRITE.
"You were serious?"
I put the advice in capital letters. Same as here. I know it's hard to believe but your life, your stories, save for the few miserable scraps I've used, are beyond being written about. They have no meaning.
"Should I just remain tragic? Not resist my natural tendency. . . ."
For disaster? To feel sorry for yourself?
God-Believing Public: He could talk about his Christian upbringing.
"I wasn't much of a believer."
G-B P: Even better. Joe could serve as an example of someone who didn't follow the word of God.
"He could write about how everyone has had Antigone except him," Wal-terr comments.
"That's not true," Joe T. replies. "We sleep together every night."
"You better go back and read that column," says Wal-terr.
"My marriage is that bad?"
Antigone smacks him across the back of the head.
"Don't listen to those mugs," she says. "We have a great sex life."
Logged -In Public: How can he not know?
The Sardine is a humanitarian. It's best to keep the worst secrets about people from themselves.
"I want to know," says Joe T.
G-B P: He wants his true confession to be written for him.
Joe, haven't you heard of plagiarism?
"I'd be borrowing, not stealing."
Your readers wouldn't know the difference. You're still using my stuff.
L-I P: Doesn't the Sardine use his own stuff from these columns in other articles?
The Sardine doesn't know what they mean.
L-I P: Sure. We remember years ago. Sardines 37 and 38. There was an essay a couple years before. It was in an online journal.
You're free to look and find it.
L-I P (1 minute later): We couldn't find it. The journal must be defunct. But there were surely others.
"The articles about my Social Pets were in a magazine," says McNulty.
L-I P: Do you have any copies?
"No. And the magazine went out of business a year later."
L-I P: It doesn't matter. McNulty's offered proof.
He's getting old. He might not remember right.
"I was mentioned in the same piece," says Frank Weathers. "It was the one about snail eating."
Theoretically, say I did use them. First, they were not written as Sardine articles. They weren't the same.
"They were the same ideas," says Joe T.
Second, they were MY IDEAS.
G-B P: Uh-oh. He's shouting in capital letters again. We only thought God was allowed to do that.
I retain the copyright. I could publish them again since the magazines are now defunct.
"If I didn't plagiarize in school," says Joe T., "I wouldn't have gotten my degree."
The Sardine's advice to you, before you reached the point where you had to plagiarize, would have been DON'T GO TO COLLEGE.
L-I P: There are no new ideas. Everything written is some form of plagiarism.
G-B P: True. In fact, God's the only one who did something original.
Bob Castle is the unveiled author of A Sardine on Vacation. Check out his bio page.