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From Behind Our White Picket Fence Week 179
By Freddy and Eddy
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Is the Worst Over? We Plot Our Course Forward…

After finally closing our store doors two weeks ago, finding a sub-tenant to occupy the newly empty retail space (we still have 2 ½ years left on our lease, hence it’s not so easy to simply walk away), placing Mom into nursing care, and getting current on our mortgage, we’re finally seeing a few slivers of light peek through our two year period of darkness. Our moods have collectively brightened and life’s hectic pace has slowed considerably, with an ever-so-subtle calm creeping through our household. Revenues from our website are holding steady, if unspectacularly so, meaning we’ll manage to pull through another month of paying our bills and keeping a roof over our heads. In short, we’re feeling validated that closing the doors on the experiment that was Freddy and Eddy – The Retail Store – was the correct course of action and now comes the difficult process of digging out of the financial cave in which we’ve been spelunking.

Where to go from here, however, remains to be seen. Love LA, our adult consumer show slated for summer, may have to be postponed yet again due to harsh economic realities. Vendors and manufacturers continually tell us they’re not only not seeing improvements in orders, but to the contrary are worried that the bottom of our recession may be even further off than the CNN talking heads have predicted. For our online business, we’ve shaved our inventories down to all but the most popular items, leaving remaining items in our catalog to be ordered as needed (“Just in time,” we believe is the proper term). We’ve also cut our non-business spending, outside our home mortgage, utilities, and gas for the car to little more than food, $1.00 Red Box video rentals, and the occasional indulgence for our son. We did step out to see “Star Trek,” this past weekend at $10.00 for each of the three of us (plus another $20.00 in refreshments), but the three hour diversion was more than justified in savings the following day when we decided to cook brunch for Mother’s Day, thereby avoiding the huge expense of a crowded restaurant.

Sexually, we still haven’t broken our pattern of fits and starts, notching a worthwhile encounter only sporadically. As the crest of our personal financial crisis has broken, though, we’ve seen passion make a subtle comeback in our everyday relationship, with an act as simple as holding hands a welcome reminder that intimacy in a 21 year relationship can return to where it began. Hopefully, as our economic military mentality continues to ebb, all of the beautiful qualities we’ve fostered in our lengthy time together will fall back into place, with love replacing fear, calm overtaking panic, and (numerous) sexual adventure replacing conflicts and physical awkwardness.

To that end, we have been slowly reintroducing a few of our favorite sexual pastimes to our nightly ritual, one of which is reading steamy erotic stories aloud to each other. We normally choose tales no more than 3-4 pages long, alternating reading paragraphs or whole pages until reaching the end. If the narratives are decent, we’ll complete 2-3 in a 30 minute period, hopefully turned on by the experience and ready to create a few of our own. The experience can be awkward at first, since many couples’ only experience in eroticism has been to watch porn (which is visual and fairly unchallenging); however, if you can work through a few stories together and allow your imaginations to engage, the result can be as good as – if not better – than watching paid participants engage on screen.

Ah, but where to start? Amazingly, you can find a wide variety of erotic book collections at the local Barnes and Noble. For beginners, we highly recommend the Sweet Life – Erotic Fantasies for Couples series, edited by Violet Blue. With over 21 encounters, most catered specifically toward women, in each volume, the stories themselves range from an adventure at the spa to threesomes to mild BDSM. Once sufficiently turned on and tuned in by Sweet Life, turn to Taboo – Forbidden Fantasies for Couples, again edited by Violet Blue. These are edgier stories, with emphasis on role playing, more extreme bondage, and fetishistic sex. If you like your sexual exchanges rough, this is the collection for you. Finally, if you’re willing to commit to an entire erotic novel, we absolutely love Robert Scott Leyse’s Liaisons for Laughs: Angie & Ella's Summer of Delirium. Leyse is the editor of the popular erotica website Sliptongue and his first book release is fun, steamy, and intelligent.