Even though my life is a constant, swirling vortex of male sexual attention and proximity thereof, I can't handle it when I sense another woman in the immediate sphere of a man I like. My woman's intuition always tingles when someone with whom I'm even a little bit involved is seeing another girl or is around one who likes him a lot. I can feel the bitter tension in the air like a thunderstorm about to cause an unhappy downpour, for me, at least. I've been getting to know someone and have been feeling joyful lately, but I can tell all that is about to change, somehow.
I can dish it out but I can take it... however, the difference is, I'm not going to have sex with anyone, let alone be intimate with more than one person at a time. Unless you consider getting nude for hundreds of strangers a week intimate, sigh. But that's just a professional thing.
Maybe I should give up dating forever.
I think about it often.
My romantic relationships never seem to last.
I never do consider marrying for security to be a real option, and since I have never been in love, maybe marriage will remain permanently out of the question for me. It's just that I don't know what else to want for my adult life.
Sometimes it's as though I can feel life as I know it winding down altogether. I feel like a clock made gradually aware that I have been keeping time for a purpose no longer relevant, surrendering the momentum of my useless machinations until, at last, I am silent and still.
What can it all mean? Death? A life-altering revelation that dramatically makes defeat of my personality and lifestyle?
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
A Charnel Chanticleer
"Alas!" said he, "O Chanticleer, alas!
I have to you," said he, "done offense,
In as much as I made you afraid."
-- Chaucer, "The Nun's Priest's Tale"
I had another day off from Tryst today, my only one for the week, and I spent my precious time alone thinking about my astrological prospects for the year.
According to my annual Chinese forecast the next 10 months will be an excellently successful and prosperous period of growth for me.
I'm a rooster, full of ego and vanity as well as ambition and trustworthiness, so, keeping these things in mind, I tried to draw a properly proud and crowing barnyard prince today, as a sort of self-portrait.
However, I soon thought of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, and her disgust for the prospective "one cock of the walk" in her world as well as the many customers I encounter, in turn, who make me feel the same way.
I also thought of Chaucer's Chanticleer, the rooster who dreamed of his own impending death, in the end happily, albeit narrowly averted. I imagined what it would be like to be nearly killed by a flattering, predatory creature, such as the Fox who ensnared Chanticleer, feeling deja vu as the razor-sharp jaws snapped me up and carried me away with devilish swiftness, to a secret lair where I would surely be devoured...
This put me in a disturbed and mordant frame of mind again, so as I drew it seemed as though the rooster's body was sprouting, rotting and going to seed even as I created it.
Today the hollow fruit of my material creativity-- an inevitably stillborn brain-child, which just so happened to be a drawing in this case-- was destined to be a vessel of decay because its genesis was confusion instead of Virtue.
I'll redo it tomorrow when I'm sure I'll be able to draw a bright, happy animal that doesn't look so much like a charnel Chia Pet, to me at least. It has other flaws anyway, as a drawing, and needs another go.
Yes, it's all settled-- tomorrow morning I'll imagine myself as a happy, enthusiastic rooster, overcoming all obstacles and predators, ruling myself primarily and try to envision the customers tomorrow as hens instead. I'll make a beautiful new drawing and go off to dance with a light heart.
PS Went over to my old building to feed Megan's hamsters while she is out of town with her parents in DC. I'm so happy I don't live in that dirty, crackish, wackish apartment building anymore.
I have to you," said he, "done offense,
In as much as I made you afraid."
-- Chaucer, "The Nun's Priest's Tale"
I had another day off from Tryst today, my only one for the week, and I spent my precious time alone thinking about my astrological prospects for the year.
According to my annual Chinese forecast the next 10 months will be an excellently successful and prosperous period of growth for me.
I'm a rooster, full of ego and vanity as well as ambition and trustworthiness, so, keeping these things in mind, I tried to draw a properly proud and crowing barnyard prince today, as a sort of self-portrait.
However, I soon thought of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, and her disgust for the prospective "one cock of the walk" in her world as well as the many customers I encounter, in turn, who make me feel the same way.
I also thought of Chaucer's Chanticleer, the rooster who dreamed of his own impending death, in the end happily, albeit narrowly averted. I imagined what it would be like to be nearly killed by a flattering, predatory creature, such as the Fox who ensnared Chanticleer, feeling deja vu as the razor-sharp jaws snapped me up and carried me away with devilish swiftness, to a secret lair where I would surely be devoured...
This put me in a disturbed and mordant frame of mind again, so as I drew it seemed as though the rooster's body was sprouting, rotting and going to seed even as I created it.
Today the hollow fruit of my material creativity-- an inevitably stillborn brain-child, which just so happened to be a drawing in this case-- was destined to be a vessel of decay because its genesis was confusion instead of Virtue.
I'll redo it tomorrow when I'm sure I'll be able to draw a bright, happy animal that doesn't look so much like a charnel Chia Pet, to me at least. It has other flaws anyway, as a drawing, and needs another go.
Yes, it's all settled-- tomorrow morning I'll imagine myself as a happy, enthusiastic rooster, overcoming all obstacles and predators, ruling myself primarily and try to envision the customers tomorrow as hens instead. I'll make a beautiful new drawing and go off to dance with a light heart.
PS Went over to my old building to feed Megan's hamsters while she is out of town with her parents in DC. I'm so happy I don't live in that dirty, crackish, wackish apartment building anymore.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Recession Strippers Are a Myth... Or Maybe It just Seems That Way to Me
I wanted to be a stripper long before I was laid off my bread and butter writing job, the one that turned my three week holiday in New York into a permanent thing almost two years ago and ended in November, but I am not sure I ever would have actually taken the plunge if the job market didn't seem so impenetrable at the moment in NYC.
I keep hearing reports about the recession stripper phenomenon, yet I haven't seen any evidence of it. I've worked at three clubs here in NYC, and I have to say, although I only started in late February, I haven't met another American-born woman who could legitimately say she started stripping for the first time recently because she was laid off of her white collar job. In fact, with only a couple of exceptions at each club, no matter how large or posh, I have found that American-born women are nearly as rare as yetis in this industry altogether. Most white girls who dance seem to be Russian, with a smaller percentage of Eastern Europeans thrown into the mix.
I've been asking everyone where the girls born in the US dance here in NYC, and nobody seems to know. They can't all be escorts, can they?
It's a mystery to me...
Though MSNBC says it' a fact:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29824663/
PS Note how uncomfortable the anchor and correspondent appear to be while presenting this segment.
I keep hearing reports about the recession stripper phenomenon, yet I haven't seen any evidence of it. I've worked at three clubs here in NYC, and I have to say, although I only started in late February, I haven't met another American-born woman who could legitimately say she started stripping for the first time recently because she was laid off of her white collar job. In fact, with only a couple of exceptions at each club, no matter how large or posh, I have found that American-born women are nearly as rare as yetis in this industry altogether. Most white girls who dance seem to be Russian, with a smaller percentage of Eastern Europeans thrown into the mix.
I've been asking everyone where the girls born in the US dance here in NYC, and nobody seems to know. They can't all be escorts, can they?
It's a mystery to me...
Though MSNBC says it' a fact:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29824663/
PS Note how uncomfortable the anchor and correspondent appear to be while presenting this segment.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Bed
Unflattering in my opinion mind yet possibly sensuous to a certain sort of sensibility...
Almost universally, compliments now ring hollow in my ears. The pretty face or body one boy or man says I possess is ugly in comparison to that of another, more classically beautiful woman.
Yet how can I honestly say I refuse to derive my identity from my physical characteristics on one hand while vowing to "improve" certain "flaws" through surgery?
I am so confused.
For the first time in a couple of months I wandered into the Pentecostal church near my home Friday night after work, immeasurably worn out after a day of dancing, and heard, for the first time, the songs sung by the congregants as if through a layer of cotton.
Was it simple exhaustion, the demands of my job or the sin that allegedly attends it that made me feel so cut off from the lightning bolt of spiritual intensity and connection I usually feel in that humble, yet vibrant sanctuary?
Time will tell...
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Sensuality and Death, Francis Bacon
Things divine are not attainable by mortals who understand sensual things, but only the light-armed arrive at the summit.
-- Zoroaster
I know I've said this before, but the way the material world constantly deconstructs/decays makes me question the wisdom of constantly investing my time and energy into making my surroundings and physical being more beautiful (to my sensibilities). Basically everything reduces itself to a pile of rubble or compost eventually. This life is so temporary, and my sense of beauty is becoming so inexorably associated with sensual things--especially ones which are made and meant to be commodified-- that I am struggling to find sure footing based on any Virtuous precepts while navigating this slippery slope that is sex industry work. Getting naked for fun and money in order to get plastic surgery may, perhaps, be the equivalent of placing marigolds on a Dia De Los Muertos ofrenda-- a conciliatory gesture made by the quick to bring beauty and enliven to a fear-inducing shrine of death (aka beautifying my imperfect mortal shell as it dies all around me). I fear ugliness and aging in equal measures. Perhaps I am, yet again, constructing my reality on a sure-to-crumble foundation of sand, whose shifting base is creating all this unrest in my soul. After all, it takes just one powerful tide to sweep away a castle made of sand.
This is the essence of separation from spiritual integrity. This is the essence of sin.
I've been jogging endlessly, trying to make up for the week and a half of regular exercise my recent illness caused me to miss, and yesterday I came upon a remarkable documentary of the painter Francis Bacon. Like Egon Schiele, his work possesses a mesmerizing, inky depth of morbidity that appeals to me when I'm in depressed and confused in the midst of the flesh-press of an objective world whose vagaries I can't seem to transcend. I know life is about to get sour when I begin correlating flesh with carrion and domestic spaces with cages.
Anyway I was transfixed by the endless parade of iconic, deformed figures that transcended the merely grotesque in the Bacon documentary:
One day soon I too will be a rotting pile of flesh.
Maybe the most noble thing I can do is be a vessel of light while my dying form can still telegraph some of the amorphous, yet unmistakable Divinity that still manages to shine through my increasingly manhandled body.
-- Zoroaster
I know I've said this before, but the way the material world constantly deconstructs/decays makes me question the wisdom of constantly investing my time and energy into making my surroundings and physical being more beautiful (to my sensibilities). Basically everything reduces itself to a pile of rubble or compost eventually. This life is so temporary, and my sense of beauty is becoming so inexorably associated with sensual things--especially ones which are made and meant to be commodified-- that I am struggling to find sure footing based on any Virtuous precepts while navigating this slippery slope that is sex industry work. Getting naked for fun and money in order to get plastic surgery may, perhaps, be the equivalent of placing marigolds on a Dia De Los Muertos ofrenda-- a conciliatory gesture made by the quick to bring beauty and enliven to a fear-inducing shrine of death (aka beautifying my imperfect mortal shell as it dies all around me). I fear ugliness and aging in equal measures. Perhaps I am, yet again, constructing my reality on a sure-to-crumble foundation of sand, whose shifting base is creating all this unrest in my soul. After all, it takes just one powerful tide to sweep away a castle made of sand.
This is the essence of separation from spiritual integrity. This is the essence of sin.
I've been jogging endlessly, trying to make up for the week and a half of regular exercise my recent illness caused me to miss, and yesterday I came upon a remarkable documentary of the painter Francis Bacon. Like Egon Schiele, his work possesses a mesmerizing, inky depth of morbidity that appeals to me when I'm in depressed and confused in the midst of the flesh-press of an objective world whose vagaries I can't seem to transcend. I know life is about to get sour when I begin correlating flesh with carrion and domestic spaces with cages.
Anyway I was transfixed by the endless parade of iconic, deformed figures that transcended the merely grotesque in the Bacon documentary:
One day soon I too will be a rotting pile of flesh.
Maybe the most noble thing I can do is be a vessel of light while my dying form can still telegraph some of the amorphous, yet unmistakable Divinity that still manages to shine through my increasingly manhandled body.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Provisional Intimacy
My time off at home is so sweet, quiet and satisfying that I always try to make every second of it count. I have today and tomorrow to accomplish my own private creative endeavors. After that I'll be immersing myself in the neon bombast of Tryst for my typical Thursday-Friday shifts.
Today I painted the picture frames in my living room white, thinking now and then of a certain customer from yesterday evening... he was so handsome, he looked like an Iranian Eric Bana, and he was remarkably intelligent, too. He lives in the same neighborhood as the club, and says he has a look-alike brother who frequents Tryst also, bonus...
I have to admit part of me hopes he stays away. It's too difficult to deal with mutual attraction on a regular basis when it goes nowhere, even when the name of the game is ostensibly teasing and making some money while one is at it, rather than establishing a connection that's earmarked for eventual intimacy.
Provisional intimacy is actually the big thing at strip clubs. Yesterday evening I approached a customer who was polite but explained:
"I'm waiting for Sharita. We have a relationship (wink)."
From this I could infer he was waiting for her to get off the stage and be his fake girlfriend for 30 minute or an hour. It makes sense to me. I'd ideally like a marriage that functions with similar time constraints. Once a week is all I would need to feel good and related to my spouse. I like my private time, you see.
To the gentleman at hand, I responded:
"Can't hate on that!" I said, smiling. "You have fun, she's an awesome lady."
It must be delicious to have a harmless secret fantasy one indulges weekly. I'm starting to forget the desire for such lustful daydreams or experiences. It's a funny thing-- the longer I make being someone else's fantasy my profession, the fewer fantasies of my own I seem to have.
PS After work last night I stopped to get sushi (no good eating after 7 when one is trying to lose weight :( and sat near a pretty woman in her early 40's. She struck up a conversation with me-- she's an attorney-- big surprise, I meet almost no one in any other field of occupation-- and had quite a lot of insight about dating. Single herself, she exuded a slightly nutty vibe (she mentioned her mother twice in our 20-minute conversation, always red-flag behavior) yet had many bits of friendly advice:
"If you want a boyfriend, God will give you one, just make sure you are personally evolved enough to keep the man you attract, or you'll miss out."
So true!!!!!
Afterward I headed to the nearest big screen tv I could find in Tribeca and watched the Chicago Bull's heart-breaking playoff loss with a bunch of Celtics fans (booo). I'm thinking of making a Ray Allen voodoo doll-- a Chicago girl such as myself can only take so many unexpected 3-point shots before resorting to the occult begins to seem appealing. That'll stop you, jerk!
Today I painted the picture frames in my living room white, thinking now and then of a certain customer from yesterday evening... he was so handsome, he looked like an Iranian Eric Bana, and he was remarkably intelligent, too. He lives in the same neighborhood as the club, and says he has a look-alike brother who frequents Tryst also, bonus...
I have to admit part of me hopes he stays away. It's too difficult to deal with mutual attraction on a regular basis when it goes nowhere, even when the name of the game is ostensibly teasing and making some money while one is at it, rather than establishing a connection that's earmarked for eventual intimacy.
Provisional intimacy is actually the big thing at strip clubs. Yesterday evening I approached a customer who was polite but explained:
"I'm waiting for Sharita. We have a relationship (wink)."
From this I could infer he was waiting for her to get off the stage and be his fake girlfriend for 30 minute or an hour. It makes sense to me. I'd ideally like a marriage that functions with similar time constraints. Once a week is all I would need to feel good and related to my spouse. I like my private time, you see.
To the gentleman at hand, I responded:
"Can't hate on that!" I said, smiling. "You have fun, she's an awesome lady."
It must be delicious to have a harmless secret fantasy one indulges weekly. I'm starting to forget the desire for such lustful daydreams or experiences. It's a funny thing-- the longer I make being someone else's fantasy my profession, the fewer fantasies of my own I seem to have.
PS After work last night I stopped to get sushi (no good eating after 7 when one is trying to lose weight :( and sat near a pretty woman in her early 40's. She struck up a conversation with me-- she's an attorney-- big surprise, I meet almost no one in any other field of occupation-- and had quite a lot of insight about dating. Single herself, she exuded a slightly nutty vibe (she mentioned her mother twice in our 20-minute conversation, always red-flag behavior) yet had many bits of friendly advice:
"If you want a boyfriend, God will give you one, just make sure you are personally evolved enough to keep the man you attract, or you'll miss out."
So true!!!!!
Afterward I headed to the nearest big screen tv I could find in Tribeca and watched the Chicago Bull's heart-breaking playoff loss with a bunch of Celtics fans (booo). I'm thinking of making a Ray Allen voodoo doll-- a Chicago girl such as myself can only take so many unexpected 3-point shots before resorting to the occult begins to seem appealing. That'll stop you, jerk!
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Baby Wants To Ride
My all-time favorite dance artist is Jamie Principle, the king of early Chicago house music. I would strip to his music almost exclusively, if it wasn't too underground and alienatingly religious (lyrically) for a middle of the road place such as Tryst.
No musical artist with whom I'm familiar explored religion and sex with the depth and explicit honesty of Jamie Principle. In my mind, he's the middle deity in the Sam Cooke/R. Kelly Trinity of Chicago soul artists who made music for dancing.
Obviously coming to terms with his own homosexuality (or, possibly, bisexuality) and drawing parallels between his sexual experiences and religious ecstasy (ie "Your Love"), Principle also infuses his music with a social conscience that is all his own (see "Rebels (Get Righteous").
I met him once, a few years ago, after Frankie Knuckles was honored at Summerdance in Chicago's Grant Park. A few thousand smiling, joyful party people from two generations united in their love of house music danced in the rain that evening.
Afterward I ran into Jamie Principle himself, whose early collaboration with Knuckles had occasioned his participation. He looked remarkably young for his age, gave me a big hug and talked with me about life and music till they kicked us out of the park. I've never been so happy to meet an artist whom I admire.
God bless!
One of the dirtiest, sexiest, most religious songs ever made, "Baby Wants To Ride":
No musical artist with whom I'm familiar explored religion and sex with the depth and explicit honesty of Jamie Principle. In my mind, he's the middle deity in the Sam Cooke/R. Kelly Trinity of Chicago soul artists who made music for dancing.
Obviously coming to terms with his own homosexuality (or, possibly, bisexuality) and drawing parallels between his sexual experiences and religious ecstasy (ie "Your Love"), Principle also infuses his music with a social conscience that is all his own (see "Rebels (Get Righteous").
I met him once, a few years ago, after Frankie Knuckles was honored at Summerdance in Chicago's Grant Park. A few thousand smiling, joyful party people from two generations united in their love of house music danced in the rain that evening.
Afterward I ran into Jamie Principle himself, whose early collaboration with Knuckles had occasioned his participation. He looked remarkably young for his age, gave me a big hug and talked with me about life and music till they kicked us out of the park. I've never been so happy to meet an artist whom I admire.
God bless!
One of the dirtiest, sexiest, most religious songs ever made, "Baby Wants To Ride":
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