Look, as I see it, you NEVER waste a coupon.

That's how our latest mommy-daughter outing ended up being the kid and I in an um, er, ah marital aids store testing out lubes. Fortunately, she's now too old for this sort of behaviour to be considered child abuse, although I'm not ruling out the possibility that she is permanently scarred by the ordeal.

I am a past customer of a very woman friendly co-operative called Come As You Are (is that not the perfect name for a marital aids store, or what?) and they just recently opened a branch in Montreal. They sent me two discount coupons.

DISCOUNT COUPONS.

The problem was that the store is way the heck out on St. Laurent Boulevard and I am severely directionally impaired. Severely. I can navigate addresses that don't involve more than one bus change and one Metro (subway) change. After that the odds of me finding either my destination or returning to my home base are about equal to me being named Queen of the World. The kid took pity on me and agreed to take me there.

At the moment, Venez Tels Quels is a pretty small operation, just one good-sized room. But the atmosphere was wonderfully wholesome and the women who worked there were knowledgeable, matter-of-fact, and helpful.

There are certain things I've never considered buying from a catalogue because there are certain things I want to, well, you know, handle. Get a sense of. It's one thing to look at a picture of something, it's quite another to actually uh, work with it.

There was a wall with vibrators. Brightly coloured vibrators of various sizes, textures and power. Some of them were amazingly anatomically correct and if they were also in scale, then there are some men out there who could answer to the name Seabiscuit.

Good Lord.

A person could play with the vibrators if they wanted to, since there was a demo model of each. The sales clerk was showing a woman the options on a bright blue number that not only vibrated, but also oscillated at the same time. It had settings that seemed to go from "Hi, nice to meet you" all the way to "Honey, who needs a man?"

There was also a large shelf of lubes, including flavoured lubes, with testers. When I was a child I would gleefully squirt myself with perfume from almost every tester at the cosmetics counter. You can well imagine my delight at being able to play with small bottles of gooey stuff, especially flavoured gooey stuff.

This is not the sort of thing they sell out in the boonies where I live.

Now you would think that gooey stuff is gooey stuff, but you would be so very, very wrong. There are various textures in the wonderful world of goo and a person is well advised to explore the goo, get to know the goo.

So I popped open the first lid on the squeezable goo tester and squeezed tentatively. No goo. I shook the bottle and could feel there was goo in there, so I squeezed a bit harder. Still no goo. I gave the bottle a serious squeeze and whatever obstruction had stood between the goo and I getting to know one another popped out.

Only, so did A LOT of goo. There was a generous, uh, ooze of goo on my fingers. Suddenly I had a glimmer of how it must have felt to get slimed in Ghostbusters. Slung over the wrist of the hand that had received the shot of goo was a bag of used books I'd bought earlier that afternoon.

The bag was the victim of a random, senseless drive-by sliming. If any of you has a fetish that involves slippery bags full of books, I can tell you with complete confidence that a product called Liquid Silk will fulfill all your goo needs.

My daughter confiscated the bag of books right after we got it cleaned up and jammed it in her purse. Clearly she felt I was not smart enough to play with goo and hold books at the same time. You can well imagine my pain.

In the end (SHUT UP that was NOT a pun) I decided that there is no substitute for actual clinical testing. So I purchased small sample packages of all the bits of goo goodness and the brain trust at MarnCo Labs, a wholly owned subsidiary of MarnCo--the ruthless multinational behind The Big Adventure--will conduct trials.

Hope I can keep the Ghostbusters theme out of my head, eh.

--Marn

Tomorrow morning is The Jog for the Jugs! The weather forecast is for cold and rain. I beg each and every one of my three loyal readers to please send sunshine thoughts up towards Montreal for tomorrow morning. It will be a miserable experience, otherwise.

Behold the power of pretty please covered with sprinkles! Here's the new inductees into the Bazonga Boosters Hall o' Fame, kind-hearted souls who have decided to spend some of their hard-earned buckazoids supporting me as I run the Jog for the Jugs Oct. 5 in Montreal.