Long ago, when I was still but a whelp of a child, I plied the trade of a ship's boy, an occupation into which I fell after the tragic circumstances1 befell the dakotan compound wherein I was born left me to fend for myself at a tender age, a misfortune that I first dealt with by working my way o'er the Boundary Waters by way of trapping and selling the hides of the great beavers which still swim through those insect infested bogs until I reached the port city of Duluth wherein a gang of be-shore-leavened sailors, little older in years than myself, but afforded ages of experience of which I had no conception of as of yet encouraged me to wager my beaver-earnings upon a series of dice games of varying honesty, whereby I ended up indentured to the lot of them and thus indirectly press-ganged onto the notorious Ophiucus3 which I was later to discover plied most of it's trade during the New Moon, if you catch the wink I am sending your way, and was later to meet a most untimely end off the Barbary Coast which was to lead to all manner of unexpected outcomes for your narrator which i must refrain from digressing into at this exact moment as this introductory passage grows to ever increasing lengths, much like unto appeared to me the great tendrils of the Kraken that beset my fondly remembered Ophiucus once upon one eternal day in the arctic sea as we had ventured into the northern waters following the direction of some strange lode stone of a curious pseudo-compass that the first mate Randolph had stolen from the carefully locked ivory4 chest of the Filipino Lass he spent one Tuvaluan week-end fucking which was later to lead us in ever decreasing concentric circles about an immense iceberg, frozen inside of which was what appeared to us a gigantic series of nested catacombs containing any number of peregrinate relics which we initially viewed a fantastic treasures but later were to understand were possible the worst degree of curse.
There were numerous entertainments to be held by a naive soul as I fancy I was at the time, mostly belonging to the aerthly realm populated by cussing, beer drinking, advanced spitting, and introductory whore-mongering. But out of all the past-times indtroduced to myself during that time, the one that remains a fond divergence even to this day is the evening enjoyment of pulp magazines. The lurid titles and eye catching (and gregariously assumed) names of the authors fed the fires of my previously rustick imagination. But this is not even to mention the prime appeal of these spirited broadsides: the salacious cover illustrations, practically begging any youth to educate himself on what thrilling and indecorous acts were to be beheld within. Now, with no further mono-logue, allow me to present to you a slim gallery of but a selection of my favorite pulp illustrations. Onwards!
1which I will speak little of at this point other than that they involved a little know even to this day clan-destine sub-division of the US Federal Government's law enforcement agencies which was rumoured to have had it's beginnings under the auspices of Cotton Mather
2which may confuse those who are under the widely held impression that United States of America did not even exist as a political entity at that time, to which I say, there are many histories available to us, the ones we choose to believe as truth are typically more an issue of aesthetics than veracity.
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4"Yet to the touch it somehow felt denser, not in terms of weight, but in, how can I say, palpability? Somewhat like the feeling one gets in a dream when some sound or touch from the waking world interjects and for some half remembered moment dream and reality co-exist as one..."
