Monday, September 15, 2014

Toe Aroma!

I guess it's time I tell this story. 

It's a dumb one, I'll grant you, but still...I just can't resist. 

Back when I was a kid, magazines were how we got our porn.  Sometimes my friend's dad would leave one behind and while his parents were out we'd watch it for a bit.  That was big news back then.  The VCRs were all 80 lbs and huge.  Only one store in town had tapes.  Half the store was BETA, the other half VHS.  There was one small section for video disks--which is what my dad bought because the technology was crap and it was being phased out, so his great idea was to buy into it as it became obsolete.  Great deals to be found in dying, obsolete technology! 

But when I was a freshman in high school, I worked at a news and magazine store.  They had porn magazines in the back.  Once in a while, I'd sneak through and borrow a couple.  Because I had to be quick, I never really looked at what I was taking, and wouldn't know until I got home to see the score. 

One time I accidentally grabbed a fetish magazine about foot and nylon fetishes.  It was called Leg Show and let me say this--it was the funniest damn thing I'd read in a long time.

Pictures of women's feet and legs.  Pages and pages of feet.

I didn't get it.  I didn't get any of it.

There were pictures of fat, hairy guys being stood on by women in heels.  And they were ugly women, too.  The kind that hang out in those shitty old people's bars and wear tons of make-up.  These women were in their 40's and 50's and dressed in early 1960's styles.  One had a woman sucking her own toes.

My friends and I had a great laugh about this.  We'd drag our feet through the hallways at school and say we were jacking off.  We didn't have a clue and that made it all the funnier to us.  One time, Mrs. Wade in math class asked us why we kept shuffling our feet while we sat at our desks.  We couldn't stop laughing the rest of the hour. 

But the cartoons were the best.  This magazine had cartoons of leg teasing and foot fetish fantasies.  One of these had a woman teasing some guy in a city park and at one point, he sniffs the air and then looks down at her feet while exlaiming, "Toe Aroma!"

Toe Aroma!

The cartoonist even drew a picture of the women's toes with those little squiggly lines coming off because apparently they stunk.  And this guy was totally digging that so much, he had to exclaim, "Toe Aroma!"

That became our battle cry in high school for a while.  Toe Aroma!

Have a bad day?  Toe Aroma!

Teacher was stupid?  Toe Aroma!

That girl I had a crush on was making faces at me like I was the most disgusting piece of shit she'd ever seen?  Toe Aroma!

After a while, the fun stopped and we moved on to other things, mainly because we were getting our driver's licenses soon.  That sort of inside humor never lasts long anyway.

But every once in a while, I feel the need to exclaim loudly, "Toe Aroma!"

Life is absurd and makes no sense.  Toe Aroma!

The people we fall in love with are terrible for us and the ones we cannot stand care about us.  Toe Aroma!

The more you care about somebody, the worse they are for you.  Toe Aroma!

We work stupid jobs that really shouldn't be jobs that pay money.  Telemarketer?  That can't possibly be profitable.  You call people all day and annoy them while giving your company a bad reputation as annoying and intrusive?  Toe Aroma!

The people you want to throttle and slap the shit out of the most are the ones who offer the most to lose.  Toe Aroma!

Maybe that was our version of Douglas Adams Hitchhikers series.   Our need for surreal humor just so we could get through the horrors of being trapped in a Catholic high school surrounded by snobby shitheads who had known each other since kindergarten.  Myself and only a few others were new to that system and would never fit in.  We needed something so our brains didn't explode. 

Shouting gibberish out of a porn magazine seemed to really do the trick. 

So I'll leave you with that truth--when things are stupid and don't make sense, shout, "Toe Aroma!"  It won't help anything be more easily understood but it will help you not care. 

And as I get older, not caring is just as important as understanding. 

Toe Aroma! 

1 comment: