your basement's on fire would make a delightful in store euphimsim

[foxtongue]

ScanImage171
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

There is something startling about the first kiss. It's always a surprise, even if you've known for a year that it was coming.

I wore a police cap in the store today. It kept falling forward onto my eyes, resting on my glasses and obscuring my vision. Someone said it looked too appropriate to be sexy and I laughed. My sleeves are pink silk today, and everything else is covered in wine velvet. I look as if I dressed to span three centuries and I forgot to brush my hair. It floated in a tousled corona of cloud around my head until I went out into the rain to fetch us tea from the Starbucks on the corner. I stood a minute outside the shop while my hands were slowly scorched by the cups of hot water and looked up into the sky, fascinated by the feeling of light wind and water falling out of the heavens, feeling a moment like I was alive instead of pretending to be infatuated by a little grinding retail life. It soaked me enough that I could tie my hair in a passable knot and be done with it. I'm fairly certain my manager didn't notice the delay. She stands outside intermittently and smokes.

Every time I approach the red velvet curtain that separates the store proper from the storage area haphazardly filled with sex toys, I face a a row of unpleasantly shiny vaginas in clear cases winking at eye level and inwardly wince. It's a vision of cheaply kept entertainment, our back area. The door to our bathroom has broken off its hinges. To the left plastic bins messily marked ANAL (small) and HARD DILDOES in block letters with black permanent marker are stacked on cheaply made metal shelves, to the right is a wall plastered in tiny crabby notes on how to properly run the store written by people who aren't familiar with what needs to be done. I am continually impressed at how difficult it is to find anything in a place where black marker writing is on everything. LIGHTSWITCH, ALLURE, NIPPLE CLIPS, ALL CROTCHLESS PANTIES, POCKET ROCKETS, REMEMBER TO TURN OFF THE LIGHTS, SOFT VIBRATORS, ANKLE CUFFS, MENS, ALL GARTER BELTS, PLEASE REMEMBER TO REMOVE BATTERIES FROM TOYS BEFORE PUTTING THEM BACK ON THE WALL, BEADS, BOOTY SHORTS. It just goes on, and yet everything is moved every day. It would be an adventure if the prizes were anything I wanted to find.

Comments

[asrei.livejournal.com]

... Jesus, you are one very beautiful woman Jhayne.
Every time I see a photo of you - I quietly melt.

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

That one's about a year old, last December maybe.

[michel-lacombe.livejournal.com]

Ah, so you're all dried up and wrinkled now.

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

You only haven't noticed because I'm too far away.

[michel-lacombe.livejournal.com]

Distance makes the heart grow selectively nearsighted.

[abracas.livejournal.com]

I dunno...theres something about sex stores that reduces lust to a pale imitation, a surreal cavelcade of imitations....

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

I need out before I'm ruined, i figure.

[abracas.livejournal.com]

yeh..I guess it could burn you out..I had a friend who did phone sex..same thing..aftre three months she couldn't bear to be touched by anyone...

[silver-notebook.livejournal.com]

I feel such a prude when I question how anyone can find all that nasty, cheap plastic contrivance in any way sexy, and any humour of it must wear thin pretty quickly, especially when so much of it looks wincingly uncomfortable.

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

The number of gaudy GLO-IN-THE-DARK items outnumbers the tasteful ones to the point where it hurts to think about it. The descriptions on the boxes went to being slightly unbelievable to more than a little baffling when I discovered that there are people who find these badly packaged, slightly leery products attractive.

[mad-and-crazy.livejournal.com]

Two random incomplete notes: the interspersal of the ordinary and the kinky (the banal and the anal?) in the list of things written in black marker is a wonderful literary device, and it's a hell of a thing for a man to wake up in the morning, check his LJ friendslist, and to find your cleavage pointed at him. Put that stuff away before you cause injury!

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

A) it's worse in person. really. that's perhaps the slightest list I could have given you.

B) bloody well too late, mate. too damned late.

[ennazu.livejournal.com]

I suppose it would depend what kind of sex shop you work at. You have your run-of-the-mill sex shops, like the kind that are downtown, and you have ones like Venus Envy (http://www.venusenvy.ca/Ottawa/index.asp) in Ottawa. Though I've never been (I keep meaning to), Womyn's Ware sounds very similar.

[mad-and-crazy.livejournal.com]

See also this

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

Womyn's Ware is friendly in narrow sort of way. They piss a lot of people off, but they're also very positive in their influence. I work at a sort of halfway shop. We're more known for having sexy costumes and fetish things than for toys. I mention the toys more only because they're getting to me more and more as time passes by rather than the other way around. i like selling corsets and latex stockings. I think those things are positive. in theory, I actually find selling toys a positive thing too, it's just that in practise, it's beginning to wear at me in sneaky psych ways.

[bloodykitty.livejournal.com]

nice tit shot, yo. :P

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

As if I could help it. Nyah.

I had someone recently think I was a boy faking being a girl on-line. How's that for a surreal thought?

[bloodykitty.livejournal.com]

omg! you mean, you're not?!

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

Shocking revelation, no? I had everyone fooled.

[michel-lacombe.livejournal.com]

And hiring a model for all the photo shoots? Or were they blind?

[kahoki.livejournal.com]

Yes, working in a sex shop will be the next untapped territory for Reality Television, as humor, sex, and pathos would abound with every episode. Interestingly, it seems that a sex store would have its own vinacular when it came to people and situations unique or significant to the industry.

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

So farm y only languagw shift is in knowing a bit better how to describe certain kinds of clothing. I went in with quite a bit of my own lexicon.