The Porn Fairy

Hello, Dear Reader.

This one is going back a few years but you may still find it vaguely amusing...

I've started walking everywhere. Public transportation is the opiate of the lazy man. I save about five minutes talking a bus to, say, Halifax Shopping Center but I'm $2.00 in the hole and I've been exposed to public germs so virulent it makes the Andromeda Strain look like Strep Throat.

Anyway, as a reward for my diligence, I got a visit from the "Porn Fairy". I don't know if anyone else has received her favors but I'm willing to bet someone out there knows what I'm talking about.

In fact, a few years ago I can remember some "friends" of mine regaling me with a good yarn about their first visit from the "Porn Fairy". They were all in Senior Elementary at the time and while en route to "Woolworths" one day they came across the mother lode: a stack of the nastiest, filthiest, skankiest expired porno mags bundled together behind a dumpster.

Being, young, brave, and chronically horny, they overlooked their location and the state they were in and smuggled them into the home of someone who had either lost or won a draw.

At the nerve center they hastily divided up the clandestine wares. As soon as this was accomplished a series of transparent excuses to go home suddenly took to the air. The intrepid "Fellowship of Smut" disbanded without further ago and it's individual members rushed home to do lawn mowing, homework, and, should time permit, masturbate like a pack of overheated chimps.

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that I didn't know these people at the time of this...*ahem*...visit.

But this is not to say that I haven't been smiled upon by the "Porn Fairy". Maybe not in the same epic scale, but I have.

A few years ago my girlfriend and I were having supper at "Pizza Delight" and I went to the washroom to scrub down to the elbow (we'd gotten there by bus). Well, in the stall on top of the toilet paper dispenser (which was obviously doubling as an ersatz magazine rack) was a copy of "Hustler". Just sitting there. And I ain't talkin' about one of those little flimsy issues, I'm talkin' about one of them big, thick honkin' annual type deals with a red cover and a totally naked model on the cover.

Which brings me to some thoughts about the nature of the medium. I fear that, to an extent, pornography is a necessary evil. I say evil because most so-called "professional" porn is truly garish, exploitative and demeaning. It reduces sex to to a robotic, gynecological commodity. But erotica in some form or another will always exist. It's been around as long as people have had blank cave bathroom walls to decorate.

I just wish that it's industry peddlers had a modicum of taste. Do the covers of these things lend the internet-deprived any shred of dignity or a semblance of conscience to purchase in plain view? Or the contents concealed inside for that matter? I dunno, I guess that's the point...

Anyway, my reaction to the new meaning of "Pizza Delight" was the same as it was the other day. En route to Halifax Shopping Center, 8:30 am Dutch Village Road is a raging river of roiling traffic, fueled by the residential tributaries spilling out of Clayton Park, Rockingham Ridge and Fairview. The morning-huggers are milling around in the "Shoppers Drug Mart" parking lot like zombies from a George Romero film, the only difference is that these fiends eat Tim Horton's coffee cup rims instead of brains.

Amidst this suburban hell devoid of any aesthetic value (like, for example, a tree), I approach a gravel parking lot next to a gas station that ran dry years ago and now lies abandoned. I'm puffing up the dip in the road, handicapped by the lethal levels of automobile exhaust in the air and the perverse angle of the morning sun.

And there it is on the sidewalk just ahead: an issue of "Swank" spreadeagled out in front of me, all black leather, beads, stiletto heels, hair (of varying types) and blood-red talons. Not attractive but still strangely compelling.

I'm stuck dead in my tracks as if I've trod in the result of this thing sitting here. I look at it and look around. Something strange happens. The torrent of traffic becomes a dribble. Everyone seems to vanish. I'm in some sort of weird porn nirvana.

Within this "Star Trekkian" glitch in the space-time continuum I have more than ample opportunity to snatch (?) the thing up and backpack it. But instead I just stand there gaping at it. I root it around with my foot like a dead badger on the shoulder of the TCH. But for the life of me I can't bring myself to pick it up.

Mr. Scott comes through for me and I willingly come back to real-time. I turn on my heel, leaving the "Porn Fairy's" gift for me behind, for someone younger and less...*ahem*...anal to covet.

Please, "Porn Fairy", don't take this as a final rebuke. It's just that the thought of your gift being discovered on the floor of a public bathroom, on a sidewalk or behind a dumpster just isn't the most...hygienic delivery channel in the world. After all, it might be carrying the kinda germs that makes Ebola look like a mild case of psoriasis.

So until my crippling fear of microscopic boo-baggers begins to subside I fear that I cannot accept your generous but ill-gauged offerings. Now, if you wanna leave one in my mailbox, well, y'know...then we'll talk.

Oh, and in case you're interested, the magazine was gone later that day.

EPIC: http://www.thenewpornographers.com/media.html

FAIL: http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html