A Long Weekend

Paper Heroes Con has ended. I had a lot of fun. Sales were…well, I had a lot of fun, anyway. Jennie Breedan of the Devil’s Panties and I hung around a bit, she’s great company, and we explored the abandoned Belks.* The back rooms of a semi-trashed department store look like a zombie movie waiting to happen. The shoe storage room was particularly freaky. One of the comic book shop guys hosting the place came up to me and said "You want to see the scary place?"

Part of my brain pointed out that when a strange man** asks you if you want to see a scary place, red flags should go up. The other part of my brain shrugged and said "Meh." So he showed me the shoe storage area, and that was awesome. It was two stories, packed tightly with metal shelves, an angular little labryinth barely wide enough to walk through. If you went upstairs, there were no lights, but since the shelves were all two stories, the light streamed up through the cracks around the shelving, making a creepy-underlit maze. Jennie took photos–I’ll drop a link when they go up. There were also rooms of old perfume posters, an empty box advertising "KISS perfume" (for him and her!) an old security room with curling photos of shoplifters, giant safes, and many ruined display cases. It was awesome.

Also, my buddy mckenzee  found a length of metal pipe. They put it within arm’s reach of me. This was a mistake. The pipe is bizarrely seductive. I couldn’t put it down, despite the fact that a woman in leather and monstrous boots smacking a metal pipe into her palm is apparently not conducive to sales. Screw it, I found a new friend. The pipe went into my con kit.

Other adventures included a trip to the adult store with Jennie, where she was recognized as the video blogger from the Devil’s Panties, and I was recognized as the poor woman who’s sex toys had all been stolen. (Sure, nobody recognizes either of us on the street, but you take us into a PORN store, and we’re famous…) While we were there, a trio of giggling girls came in, who were obviously underage, and who were carded and ejected. This would be unremarkable, except that they were wearing headscarves, which made me weirdly happy for some reason–one in the eye of all those people who get grumpy about cultural acclimitization not going fast enough, I suppose.

Anyway, it was a good, if not terribly cash heavy weekend. And now, back to the grind…

*Belks is a department store chain in the South, largely unremarkable among department stores.

**Insert Mae West line here.

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