Monday, July 12, 2004
It's Raining Porn...Hallelujah... It's Raining Porn!
When I was around nine or ten years old, my friends and I used to play army. We would rampage all over the neighborhood blasting everything in sight with what ever we had that even remotely looked like a gun. That was one of the cool things about that age. Anything counted as a gun. Broom stick, fishing pole, dad's golf club (that one’s very risky if you know my dad). You knew you were really cool when you could get away with no gun at all and just point your fingers. This meant that you were so intimidating that the other guy was afraid to point out the fact that you had no gun for fear that you may actually punch him. And, we all knew it was better to get shot with a fake gun than get punched with a real fist.
All this, of course, was long before we were old enough to understand the trauma and tragedy that is war. For, once we reach that realization we would never emulate such a horror, and we stop playing army. Instead, we take powerful air guns and fire semi-ridged paint balls at each other at the speed of light. Cloaked in the guise of adult recreation, we attempt to bring forth a welt the size of a softball or, maybe, if we're lucky, make the other guy cry. But at age ten, life is simpler (and cheaper). And “Army” was the name of the game.
To play army, all you really need are two things…some really good hiding places, and the ability to make high quality gun noises with your mouth. The latter of which is the most important, I think. This is why girls never get very far playing war. I think it's genetic. Go up to any girl in any sports bar and ask her to make a gun noise with her mouth and she will immediately start making some sort of sputtering noise that may actually be accompanied with bits of spit flying from her mouth. And while there may be a time and place where that would be a good thing, it certainly isn't enough to cause a ten year old boy, running across a crowded battlefield, to drop to the ground, mortally wounded!
On the other hand, if she were to ask the guy to make a gun noise, he would immediately ask "What type and caliber, and would you like semi or fully automatic?" He would then proceed to make rich, deep percussive sounds that would cause every duck and goose within a two-mile radius to instantly crap themselves. Of course then, some other guy would turn and say something like "You know that was really more like an M-16 than an AK-47. You really need to get the machine noise of the bolt action in there. It's more like this..." After a few minutes of this, both guys would realize that the girl who had originally asked the question had since walked off and was now talking to (who else?) the guy in the bar with the most money! The really sad part is that we didn't ca_... Uh…I mean these two geeks wouldn't care.
(This is the part where you're starting to wonder, "Where in the hell is Hawley going with this crap.")
This isn't really about playing Army; it's actually about porn (Isn't everything?). I'll explain. On one specific Sunday (I know it was Sunday because it was garbage night and my strike team and I were always out on garbage night.) my "squad" and I were scouting out the neighborhood. And on Sundays, this included the garbage cans because you never know what you might find. Who knows? Maybe someone will throw away a real AK-47, or $50,000 in cash, or maybe even a human skull...when you’re a 10-year-old boy you have an open mind. This one Sunday we came upon a can half way up the street that had something that seemed familiar in the back of my mind. It was a stack of Playboy magazines! You could just tell at a glance because back then they had this thick stapled spine. Unlike the thin, wimpy spine of other magazines, Playboys were really thick because (a ten year old boy knew this) they were chocked full of stuff we weren’t supposed to look at! Now, the cohesiveness of our neighborhood paramilitary unit was as strong as you could get, but when you stumble upon a cache of Playboys, greed sets in and you start thinking ‘I would trade every one of my friends for this stack in a minute.’ Hell, I'd trade an AK-47, $50,000 in cash AND a human skull for these babies...For God’s sake, I was only 10 years old! Reason got the better of us and we made a plan to get together the next day and review our newfound booty. (Yea…I know...I know...That one was for Darren)
We met the next day in a secure hiding location…a safe house, if you will (actually I think it was the wash behind my house)…and began looking through the magazines. There they were before us…The Holy Grail of boyish adolescence. Real Naked Lady Boobs! These were no saggy National Geographic African Native Boobs. Those are OK when your seven or eight, but I never saw a Kenyan native chick in a frilly red thong sitten’ on Santa’s lap. I mean these things were tan, round, and awsome. I’d always heard about them but words could never have lived up to this. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with them, but I knew that I was supposed to want to do something. We decided to keep the whole stack but we would have to hide them somewhere. The first thing we had to do was cut out all of the pictures and get rid of all the annoying articles. I mean, who in their right mind would be reading when you could be looking at…you know…My god man…Naked Lady Boobs!
Now, I mentioned that the other thing you need for playing army is a good hiding place. And we had dozens. A while back, I had found a plat map of our street that my parents had gotten when they moved in. I made a copy of it (By hand. We didn’t have your new fangled copy machines back then, sonny. Jeeze dude, how old are you anyway?) and we marked all of our hiding places on it. This map was kept hidden in a very secure spot (Who would ever think of looking under my mattress. It was diabolical) because there was no limit to the damage that might occur should this map fall into the wrong hands. Not to mention the devastation that would befall the whole “Hide and Go Seek” industry of Mountain Ave. I had been hiding that for a while so the addition of our “ladies” to the package seemed insignificant. Mom would say, “What’s that?” I would innocently respond “Oh, just maps.” Beautiful!
She found ‘em!
Yea…that’s the one mistake every young lad makes in his life…underestimating the investigative abilities of his mom. I think law enforcement around the world should make a big recruitment push to hire moms everywhere. Criminals would say, “I swear, I have no gun and I never have had a gun.” and this friendly, middle aged, house wife would saunter up and say “Of course not, dear!” She’d run her hand over his head. Give him a little peck on the forehead. And then go to his sock drawer and find the gun…Case closed!
Now here’s the weird part. My mom didn’t do anything. She let me keep them. She just left the room. I knew it had to be some sort of plot but who cares…I have Naked Lady Boobs to look at! I immediately took it to the next level. Yea…that’s right…I took out all the centerfolds and tacked them to the walls. I was surround by what I will now refer to as NLB’s (naked lady boobs). Man I was cool! Later, my dad came home and my mom said, “Your son has something he’d like to show you in his room.” He walked in as I lounged on my bed. He looked around the room and then back at me. I, with my smirk, thinking something like the 1970’s equivalent of “Yea…that’s right…these are my bitches (…well…in…10…or 15 years anyway.)” He nodded recognition of what I had done with a look on his face as if he was thinking to himself, ‘Enjoy the moment son because the world is going to crush you like a walnut later in life and you’ll need moments like this to remember’ and he walked out. This was not nearly as fun as I thought it was going to be. Where’s the “eyes popping out of the head” and the yelling? A few days later I got bored and took them down. “I got to find me some new bitches!”
My grandmother heard about the incident and the next time she came out to visit, she promptly bought me a fresh copy of Playboy. I felt very grown up. Of course you have to play it cool when you’re looking at the NLB’s in front of someone else. Don’t want them to think you’re obsessed. ‘Maybe I’ll pause at this article about the White House for a moment, just to throw them off the scent.’ ‘OK that’s long enough.’ Later on, and I have no idea how this got started, it became a tradition to put a Playboy magazine in my stocking at Christmas. It never failed. Every Xmas morning it was there. (And they wondered why I was always the first one down) One year my sister even brought my stocking up to me. There I lay in my bed on Christmas morning “reading”(wink, wink) Playboy and listening to carols. It gave new meaning to the passage “o’r the hills we go.” Just think if that tradition had caught on back in the early days. Tiny Tim standing on his chair…A feeble little voice saying “God bless us, every one…especially that fine looking bitch on page 73.” Ah…you gotta love Dickens!
To this day, at my house, if someone says something about ”Maps”, everyone looks at me and grins. (I think it’s rather ironic I graduated with a degree in Geography.) Now, you’re still, most likely, wondering “Why this laborious story about hiding porn?”
Well, something recently happened that made me think about this.
My dad came down to help me wire my new garage and one of the first things we had to do was take down the plywood ceiling of the original carport. We were on the second to last sheet of wood and as we lowered one end, something slid off and landed on the floor. We set that piece in the pile and I went back to investigate. It was a brown paper bag and inside was, you guessed it, porn. Actually, it was really pathetic porn. They were swinger magazines printed in black and white with amateur photos of 40something housewives. There were also a number of condoms (unused, thankfully). At first I thought it was a kindred spirit hiding his porn from his parents. But what would a kid be doing with condoms? The kids who lived here were rather young. I now imagine these belonged to the dad who was, perhaps, stepping out with the gals in the ads. They were getting divorced as the house was being sold.
Oh well. Look on the bright side. At least it wasn’t a human skull!
When I was around nine or ten years old, my friends and I used to play army. We would rampage all over the neighborhood blasting everything in sight with what ever we had that even remotely looked like a gun. That was one of the cool things about that age. Anything counted as a gun. Broom stick, fishing pole, dad's golf club (that one’s very risky if you know my dad). You knew you were really cool when you could get away with no gun at all and just point your fingers. This meant that you were so intimidating that the other guy was afraid to point out the fact that you had no gun for fear that you may actually punch him. And, we all knew it was better to get shot with a fake gun than get punched with a real fist.
All this, of course, was long before we were old enough to understand the trauma and tragedy that is war. For, once we reach that realization we would never emulate such a horror, and we stop playing army. Instead, we take powerful air guns and fire semi-ridged paint balls at each other at the speed of light. Cloaked in the guise of adult recreation, we attempt to bring forth a welt the size of a softball or, maybe, if we're lucky, make the other guy cry. But at age ten, life is simpler (and cheaper). And “Army” was the name of the game.
To play army, all you really need are two things…some really good hiding places, and the ability to make high quality gun noises with your mouth. The latter of which is the most important, I think. This is why girls never get very far playing war. I think it's genetic. Go up to any girl in any sports bar and ask her to make a gun noise with her mouth and she will immediately start making some sort of sputtering noise that may actually be accompanied with bits of spit flying from her mouth. And while there may be a time and place where that would be a good thing, it certainly isn't enough to cause a ten year old boy, running across a crowded battlefield, to drop to the ground, mortally wounded!
On the other hand, if she were to ask the guy to make a gun noise, he would immediately ask "What type and caliber, and would you like semi or fully automatic?" He would then proceed to make rich, deep percussive sounds that would cause every duck and goose within a two-mile radius to instantly crap themselves. Of course then, some other guy would turn and say something like "You know that was really more like an M-16 than an AK-47. You really need to get the machine noise of the bolt action in there. It's more like this..." After a few minutes of this, both guys would realize that the girl who had originally asked the question had since walked off and was now talking to (who else?) the guy in the bar with the most money! The really sad part is that we didn't ca_... Uh…I mean these two geeks wouldn't care.
(This is the part where you're starting to wonder, "Where in the hell is Hawley going with this crap.")
This isn't really about playing Army; it's actually about porn (Isn't everything?). I'll explain. On one specific Sunday (I know it was Sunday because it was garbage night and my strike team and I were always out on garbage night.) my "squad" and I were scouting out the neighborhood. And on Sundays, this included the garbage cans because you never know what you might find. Who knows? Maybe someone will throw away a real AK-47, or $50,000 in cash, or maybe even a human skull...when you’re a 10-year-old boy you have an open mind. This one Sunday we came upon a can half way up the street that had something that seemed familiar in the back of my mind. It was a stack of Playboy magazines! You could just tell at a glance because back then they had this thick stapled spine. Unlike the thin, wimpy spine of other magazines, Playboys were really thick because (a ten year old boy knew this) they were chocked full of stuff we weren’t supposed to look at! Now, the cohesiveness of our neighborhood paramilitary unit was as strong as you could get, but when you stumble upon a cache of Playboys, greed sets in and you start thinking ‘I would trade every one of my friends for this stack in a minute.’ Hell, I'd trade an AK-47, $50,000 in cash AND a human skull for these babies...For God’s sake, I was only 10 years old! Reason got the better of us and we made a plan to get together the next day and review our newfound booty. (Yea…I know...I know...That one was for Darren)
We met the next day in a secure hiding location…a safe house, if you will (actually I think it was the wash behind my house)…and began looking through the magazines. There they were before us…The Holy Grail of boyish adolescence. Real Naked Lady Boobs! These were no saggy National Geographic African Native Boobs. Those are OK when your seven or eight, but I never saw a Kenyan native chick in a frilly red thong sitten’ on Santa’s lap. I mean these things were tan, round, and awsome. I’d always heard about them but words could never have lived up to this. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with them, but I knew that I was supposed to want to do something. We decided to keep the whole stack but we would have to hide them somewhere. The first thing we had to do was cut out all of the pictures and get rid of all the annoying articles. I mean, who in their right mind would be reading when you could be looking at…you know…My god man…Naked Lady Boobs!
Now, I mentioned that the other thing you need for playing army is a good hiding place. And we had dozens. A while back, I had found a plat map of our street that my parents had gotten when they moved in. I made a copy of it (By hand. We didn’t have your new fangled copy machines back then, sonny. Jeeze dude, how old are you anyway?) and we marked all of our hiding places on it. This map was kept hidden in a very secure spot (Who would ever think of looking under my mattress. It was diabolical) because there was no limit to the damage that might occur should this map fall into the wrong hands. Not to mention the devastation that would befall the whole “Hide and Go Seek” industry of Mountain Ave. I had been hiding that for a while so the addition of our “ladies” to the package seemed insignificant. Mom would say, “What’s that?” I would innocently respond “Oh, just maps.” Beautiful!
She found ‘em!
Yea…that’s the one mistake every young lad makes in his life…underestimating the investigative abilities of his mom. I think law enforcement around the world should make a big recruitment push to hire moms everywhere. Criminals would say, “I swear, I have no gun and I never have had a gun.” and this friendly, middle aged, house wife would saunter up and say “Of course not, dear!” She’d run her hand over his head. Give him a little peck on the forehead. And then go to his sock drawer and find the gun…Case closed!
Now here’s the weird part. My mom didn’t do anything. She let me keep them. She just left the room. I knew it had to be some sort of plot but who cares…I have Naked Lady Boobs to look at! I immediately took it to the next level. Yea…that’s right…I took out all the centerfolds and tacked them to the walls. I was surround by what I will now refer to as NLB’s (naked lady boobs). Man I was cool! Later, my dad came home and my mom said, “Your son has something he’d like to show you in his room.” He walked in as I lounged on my bed. He looked around the room and then back at me. I, with my smirk, thinking something like the 1970’s equivalent of “Yea…that’s right…these are my bitches (…well…in…10…or 15 years anyway.)” He nodded recognition of what I had done with a look on his face as if he was thinking to himself, ‘Enjoy the moment son because the world is going to crush you like a walnut later in life and you’ll need moments like this to remember’ and he walked out. This was not nearly as fun as I thought it was going to be. Where’s the “eyes popping out of the head” and the yelling? A few days later I got bored and took them down. “I got to find me some new bitches!”
My grandmother heard about the incident and the next time she came out to visit, she promptly bought me a fresh copy of Playboy. I felt very grown up. Of course you have to play it cool when you’re looking at the NLB’s in front of someone else. Don’t want them to think you’re obsessed. ‘Maybe I’ll pause at this article about the White House for a moment, just to throw them off the scent.’ ‘OK that’s long enough.’ Later on, and I have no idea how this got started, it became a tradition to put a Playboy magazine in my stocking at Christmas. It never failed. Every Xmas morning it was there. (And they wondered why I was always the first one down) One year my sister even brought my stocking up to me. There I lay in my bed on Christmas morning “reading”(wink, wink) Playboy and listening to carols. It gave new meaning to the passage “o’r the hills we go.” Just think if that tradition had caught on back in the early days. Tiny Tim standing on his chair…A feeble little voice saying “God bless us, every one…especially that fine looking bitch on page 73.” Ah…you gotta love Dickens!
To this day, at my house, if someone says something about ”Maps”, everyone looks at me and grins. (I think it’s rather ironic I graduated with a degree in Geography.) Now, you’re still, most likely, wondering “Why this laborious story about hiding porn?”
Well, something recently happened that made me think about this.
My dad came down to help me wire my new garage and one of the first things we had to do was take down the plywood ceiling of the original carport. We were on the second to last sheet of wood and as we lowered one end, something slid off and landed on the floor. We set that piece in the pile and I went back to investigate. It was a brown paper bag and inside was, you guessed it, porn. Actually, it was really pathetic porn. They were swinger magazines printed in black and white with amateur photos of 40something housewives. There were also a number of condoms (unused, thankfully). At first I thought it was a kindred spirit hiding his porn from his parents. But what would a kid be doing with condoms? The kids who lived here were rather young. I now imagine these belonged to the dad who was, perhaps, stepping out with the gals in the ads. They were getting divorced as the house was being sold.
Oh well. Look on the bright side. At least it wasn’t a human skull!
// posted by Chris @ Monday, July 12, 2004
