Things from the Gas Station
About half a mile up the road is a gas station/convenience store. It used to be a Citgo station back before Citgo quit selling in Ohio. [Citgo, I believe is Venezuelan-owned and the president of Venezuela is, of course, Hugo Chavez. You may remember Hugo Chavez as the man Pat Robertson wanted to have whacked and as the man who compared Bush to the devil (which really doesn't narrow things down all that much, but he did it in front of the UN).] 
Now it’s closed.
Not long after I started stopping there I was standing in line and sort of checking out the things behind the counter. There were the tobacco products, lottery tickets and, of course, soft-core porn DVDs.
The DVDs caught me off guard. I’d been in the store dozens of times and I’d never seen them. They weren’t displayed in an in-your-face manner and I wondered if they ever sold any of them. Despite the fact I sometimes make reference to Ron Jeremy I really don’t know all that much about porn (except for the fact that, like most guys, I like it … and I say that just for effect, Mom … if I liked it I’d probably know more about it) but it seemed to me, based on the titles, that this was probably B-level soft-core porn; not your high level hard core stuff. I doubt that any of the titles would have been a current-day Debbie Does Dallas, Behind the Green Door or Deep Throat (which I think are hard core titles, but, for all I know, are pretty tame and available behind the counter at United Dairy Farmers and In-N-Out Burgers all across the country). 
Wait, I did see a really bad copy of Debbie Does Dallas about 22 years ago. This, if your porn-history is as bad as mine, is the porno flick that doesn’t start with a young guy delivering pizza to a group of women having a candle party.
Anyway, months passed. One day I noticed the porno DVDs were gone from the Citgo. The guy behind the counter didn’t know where they’d gone but said he was never aware that they’d sold any of the movies.
Now, as I’ve said, the Citgo station is closed.
I don’t know that the two are related… but I don’t know that they’re not.
