Tease your lover by text — and drive the Feds crazy doing it.

Last week Uncle Willie wrote about the kinds of playful games loving married couples can carry out over years or decades. This I totally get. I am always pulling Cathleen’s pigtails, because I always want her attention.

Here’s an example, a brand new game I invented today: Our little dog Dusty, my mother’s best legacy and a little piece of her in all his mannerisms, has a grooming appointment later this week at a dog spa called ‘A Loving Touch.’ I thought that sounded kinda creepy, so I changed it in our shared Google calendar to ‘A Furtive Grope.’ I don’t know when she’ll notice the change, and I won’t toy with her business appointments, but that seems like a fun game to play with the family stuff — fun like mussing up her hair or rubbing a little sliver of ice into the nape of her neck.

Here’s another one we do: Poetexting. I think like a poet all the time, which means I’m always swapping sounds and words and concepts around in my mind. Not everyone who gets my full attention likes it, but I can be a fun ride in person, especially if you’re in the mood to keep up with me.

So: Like this: I just texted this to my best-beloved:

Yuba Quinn?

Pure sound: “You back when?” We have a young friend named Quinn, so that will serve as a red-herring, I hope, pushing her off the obvious, leaving her chasing after a second reading that isn’t there.

I do it all the time, she less so, and, obviously, neither of us is clever or coy when minutes matter. Lately I’m transfixed by sound, but another way to play this game is with crostic-style clues or glyphic rebuses. It’s just a little way of putting hot-sauce on hamburger, making an adventure of the mundane.

But wait. There’s more. What do you suppose the NSA might make of this, which I texted to Cathleen last night?

Of ocular stalks, I counted seven, but then I remembered…

What’s the message? I ate (eye eight). But what grave portents could a spy-catcher invest in that taunting code?

And that’s the idea, at last. Poetexting is fun, and it will make you and your spouse closer, just by having that little private game together. But at the same time it will drive the paranoid schizophrenics who desperately long to supervise your life in every particular absolutely apeshit. Every time they think they’ve got you all figured out, you will give ’em a little something to gnaw on.

My own all-time favorite poestastic text was written decades in advance by the late, great Robert A. Heinlein:

EF or FF?

It’s cryptic, to be sure, although it might be obvious even to a Fedtard, but it’s just the right kind of urgent communication for a marriage of happy rebels. Considerate, too, don’t you think?