Reading a thread at the SA forums tonight, which began with the question : "Did you ever find porn in the woods as a child?"
My immediate answer was "Yeah! I did!" And apparently dozens of other goons did too, leading to the positing of a magical Johnny Pornoseed who long ago in a more idyllic age travelled the byways of North America and charitably scattered dirty pictures in the forests for pubescent males to discover and cherish. Astonishing. Something I'd never thought about as a common experience, hadn't really thought about in decades, but there it is : finding porn in the woods is something that many many young men have experienced.
And what a joyous, revelatory experience it is, too! Explains the fervor of a lot of Green Party members, I reckon.
One SA Goon said this, which is so evocative for me of my teenage hunger for porn :
I will never forget the smell of rained on porn mags that have been dried up. For me, it's the smell of porn.
What's f--ked up though, is that to this day, my brain associates the smell of ferns with porn. No lie. We hid our rescued stash in a small cave that was hidden by a blanket of ferns.
The reason I talk about this, though, is because it reminded me of what I like to think of as one of my more amusing off-the-cuff comments, one of the proud random snapshots from my life that I like to remember when I'm in need of proof that I'm not a complete moron.
It was Edinburgh, Scotland, in the winter of 1998, I think. Me and Rick (of whom I've spoken many times before) and the Bearman and Stiffy The Magic Austrian were living in a B&B in Portobello, which is a grey concrete seaside suburb of Edinburgh (which we customarily referred to as Edithburg, just to be annoying), perched like a frozen dog turd on the southern edge of the Firth of Forth.
For some reason, while drinking the cheap Hungarian wine ('Blood of The Bull') that fueled my joyous and aimless unemployment at the time, I'd gotten it into my head that I was infallible at finding sexy bits in novels. I'd sit down with Rick or Barry and make them riffle through the book of their choice. I'd melodramatically stick my finger into the flying pages, and 4 times out of 5, stop the cascade on a page that contained some sort of sexuality. It was downright spooky. But an amusing party trick.
So. One afternoon we're walking back from downtown Edinburgh, which was only couple of kilometres away, through the shortcut alleyway which bore a sign that designated it, colourfully enough, as the 'Fishwives' Causeway'. Some way along the narrow, high-walled, piss-reeking, dogturd-littered alley through which we meandered, I spied a flash of colour to the side, investigated it, and discovered it to be a Nudie Magazine. Huzzah!
Says I off the cuff, as I reach in under the vines to peel it off the asphalt, breathing deeply of that magazine-that's-been-rained-on scent, unmindful of possible cooties : "Not only can I find sex passages in books, I can find sex books in passages!"
Much hilarity ensues, hindered only by the lack of a laff-track and rimshot.
Having actually written the little story down, I now realize how lame that comment actually was. I swear to god it was funnier'n hell at the time...
Proves, I guess, how deeply unexciting the day to day existence of being a World Traveller can actually be when you get right down to it (at least if you did your travelling with us)...remind me to tell you the tale of Ailsa the Hogmanay Girl sometime, just to balance things out.
So : you ever discovered woodland porno?
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steve said
Yes, actually... some severed pages pressed under a flat rock for 'safekeeping' by somebody to stupid to realize what under-rock moisture does to magazine pages and the fastness of their ink. 'I think it's a naked woman,' we said, 'or perhaps a page from a really bad cookbook.'
More exciting by far was the day some grade seven chums and I found an entire keg in the woods, stashed by highschoolers for a party that evening. Without even a tap, pushing the bearing down to spray beer which we caught in our mouths (and on our clothes and in our hair), we managed to drink the whole thing. That evening, when I went to pick up a French exchange student who would be staying with my family, I made (ahem) quite an impression on both the arriving students and the parents of the other preteen hosts.
June 18, 2002 5:41 AM
Richard said
I can't say that I have ever found porn in the woods but I have found it in other places.
When I was a lad my mother lived in an apartment building where I once discovered, near the garbage bin, an issue of Playboy that seemed like a rare treasure at the time. I still remember the centerfold model after all these years.
There were other instances of mens magazines turning up in unexpected places as well, as if some god of the male gaze was answering the prayers of my young hormones.
I think your Johnny Pornoseed ventured into urban areas on occassion.
June 18, 2002 8:40 AM
ruzz said
I'm with you on that, we often found magazines in alleys. It was all fun and games until we found one with pictures of a hermaphrodite and having no working knowledge on how this could be possible it sorta soured the alley porn. You just never knew what you would find if you opened them.
that and mom gave the requisite "I'm disappointed in you for looking at that filth" speech and she weaves guilt the way grandmothers weave things that need to be woven (Ack! what does get woven, Im out of my depth).
I thought the bit about sex books in passages was ridiculously funny.
June 18, 2002 11:16 AM
Kermix said
I had porn accidentally delivered to me in the space between the drawers of a huge hand-me-down dresser. It was a Penthouse (not the pre-insertion-era, either), and if I recall, the dresser was being dropped off by my girlfriend (at the time)'s mother. Needless to say, we were ALL a bit confused.
Incidentally, I thought your punchline was much more amusing than it may appear to read, probably because I could visualize the event as I was reading it.
June 18, 2002 4:08 PM
ruzz said
To quote the hip in relation to the above comment (a little canadiana for Steve, who must dearly miss good ol canada)
"Why do you look at that playboy cunt, when you see me naked anytime you want?"
Ladies, don't get your back up, i dont like the word much either :)
June 18, 2002 6:59 PM
bearman said
Hmmm, young man, driving parents car, buys a playboy magazine, drives out to the woods, wonders where he's gonna hide it, realises that mum'll find no matter what, tosses it out the window where it'll be found weeks later by twelve year old boys. They turn sixteen, do the same thing, repeat, repeat, repeat..
June 18, 2002 9:11 PM
Eeksy-Peeksy said
This found porn? I think it's a disposal problem. A guy could hide magazines under a bed or in a closet one by one, month by month, but when it's time to lose the stuff in a heap, a garbage bag full of Chunky Monkeys or whatever would be just too risky to leave sitting in front of your home. So they are smuggled out into the wild and flung from the windows of moving cars.
I have kicked at found one-handed literature at the side of the road, turned a few pages with the toe of a boot, but never picked the stuff up. There must be way more than enough DNA on those pages to clone the guys who owned them.
June 18, 2002 10:40 PM
eyeballkid said
Never in a forest, but in alleyways, bushes, streets. It seemed that in my youth, porn be growin' on trees. When I was 11, one of the neighbor kids and I found a stash of maybe a decade's worth of Playboy tied up like newspapers and sitting in the middle of an alley. It was like XXX-mas!
June 18, 2002 11:27 PM
ruzz said
Seems a more relevant question is: Have you ever left porn in an alley or woods?
I havent, other than porn I found there in the first place.
June 19, 2002 7:18 AM
phil said
we used to find porn in the woods regularly and as a child i always used to take it home and show my father what i had found, they were always conviscated. but i never learned. he must have had a right stash.
October 19, 2003 6:59 AM