While we're working on a loose theme, I need to talk about the great Blondes, Brunettes, and Redheads disaster of 1997. That was the year that ETP and I turned 18. We had one friend, though, who turned 18 several months ahead of us. His birthday was in February, while ETP doesn't turn older until May and I don't get mine until June. So this was like a big deal, right? We finally have a friend who can go and just walk into a store and buy porn. Sure, we had the Internet, but that was still the days of slow-ass dialup. So yeah, big deal.

In the Denver area, we have a chain of stores called Newsland. I don't know if their empire expands beyond Denver, but whatever. Anyway, they have a fairly sizable section of skin rags (or at least, they used to). Once this friend of ours turned 18, we were immediately like "Dude, can you go buy us some porn?" Of course, back in that day, "porn" to us was still issues of Playboy and shit, as opposed to things involving a man, another man, a midget and a woman doing things to a donkey or a monkey fucking a coconut. But I'm getting away from our story.

So we go to Newsland, and I specifically ask this kid to check out Playboy's Newsstand Special (now known as Special Editions; you know, the ones chock-full of ultra-softcore pictures but mercifully few words) entitled, yup, you guessed it, Blondes, Brunettes, and Redheads. I even gave the kid CASH to take with him into Newsland.

Now, if you were anyone else, what would you think? That maybe I wanted you to buy this particular issue? No, of course you wouldn't. You'd go inside, check out the issue, then come back emptyhanded so that I have nothing to look at when I'm full-handed later on that evening. You know, looking back, I'll bet that pussy didn't even go into the porn section to look at things, because he was a dipshit about that kind of stuff.

I never forgave him for that, but that was the least of our issues as things really went downhill in terms of our relationship with him several years later on. One of these days I'll get to the story of how we ruined that kid's wedding.