Friday, December 29, 2006

happy goddam holidays

The Season of Love was rough this year -- eight days of canned beets and escalating tension in East Jesus Nowhere with my family, culminating in a dramatic, albeit temporary, disownment on Christmas Eve, and an offer to drive me to the bus station in cold rain and return me to Texas like a wrong-size sweater.

On a brighter note, my bestest friend from high school was visiting her own set of relatives in the area, so I cut down to visit on Christmas proper, and from there on things were pretty sweet. Her mom and stepdad are gentle and kind and spread a mean table. Also, they have a hot tub. Naturally, it wouldn't be Christmas in the boonies without fire-arms, and we spent a satisfying afternoon on the day after Christmas shooting handguns at a salt lick in an abandoned coal pit. It was pretty sweet.

On Wednesday, back to the airport, where the sight of the Starbuck's made me feel safe and warm. My friend back to the Beltway to make grief for former student-government presidents who think a lifetime of kissing ass qualifies them to run the free world. Me to get naked for strangers.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying, sorry I haven't written in a while, and P., if you don't know it, you saved Christmas for me.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

hot streak

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

itch

I'm under the influence of wierd stars, friends. For a while it seemed like the short days had me hobbled at the knee. When you consider that I go to bed most nights at 4 am and wake up around noon or after, that's a severely truncated ration of daylight. The old disorder has been flaring up. December is always a hard month.

My clinician has been liberal about doubling and tripling my medications on demand, though, and so far things have stayed tame. No howling fits of despair; just a dreamy melancholy, voluptuous and self-absorbed like the early, almost pleasant episodes I remember from my teens.

Meanwhile, increased dosage of the old SSRI's has tilted my brain chemistry around so that it is ridiculously easy to get aroused and pretty near impossible to get off, inducing a state of mild, chronic sexual frustration. The resulting fog of sex pheremones has men following me around the grocery store and tripping over themselves at the club to paper my path with money. This weekend I broke my previous (quite respectable) record for most money earned in a single evening, and also set a personal record for most songs consecutively lap-danced --25. This ammount of attention and success when I want nothing so much as to be home in bed all day under blankets has me walking around with my hair standing on end.

Not to mention that popularity never makes you popular. Other dancers tend to like me -- I'm free with my cigarettes and I talk no shit. But there's been a distinct coolness in the dressing room since I started my hot streak. Twice, guys have actually sent the dancer sitting with them to go and find me. From a customer's perspective, this might not seem like such an insult, but trust me, every dancer born hears this as, "You're ugly. Could you please go get the pretty girl?" The gossip starts right away. Any time any dancer does well, there's a little coven in the dressing room, whispering. <You know what I heard she does? She lets them put their...> Then everybody stops as you walk past, and stares. Oh, well. It'll blow over. Not that I give a fuck, really.

But the topper was the sudden reappearance of Joe (on the immediate tail of the the World's Longest Lapdance) come to train his charm and WASP-ish good-looks and large vocabulary on me like a jacklight on a deer. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure I like Joel that much and now he's in my head again, stuck like a catchy song. I went home that night and fucked my boyfriend till dawn. Woke up with scarlet hickies all over my breasts. Something else I haven't had since my teens.

I'm rich. I'm irritated. My shins are bruised. I'm tired. I'm disliked. And I'm still horny.

Friday, December 01, 2006

I'm back, motherfuckers

Man, sometimes -- not often, but sometimes -- this job is so retardedly easy it almost kind of sucks. Seriously, like taking candy from a baby. Which is not strictly the most ethical thing one can do, although candy is bad for babies and you can rationalize anything.

Like, sometimes it's as easy as walking into the bar in a t-shirt and jeans and throwing a casual smile at the guy sitting by the bar, not really even seeing his face, but he is the only person there more or less, and you are trying to get into the swing of smiling at people, and WHOOMP, that is totally it. By the time you are suited up and ready to roll, that guy -- a jug-eared thirty-something surveyor who has injured his shoulder and is temporarily dismissed from his job, with time to kill and the proceeds of a freshly-cashed worker's compensation check in his pocket which he is absolutely positively bound and determined to blow on somebody or something RIGHT NOW -- is hunting for you high and low. He likes your eyes and your smile and your dress and your shoes and your laugh and your ponytail and if there is any way he could buy two dances from you at once and thus spend money on you even faster, he would be doing it. (You have a twinge of conscious about taking his money, but it is simply and literally the truth that if it weren't you it would be any some one of these other girls, so what the hell.)And every time he gets up to go to the bathroom or you walk across the room to get some water there is some other guy, like maybe a bearded employee of the forrestry service, who is tapping you on the shoulder and asking if he can't get oh, maybe just one or two dances from you really quick until eventually you are palming the first guy off on friends of yours because you have so many customers lined up waiting for you that it's getting ridiculous. And then you tip all the staff a million dollars and everybody loves you and you come home and have a slice of pie.

If I could, I would french myself right now. Goddamn. Nothing cures the wintertime blues like a crisp stack of C-notes.