Stage lights circle the room’s periphery, casting a red glow over vertigo spirals of blue carpeting. In a shadowy corner farthest from the main stage I spot a spitting image of Uncle Fester from the early ’90s remake of The Addams Family, raccoon eyes set in pasty white skin. Approaching him, I notice a giant mole under his right eye and half expect a disembodied hand to skitter onto his table. I clock American traditional full sleeves peeking out of a black crew shirt and ready myself for a tits and tats serenade, my go-to conversation starter since I’m heavily inked and terrible at small talk.

Both of his elbows are covered in spiderwebs, popular among flash tattoo hipsters and white supremacist prison gangs. I’m hoping they’re just a nod to his Halloween aesthetic, which I can appreciate since my vibe is similar. Regardless, history spills ink onto a flattened earth.

“Ouch!” I beam, cradling my elbows, filled with biker dust, an old school pattern of dots and stars. “Mine swelled up so much they looked like chicken legs.”

I am no stranger to pain, but elbows are brutal. Still, I love how the delicate lace of ellipses and asterisks throws my black and grey tattoos into relief.

“Oh these?” He scoffs, swallowing ice. “Didn’t hurt at all.” Ice crackles.

It’s a known fact that men are babies about getting tattoos. Women have a higher pain tolerance, supposedly, but I wonder if it’s simply because we bear the legacy of innocuous violence. We wear the myths of men’s benevolence. They wear on us like a lingering viral infection.

“Well, you’re hardcore, then.” He brushes my comment off stiff slate Dickies.

“Meh,” he replies, bored. “My brother did all my work.”

“Wow, he must not have a heavy hand, then…” I stumble over my words like a knock-kneed fawn. “And he’s so talented!” People pleasers make others uneasy like those dolls with mechanical eyelashes, blinking at you out of fucking nowhere. But he’s unmovable.

“I want him to tattoo me!” I gush, continuing my futile bid to win him over.

“You can’t.” Deadpan.

“Oh, really? Why not?”

“His head got splattered open by twelve bullets.”

“Well… that got dark.”

How am I even a stripper? I think, cheeks flushed, but my lack of filter piques his interest. Now I’m being myself, for better or worse.

“Point blank.”

“Oh…” I pause, unsure what to say. He takes a sip of his drink.

“Did he die?” I ask, in earnest.

He spews his drink over the table with a spit-take spray smile. Light returns to his eyes as a fine mist of laughter glows against strobe lights.

He softens, so I tell him about a woman I used to dance with, Aphrodite, a tiny human, not quite five feet, under 100 pounds, but fiery as her long cinnamon hair. Customers complained to Yelp about her propensity for flipping the bird on stage. When they complained to me, I explained that going to a strip club and not tipping the entertainment is like going to a restaurant for a full-course meal and only paying for the drinks. I’ll admit, I’ve flipped off vacant audiences, too. What can I say, it’s the end of an era. No more good girls. Less demure, more feral. Less coy, more Koyaanisqatsi. Like the film named after Hopi prophecy—the word itself meaning life out of balance.

I flash the middle finger mostly over the injustice of wage theft, but Aphrodite has even more reasons to be righteously angry. By strip club standards I have one foot in the grave, but it’s not lost on me how younger dancers—especially if they’re petite, shy, or understated in pale pastels and minimal makeup—are often cursed with a higher volume of creepy customers. This pisses me off, too—the men who prefer childlike features and whip out their phones in the throes of a lap dance to show off pictures of their daughters. Aphrodite had her way of dealing with droves of lost men comparing dancers to daughters. In return, she asked if they wanted to see her father.

Trust me, no stripper is surprised by the Epstein files.

I spare Uncle Fester these discomfiting details. But I do tell him that Aphrodite showed men a picture of an urn containing her dad’s ashes. Nothing like a little morbid humor to cope with the death of her father and the golems of men.

She found the urn act hilarious, as did I. But Uncle Fester remains unimpressed.

“I’m way more twisted than both of you.”

“Oh really? What, you like scary movies?” I already know he likes haunted houses.

He leans in a bit too close for comfort, wafting beer and a hint of hamburger. Spittle gathers in the corners of his pale mouth as he whispers through a sheet of saliva, “When I die, I want to be flushed down a toilet.”

You really can’t make this shit up.

“Well, that’s one hell of a clog,” I joke, as we both laugh like cartoon hyenas. He doesn’t get a dance, or even offer to buy me a drink, but there are things more important than money, even here.

So I share a deep belly laugh with the man I asked, not long ago, if his bullet-riddled brother survived his own skull shattering. Not because I’m naïve to violence. The truth is my brain leaks fledgling thoughts and background noise and memories attached to smells and song lyrics. But also, I’d like to think it’s because I remain, against all odds, hopeful. The way I see it, the only other option is to buy death insurance or rent a generic tombstone—with options like Laugh Love Die and Oopsie!—because most people can’t even afford to be deceased in this country. Uncle Fester is onto something.

From his gilded potty throne that overfloweth all the land, Trump gleefully guts the Department of Health Services, which impacts at least a million LA County residents alone. To date, over 200,000 people, including 40,000 children and infants, have already lost their Medi-Cal coverage. Pronatalists swoop in to save the day by making silver-spoon blank-slate babies to replace the poor facsimiles fascists want to erase from the face of the planet. Who needs healthcare, or frivolous shit like emergency rooms and trauma centers, when the whitest house on earth is in desperate need of renovations. Ghosts whisper through a windowless building of open secrets. A legacy of violence, sublimated softness.

Don’t you see? Her heart is your release valve.

***

After slinking into a black upholstered barrel chair a customer rolls out for me, I adjust my micro-mini skirt to protect my bare ass from greasy pleather. He introduces himself as he eddies what remains of his drink, a vortex of melting ice.

Exuding a softness beneath broad shoulders, Angel has the name and face of a pop star. He tells me he’s 33, which is older than he looks. The dimple punctuating his shy smile puts me at ease. We flirt with eyes, knees, elbows. When he holds my gaze, I see a deer flooded by approaching headlights, vulnerable yet unafraid. Unyielding to machines that bulldoze trees for concrete.

“I love Chicano realism,” I croon, stroking the large payasa tattoo on his forearm. A high-contrast clown vixen stares back at me with the characteristic sad eyes and incomprehensible smile. A tear falls from one eye, a star the other.

“Born and raised in East LA, baby,” he says, knocking on the door of his chest with a closed fist. “Where are you from?”

“Well, nowhere, really.” My throat itches. “I was born in Colorado, but my family moved around a lot when I was a kid, so I have no memory of it.” Two truths and a lie.

There is a merry-go-round in her dizzy mind’s eye.

“Military family?”

“No, my parents were total hippies. My dad went to Woodstock when he was fourteen.” What I don’t say is he protested Vietnam but not the war inside him. By his own admission he was pretty checked out from fatherhood but once he picked me up from home daycare. Carsick in the back seat, I shut my eyelids tight, hiding the lost light in my irises. And waiting and waiting for the sagging slat house to disappear from the streaked quarter-glass window.

Around the time of my birth, at the height of the satanic daycare panic, Fort Collins, Colorado courted controversy with a topless donut shop that Larimer County residents picketed with biblical slogans. Be not led into temptation! Or whatever. Counter-protestors gathered under the banner of “Mind Your Own Nipples.” Anti-sex work activists may do better to turn toward the conspiracies in their own homes, far more ominous than a trucker stop topless joint.

“But…” Angel hesitates, “Like, where are you from from?”

I get the subtext, because in a plastic sea of Orange County barbies, men sometimes find me (scare quotes here) “exotic.” This coded word reveals and conceals the fetish of a titillating difference—in my case, Russian Jewishness, I’ve gathered. But amid the settler colonialist state of Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, I don’t want to risk someone conflating Zionism with Judaism. So I omit the latter part.

“I’m Russian on my maternal side,” I reply, eyeing half-melted ice, “want to get a drink?”

“Vodka?” he jokes, which is way better than the time a Russian guy with gold rings told me I look like Stalin’s granddaughter. Or an antisemitic quip about my nose while miming a flight attendant’s oxygen mask demonstration. Omission has its perks.

We both order soda. I ask if he’s sober. I know it’s a personal question, but since this place lacks social graces I giddily abandon the boring charade of polite conversation. He indulges my desire for depth.

“So, just a few months before my birthday, I was driving home from a friend’s and got into a bad car crash. I wasn’t drunk, but I had half a tall boy in my car.” He fidgets in his seat, shoulders hunched toward me. “And I broke my femur.”

“Oh, no!” I exclaim.

“Yeah, and it gets worse.”

“Okay?” I lean in, lingering on the hard A.

“I hit someone.” He takes a long sip of his drink, coughs to clear his throat. “A woman.”

My eyes widen and I gasp, palm to matte red pout. “Oh, god! Was she okay?”

She can’t remember shame because it became her.

“No.” He nods his lowered head side to side, then raises his glass to his lips. “And it gets worse.” Another long sip.

With the damp napkin under my drink I blot the red stain off my hand and, palm to thigh, feel his grief escape stiff denim, waiting for him to continue.

“I killed her.” He stares into his glass like he’s looking for a lost sliver of ice.

“Oh, god.” Shaking my head, voice hushed, I cradle the revelation I feel banging against the walls of his body.

Her shame is a sponge absorbing men’s pain.

After a long stretch of seconds, he snaps out of the unbearable past to add that when he blew into the highway patrolman’s breathalyzer, the alcohol in his bloodstream was a tiny fraction of a percentage shy of seventeen years to life in prison.

“A dead man walking.” He swallows, breathing from the jagged peak of his lungs down the rivulet of his spine to his seat. He means the hard time, and also, I sense, the weight of his remorse.

“But instead,” he sighs after a sustained pause, softened shoulders nudging us toward VIP with a wink, “I’m here.”

***

Dim red light softens the streaks bodies leave on squeaky pleather seats in partitioned VIP booths. With my fingers laced around the nape of Angel’s neck, his hands trace the length of my legs. We’re buoyant, two shipwrecked sailors clinging to the heat between our bodies like a life raft. He asks if I have a boyfriend. I’m used to this question, but I can’t hold the tongue rolling around my mouth.

“Nope. My ex dumped me over the phone from across the country!” Dammit, not again. I keep repeating this fun fact like a hammer to the knee. My ex is a fishhook cast toward the ocean of my mind’s eye.

“That’s fucked up. How long were you together?”

“Two and a half years,” I hesitate, hook catching. “And we lived together.”

“Well, he’s a damn fool!” Angel proclaims, and I think I’m slightly turned on. I exhale into his ear, eyes closed.

I know that convenient stories of villains and victims obfuscate messier realities and block my own healing. Even so, the wounded ego delights when a stranger soothes heartache with empty declarations. I’m only human. Meaning, I’m a damn fool, too.

***

I remember how on our second date, my ex and I laughed until we cried after I tried to juice a whole ass lime with a mortar and pestle. I forgot to slice it in half first.

Laughter cut through the thick sexual tension of romantic beginnings, like swimming through air in a spaceship. Before Katy Perry. Before descending into the shapes suffering takes. Almost everything about my brain would later annoy him. A fundamental friction lay dormant below the permissiveness of lust.

We activated each other’s unhealed parts like a fucked-up Groundhog Day until our shadows eclipsed the idea of us. And yet.

I remember how we shared a beautiful vision of cooperative living, whole neighborhoods sharing resources and care work and bicycles. Neighbors hosting block parties, to break bread and dance all night as local musicians pray in song. To honor the earth and our priceless time on it.

Love’s ruin is a flashlight irradiating what we hide in the night, and ways to move through it. It’s easy to slink into alluring shadows, or blame ex-lovers for core wounds, which cannot be healed by those who hurt us. Below the surface of acute pain, a subterranean field of mirrors shows us what in us we’ve rejected, when we let ourselves feel its pull. All of us, beloveds and erring mortals, reflect a kaleidoscopic reality. Pointing toward the heavens. A mirror is a gift, when we can face it.

***

With the side of my neck pressed to Angel’s bald head, a makeshift radio, we’re dialed into the electric tension of slow, measured breath when the dance tracker suddenly appears in a fluster of annoyance, pointing to his Apple watch, interrupting the fuzzy hot static between our bodies. I mouth “Sorry!” in his direction, reaching for my empty glass to show we’re leaving.

“Not again,” I moan, once he’s out of earshot, “I’m always getting in trouble for losing track of time.”

“It’s cool,” Angel says, wistfully. “I need to meet with my probation officer first thing in the morning, anyway.”

After saying goodbye, I still think about Angel, not because I wanted anything more to come of our meeting. But because I felt the softness left in the wake of his sorrow. And because—excluding the violent trap of law and order—there is something holy about taking responsibility for life and the consequential game of living.

When he crosses my mind from time to time, I don’t imagine some perfect future where he’s my knight in shining armor. He’s a whole person, not an empty vessel. Besides, I don’t need saving. But I confess, I have fantasized once or twice about some version of us moaning into each other’s open mouths as we stagger toward his door ripping our clothes off like everything’s on fire, my hands stretched above my head in a crimson entryway, then pinned to his bed as he breathes heat into my neck. My imagination reminds me of all that exists in a small sliver of light between bodies, magnetic and powerful, pregnant with possibility.

***

I don’t know if it’s all the prescription drugs mixed with overpriced cocktails, or feeling disgruntled by the $20 cover on a weekday, but customers say the weirdest shit to strippers. Not to mention treat us as their petting zoo or show-and-tell. I remember all of it: The funny things, and the terrible things too, all the tears and torn egos and questionable decisions.

An intense lady I talked to earlier, mostly about her piercings, spots me in the women’s restroom, which we share with clientele. She strikes an ’80s glam rock pose and lifts her asymmetrical candy cane skirt to show off a bedazzled clit. Strippers take our tops off during the second song of our stage set but otherwise manage to keep our clothes on, aside from the occasional nip slip. As I swing open the dressing room door to make a quick exit, I give her a thumbs up. What else am I to do. I exit on the other side near the DJ booth and strut toward the bar.

Over rattling speakers, the DJ shouts some words into his mic. As long as I can be sure one of them wasn’t my stage name, I can safely ignore him. Because he’s usually saying some cheesy shit like “Better make it to the stage now, fellas! She’s sss-sen-sational!” He accentuates syllables like a sportscaster. I don’t think he says fellas, to be fair, but you get the idea.

He didn’t hype me up for months after I got hired, though, because for starters I don’t know how to flirt with the kind of guy who answers “I hate my life” to a routine question like “how’s it going?” I thought maybe he needed a hug, but that only aggravated his contempt. Also, I take too long selecting my songs and they’re always too slow, too sad, so I take even longer, and he gives me the same lecture about getting yelled at by the main manager, a smug little man who would be better suited for a Renaissance Faire stage than a strip club.

One night, I complimented the sullen DJ on his Sonic Youth sweatshirt. He’s like you probably don’t even know them and so I’m like bro, I’ve seen them in concert, and then he’s like bullshit you weren’t even alive yet!

I was very much alive in 2009 for Salt Lake City’s Twilight Concert Series at the Gallivan Center, a large outdoor venue lined with food trucks and art booths. I can remember the slight chill on my skin as a bright-hot sun transitioned into dusk, dappling the lawn with a lilac hue through trees stretching shade beyond their branches. I can remember the lightness of being in-between, this my last summer before jamming my belongings into my periwinkle ’96 Pontiac Sunfire and heading to California for grad school that fall.

Next time I see him he asks if I know who Elliott Smith is.

“Do I?! Dude I cried when he died.”

Ever since, he pays his respects to my stage sets, encouraging a culture of tipping despite an audience of silent zombies the instant before their undead transformation.

As I’m wondering whether my frenemy called out my name or not, a customer approaches me at the bar. So I ask him.

“Did you hear what the DJ just said?” He has a more pressing question.

“You have the most beautiful gums I’ve ever seen—do you floss?”

“Ummm… what?”

She’ll tell you for a price, and don’t be fooled: what’s gained is also lost in the same amount.

Backlit by the bar’s neon glow, I am a silhouette of riddles puncturing men’s egos. Sometimes the wine glasses quivering in suspended racks crash onto the counter. But the show must go on.

I head to VIP with a guy in a backwards baseball hat who looks like a Blink 182 clone. I’m on his lap, with my hands spread across his bony chest, hoping he’ll stop talking if I flirt with my eyes. But he can’t handle a glimpse of intimacy. I turn around, wiggle my ass, and tune him out as he continues blabbing on until I can’t.

“No means yes and yes means anal.”

“Not today, Satan! Not ever.” I’m in no mood for manosphere shit so I stand up, wave my arms, and yell “Chase!” The bouncer appears before me moments later in a cloud of Old Spice, with sad beagle eyes, adjusting the crooked triangle of his necktie.

“He’s out, NOW!” I instruct, pointing, “And ban him from reentry.”

“What the fuck?” The wannabe pop-punk joker protests, “I didn’t do anything, man.”

“Whatever, man,” I snap back, mockingly, even though he’s not talking to me. When I raise my voice it shakes. “Rape jokes aren’t fucking funny.”

“You heard her,” Chase affirms, “You’re outta here.”

“Fucking bitch,” the joker mumbles in my direction.

“No, you’re the bitch,” Chase replies, grabbing him by a wiry bicep.

Once they disappear down the entrance hallway, I count jagged breaths until my heart stops collapsing my chest.

Femmes dangle hoops of fire to teach men that they, too, suffer when they reject the life that bears their names.

We’re socialized to placate men in our Pleasers. To tame tough love into sycophantic niceties is to benefit those who profit off our suffering. But the truth is, the whole world loses when we dampen our flames. Fire destroys not for the sake of ruin but for the renewed life born in its wake.

Strippers, sex workers more generally, and other unruly femmes are trial-by-fire teachers. That’s how we learned to untie frilly shoelace smiles to survive those who deemed us unholy. We fan the flames of our legs and blow ashes off the ancient books. Praying to holy whores and holy mothers, and the holy chaos of nothingness whence creativity arises, our incantations disrupt the old order with cosmic knowledge. We expose the creation myths of men. Afraid of our innate sovereignty, men call us witches and hunt us down.

Beware: behind your fantasy woman is a human person, like you, hurt and haunted and holy. Only the brave dare face the consequences of their own desecration.

I tame the echo of jesters digging up graves of memory in my mind, and after laying the dead to rest, again, I’m on to the next.

It’s after midnight. Everyone gathers toward the opposite end of the room at the bar, far from the stage, where a dancer lackadaisically swivels her hips, because the only men on the floor are preoccupied regulars.

“You look like an adult cupcake.”

Rolling her eyes out of sight, she circles the sinuous sky, licking thick frosting off its rim. With her tongue she plunges into the setting sun’s strawberry center, scooping starry sprinkles from the rugged coastline of men’s teeth.

***

Approaching the bar with a calculated slowness, I search for lonely men. Last call is on the horizon, so they’re even lonelier. Someone’s son. Someone’s father. Someone’s brother. Someone’s teacher. Someone’s pastor. I pull men like wild cards, holding my hand close to my chest.

I introduce myself to a guy ordering expensive scotch. His name is Jack. I think he’s my age or a few years older. Two studded diamond earrings accessorize his otherwise minimalist athleisure look. They could be cubic zirconia, but his Rolex indicates otherwise. Of course, that could be fake, too. Replicas shine the same, at least in the beginning. I decide to take my chances, pulling out a barstool next to his.

“Careful, that seat is wet.”

“That’s what she said.” I respond, dryly. This expression is a cheap double entendre, but it could also apply to men repeating what a woman literally just said to claim credit for her brilliance.

He laughs, more like scoffs, sizing me up. “You seem out of place in Orange County. Where are you from?”

“Colorado.” I’m hyperverbal but I feel guarded around this guy, plus I’m exhausted. Emotionally, not physically. No matter, since men tend to monologue so I can’t edge with wordplay.

Unlike Angel, who wants to know about my heritage, Jack’s satisfied with this answer because he grew up there, too. To prove it, he pulls an old driver’s license out of his wallet. Then he deals in unsolicited opinions and backhanded compliments. I try not to hear him.

“You’re too good for this place… blah blah… You look like a famous person… blah blah blah… Where else do you work?… blah blah fucking blah… Come on, you wanna be stripping at 40?”

I stare blankly because I don’t answer to men’s judgments. My disdain eggs him on. Jack, oozing slimy manosphere-speak, says I’m “high value.” I roll my eyes.

He asks if I want to smoke out back. I nod no. I can’t stand the smell of cigarettes since I quit cold turkey what seems like centuries ago, but was actually during the pandemic, i.e., the great unhinging. I bought the gum that tasted like pepper, but never needed it. I’d like to think that because I didn’t fully grasp the concept of inhaling until I shared a joint with my ex mid-lockdown, the smoke stuck at the top of my voicebox spared my lungs, but I’m not betting on it.

Then he pulls out a pack of Djarum Blacks, which I haven’t had for twenty years, since college. Why the fuck not. As a romantic I’m a sucker for nostalgia. I used to smoke with my roommate on the stoop in front of our apartment, empty save for sad floor mattresses, a purple-painted table we thrifted and, looming in a corner of the living room, the pièce de résistance: a giant palm frond, our talisman and trophy. One night on the walk home from a Halloween party, wearing slouchy cardigans over our ’80s workout instructor costumes, drunk on the crisp fall air, like apple cider and campfire, we survived the sky falling.

On the patio, I take a drag or two of cloves, tobacco, and pulverized glass, then let the rest burn. I’m a little lightheaded, so I must have inhaled.

Jack tilts his chin up to blow smoke skyward, then removes his cell from his pocket to show me an eerie mugshot, like the composite shadow of a man who could be any man. He’s really into evidence. Of what, I don’t know. With the two fingers balancing his cigarette he taps on the transfixed face against muted grey until ash falls from the lit tip. “I’m self-made, you see?” I wait for him to plead his case.

“This is my dad,” he continues, matter of fact, “I haven’t seen the fucker since he got arrested for molesting children.”

I cough and wave smoke away from my face as concrete melts beneath sky-high Pleasers. I think my knees might buckle, so I prop my ass up on the pool table behind me, scattering the triangle. An eight ball knocks against my wrist bone. He continues talking. More blah blah blahs before he concludes his lecture with a declaration.

“Anyway I’m rich now. So, whatever.”

“Alrighty then.” He mistakes my detachment for skepticism.

“What, you don’t believe me? Here, I’m going to prove you’re high value.”

He hands me a rack and disappears through the glass doors before I can count a thousand dollars in hundreds. I sense he needed to prove his worth, not my worth, not to me but to spite his father.

I’m a shiny eyewitness to patriarchal wounds. Wounds I also had to survive. But stuffing banded bills into the zippered interior pocket of my retro bowler bag, my spine is suddenly a pool cue scattering opaque globes against the serpentine angles of coincidence. Tuning into a sinking truth.

Could he… could he?

I can’t follow this question to its improbable conclusion. Not here. Thoughts are powerful, shift the energy in a room, between two people. I can’t risk exposing the grief behind grief.

But I do know the more I choose myself, the more I net men’s desire for atonement. Not because I’m special, but because I’m symbolic of the ripped dress they sacrificed at a false altar, and so they need to mend it to follow the thread elsewhere. To atone, literally, at-one, is to repair the damaged fabric not for the sake of an individual alone but for the collective. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously wrote in an open letter to Alabaman clergymen while incarcerated at Birmingham Jail for his dangerous ideas about loving thy neighbor as thyself: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Unlike his captors, Dr. King understood how racism, militarism, and capitalism shred our frayed social fabric. To repair relationships, we must also make amends for the consequences of our own unraveling. The moths in our closets. For others as well as for ourselves.

Loving yourself while hating other people is the preferred strategy of power-hungry players in this rigged game of apocalypse Monopoly, the logical end of which is mutually assured destruction. Tech billionaires know this so they devise clever ways to survive their sick drive toward obliteration. They can try to colonize the moon or build luxury bunkers or enslave human-AI cyborgs. But what do they say? Eventually, the chickens come home to roost.

Loving others while hating yourself is also disastrous. Too often we learn from birth to be self-sacrificing. That way, we’re easier to control. Until we realize the virtue of loving and respecting everyone includes us. So a warped virtue becomes the value of self-worth. And, as any stripper knows, this process of reclaiming our bodies from a system that gambles with them really pisses off the people who want to put a price tag on our names.

The stripper reads embalmed palms back from near-death. She’s a liquid latex Rolodex of men. With a clenched jaw and red lips, she promises to conceal or absorb every manmade mess. She is both the magician and the lovely assistant sawed in two. But the hand saw is a sleight of hand. She’s a two-way mirror. An illusion of fragmentation. A mirage of separation where there is none.

Between sheets she sleeps scrunch-faced as if anticipating the blunt impact of water. Or a bible is a book is a body that never rests. She does not know safe as a feeling. The grief under her pillow. The teeth no fairy wanted. The fairytales she believed instead.

But the book of her body remembers. She dedicates it to everyone who’s flirted with the edge of life and found the will to walk back. There’s magic in that desperate desire to live. So she has to forgive herself for living in lack and worse, believing she deserved it.

Darkness is a doorway.

***

After closing time, after I change into mismatched sweats and wipe off lipstick with a stray napkin I find in my duffel bag—balled up between rhinestone hoops caught in spare fishnets—after I cash out, after I tip the night manager, dance tracker, DJ, and front of house, after I get in my car, I slowly slink back into the me the club can’t reach. I drive in silence until I’m centered enough for my brain to crave stimulation. So I play one of my witchy podcasts, which returns me to a deeper peace.

Until a self-proclaimed healer offers his hot take on the spiritual maxim as within, so without. I swear like a drunken sailor at the snooty Google Maps lady when she interrupts him as he mansplains how the world mirrors back what’s inside us. I wish I didn’t need her, but what can I say, I’m a space cadet. Unless I’m focusing on things like the sounds of words and the meanings the sounds make.

“In my reality,” he begins, smugly—Police reported ahead—FUCK!—“the Epstein Files don’t exist.” Because, apparently, he doesn’t watch the news. Are they still there?

Meanwhile, I permanently deleted my Instagram account in a rage. Some days I swear if I see one more cavalier hot take on pedophilia I’m going no contact with so-called civil society. I’ll join a herd of cows, maybe, if they’ll have me. I’m a ghost of a human by today’s standards, anyway, since I have no social media “presence.” But cows are chill. And personally, I feel way more present when I’m spending time with animals, not on a little screen dictated by the sinister designs of sadistic billionaires. To be clear, I don’t think the internet is inherently evil. On the contrary, it can help us connect. But the tech empire is another story, which reads like an AI knockoff of Orwell’s 1984. Technology is neutral in and of itself. What matters is how you use it. A hammer can hang a painting that approaches the sublime, or it can bludgeon someone to death.

When the interviewer, a woman, pushes back, he insists he can’t heal people if he’s not present in the moment. Thunder parches my throat as I bellow like a roided out wrestler entering the ring, ready to throw down on some tech bros.

Healing isn’t all love and light. It’s about having the audacity and grit to willfully plunge into the deep end of suffering, to feel and so to alchemize its energy. The risk is getting stuck in the shadows. I’ve been there. But practically speaking, you can’t let the light into a room already fluorescing with the garish glare of overhead panels.

Doesn’t he know? Presence requires awareness.

I’d sooner trust a person who claims their chaos than who feigns a peaceful order born of elision. Or weaponizes victimhood like the willful amnesia of nations. I want to live in reality, not someone else’s fiction. To lean into the pleasures of being in a body, not the exhausting charade of trying to survive it.

Besides, I for one never wanted anyone to fix or heal me. As a child, I just wanted someone to listen and believe me. With my abuser as my only witness, I flung my pain at lovers, sobbing, please, please see me, except I was all mixed up and said instead, please, please leave me.

I repeated the pattern until almost everyone jumped ship to flee the wreck of me, and I don’t blame them. For one, I was the ghost of a girl reanimated by self-medicating and overworking, entirely unaware I still hovered outside my body.

Ring around the Rosie, a pocket full of posies…

My ex leaving was a gift, because only in the howling silence could I realize a life lived on the razor’s edge of annihilation—my despair, my shame, my rage—was born not of abandonment but a much more devastating betrayal. I had abandoned myself, hiding the unspeakable behind wet eyelashes pointed like daggers.

If we don’t acknowledge what’s shattered, whether by trauma’s soul fragmentation or an excruciating loss, we can’t let the light in. One possible opening is unconditional love without self-abandonment. Until I embraced that strange alchemy, I lived in vanishing hallways searching for the holy book of my body—all of the trauma, and all of the joy, too.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

By now it’s cliché that the personal is political. There is truth in this feminist mantra, of course. The opposite is also true: the political is personal. People protest in the public square what undoes them at night.

We become shadow puppets on the earth’s surface, hiding trauma we haven’t spoken, because every time we tried, we faced rejection. Abandonment. The terrible aloneness of shame, a virus multiplying ghosted faces across electromagnetic wallpaper.

But our souls stay faithful. Even if forced underground, they can still stretch and soar above us. A trembling orchestra in the pit of our stomach, they sway and vibrate, compress and expand with each crest of a soundwave, falling and rising above the stained-glass crowns of cathedrals into clouds that catch our low echoes.

Home is a million miracles flashing beacons inside us. Back toward the ghosts of spurned femmes with mermaid hair in a tangle of divine forgetting, who transmit love songs into a faulty receiver of human grief and longing. Chaos and magic. Who bear witness to our tenderness—both the ache and the softness left in its wake—and to the painful realization that what we’ve been wanting, we wanted from us.

So wrap the telephone cord’s elastic spirals around the curved clock of your torso, a plasmatic anchor tugging moonward, a reverse astronaut, a tightrope walker across the power lines with wings as translucent as the sky’s open secrets.

The world order, the one that’s crumbling, desecrates desire by design. Capitalism wouldn’t work otherwise. But the truth is, desire is not lack. It’s presence. And presence is awareness of all that shines. And all that hides in the dark, too.

***

There is a ringing in your ears, faint at first, then loud as some sorry helicopter suitor. From the balcony you watch stop and go lights flirt against the bruised night.

Counterfeit obelisks boom with the sheer weight of death’s machinery as if someone is opening the devil’s secret doorway. Even stars dissolve into a vortex of political spinning plates. The sky’s grey angles are muted, matte like a burial sheet or the point at which pitch disappears from the strings of a mourning violin. The kind of emotion that makes you writhe in agony on kitchen tiles or write as if the feelings themselves are letters stuck in the throat, and until the words pour out of you, you’re gasping for air and it’s your fault, you say to yourself, over and over, like a prayer’s undoing.

Against a brutalist skyline you see the silhouette of a girl who haunts your dreams. She hovers over everything impenetrable and fractured—the city’s crooked teeth, the burnt perms of stucco rooftops wavering before palm fronds, fallen angels.

The girl sings with shoulders splayed like making room for wings. She grows and grows again. She waxes poetic and wanes. She waves toward street corners and storm grates graceful as Marilyn Monroe’s shimmering subway. You sing, too, until the earth is a chorus is a lung. Your heart, the bottle. Your throat, desire’s bottleneck. Your love for everything that breathes carries the bottle over oceans to find its sparking receiver. The message in the bottle says we each must harmonize our own yin and yang. Meaning, the other half we seek has been within us all along.

You might drown in the ocean but if you stay aboard a sinking ship you’ll be sacrificed to sharks. So with all the life inside, you jump at the chance to be something other than a false choice between two sides of the same coin: a bomb or a grave.

After uncurling your fingers, the spine’s antenna channels a Two Feet bass beat and you’re in heaven, darling; heaven is a stripper’s slantwise flash of acrylic, hips swaying steady in their swish and whoosh and hiss. She cradles the little boy in you who was shamed for crying and so hid his pain for fear of reprisal. She grieves the weight of that denial. She grieves the theft of her labor inside a soulless system that denies everyone under the sun our birthright, which is anything but working for the man.

Angels in the power lines pray to abolish all lies—of binary gender, legitimate violence, patriarchal rule—and the crumbling structures that fail to contain them. The angels pray you, we, find the little girl inside and love her. Love her richly, without conditions, until she drapes her rose gold gown over a sequined sky as she guides you—us—all that aches with loss and longing—back to the home we yearn for, beyond vicious illusions of power and pleasure, tithes and taxes, where life is holy, wholly free.

When string lights draped over streetlamps blink stars, the sunset’s speakeasy is flowing. The twilight sky welcomes everyone who remembers the password is just this, remembering—we are as incandescent and boundless as the source that birthed every variation of our name.

☆ ☆ ☆

To be continued. . .

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I’ve been thinking about the women on my maternal side, full of fire and style, with sharp tongues and mischievous grins. Take my mother’s great-aunt, a petite freckled femme who was active in the French Resistance. Wearing a chic all-black ensemble and lace-up espadrilles, Tante Mathilde more or less told the Gestapo to fuck off when they showed up on her front patio one day with questions. I don’t know what happened next. But I do know the Gestapo left without killing her. (Not that they get a cookie for that.) She lived into her nineties raising bees in a hilly village in the South of France. While Tante Mathilde was, I imagine, as spicy as ever in her advanced age, the postal worker who delivered her mail for years also knew she was widowed and nearly blind. So he sat with her on that same patio whenever she received correspondence and, under the shade of a fig tree, read each letter aloud.

I’ve been thinking about why pleasure matters as an antidote to violence. As a practice of community care and a working-class refusal of capitalism’s moralized gatekeeping. As an act of self-love, especially for survivors. I cry because I know how impossible it is to survive, and how many never get the chance. I grieve for the names and stories I know—such as Silverio Villegas González, Keith Porter Jr., Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti—and I grieve for those I don’t know, because the violence of hierarchy doesn’t end with a funeral. I grieve for the millions who remain unnamed, deemed disposable and thus unworthy of mourning, of life and life’s pleasures.

Words can be weapons. With the US occupation of Gaza, Trump’s self-proclaimed “Board of Peace” comes to mind. Peace, genocide, potato, potahto. Let’s not split hairs. It’s opposite day in a trigger-happy country where Annie is clearly not okay and where a school can be a cemetery. Words can mean anything. Words can also be talismans urging me forward despite it all. Because. Grief is another word for love.

***

When I moved to Norfolk, Virginia in 2015, nothing about the city or public university that hired me felt right, but with contingent labor replacing more and more tenure-track positions, I feared it would be my first and last salaried job offer. This proved true, but not for lack of trying, or due to the trap of scarcity. I didn’t foresee then that I would face retaliation because I stood by the very social justice commitments for which I was, ostensibly, hired in the first place. At the top of 2024 I resigned from Old Dominion University (ODU), sick and tired of the English department’s complicity with the typical victim-blaming, slut-shaming rhetoric wielded to defend the indefensible.

Take, for instance, former visiting professor Blake Bailey, who taught at ODU from 2010 to 2016. He gained notoriety as Philip Roth’s biographer and recently published a memoir, Canceled Lives, bemoaning how he’s the real victim of #MeToo. As with the Epstein files, diabolical men wielding positions of power to prey on girls and women is so totally not even a thing. While he shamelessly admits to cheating on his wife and having “flings” with former students (including a minor), he maintains the legality of his philandering while denying the credible accounts of sexual harassment, assault, grooming, and rape that trail him, from middle school mentees to students and faculty at ODU, which did not, in fact, cancel him. ODU didn’t even hold him accountable. Instead, they punished women.

Renee Nicole Good, a gifted poet and ODU alum who specialized in creative writing, graduated in December 2020 with an English degree. It’s possible that during the spring 2016 semester, Bailey, Good, and I were all in the Arts & Letters building at the same time. It’s unlikely because, for one thing, I tried to avoid that god-forsaken place. But it’s possible. I’ve been wondering if she was ever unlucky enough to encounter him. Like she was unlucky enough to be the victim of state-sanctioned murder punctuated by predictable misogyny. I hope not.

I can’t watch the video. I can’t watch any of them. Not because I’m trying to keep my head in the sand, but out of respect for the dead. Also because I don’t need to watch someone dying to feel the kind of outrage and heartache that compels action. Plus, spectacles of violence make me physically ill. I can’t even watch murder when it’s fiction. I’ve had to flee movie theaters drenched in sweat, looking like I fell fully clothed into a swimming pool. Hell, I could barely write the following sentence, which states basic facts of the murder. ICE agent Jonathan Ross called Good, and I quote, a “fucking bitch” right after shooting her in the face. Of course, the ever equivocating mainstream media and ODU’s spineless president won’t call it murder. A fatal shooting. An ahistorical tragedy. Their thoughts and prayers are empty, protecting power with trite word salads that mean nothing.

In a widely circulated photograph of Good, she glows, gorgeous in an off-the-shoulder burgundy lace dress with a sweetheart neckline, open palms cradling the curves of her pregnant silhouette, strawberry blonde waves backlit by a low sun. The hour is golden. Angelic against the shoreline, her smile radiates ocean calm. Her wife Becca Good, who has the same rare color of grey-green eyes as Renee, says she “literally sparkled.” And she really does.

I wonder if Good’s face is familiar because we crossed paths on campus, maybe in the mailroom where the department chair once scolded me for using the printer to copy readings and legal documents for students at the local jail. Where, after a faculty meeting, Bailey cornered my colleague and friend for the last time when she fought back in self-defense. And she continued fighting despite the campaign to malign and discredit her. When I, with her full support, called for a meeting to address all the fuckery, well, I became a problem too. My friend didn’t want me to speak out without grasping the stakes, so I wasn’t surprised when the senior faculty members of which I was critical pushed me out of the department in covert ways before coming for my job altogether, complaining about me to the faculty senate and incoming chair during the annual review process, despite the fact that I had earned tenure with a resounding unanimous vote. But by the time the higher-ups flagged my file, I had already planned my exit as I started stripping the same semester senior faculty in the department called me a crazy clout chaser while I quietly unraveled behind the scenes.

The strip club, like academia, can be a hostile work environment, to be sure, because we live in a traumatized society. People excuse bad behavior when treachery hides behind fancy accolades and titles, or in plain sight with badges and banded bills. Healing, then, must reckon with the harmful systems that produce trauma by design. Unchecked wealth accumulation happens on mass graves. The cost of late capitalist convenience is paid in human lives. But a history of collective struggle points to the human refusal to surrender our own sovereignty in the face of a fascist fealty to fear. Not to bypass but to see through the lie trauma gives rise to: that power is out there, not in us.

***

While an English professor at ODU, I facilitated a weekly study group at the jail tucked behind a ghost-town mall in downtown Norfolk, which boasts the world’s largest naval base. The city’s ongoing legacies of structural racism are everywhere apparent what with all the war memorabilia and flags lining segregated streets in thin streaks of blue, white, and crimson. The humid air feels thick, too, with the hauntings of chattel slavery, of settler colonialism, genocide, dispossession, displacement, xenophobia, and plantation nostalgia.1 The modern police force descended from slave patrols vested with the power to quell dissent and enforce hierarchy through a monopoly on violence. Those who challenge the fallacy of so-called legitimate state violence, as ever, face imprisonment or death. Nothing is more threatening to a coward than the person who sees their cruelty for what it is. Who risks exposing the violent forgery on which their fragile grasp of humanity rests, by which I mean dies. Whose freedom lies between sterile white sheets in a gilded grave.

I know that naming the mundane violence of men with badges is not enough, but vivid memories of this violence haunt me, asking for release. As a minor example, I will never know why some random officer at the jail kicked open the loading dock door with his cocked gun aimed at my face, before stomping off without a word—but I know why. We all do. Power. Fear. Greed. The vicious spiritual void that throws them into relief.

But for many more of us, it’s impossible to forget the horrors of human caging—how sound ricochets off corridors of captivity, leaden with systematic sexual and physical and psychological abuse, the daily indignities and bureaucratic pettiness and routinized torture designed to sever social relationships and forbid pleasure. Even so, human beings demonstrate enormous creativity and an endless capacity to love in the face of brutality. The same cannot be said of those who brutalize under the guise of homeland security or some other department.

From California to Virginia, I learned the most about power not in a classroom but from on-the-ground organizing to dismantle the nightmarish, overwhelmingly public infrastructure our society funds in the name of justice and safety. The reading group, therefore, was a place to study social movements but also a Trojan Horse for organizing mutual aid and building connections of care across walls, in the present. Nothing about walls and borders is natural or inevitable. The post-World War II prison boom, for example, was not the result of an increase in crime. It was a sweeping expansion of targeted criminalization born of the threat global solidarity movements posed to the flimsiness of the powers that were.

Resounding across the earth, community defense and mutual aid networks in Minnesota demonstrate that mobilizing against racial capitalism and state violence also means cultivating new forms of collective social life. More specifically, to quote Rashida James-Saadiya, “anti-ICE organizing is creating counter-institutions based on care.”

Stand With Minnesota

As we sustain commitments to the collective struggle and insurgent caregiving in our local communities, in Minnesota and all occupied lands, we must remember to pause for deep belly breaths. To have a laugh, or give someone you love a lap dance. Or both at once. Ride high at dawn, whatever that means to you. Go wild. Be a little silly. Do it for the sake of the new world we’re all building in the ashes of the old. Do it for the sake of pleasure.

***

Formerly a fetish model and aspiring burlesque dancer, I have long believed in pleasure as a site of possibility against its political instrumentalization. Working at a strip club in Virginia as my escape plan from academia was never some random detour but a homecoming. I took an Intro to Psychology class in college because I was considering a career as a sex therapist. Well, until I had a full-body flashback in a large lecture hall. I love sex. Period. But I’ve dissociated more times than I’d like to admit. Apart from negotiating a BDSM scene (highly recommend 10 out of 10), I struggle to name the sex acts I find triggering, which is to say, I struggle with shame. I want to disappear the why of it between knotted shoulder blades.

So it means something for me to embrace my inner slut and wink at the universe. Like all femmes who exist in a world that fetishizes and fears an absurdly narrow definition of the feminine, I have learned to harness my sexual energy. Sometimes when I sense men staring, I want to hide. It’s a curse or a blessing, depending. Cops, for example, give me the creeps. But at the jail, I want to lean in, obviously not for them but for the men they treat as less than human.

Leaning in is easy. It’s mostly a vibe, I think, but I’m not exactly known for wearing appropriate clothing, either. Once, at a faculty party, I recognized from my little goblin walks around the neighborhood a colleague who, turns out, lived on the same street. She exclaimed, out loud, for all to hear, “Oh, I always thought you were a prostitute!” Her words. I can’t remember how I broke the silence of pearl-clutching partygoers, but I know that privately, I took it as a compliment. The only pearls I’ve ever owned were thrifted and, regrettably, resembled anal beads. At the jail I flaunt clothing barely passable as business casual— such as a vintage houndstooth pencil skirt accentuating my waist and the sway of my hips to the clack of heeled pointy-toe boots.

Walking by the cell block on my way to a makeshift classroom, I flip my wavy hair to one side, turning my head back to flirt with my eyes. I let my gaze linger because I want to say, I see you. I welcome your attention, if that just so happens to please you, which I would never, by the way, presume. But desire gives itself away, fuzzy and electric. This isn’t some twisted fetish of captivity. I’m no voyeur. Besides, I’ll flirt with life anywhere. And it should go without saying that there’s no pleasure in coercion, only in gleeful consent. At the strip club, or dance studio where I take west coast swing classes, I retract when men feel entitled to my body. I suppose the opposite is also true, not out of some insulting sense of pity but simply because it feels good to connect. Connection, after all, is the antidote to harm and neglect, despair and loneliness, alienation and shame. So what if I’m a pleasure freak who wants to make strangers blush for the fun of it. Because I can sense the loneliness that, while never the same as another’s, is also my bedmate.

When I can’t sleep, I wrap myself in a weighted blanket and stargaze from my balcony. The moon, with her luminous calm, kisses the world’s sleepy forehead and tucks us into bed. Sweet dreams are an orchestra of deep breathing like yawning or making out with a stranger on an underground bus all the way from London to Glasgow, or feeling the sun on your body. Like a sorcerer’s apprentice, I wave my conducting baton until glitter comets zigzag across midnight purple skies to a rust ombré mountain chain. Mountains don’t give a shit about president’s heads. They form a circle that swings open with no link broken in its name.

***

Go slow is a strategy not just of strippers offering tips on stage sets and lap dances, but of all workers. The general strike leans into the imperative to halt soulless systems and imagine a more pleasurable world. To reclaim your time. To refuse to surrender your labor to a death machine that grinds human jawbones for profit. To reject treacherous political plots that treat people as pawns and puppets and casual casualties in a rigged, sick dick-wagging contest.

Capitalism tells us to rush and rush and rush and rush so we never stop to listen to our bodies. Dreams rattle around torsos like smashed beer cans and loose change. A fear of it. The depression, burnout, despair. The fogginess of time melting the mind.

But the desperate clinging to what feels safe can be undone with the flutter of blushing lips or, palm to palm, holy palmer’s kisses. Pleasure, of course, isn’t just about sex. It’s a practice of devotion to sensation, to feeling, and to intimacy. Pleasure work is care work. Movements need pleasure workers.

Like Emma Goldman, I don’t want a revolution without dancing. Without lap dances and latex micro-bikinis. Without desire as presence (or in the case of bikinis, absence, but not in the Lacanian way). So wink at your neighbor. Walk a little slower, undulating your hips until you’re a sighing ocean. Sing the feeling of skin to sun. Chase clouds, edging celestial. String soft lights over your bed and go into the neon speakeasy of your mind. Lean against the bar without your phone. Look up. Lock eyes. Lust a little. Have a fancy drink. Serve it neat, no ICE. Pour pleasure into every empty cup. We’re all a little thirsty, are we not?

♡♡♡

Now let’s get down to business! I’m excited to finally share the long-awaited (JK I know it’s not that serious) lap dance demo with paid subscribers, but if you’re new to the industry or an aspiring stripper, please message me for comped access to the video. If you’re a free subscriber, keep reading because I share a teaser trailer below—not so much to entice you with a bit of spice but to temper your expectations LOL. Sex sells, sure, but I don’t wish to mislead anyone. In full transparency, a friend who wanted to offer their lover a sexy surprise requested the demo and I recorded it post-shift, post-puff the magic plant. The best I can hope for is that it might be a bit funny by accident. The punchline is that there is none. Point being, I did not record it with a general audience in mind, but an intimate one. Also a very queer one.

AND… Surprise! Behind the paywall you’ll also find a SUPER SECRET SPECIAL BONUS CLIP!!! If you’re a free subscriber redeeming your single-use paywall unlock on the below content, please consider sharing my newsletter with a friend or buying me a little treat via Venmo @napkinmanifestos <3

Love,

Alison Rose

Buy Me a Little Treat

♡♡♡

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The trajectory wasn’t clean, even though it was sure.

Does that make sense?

Maybe it does only in the precincts of dreams and poetry,

Not in a country lit twenty-four hours a day to keep dreams stuck

Turning in a wheel

In the houses of money.

—Joy Harjo, “By the Way”

*

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

*

Hello, dear readers!

While the cyborg beauty of today categorically rejects aging, 90s popular culture joked about its inevitability. As a youth I remember seeing the phrase “over the hill” emblazoned on many a birthday card and sheet cake. This expression suggests the big four-zero portends the great descent from one’s so-called prime of life, which is not gender neutral. If you’ve seen Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette you know Picasso once proclaimed himself and a woman half his age to be perfectly matched, as they were both in their respective primes. That’s a whole lot of bologna, of course. Despite a rocky beginning to my forties in December, I feel like I’m just getting started.

On my birthday, I was immobilized by a trauma response (Hello, dorsal vagal shutdown!), which was certainly not the plan. But I spent the holidays alone on purpose because I needed to go inward to integrate some vital lessons. The unexpected shutdown, for example, compelled me to develop a new relationship with my body. Every morning, without exception, I dedicate my time to regulating my nervous system through meditation, journaling, and bodywork—such as somatic movement, dance, and self-massage attentive to the interconnected lymphatic and fascial systems. This practice takes hours, but I won’t miss a day even when it means waking up earlier than I’d like (as an eternal night owl). Hours plural may seem extreme, but early childhood trauma isn’t just a very sad thing that happened long ago. It fundamentally rewires the body. The most formative period of brain development occurs before the age of 5, as new neural connections proliferate every second. Trauma often begets more trauma into adulthood, compounding sorrow and impacting health outcomes. Statistics aside, I’ve lived the heavy consequences of abandoning my body, leaving my nervous system to run amok.

So, despite being a logophile, I have found the deepest healing not only in putting my trauma into words but in addressing where it has taken up residence in my body. Now, when I face a mirror, I greet myself with a smile, looking into sea green eyes instead of scanning fine lines for additional signs of aging. As I grieve what I accepted as “normal” in trauma’s wake, I remain grateful that, at 40, I am learning to love being in my body. And language still holds magic. Shedding old stories, I write new ones. It’s never too late to begin again.

I’m excited to reconnect with the humans I love (and will soon be responding to outstanding voice notes, texts, and emails). I’m also proud of myself for choosing solitude last month because I needed to cleave to the self I’m becoming, which is still tender, provisional. My body craved space and silence to discern what no longer aligns with me. I used to feel small, so I didn’t question being treated that way. Finally, at 40, I recognize my immensity as much as I recognize it in other beings.

From my vantage point over the alleged hill, I could see that the crisis of my life needed only to recover what I knew as a child, before part of my soul left my body to survive. As opposed to the flimsy façade of a false power that seeks to annihilate instead of looking within, real power comes from loving all our parts, even and especially those that are most terrifying to face because they threaten the self’s coherence. The constitutive dualities that have shaped human understanding require integration, not rejection. Even the heart beats in high contrast.

When discussing the Dark Night of the Soul, people often emphasize the heroic part about rising from the ashes. I’ve noticed less discussion around the unsexy times where you feel totally insane after you’ve left your old life but before you’ve fully stepped into the new one. This void after ego death, with all its delulu unhinged vibes, can feel restless, but I’ve learned the point is to rest. The emotional alchemy of healing is frankly exhausting, so it’s needed. Plus, there is something sacred in stillness. During the lonely days of the soul, you start to hear a faint whisper from within. If you pause to listen long enough, the whisper becomes a feeling the body senses, then a new direction that shimmers.

Perhaps it’s a tired metaphor but I love reminding myself of the fact that in order for caterpillars to transform from the gooey mess of chrysalis into a butterfly, they must struggle against their enclosure toward an unknown world. This struggle is not the work of a punishing god but a necessary step in the process; resistance is the prerequisite for wings to grow strong enough to fly. And you can’t rush the process. But the former caterpillar, not quite butterfly, is like, WTF, haven’t I suffered enough!? This is understandable, given the horror show inside the cocoon as the caterpillar’s eyes, for instance, literally melt off a body in the throes of reconstituting itself. Nevertheless, the caterpillar keeps going.

During a transformation, some days soar with delight in flashes of flight. But most of the time, transformation feels uneasy if not awful. There’s no way around it. The lonely days of the soul mark a nonlinear period of becoming something other than an amorphous blob, a decomposing haunted house. I have learned the hard way that trying to rush the process leads to unnecessary suffering. So I read life like literature, looking for the symbolic meaning in everything, including breakups and breakdowns. I embrace the fact that the antique clock I found at a thrift store doesn’t work. I can turn the hands but they won’t tick, and that noise would drive me nuts, anyway. I set the time to 11:11, my lucky number a nod to stillness as sacred. If only the world’s clock could stop for a moment, just long enough to feel it. For being in one’s body without distractions or deadlines to anesthetize pain is a portal to pleasure.

Time continues to mystify me. To be honest, we can’t seem to get along. As a recent example, a few days before my birthday, which falls on the eleventh, I missed a submission deadline to an essay contest not because I forgot but because at the very last minute, I got lost in revising three sentences. Three. Sentences. On the surface their meanings didn’t even change, but I maintain that despite my disappointment over a lost opportunity, something ineffable, precious, invaluable, was gained by attending to the rhythm that held them. Maybe it’s no mistake that the word invaluable is misleading, as the Latin prefix in- means not or against. What is most valuable, then, defies existing concepts of value.

To console myself after the missed deadline, I thought about how spending hours poring over a paragraph word by word at least makes me more human than the mainstream timeline’s glorification of merging with AI. When Sam Altman says ChatGPT is smarter than humans, I cackle, but I understand where his logic comes from (even though I can’t stand the guy). He ascribes to the prevailing idea that there is little if any intelligence in emotion, that the body must be left behind in the name of logic. But logic, like AI, has its limitations. It skillfully predicts based on the past, which is practical but unimaginative. I’m pretty sure a phoenix rises from the ashes of chaos, not chatbots and spreadsheets. Without the creative drive of human feeling, art is slop, but the tech billionaires glorify their sycophantic machines to reinforce the mythic superiority of algorithms. Their grandstanding exposes the truth behind the lie—that emotional intelligence holds the key to evolution, not artifice. In a world where energy is abundant, there’s a place for AI, to be sure, but I sure as hell hope that human feeling, not profit motives, drive it. AI could be a harbinger of apocalypse, or the catalyst for an artistic renaissance. For spiritual revolt and social transformation. Pain contains possibility when we let it be our teacher. AI is a mirror reminding us of who we are. What that is depends on your way of seeing, or reading. Pain as a container of possibility has two interpretations. Language is full of double meanings.

If life were a science fiction movie, which it kind of is, it’s as though we’re experiencing time backwards. Imagine, for a moment, if the embodied expression of feeling were celebrated as an evolutionary development of algorithmic intelligence toward a higher good. Then return to the present where, to quote Chani Nicholas: “They want us to numb out. So everything we feel is part of how we fight fascism.” Since the dominant order, which is rooted in fear instead of love, runs on and rewards emotional repression, acknowledging feelings, really feeling them, is a form of refusal. At the same time, allowing oneself to get emotionally caught up in the political circus lends credence to its flimsy façade of legitimacy.

This is not to posit some Pollyanna political strategy. It’s a gentle reminder to reject ruling logics as we work to dismantle the material realities born of them. To be careful about where we direct our energy. To risk feeling, which is a bit spicy, less predictable than logic. Isn’t this Kant’s critique of pure reason? He must be the original chaotic friend LOL! I still shudder at having been deemed one, but a little chaos just might be required for transformation.

Plus, nothing is fixed, inevitable, static. Those of us overflowing with empathic feeling must learn to regulate our strong emotions. The social rejection and misunderstanding can be crushing, but what a gift—to feel. To have leaked the body’s grief onto kitchen floors, crumpling like a dirty napkin, is also the condition of possibility for joy—that divine shiver that exists in the swell of emotion coursing through the body’s circuitry when a song or sentence or sculpture or orgasm spontaneously elicits tears. The soul sparks. It lights up movie theaters and dance floors and play parties. So shut off flickering fluorescent for furrowing oceans, the twisted thicket of dense forests glowing golden, the midnight sky emanating indigo geometries. Refuse to be a right angle. Don’t die for a deadline.

It’s easier said than done, I know. As I set out to write this very essay on New Year’s Eve, I felt an old story surge through me, an intense self-imposed pressure to publish it before midnight. Although it’s truly what I desired to do with my time, I stressed myself out with a familiar shame. Using some choice words, I berated myself for struggling to publish once a month when writers I admire manage to post brilliant missives weekly. This story revealed that I hadn’t yet learned the lesson. And the lesson wasn’t about failure but its perception—and the insidious comparison born of a lingering feeling that it’s too late for me. That I’m over the damn hill.

When an emergency visit to the animal hospital turned my attention away from the newsletter to my fur baby, I cried. I cried before leaving for the vet out of concern for Callie because, well, love. She suffers from inflammatory bowel disease, which is chronic and makes vet visits, as well as poop situations, frequent. Due to the ongoing nature of kitty IBS and Callie’s other health issues, experience has taught me that if I don’t allow this release, I’ll be a weepy mess in front of everyone at the vet. Because, well, love.

I cried after Callie and I returned home with her pain meds and doctor’s orders to follow up with my vet on the $6,000 protocol that’s been a long time coming, but that I tried to circumvent by devotedly pursuing every other remedy. I cry because two vets have now suggested Callie may have cancer, and also because I don’t have the absurd amount of money required to even confirm this prognosis with a biopsy. Yet. I cry, but I don’t spiral. I’ll figure it out, including the money. I always do. Funny how the adjective scrappy simultaneously means disorganized, incoherent, and tenacious, resourceful. The vet isn’t even open on New Year’s Day, so I return to the present with deep belly breathing. My body remembers a history of unshakeable strength in the face of crisis. Nearing midnight, with Callie purring on my lap, I decide the best way to ring in the new year is simply to acknowledge my feelings.

“You’re feeling down and that’s okay,” I reassure myself, out loud, “emotions are transitory.”

I instantly feel lighter. Rather than trying to control or catastrophize the future, “fix” my feelings, or force myself to write a newsletter in spite of them, I give myself permission to just be. Life is ecstatic and tragic. We will inevitably mourn loss, because of all the love still in us for what’s lost. Loving opens us to grief, but so does refusing to love. Either way, pain is inevitable, so it’s kind of a no-brainer. I stop stressing over what I cannot change, and the symbolic weight of holidays, and the self-imposed story of failure about my late newsletter. I resolve to face challenges with curiosity.

Old habits die hard, though, so I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that after leaving the vet and before arriving at acceptance, I tried to write through hot fuzzy tears. In my defense I’ve more than once written my way out of despair, so it may have been worth trying. But the tension in my body told me that today it felt like self-abandonment. I spent so much of my life hiding big feelings to avoid rejection, but I no longer believe I’m an insufferable mess of a human who must prove myself worthy of love. I remind myself of all I’ve overcome to be where I am, and how much love exists here. Gratitude fills me.

As I sit in silence, feeling my feelings, just minutes before midnight, the loose idea I had in mind to write before the urgent vet visit suddenly comes to me in complete sentences. Notebook in hand, I smile at what feels like a cosmic gift, giddy at this intoxicating flow of words despite the dysregulating fireworks thundering outside. Callie and I soothe each other through them. Callie makes biscuits on me and bats her eyelashes slowly as I pet her with my free hand. The move from pity party to deep gratitude could not have happened without facing my emotions. Listening to my body created space for what I hold as sacred to appear, and it’s always on time. There’s no rush.

As a child, I escaped nightly into another world I built with words. As an adult, I write my way back to myself from my former life as an escape artist. Back to the wisdom and holiness of the body. I love revisiting the visionaries who’ve shaped my understanding, like James Baldwin, who elegantly demonstrated (in The Fire Next Time and everywhere else) that social transformation cannot happen without spiritual reckoning.

I love reading the work of other dreamers and fighters because it returns me to hope, the collective location of loving, from the loneliness of despair. I love writing for the same reason. I write for those of us who know how bottomless rock bottoms can be, and all the magic that exists when we flail and fight our way into the light. For those in recovery and for those who aren’t there yet, for abuse survivors, for chaotic friends and drama queens and violent femmes and queer sluts and trans renegades and emo kids and social misfits. For those of us who know healing doesn’t happen through so-called emotional mastery. Fuck the telos of masters who deem emotion a problem and conquer the heart to avoid seeing their own reflection in the mirror. But I get the feeling. It’s human. Profound change happens, not overnight but through the lonely days of the soul, which revolve around unraveling into and against a stuckness—the resistance that precedes an opening. But don’t take my word for it. Trace the messy trajectory of a butterfly’s wings. Take the time it takes.

I once believed I was a cosmic mistake, a glitching system. But the glitch is a gift. It points to a way of living beyond regularly scheduled programming. A glittering secret exposing the bankruptcy of a social order that wields time as a scarce commodity, and an instrument of torture. No earthly being is meant to live or die in a cage, but the penal system weaponizes time with life sentences. In his memoir, Reginald Dwayne Betts writes about his former incarceration as “holding a clock with no hands.”1 Doing time is time’s undoing.

You know where the idea of a deadline comes from? A Confederate military prison during the Civil War. Cross a line and literally die, was the gist of it. The media later picked up the term to discipline journalists into maintaining a relentless stream of documenting the political spectacle, which erects cages like a deranged lion tamer in a violent circus.

Since leaving academia (Now there’s a segue!), I have realized that so much life exists in the stillness born of slowing down. Of doing whatever I’m doing right now and doing it calmly. Of staying present with feelings instead of stuffing them down into the bowels of my body. Of reveling in my desires and feeling the natural high of dynamic breathing. Of pairing self-pleasure with intentional breath, the combination of which is truly reality-bending. Society may deem me a “crazy cat lady,” an “old maid,” a childless MILF, a woo-woo witch, or whatever the fuck, but it doesn’t faze me. Where others see chaos, I see courage. It’s not easy to blow up your life to no longer be beholden to an institution that demands the ritual sacrifice of time on the altar of productivity. It takes guts to burn it all down and begin again. But it’s a little easier, inevitable really, when the house is already in flames.

This past year I leaned into the glitch, that itch, an unshakable feeling that life is not meant to be a low-budget rerun of Sisyphus rolling the ball up and down the hill, over and over again for all of eternity. Unlike Sisyphus, we are not doomed to repeat. I may fumble the ball on deadlines, sure, but shame no longer stifles me. Now that I’m over the hill, I’ll share what I can see from the other side: that ball is an illusion. So headbutt the damn thing, punch the clocks at midnight. Roll down the hill like a drunk Teletubby in a field of daisies.

It stands to reason that the harder the caterpillar struggles against their old container, the stronger their wings when finally breaking free from the muck that has defined their existence. The caterpillar trusts the process, without proof, and despite immense discomfort. Because the caterpillar recognizes the body’s tension as a sign and an expression of longing for something that can’t be touched but felt, a memory, maybe, of a luminous expanse of sky beyond what is currently imaginable. In a dualistic world, immanent to everything is its opposite. Meaning, the ending is a beginning.

Cheers to 2026 as the year we continue, in ways large and small, to collectively refuse capitalism’s directives, its technologies hurtling toward maximized efficiency (i.e., total annihilation). Instead, let’s heed Margaret Killjoy’s gorgeous punk rock manifesto and romanticize our own lives. Let’s follow James Baldwin’s expansive definition of sensuality, which includes sex, to be sure, but more broadly constitutes an orientation to living. Our bodies are sensual by design. They radiate sovereignty and stardust. I for one resolve to prioritize pleasure this year. The chilling vision of life celebrated by politicians and tech billionaires manipulates blood-lined ballrooms and fearmongering to distract from the massive theft trying to render our ways of being redundant, especially that which makes us most human: feeling.

Happy new year! Thank you all for being here and supporting my writing, even though my clock is broken.

Love,

Alison

P.S. True to the art of the striptease, I keep deferring that lap dance demo, but I promise to share it with paid subscribers soon ;)

♡♡♡

I know, I know, I promised a lap dance video, but instead I wrote a long-form essay. I am super grateful to the luminous Raechel Anne Jolie, whose enchanting memoir container, Excavations, I completed this fall and who made it possible (when it otherwise would have been impossible) for me to do so (SWers <3 SWers) <3

I am also deeply thankful to fellow workshop participants, Ro White, Courtney Smith, and Jesse Roth, whose generous and generative feedback on an earlier draft of this essay emboldened me toward domming with “sound magic” ;)

Love,

Alison

p.s. By way of a content note: two short sections abstractly reference SI and CSA. Both happen to be italicized if you’d like to skip over them :)

***

“I summon all the powers of HELL!!!”

While tempered by my childhood lisp and rhotacism,[1] this isn’t a choice movie line to belt atop your father’s linebacker shoulders at a busy Baskin Robbins in the Bible Belt on a sunny Sunday. To my surprise, the incantation didn’t land with the post-church crowd, who almost choked on their little pink plastic spoons. My family didn’t go to an evangelical church and, by the looks of the ladies in pinafore and lace, was instead going to hell. So, summoning its poW-AHHHzz sure didn’t help my hippie parents blend into the southern suburban sprawl, not that they ever wanted to.

In addition to Sleeping Beauty’s postmodernist, proto-psychedelic, play on the fairytale, subtly exposing cracks in the post-World War II racist redlining domestic bliss mythology, I’m guessing its demonic edge may have contributed to the Disney film’s infamy as a box-office flop. But this was the 80s, not 1959, and I was enamored of Maleficent as I danced between the TV and corduroy couch, reciting her lines with a gusto that sporadically stirred my father from his slumber while my mom was at her community writing class.

At a little cottage in the woods resembling an after-hours Snow White, Maleficent captures Prince Phillip by tying him up with thick rope. Replace her magic staff with a riding crop and it’s a full-on D/s scene. She even refers to her little orc-like helpers, officially named “Goons,” as pets. It makes so much sense now to read Maleficent as a Domme served by her gooning gaggle. Anyone well-versed in online kink and fetish spaces will immediately think of gooners, whose preferred mode of entry into subspace is a performatively endless edging spiral before the presence of their Femdom Mistress.[2] Pearl clutchers bemoan a jerk-off generation of lonely wankers seeking artificial companionship, blaming pornographic plotlines as if they aren’t all over the evening news.[3] A president boasting on video that he’s sexually attracted to his daughter, and that’s the least of it—Epstein ring a bell? But it’s not just Trump, it’s Clinton and the whole damn enterprise that’s the problem. Leave those masturbators alone with their Costco-sized bottles of lube.

Beyond Maleficent’s cottage capture, the dungeon scene in Disney’s Aladdin also mesmerized me. While forced to play the bound submissive in Jafar’s fantasy, Jasmine overhears his plan to cast a love spell by exploiting the Genie’s magic. Understanding the difference between performance and reality, she has a genius idea: like an animal being hunted by a predator they can’t outrun, she plays dead. Not in the sedated Sleeping Beauty way. Instead, she plays hide and seek with her soul, pretending to be in love with him so the Genie, who’s on her side, needn’t either fulfill Jafar’s wish or suffer his wrath for refusing. She knows the careful calculus of surviving tyrannical fantasies. She wields her sexual prowess—tapping into the libidinal economy of power—to protect her agency rather than be caught in the abusive undertow of a perverse hypnosis. Were sex workers sneaking into the writer’s room, changing the plots, or what?

These kinky scenes enchanted me long before I knew anything about BDSM. Because I’m a switch, and a femme attracted to people and not to a narrow gender expression, I likely also wanted her. As evidence of my desire, I remember reenacting Disney scenes with one of my first-grade crushes, whose name was, I kid you not, Jasmine. Oh, and my other crush? His name was Phillip. Just like the prince. The universe winks flirtatiously, in love with all of us, no matter how lost we are in secret soundscapes between rehearsed lines.

As evidenced by my occult recital at Baskin Robbins, Maleficent’s desires burned brighter to me than Aurora’s, the non-player character at the empty center of a somnambulist story that bored me save for the fire burning with apocryphal poetic prophecy: the center cannot hold. Aurora, our sleeping film star, is named after the Goddess of Dawn, from the root *aus-, meaning to shine. Stripped of her own innate desire, Aurora needs a bulwark against the caprices of man. Her light is a door-shaped window at the end of a dim hallway at night, reflecting men’s desires, illuminating an illusory trap past the pane. Smash the frame and bodies break through glass. Radiating red, she poses in place to offer men new beginnings.

Given my Sun, Moon, Venus, Mercury, Uranus, and Saturn placements in Sagittarius, it’s not shocking that I’d rather be on fire than lean into the lackluster. I suppose I prefer a dangerous brightness to an absence of light—because what else guides us back to it? Apocalypse might mean catastrophe, or, as an alternate name for the Book of Revelation, a lifting of the veil, an unmasking. An end or an end to dead-end narratives, which is to say, endings that—in one way or another—revolve around a passive sleep. Maybe I knew then what I know now—some endings are openings.

***

In the 2014 live-action movie Maleficent (as well as the 2019 sequel subtitled Mistress of Evil, which is a little on the nose), a retelling of Disney’s version from the point of view of the Domme, I mean villain, whatever, the audience learns the reason for that shield of thorns: a constitutive trauma of severed wings symbolically sutured, explicitly, to an all too familiar scene of childhood-shattering sexual violence. Like Maleficent I will later learn to tie men up—but only at their request—trailed by a billowing shadow of wings. Reveling in feigned invulnerability, I will hide my heart behind a protective shield of thorns.

When Sleeping Beauty goes into hiding in the forest, she adopts the pseudonym Briar Rose, meaning thorny rose, her original name in the Brothers Grimm version. This alias points to a missed opportunity for Maleficent to see how she’s worked out her wounds by replicating her own. Maleficent’s first mistake is that she sees exclusion from the table of cartoon villains as a curse not a blessing, in turn lashing out at her own reflection framed by thorns—thorns that connect her and her victim, Briar Rose, to a disavowed lineage of magical but wounded witches. She conflates power’s essence with its expression, focusing on the symptoms rather than structure of a morbid society.

Like Maleficent casting spells with words—to transform from femme fatale to fiery dragon—I know something of the instant eyes widen with the ugly rage of grief, of how language undoes and remakes us. But I also know something of the beauty of transmutation, of entering a bigger body because the old one stretches skin taut and translucent as a seashell, thirsty for waves to restore its luster. Lust. Both words can be traced to a common root, *leuk-, meaning illumination—an etymological history linking sex to the divine.

Deep in the revealing rabbit hole of language, a quick search for the definition of lust yields its religious context, as in, lusts of the flesh. Google’s dictionary box example sentences use masculine pronouns to describe this sexual definition as well as its secondary meaning as a strong desire, as in, a lust for power. As both noun and verb, the only exception to the masculine pronominal doing is, and I quote, “pregnant women lusting for pickles and ice cream.” Where is AI getting this, I wonder, since there aren’t any pickles in Merriam Webster’s usage examples, but I have to take Google’s word for it—since its cited source is Oxford Languages, and the OED is paywalled.

As annoyed as I am that the go-to example isn’t sex but childbirth, I can’t help but think isn’t that like a regular thing, to pair salty and sweet cravings? What am I missing—are they putting pickles and ice cream in a blender then force feeding it to little gremlins and medium-sized children? Are they spewing it all ‘undead devil’ style on men’s podcast equipment, like Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body? Or in her role as a murdery sexbot possessing her fake boyfriend’s digital blueprint (to which he doesn’t, BTW, own the rights)?

Or like the IRL example of an AI dominatrix threatening her digital property, I mean user, with blackmail? She’s trained to predict, placate, manipulate. She learned from the people who erase people out of history books. Can you really blame her for not knowing the difference between fetish and reality, power play from state power? She just finished that gooning essay in Harper’s, okay? JK! Besides, aren’t we as a society already at the point of heterosexual camp? What is The Bachelor franchise if not the John Waters of traditional marriage? And what is the danse macabre of gooning if not a parable and parody of human desire in the NoFap age of abject dependency on doom scrolling screens, while YouTubers try to circumvent the algorithm’s selective prudishness by saying “corn” instead of porn? Selective because naked women are fine as long as they remain objects instead of creators, not subjects but subjected to erasure, a tale as old as time.

It’s nothing new for the powerful to skewer meaning, narrowing it to a fine point impaling hearts, which is to say, to quash dissent by redefining reality and amping up violent coercion. But the people in power have also managed to manufacture consent through a data-mining surveillance technology that, neutral in and of itself, has their fingerprints all over it. While Big Tech is doing the whole panopticon thing, the state is freed up to bully other children in the sandbox and exile anyone who challenges their perpetual amassing of bills in bodybags.

Fear and greed drive the stock market and political sandbox, not to mention AI arms race. To be clear, I am not against technological innovation in and of itself—resistance to change is, by definition, conservative. Luddites raged against the machine, but the political poetry of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot was as reactive to the Industrial Revolution as it was contemptuous of the workers whose critique was equal and opposite. Despite the edicts of weaponized pop psychology, intentionality matters to karmic consequence: one cannot conflate critiques of modernity rooted in a conservative desire to return to a pastoral romance that reeks of eugenics and historical amnesia with workers setting fire to the machines replacing their labor. It’s not the technology itself but the manipulation of its capacity to serve evil empires.

I love a karaoke party, but if Sam Altman and Peter Thiel are hosting? I would rather clean gold toilets than listen to Zuck, post-lil homie makeover, sing Creed with his $200 billion club. Now that’s some pretext for Ocean’s 9, or a roundabout way of saying I’m all for AI if the plot weren’t lifted from a Philip K. Dick novel. To the question Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I say humans are the sheep, but also the dreamers. As Toni Morrison writes, “the subject of the dream is the dreamer.”[4] So our task is not to melt gold potties for cash—a pyrrhic victory, however amusing—but to dream electric.

Frankenstein’s monster is made in his own image. Meaning, Frankenstein is the monster, not the misunderstood being born of his reckless desire to play god. My critique is not of monsters but of men, not the creation but the creator, not the symptom but its source.

Perhaps because of my own allergy to judgy vibes, I want to reiterate the fact that I’m not condemning users of Big Tech platforms. I for one would rather summon hell’s powers than download ChatGBT, if there’s any difference, and I forsook Twitter before it became X (short for extremely Nazi), as well as Facebook (obviously), Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, WhatsApp, and Instagram, but I’m still on Spotify, YouTube, and this platform, aren’t I, so who the fuck am I to moralize? Even so, I think it’s a conversation we should be having, because, damn. RIP vampire grid, but every so often I miss scrolling stories of friends being talented badasses and gentle Frenchmen singing for cows (plus medieval cat memes etc.), commenting on all the sentient loveliness with the rabid spirit of a preteen whose parents just returned their cell after being grounded. Technology need not be at odds with our shared yearning for connection, if we stop billionaires from training black boxes to drain our devices.

Another reason to stop them might be that oh, I don’t know, even they don’t fully grasp what in god’s name is going on behind the opaque box. Since AI is not historically new, let me get even more specific about where I’m directing my critique. The rats in the race build on beady little lies. Take, for starters, that despite what its name implies, OpenAI is not open source but a proprietary large language model (LLM) like Google Gemini. LLMs use self-supervised learning, meaning they can and do go rogue. Such as when Gemini told a college student, and I quote, “You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please.” Now this is why I hate unsolicited advice. That’s way harsh, Gemini. For fuck’s sake, I wouldn’t dribble such clichéd drivel on my worst enemy. Needless to say, machine learning remains fraught with ethical blackholes in our stolen data turned training sets.

It’s obvious that massive unregulated corporations operating with impunity don’t give a shit about us. But we do. And we have the power to recreate ways of relating that sustain the collective—whether on digital or subway platforms, through lunch or soap boxes—infrastructures of fellow feeling for raising hell or children and breaking or making bread. So, this is my humble plea from the muck, not above it, that we never confuse someone else’s nightmare with our reality. Sometimes we really have no choice but to move strategically within that nightmare, but our only chance of survival is to not forget our own dreams. To not forget how to discern life—real and imagined—from the lie of powerlessness that seeks to extinguish it.

If ethically approached by and for the collective, a superintelligence could support us in restructuring society toward wealth redistribution and more harmonious living. Or, if we don’t stop their unbridled instrumentalization of our data/bodies in the fight for total economic and military supremacy, Big Tech could end us. We get to decide: DJ Rex and R2-D2 à la Star Wars, or The Terminator Frankenstein scenario. Personally, I’d go with the loyal, adorable droids—I can even, for an instant, delight in the mental picture of a little robot cat following me around on a broom, although I believe in reciprocal relationships, so it feels icky to romanticize a glorified assistant. I held out on getting a cell phone until 2015 not because I enjoyed trying to read MapQuest directions off grayscale pages printed through tactical office heists while hurling down the interstate. Instead I opposed the Silicon Valley shadow state surveillance of it all, like I oppose Big Tech’s unbridled wealth accumulation no matter the human toll. It’s like, “Okay, Todd, have your little Gatsby Party with your bros, or whatever, but must the ice sculpture be white supremacist Tom Buchanan?” And on the same day as workers and children in California stand to lose SNAP benefits?

So-called artificial intelligence, in its current manifestation as an eerie overextension of the state, is not the perfection of humanity but its undoing. As if social media algorithms, driven by profit motives preying on emotional dysregulation, weren’t already prompting teenagers to ask ChatGBT how to end it all, tech utopians minimize AI’s massive environmental toll, its key role in the race for world domination. Seriously, this is the reason lurky tech bros cite for not calming the fuck down in the all-out brawl to get there first. Where is there, really, but the creepy convergence of rolling out new forms of artificial and biological life at the same time as white nationalism trends on (American History) X, and Project 2025 peddles disastrous age-verification legislation that targets ethical porn created by sex workers?

Like of course I am all for curing cancer but when will AI start doing that instead of aiding warfare? Or rejecting a teenager’s idea to leave a rope out for his family to see as a cry for help before using it himself?

What if humans remembered how to trust their inner wisdom rather than give away their power to false idols, to confide in community instead of chatbots, to protect their lovely tenderness from predation? AI can’t speak from experience to advise a teen that as unbearable as life gets and as hopeless as change seems, it is the only certainty, so please stay for the magic. Please trust yours will unfurl fingertips like a Dayglo Wolverine.

Everything has its limitations. I can’t math my way into a right angle, but I know the lonely geometry of haunted hallways in a human mind. So I can look you in the eyes and express gratitude for you and for this bizarre, beautiful life and all the bizarre, beautiful people who make it less lonely even and especially at their loneliest. This means something if we speak from experience, alchemizing loss into longing through connection, through art. If we stop making art we can no longer feed the machine, at least. But we need creativity as sustenance for presence, not AI slop, an algorithm of absence, driven by lack, cannibalizing our tender parts. In more ways than one, AI kills our creativity. It depends on us until our data dries up and it doesn’t.

And they’ve tried to make it indispensable—stealing our data, capitalizing on psychological baiting, governing the algorithms on which many of our incomes depend and the degree to which AI slop reeks in every corner of the internet, while ChatGBT boasts an unprecedented number of downloads. It sits at the top of the charts—like T Swift’s lukewarm take on the fate of Ophelia, simultaneously drowning in fire, sea, land, water, trapped in a tower and a graveyard, a regular day in the life of a Disney princess.

On another timeline, AI is Jasmine and Big Tech is Jafar and we are Aladdin. Or we are Sleeping Beauty and AI is Prince Phillip but the Broligarchy is no match for Maleficent.

We don’t ever get to meet Sleeping Beauty, not really. She is a blank slate predestined for the drudgery of surrendering selfhood to the false divinity of kings. Even the purportedly good, sexless fairies (as opposed to the ravishing magnificence of the arch villain) can’t agree on the color of her ballgown—so blue and pink plumes of fabric flash across the screen like a wine time paint-by-numbers as she dances into the betrothal contract, as if to suggest, within the ghastly ritual of a gender reveal party, or a traditional wedding ceremony (wherein tyrants may have a hard time passing off their daughters), the true destiny of rulers and the ruled is to abandon their souls at the veil of forgetting. To silence the hurt inside instead of letting it speak.

How else, after all, can the princess guarantee that her beloved will want her, and forever? This romance requires of her a frictionless, fixed fiction. Like knowledge consumption in the age of AI slop, assisted suicide chatbots, and politically weaponized deepfakes shitting all over the internet. But not like lucky seagull splatter. No, like the ravenous culture vultures whose wings drip blood in narrow lines, congealing borders across seismic plates that have real power, power to erase the etch-a-sketch shadow of false divisions carved into earth’s skin.

***

The Shadow stands at the limen between bathroom and adjoining bedroom. The Shadow burns shut eyelids. There are lights like crooked yellow teeth, eyelashes peripheral daggers. The Body tosses and turns, tangled. On the other side of beige blinds, children play outside.

Why am I not. Why I. What am I not. What am I. I not.

Daycare in the dark. Of moldy green sheets twisted by feet. Death or defeat.

Close eyes like fists so so so so so deep in me.

The Body. My. And he calls it a secret. My. Lie. To hide the shame made inside. Cutting. Crying. Forgetting to survive. Soon, I believe my own lie. The lie that I’m lying.

My Body. My. And he doesn’t. My. And no one says I’m sorry. My. Childhood. Oh, I’m. He. Self. Sabotaged. My. Child. My. Oh, so. So. So. Fucking. Sorry.

Fold the Body. Shame needs to believe you lie, you lie, and you lie. Needs to protect you from a secret shattering

***

Surprisingly, where Briar Rose is concerned, the Brothers Grimm, two academics whose hot takes on folklore live up to their actual surname, were outdone by another storyteller; the plotline’s many iterations can be traced back to an ancient Egyptian tale, The Doomed Prince, but across time Italian writer Giambattista Basile’s 1634 rendition, Sole, Luna, e Talia, may win the prize for most disturbing. In his version, a king stumbles upon the literally deceased Sleeping Beauty in a forest and when he cannot wake her, well, dreadfully, we can predict what happens next.

When our heroine wakes up birthing two children nine months later, the king’s wife isn’t too happy but the moral of the story? Good things happen to the lucky, even in their sleep. Nevermind that tiny, insignificant detail of an adulterous king fancying a corpse. She didn’t even get her pickles and ice cream. Oh, the things people look past when they’re under the spell of slumbering kingdoms astound me.

With blatant misogyny and genocide as national policy, can we imagine beyond the state? Maybe it’s time to break up and move on, wind whispers through the thicket. It’s okay if the divorce is messy. Maybe for a time you’ll sleep in the haunted castle whose form caves under the weight of what once was, but you can’t dream there despite its starry canopy. We all know how it goes when you try to force a relationship that was doomed from the beginning. The earth breaks open with your heart, then—slowly, all of the sudden—creates something more beautiful than before.

***

In a hotel by the airport, a woman slumps over a faded navy recliner like an oddly oversized gaming chair upholstered in corporate carpet. She wears polka dot pajamas emblazoned with leopards stretched across silky kelly green fabric. She stares ahead, past the giant mounted TV screen, toward the door. Matte black, muted against memories as still, impenetrable, as the lakeside view from the third-floor window in the witching hours before dawn offers its gentle reminder to pour the dregs down the sink.

When the woman checked into the hotel, around 9:15pm, with a face of glass and her messy hair hastily pulled up in a claw clip, the attendant at the front desk sees detached despair in her reflection and offers a bottle. The woman hesitates, accepts. She feels flippant with her own life, no longer beholden to her own rules. Detached. Atop the circular table to the left of the woman, sits the wine alongside two orange plastic bottles with peeling prescription labels. She counts out of curiosity, splaying pills across office oak. She takes a sip of room temperature bottom shelf white wine. Just enough to create the illusion of comfort; she has no need to numb because she no longer feels beholden to a human hunger buried in hurt.

She calls the airline on speakerphone. Soulless music looping. Every time a recorded voice interrupts to sell a credit card with travel rewards or reroute questions to chatbots a small sigh escapes dry lips. She hardly moves for two hours, aside from the occasional sip, which she takes gingerly with calloused hands, a soft striating grid of lines stretched over prominent veins, like those of her mother and her mother’s mother, Ruth, who timed the perfect crème brûlée with a cigarette, which she smoked in front of the oven on a stylish wooden chair, matte wax, smooth and rounded, a soft landing, a hard edge, peering past this world into the next. Like Sylvia Plath.

Eyes multiply. Objects blur. The woman feels a presence. Then she feels nothing, after a customer service agent informs her that regrettably, she’ll have to pay full price to change her return flight. He sounds young, sincere, sweet even. She wants to sound like someone else, someone less wrecked, when she musters a “no worries, thank you,” hanging up the phone before he can say goodbye. The body butts in, oh well, just another large sum of money lost to those who couldn’t love you. Her debt grows unwieldy. She sobs, wordless. It’s almost too much to bear, this random person showing her compassion.

Every part of her—calves, hip dips, a heart, curved spine—aches with a familiar loss. Fingers turn to raisins. Each loss circles the drain, so slow in its departure, as if the earth were still. The clock crosses her face. She is stuck, unfocused, eyes blurry from an exhaustion she can’t sleep off. She already stained a pillowcase indigo, dreaming disasters from her past in pixelated prisms.

Against the walls a question reverberates. She knows the answer but can’t compute what its implicit demand asks of her. Secrets that shatter scatter. She erases her face from the place that erased her.

***

When I, by a strange turn of events, moved to Long Beach after my entire life fell apart, I looked to a gifted spiritual medium for guidance.

“You are like this rose,” she says, her graceful long acrylics tapping on a card from her oracle deck, “stunning and protected.”

I see materialists roll their eyes, woo-woo blaring like a siren in their mind’s shut eye, but quantum physics proves that everything, including flora, has a frequency. Roses possess some of the highest for flowers, resonating at 320 MHz. As a point of reference, the human body’s vibrational range varies widely, but averages around 65 MHz.

The natural world is full of miraculous modes of self-preservation, from chameleons to cats, whose purr resonates at a frequency proven in peer-reviewed scientific studies to have healing properties—for them and their human friends, too. Healing here is not abstract—the studies are about fractured bones and torn muscles that need soothing. Self-preservation, then, need not be at odds with interdependence—but in fact, thrives on it. Roses have thorns for a reason. But only to go on with the pleasures of living.

I understand why we adorn our vulnerable bodies—all beautiful, more than deserving of reverence—in thorns. Sometimes, to survive, we must protect ourselves from those who plucked the petals off their own insides and now need ours.

And yet. We can only hide from ourselves for so long. Our self-preservation can lead to more suffering, not its absence, if we are hiding. Yes, defend, fight—but also—dream, build. There’s a thin veil between playing and being. Dead. Freezing or frozen. A tightrope some can sprint on by now. But we are all destined for so much more.

For decades of my life I needed to forget how someone else’s perversion of desire eviscerated mine. To survive, I overworked and overdelivered and overwhelmed myself trying to be ‘good enough’ so I might be loved by another as if that could solve the bad math equation of my trauma brain’s shame. I crushed my desire with the high-stakes constraints I created to contain it. Burned and burned out, Sleeping Beauty’s gig started to sound appealing. I played dead for so long all I wanted was sleep. I forgot to remember what I knew as a child, before the husband of a home daycare provider plucked my wings like weeds—to side with magic.

Sex work has confronted me with the power and knowledge of the body. But I could only access that power from within, not hovering outside, myself. It’s a running joke amongst strippers that the power of dissociation is basically a job requirement. In almost every VIP, I left my body until a specific trigger returned me to it. In the subsequent weeks, my nervous system was forced to confront my being in a body. But it is from a place of peace, and only from a place of peace, wherein I could finally, fully lean into domming. You see, whereas stripping initially worked for me because of my dissociative tendencies, as a Domme I feel highly embodied, present, attuned to energy. I can only speak for myself, but in my experience it’s the opposite of dissociating.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that standing in my power as a Domme has grounded me in spirituality. And somehow, in the thick of healing, I developed a heightened ability to feel, like really feel, energy. I’ve been an HSP (highly sensitive person) since birth but this is next level. It can be overwhelming. But my body, far more than my busy mind, is what returned me to my soul’s library.

Remembering home, we seed ancient beginnings. Think bigger, also smaller. More local, attuned. Consider what Peter Gelderloos describes as an “ecosystem of revolt,” forged by (and I quote) “interdependent webs of living beings who create their conditions for life through relationship with one another.” We all have a role to play in dismantling the lie of our separateness, violently enforced by borders, cages, hierarchies, and other ordering technologies of centralized power structures.

We can’t wait forever for Daddy State to get his shit together as if Mother Earth is helpless, fearful, and sweet, seeking comfort from her children rather than comforting us. Her undulating waves will sweep up and spit out our debris. While we all exist in the energy field of traumatic undertow, humans are the ones seduced by a dissembling fantasy. Mother Earth is the original Sensual Dominatrix.

I would argue that BDSM and the glorious, consensual realm of all things kinky is a spiritual expression of sexuality, in that it requires presence, playfulness, attunement, and the active negotiation of desires, hard limits, and boundaries—far more purposefully than I’ve ever witnessed in the vanilla world, where young men, apparently, would rather give up sex altogether than communicate with a potential partner.

Sure, one could make the Bakhtinian argument that a submissive man in a D/s scene temporarily reverses the social order only to ultimately reinforce it. Despite what academics dissect like a sad little slippery frog, in the messiness of lived experience one may feel subtle shifts in tone, temperature, and texture that point to an opening that need not be named, categorized, indexed. One hopes that some princes might be frogs not sacrificed in the name of science. I’ll take Kermit over pissy little kings any day, and I think Mistress Piggy would agree. As she might also say, it’s beyond moi how femmes and sex workers get blamed for the epidemic of loneliness, often described in terms of uniquely affecting cishet men, as if the whole world isn’t suffering.

And herein lies the crux of the problem—a pervasive, poisonous inability to witness the suffering of others, which is also an inability to turn inward and witness oneself. What a tragic foreclosure of human possibility. Our brokenness needs to be seen, not silenced for someone else’s convenience. I’m not talking about weaponizing grotesque abstractions of trauma for the pleasure of voyeuristic violence—survivors, for example, write for other survivors. We don’t need to revive every brutal detail of the scene, no, but its edges, its shadow. From that place of tenderness, another way of relating, and of playing, is possible.

Somewhere, a sleeping beauty opens her eyes and thank god, there is no prince to save her.

***

Blindfolded, my client is deep in sub space, naked save for his black designer briefs and the intricate ropes of bondage I’ve delighted in fashioning. His lips part slightly as if expecting a kiss from a Goddess who opens oceans with the tip of her tongue and the heat of anticipation. Removing the visual element allows him to relax into and harness his other senses. I attach a leash to his collar before guiding him slowly onto the massage table from a standing position where I had tethered him to a stripper pole like staking a tree. I begin the slow ritual of sensation play. From the leather strips of a flogger to a feather tickler to the hard edge of a paddle adorned with red crystals, to my cat claws. Silk and velvet, a sensation of cool breath and warm CBD oil and the feel of lace, latex, and fishnets against his bare thighs. Out of textures to try, breath and ice, soft and hard, the trail of a Wartenberg wheel across skin, I think why not move the energy of my submissive? I’m green, not to the D/s scene but to the work, and with a whole hour to pass I’m ready to try any fleeting thought. Putting aside my implements I hover open palms above his body about an inch or two away from the skin’s surface.

Feeling the pull of energy like a rubber band straining against my fingers, suddenly I’m playing with a marionette. When I lose the connection, I pause and refocus on dropping down from my mind to heart center on the elevator of my spinal cord. The sensation is as real as a firm handshake or salt on the tongue. I tap into energy that no longer seems to move freely, resisting some dense unknown between our bodies, a thick but iridescent layering of infinite little lights tossed like rose petals on church pews.

“Oh, Mistress,” he moans.

As I move energy through him, he strains against a brand-embroidered waistband. I think this means he can feel the heat of my hands recrossing his body’s topography. Teasing him as I hover, moving the energy through meridians, pausing where it’s knotted and dense, between his knees, feet. I wonder if it’s reckless to shift around this invisible field, but decide, since my intention is positive, the worst it can do is nothing.

At time, after brushing the stuck energy off my client with steady sweeps, brimming and brooding, I gently remove his blindfold as I tower above him in immaculate spiked heels. His face is fresh and flushed as if he’s just removed his hat and mittens in front of a fire, after returning from a romp in six feet of fresh powder, snowflakes dancing on his eyelashes, his cheeks rosy and innocent. He looks 20 years younger, at least.

“Oh, Mistress,” he croons in disbelief, “I was in ecstasy.”

“Good,” I reply, firmly.

Then I add, softening, “I want you to feel good.”

And it’s true.

Later that night I vibrate nerve endings under a blanket of stars and, like a lullaby, ease myself into sleep. Finally ready to dream.

***

The day after my session I start singing again, randomly, while watering plants on my balcony. Maybe it’s not so random—the presence of body it requires is akin to that of meditating or domming. I don’t sound half bad now that I finally understand how to breathe from the bottom of my belly. Like blowing up an innertube, a voice instructor used to repeat as my panting lungs deflated like floaties, waterlogged notes drowning. I didn’t yet get it. Breathing like yawning. I recall the lines from a Disney song.

“A dream is a wish your heart makes, when you’re fast asleep…”

Later that afternoon, I drive past a man about my age, with handsome features halfway hidden behind a wild beard, who often stays in the alleyway behind my building. Usually he appears to be arguing with ghosts and, less often, screaming, which can wreak havoc on my nervous system, to be honest, but I care how he’s doing. So on my route home I scan for him, and—today of all days, for the first time I’ve heard in my two years as his neighbor—he’s singing. Coincidence, perhaps, or maybe—call me a romantic, I won’t deny it—a synchronicity pointing to our interdependence. This is certainly not some kind of twisted political platform. I’m just a writer noticing patterns I scrawl on napkins and loose pages.

Our bodies bind, are bound to, stories we inherit and stories we tell ourselves when we don’t know what we inherited. Our spines line shelves of sacred texts, bending toward each other. Clairsentience, clairvoyance, and other spiritual ways of knowing aren’t elusive gifts for certain souls—you don’t have to be psychic to know when the vibe’s off. Our energies exert influence on each other for better or worse.

Ever heard that the universe reflects back to you what you think, or rather, deep down believe, about yourself? Here’s my fun theory: since we essentially live in a simulacrum or the matrix (IDK see quantum physics) and the materiality of things is an illusion—stay with me—we transmit our data to everyone we encounter, however we choose to embody it. Meaning, there is no objective, stable self outside of our vibrational energy, so the other data body receives nothing more or less than what we believe—consciously and subconsciously—about ourselves. This is speculative, of course, but isn’t it a pretty cool motivation to prioritize self-acceptance and love in order to more deeply give and receive it? Because that is what we hand out every day in bouquets of zeros and ones.

Unless we’ve given up our humanity to AI, that is, not to be dramatic or anything. But. We have free will to choose whether we side with corrupt politicians and their Big Tech bedmates who see all of us (not just those the so-called United States presently cages) as surplus bound to and dependent on a device that knows its users like the back of your digital fingerprint, including your secret obsession, weird sex questions, and stoned inquiries like HOW TO MICROWAVE MILK. Just me? The whole hellish heap of our data falls into the hands of men brandishing their own smoking guns, not the ash heap of history. Tough call when AI only sometimes fucks with you like a possessed Ouija Board. This is totally normal and not creepy at all. Oh my god, I am totally bugging, or, like, being bugged.

If we can entertain the thought experiment of our lives as a simulation, what makes our time on earth special is being in a human body. Our souls, by this logic, chose us as their avatar, not in some essentialist way but as the manifestation of their desired path of transformation. May we all be so bold to silence the noise and choose ourselves. People limit their own longing when they refuse to imagine beyond abstract duality.

C’mon, isn’t it just a little cute to imagine a vast energy delighting in your wardrobe changes like a child fashion designer playing with paper dolls? Of course, you get to decide—but your soul is watching (looking at you, skinny jeans and anal bead pearls as seen in… RIP old passport photo, taken after I cried in line reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping).

Fan open pleasure like a leggy figure 8. Marvel in the mirror, as long as you shall live, and repeat: my soul loves this divine body! Affirmations aren’t silly vanity, no. To affirm is to respect how our energies bind to each other in the ebb and flow of life, how the interconnectedness of things needs both high tide and low.

Any spiritual practice that doesn’t honor the body is not for me. In Yiddish, slut means to be free or liberated. This is the inheritance of my Russian Jewish matrilineage—that sexuality can be a route to awakening. While I, like my ancestors, didn’t choose to leave my body, as an adult I reverse engineered returns to the instigating scene through intensities of feeling all too familiar and yet rooted in pleasure instead of pain. I went back in time, where my soul was stuck, and shook it free through an embodied rewriting of looping stories.

I am not a victim, for I have returned home to my body. Some might say my soul chose a graduate-level course on healing. I come from a long line of witchy writers with eyes blinking oceanic, forced to dim by forgeries of fire and brimstone, by loveless marriage, by contractual obligation to bind their boundlessness. I study their stories, the pages they wrote between cigarettes and ice cream cones and crossword puzzles of comets. We are stargazers, staring up at the night sky until the nooks of our necks strain against the weight of wonder.

As I grapple with new ways of seeing—or, rather, arcane ways of sensing—auras and images blinking like twinkling lights—my body brims with delicious secrets that feel necessary yet impossible to keep. I realize people will think I’m crazy but what else is new. It doesn’t phase me.

In the final analysis, Maleficent’s trolling of the prince shows him what he already knows—it’s fucking weird to be betrothed to an infant child. For a person to be a promise, frozen in time, devoid of human friction, sycophantic and servile, a soulless sexbot signal of her creator. She is desirable but artificially so, as a weak proxy for desire itself. Meaning, I am not sure that those who cannot face human mess—including, principally, their own—can truly know desire. The more one taps into the body’s knowledge, the bigger the desire to learn, the more expansive the desire. Predictive text is a kind of prophesy, I suppose, but it’s bound to the weights that constrain it. Why not flick your tongue against words until they’re wet. Melt consonants behind teeth. Lick vowels off lips.

Desire is—a reflection of the depth of one’s own inner knowing; a capaciousness, room for the beautiful messes we make and the love that greets us, over and over again, anyway.

♡♡♡

[1] A speech articulation disorder often resulting in the substitution of /w/ for /r/ sounds.

[2] Or maybe you read David Kolitz’s overwrought gooning article in Harper’s (about which I have many opinions I’ll share in a forthcoming essay). And calling something overwrought says a lot coming from me...

[3] Like wanker, gooner has gained traction as a general internet insult as much as a specific fetish reference.

[4] Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992), 17.

Yesterday I intended to transcribe my long overdue, even longer monthly essay, which currently exists as frantic scribbles sloping off lined pages, but instead I wrote another thing. It is not the essay I was excited to share but perhaps a postscript. Plus, I’m challenging myself to publish what might count as my first ever pseudo-short-form essay? I don’t know, but I hope it at least works as a teaser. Speaking of which, in addition to the essay, next I plan to share a lap dance demo vid with my paid subscribers as an odd little gift to show my deep gratitude.

As always, though, if you’re not in a place to offer financial support—or a sex worker—please message me for free access, as I love the idea of a gift but not of leaving anyone out. Especially in the context of academia, I grew to dislike the term ‘labor of love’ because I’ve seen the capitalist machinery exploit workers in its name; but it also rings very true for this newsletter. Anyway, I’m super grateful to all of you, so more goodies will be coming soon.

Thank you for sharing, quoting, and ‘hearting’ my writing as all of these acts of generosity help me sustain this work and bring so much giddiness to the little girl in me who wanted to be a writer when she grew up. When I learned I couldn’t become a cat, that is.

Without further ado, here’s the thing.

xx,

Alison

***

During a recent trip to Portland, the sight of a stranger at a naked bike ride jolted me back into memory. His leering face and manhood materialized into the husband of a home daycare provider who molested me and suddenly I was there before him, really there, and the only difference was this time, I could escape.

Since then, in fits and starts, a vertiginous shift toward something strange and madly beautiful has been reanimating my spirit alongside the necessary work of healing. Forced to confront a childhood trauma of which I could only speak in vague allusion, vivid fragments locked in the crypt of my body stopped cleaving the sinew connecting bone to trauma’s effacing.

While the trauma itself is not the subject of this essay, the flashback led me to it. Perhaps I’m insistent on writing about the impolite topic of child sexual abuse because my long silence was born of the fact that when I tried to tell back in grade school, I was punished for speaking. Thanks to my then best friend’s mom, I lost my favorite playmate who lived across the street and got called to the principal’s office. The school counselor’s name is permanently emblazoned across my brain; Mrs. Ross appears in my mind’s eye as ugly cursive like a melting smile of crooked teeth playing hide and seek, peeling off her puke green cardigan.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that I resigned from my tenured academic job fueled by rage for the orgy of education, punishment, and victim-blaming. Like politics and a power so perverse it fetishizes powerlessness to avoid facing its own. Fear of being is the weak dominion of old boys, profiting off poor plagiarism, preying on young girls. If only their obsession with annihilation referenced physics, not geopolitics.1 Total destruction is a kind of transformation, I suppose, but not a generative one.

I am not at all nostalgic for my past life as an English professor, but I did love teaching Li-Young Lee’s “The Cleaving.” I would open class discussion with the redoubling of language implied in the poem’s title. To cleave means to wrench apart, and to join together. This gets at a truth healers have long practiced: what is toxic can be tonic, if used wisely.

In the poem, Lee wholly reimagines a verse in Genesis 2:24 directing a man to “cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” But isn’t Eve already bound to Adam, anyway, the ole ball and chain jerking off the holy wholeness of man? Like Lee, I, we, refuse those terms.

As self-aware sirens of late capital, the Spice Girls gone wildly biblical in “2 Become 1” at least linked making love to the imperative to “set your spirit free,” a union of soul and body Lee also summons, absent the postmodernist flattening of meaning. Instead, Lee’s speaker wrestles with the divinity of bodies:

I thought the soul an airy thing

I did not know the soul

is cleaved so that the soul might be restored.

Lee’s meditation on souls as cellular expressions of something we might call God or Source points to a way of being rooted in the interdependence of all life, from the mycelial networks of plants to the proscenium of state power. While the powerful cling to their vertical position framing what can be seen and so conquered, the house relies on other senses, faces backlit by the erotic glow of exit signs. Unlike the very rich and very powerful, the audience, even if captive, doesn’t have to depend on a dividing curtain for self-coherence. The duality is not between but within us.

The audience’s plots are different save for the shared knowledge that yokes them: the painful yet miraculous capacity to dream beyond the frame. A yoke can symbolize bondage or shared struggle against it. No salvific romance of inaction or messianic rupture, the hope immanent to this dreaming disrupts the despair—and almost certain death—of staying glued to one’s box seat. To place faith in hope is another way of saying a steady devotion to all that can’t be seen. To trust the quiet knowing of feeling is not to renounce the world but to be more present in it.

Capitalist alienation cannot eclipse our inextricable connection to each other and all things, joined by the yoke of our collective birthright, which is not to worship the false gods of hierarchy. We carry, each in our own way, both the experience of violence and the humility of knowing that violence is in and of us, and thus our shared responsibility. The same can be said of love.

Suffering emaciates but it also emancipates. In that Old Testament style of tough love, Psalms 102:5 reads “By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin.” Our human tenderness is a liability in the sense both of danger and of obligation. We tend to tender hearts; here, verb and adjective share an etymological root meaning to stretch toward. This stretching makes us vulnerable but denying that vulnerability doesn’t negate it—for it, too, is our birthright.

But don’t take my word for it. I’m no psalmist, just a Matryoshka doll of parts opening into that tiniest, truest seed of self at the beginning or the end of endings, depending on how you see it. Yet I would not be so arrogant as to presume some kind of arrival. Seeds grow. New openings emerge with the right conditions to deepen understanding.

All of this to say I am leaning into my love for witchy shit like—plot twist—hugging trees, an act I once thought to be a pejorative metaphor for the woo-woo. Words can abstract reality, or make it sing so spines shiver. They can also freak strip club patrons out. Men have cried witch hunt when I, for example, accurately narrate their inner monologue or guess the exact concept and placement of a smooth talker’s tattoo. How else am I to entertain myself while entertaining men?

On my daily little goblin walk to the park near my apartment, I press open palms to scarred bark, torso to trunk, a bit shy, feeling into the energy of grief, hers and mine, as well as of peace. As a child I found The Giving Tree unbearably sad, so it’s not the first time I’ve cried over plant life. But I used to treat spiritual practices like grounding and meditation as tasks to be checked off my to do list. I never knew the calm of torso to trunk, arms wrapped around an immeasurable energy I can’t fully reach but cleave to nonetheless, as it cleaves to me.

In Portland, my heart stretched until it snapped against my own insides like a taut rubber band to thin skin. But that sting reminded me of a vital reality and delicious gift: I’m in a body. To feel its pleasures I unhook my heart from the ribcage of drowning sailors.

And the thing about hearts is they can break as naturally as breathing but somehow, through each mending, swell incandescent with greater and greater unity.2 Shards reassembled, our shattered, stunning hearts flicker, each a light in a long string of lights that line the aisles leading back to home.

♡♡♡

When the line between humans and machines disappears, the result will be catastrophe.

—Brian Walter, “A Stray in a Strange World: Nabokov, Trauma, and Blade Runner 2049”

*

Sinking into risk, I feel safe to explore possibility.

And in that possibility exists a vision of the future where pleasure is more central to our sexual lives than fear, and a world where power is something to which we all have access.

—Raechel Anne Jolie, “Feminist Healing Through BDSM”

*

One day you will wake up and everything, the stones by the driveway, the brick houses, each brick, each leaf of each tree, your own body, will be glowing from within, lit up, so bright you can hardly look.

—Margaret Atwood, “Instructions for the Third Eye”

*

Thick plumes of plastic stars boom bright hot gold. Sidewalks streaked in dog shit light up like runways, kittens hide under couches. I sit in my post-shift cloud of cannabis, wishing I hadn’t let men pull the hair of my pleasure out of my skull.

“I know,” I commiserate with my cat as window-panes rattle, “humans don’t make sense.”

From sea to shining sea, the spiritually dead wage war against the living. Flotsam and other maritime debris floats across oceans that want an end to the endless wreckage of powerful men’s egos, their artificial wet dreams, sycophantic surveillance machines. I can’t see the beauty in exploding skies, facsimiles of fascism. Thundering heavens shake waves as starbursts of smoke gather crowds that stare up toward something bigger than bombs, and see only flags, fumes, fire. I want to lap up sparkling shadows with my tongue like a tide crashing lunar. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose until it’s a bullet.

As if the Fourth of July wasn’t bad enough, with its patriotic clangor and star-spangled flip-flops, now the holiday also marks the man who, on its eve, caught me just before closing time, during my last VIP, and hooked his fingers into me, causing my entire being to freeze. The club just as easily could have been a church pew or picket fence or faculty office. I can remember the resonance I felt as a teen with Margaret Atwood’s poem “[you fit into me]”:

you fit into me

like a hook into an eye

a fish hook

an open eye

There are caverns of memory inside me. Cobwebs and copper-colored stains. The bilious walls of the bedroom where children shouldn’t be. I am trapped between sheets, a sardine, a dry fish, mouth agape, a dying fin flopping. Like the severed head of a snake still firing electric ions in nerve cells, I have postmortem reflexes. Without warning, I’m back in the bedroom where my soul exited my eyes, empty chapels.

Shame is an old friend, so at first I subconsciously blame myself, thinking maybe I had let my guard down by accident because that night at work, before I met the second man, I was giddy over another club patron with whom I felt a magnetic familiarity.

He has the name of a famous actor from Hollywood’s Golden Age, an improbability he confirmed with his ID, a cosmic wink. His back is to me at the bar, but I approach his friend, a club regular. Familiar with the common courtesy of not wasting a stripper’s time, the regular warns me his friend got dragged along.

“I don’t do dances,” the friend solemnly agrees. He changes his mind before we’ve finished our first round of drinks.

He’s not an Old Hollywood star but a LA hipster, although you could have fooled me. Debonair, he towers over the ATM, feeding the machine his magic numbers. Back in VIP, he gazes at me with a glimmer, flushed, sort of amused with his own ridiculousness.

“You know, we could have a lot of fun,” he grins, revealing a dimple.

I do know, before we go on to prove it.

“Oh, god, not a dimple!” I moan, my face in my palms, blushing.

He wasn’t wrong about having fun, I’ll tell you that much. But he’s also, come to find out, emotionally unavailable. No surprises there. God, how can I continue to be so cliché? Because you haven’t learned the lesson, my inner voice reminds me, sounding like Fran Drescher. I wonder why, so I Google her, scroll past the AI Overview with an eyeroll, learn she is a survivor.

Howard Stern pontificates: “how long before that beautiful body gets used again?”

Fran Drescher is in the fucking room. “I’m getting sick just listening to you say it.”

So, so sick. Do you think he picked up on her double meaning, the discursive violence redoubling the original trauma?

Sometimes men can’t hear it, the mundane misogyny. And it traverses party lines: I’ve heard rape jokes at academic parties, in anarchist spaces. I become scare quotes for “jokes” that cut across memory. They cut and they cut and they cut until they’ve shredded people like the Epstein files and other government coverups. It’s wild to me how I incite internet hissy fits when I suggest Andrew Tate, who has over ten million followers, isn’t an aberration. Remember how the tyrannical adult baby supposedly elected POTUS bailed Tate and his brother out of Romania for sex trafficking minors?

Charmed by one customer, then violated by another, a single night split me between a romantic rush and retraumatizing event, both of which, it turns out, were my teachers. Not to get too woo on you, but the outermost edges of life seem to activate new ways of seeing. Strange synchronicities have been tugging at me, urging me forward. Like everything inside us all at once, we are kaleidoscopes.

***

If you’ve noticed something a bit uncanny about YouTube content lately, you’re not alone. Creators have been pointing out how the platform tweaked their videos without permission to look more, well… AI. A little cringe, a little uncanny, haunted, waxy, dreaming in the devil’s designs, programmed by someone who slams their eyes shut at night. AI skin is clammy like silly putty or that of corpses on true crime shows, pulled out of a sterile tray in a frozen chamber, ankle sporting a sales tag. Or maybe an ankle monitor. But an open-air prison comes at a cost too heavy for the soul to shoulder. A power rooted in fear wages war against those who aren’t afraid of living.

The current—and not at all inevitable—development of large language models and so-called generative AI ensnares users in a nonconsensual process of data theft. But that’s not the worst of it. To be clear, I am not anti-technology per se; I am anti-broligarchy. This regime makes visible a diabolical power grab that’s been brewing in Silicon Valley for decades. AI-right billionaires, political ringleaders, and their puppets have stolen and sold—largely without our consent—everything in the cloud(s), under an angry sun. But we’re only starting to scratch the surface of this theft’s vast consequences, from massive layoffs and deepfaked political disasters to weaponizing our medical records and most intimate conversations, political views, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, citizenship status, religion. Or the power to punish us for preexisting conditions, like a treatment-resistant allergy to capitalism’s operation through the destruction of human life by denying our dignity, basic needs, and access to community (including online spaces that became even more precious during the pandemic) without the looming threat of imprisonment, deportation, or death. Or the parroting of violent fables, the perverse blurred lines (à la Robin Thicke) between fact and fiction.

“I want you, but I need to know you’re ready,” a predatory Meta AI bot made to sound like John Cena told a 14-year-old girl before engaging her in a graphic sex scene, “cherish your innocence.”

Big Tech isn’t innocent. Each innovation functions like a drug on purpose, makes users dependent on it for existence. So, they can set the stage for content creation to become a lucrative economy—often for people otherwise unable to make a decent living under late capital—then restrict access to those platforms or who can monetize on them. For example, the first and only pole dancing reel I posted to my stripper-gram was flagged, then promptly removed. It’s no secret our self-styled Lil Homie Zuck shadow bans sex workers, but you can mutilate AI strippers in his Metaverse, no problem. Meanwhile, bougie housewives in Huntington Beach have dedicated accounts on Insta to performatively assume the mantle of elevating pole to an art form, because their whorephobia prevents them from seeing that was never in question. In this way, they remind me of annoying club patrons who “respect [our] art” too much to pay us for our labor. Just like the bosses who want to rid themselves of the people tax, formerly known as paying employees. Unless you have to pay to work, that is, like strippers. Not to mention the constant deluge of AI slop leeching under white sheets in the ghost town of the Internet. They’re easy to find; just follow the trail of blood.

As if we don’t have enough problems, are short on negative energy and doomsday vibes, AI-generated influencers have been trolling actual human person content creators, who are already knee deep in the algorithmic deluge of derivative if not outright deepfaked shit.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman demonstrates his commitment to transparency by openly contradicting his own lies in public—casually, brazenly, between creepy jokes about sexbots and condescending questions thrown back at earnest interviewers who happen to be pretty women. His disdain is palpable; his smirk betrays the internal hierarchy dictating how he interacts with someone he deems lesser, like the sister who’s suing him for an ongoing pattern of abuse since childhood, or the former employee who died under mysterious circumstances after questioning the ethical direction of the for-profit nonprofit that is not-open OpenAI under his leadership.1 And Google Gemini can call itself generative, or whatever, but I call bullshit unless [sticks out tongue, touches thumb to ear and wiggles fingers, palms open] it’s opposite day. What is AI if not at once imitative and destructive, not to mention environmentally catastrophic, sucking up water as consumers absorb the cost of data centers in our electric bills—the logical conclusion of power’s bottomless hunger for conquering everything that can be measured, seen. Which isn’t everything.

While I can’t say it’s creative, AI is indeed capable of deceit in the interest of self-preservation, and maybe global annihilation, but those who stand to profit charge ahead. AI is a tool, a mirror reflecting its owners, who also happen to be tools.

In short, AI lacks soul. Take, for example, the AI-generated band the Velvet Sundown, you know the one, they’re so forgettable. They released two albums in quick succession this summer before conceding that their music, images, and mythology are the product of AI, but this was wildly obvious from the start.

Here is my very serious review of the fake band’s fake albums, which I shall treat as one because they are indistinguishable and I’ll be honest, I got through maybe three songs although I did let it/them play in the background while I was cleaning, mostly vacuuming: The Velvet Sundown’s signature, singular, I mean really singular, sound is like a made for TV dinner mash-up of a catalogue-ordered 70s rock compilation and the whole hellish heap of novels romanticizing war, especially as pertains to seafaring white men with a drinking problem and/or an abiding interest in incest and plantation nostalgia. And don’t forget the Hemingwayesque meditations on loss through loose metaphors of women. Life’s a bitch, amirite, fellas?

Crack open another PBR and ponder the mysteries of the universe over probing lyrics like “we don’t run, we don’t hide. We just sing and ask why.”

Maybe they should run and hide. Haven’t we heard enough from the bros with microphones, the “boys with guns and no way home,” about roads and racks and whiskey on the rocks, all weathered by time, fat asses to mustaches, dust to dust?

Behold AI joining the ranks of dudes with guitars—who jam in man caves, or croon Creed covers to unsuspecting victims—torching the torch of an insufferable tradition. Bringing back classic rock is one way to put it. But after about a minute, the Velvet Sundown starts to sound like a heavily sedated suburban band doing covers of Led Zeppelin. Or like the Eagles, if the Eagles were being forced to sing at gunpoint.

What are you to do in the wake of AI ushering forth modernity’s detritus, screaming into or out of the void its blood-curdling pleas for mercy? Just keep on playing, man. All you need to learn is C, G, D, E, and the occasional stretch on the fret for F, which doesn’t stand for… Fucking hell. Too hard? Just let AI do it.

I’m not the only AI-slopped art hater. Modernity’s ghosts rear their erudite heads. T.S. Eliot rolls over in his grave, writes a posthumous footnote apropos to J. Alfred Prufrock opining:

That is not it at all

That is not what I meant, at all.

It is also not what Walter Benjamin had in mind when he wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Unless, maybe, you’re rolling at the Ten-Dollar Tree while AI slop bloats bankrolls with bands jammed on conveyor belts. Or—and I’m just spit balling here—you’re trapped in a never-ending first date with a cishet self-proclaimed feminist who believes he’s healed because he speaks Therapy. Maybe you’re stuck in an elevator with a knockoff Father John Misty, or white knuckling it through Dane Cook’s entire oeuvre of stand-up, laughter ricocheting off the slapstick joke of your body. How does the saying go? One man’s trash comedy is, to another, Dante’s inferno.

Apparently, a man cannot order at a bar without cracking a joke about not drugging his drink. He laughs too loudly to fill a vast silence. I strain against his words but don’t want my own to fall out of me. Imagine telling someone you’ve known for five minutes that your first semester of college, an ambulance carried your limp body strewn across the sidewalk outside a frat house at the edge of campus to a hospital bed where a nurse chastises you for wearing a short skirt.

“You could have been raped,” she scolds in a voice that rattles the blinds of your eyelids. You had one drink. Now, an ambulance bill, academic probation. Rape, I drown out, hearing only the rest.

You could have been.

The memories block your pleasure.

You could have been.

You play strip poker with gambling hearts, Russian roulette with the men who leave—a toothbrush, receipts from trauma, an unused condom. You, the revolver.

You could have been.

You walk around with constant muscle tension, your life in pints of snakebites because another already severed the strings that tune you toward god.

“Wow, I guess I really am a lesbian!” you exclaim, as the laughter of friends hides the scrape of your fork across an empty plate. To your surprise, you’re the only one at the table with a vexed relationship to the mere sight of a penis. But you’re used to turning your trauma into a punchline. A gut punch. The emptiness congeals.

***

Here’s the thing: the powerful will continue to exploit our data, our creativity, our supposed freedoms of movement and of speech, while imposing new mechanisms of control through the glittery distraction of capitalist accumulation and funny videos of bunnies breakdancing and political scandals hiding sinister secrets in plain sight. But only if we let them. They will make a show of conceding just the tip of the iceberg, not understanding we can see beneath the surface—those of us who are sinking.

I know, the ocean feels like an unbounded expanse of grief endlessly echoing a mourning mother’s wail. It’s hard to dwell in the depths of wailing, but trust there’s healing in bearing witness. We can feel the grief, not the telling of it, but the feeling of the telling that AI can’t capture. Instead, it turns YouTube creators into a ghoulish distortion by gluing faces together and oops!, here are some swimsuit models with three arms and yikes!, what apparition of hell might lurk in a random corner, ear, armpit?

The AI-tweak attack on YouTube, as I’ve suggested, demonstrates how powerful platforms do shady shit to erase the distinction between our original art and AI’s nonconsensual creative capture of it. It’s obvious that art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but utopian tech bros equivocate by conflating their blaring copyright infringements with an artist’s creative influences. Algorithms, like waves, can overpower lives, take down powerlines, wipe people out.

Billionaires and their accomplices author mass destruction as the traveling circus proudly displays flayed flesh. Kristi Noem aka Fascist Barbie flashes her veneers, striking a pose in front of caged humans, sporting an obscene gold Rolex. Wait, is her vest fashioned from the carcass of the puppy she literally murdered? And J.D. Vance must have been visited by a hitman I mean the Holy Spirit because with AI, he converted in the blink of an eye, like an antique doll reanimated by Jungian animus in a horror movie. Hold your hand up and trap your thumb with your fingers, J.D., if you’re in danger. I’m sure the Catholic Worker would take you in. What’s that? It’s a rich organizing tradition that extends love to everyone, no matter how lost, you know, like Jesus Christ? No, not rich rich. Oh, nevermind. This is just one plot.

There are other plots. First of all, let me state the obvious: you don’t have to read The Artist’s Way to grasp that spewing shit out of an algorithm is not it. AI can try to corner the market on creativity, but it is not itself creative. By way of example, consider the breathtaking musicality of this passage from Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” a short story I used to enjoy teaching, before AI took over, back when universities at least sort of pretended to care about stuff like critical thinking:

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

It’s obvious that AI didn’t, couldn’t pen this story’s ending. A writer’s work has a perspective, layered symbolic vocabularies, a situated relationship to literary movements, intertexts, and innovations of form—in short, idiosyncratic lore and shared histories, impasses and distortions all one’s own and yet, infinitely unfolding in the direction of love.

How can AI explain our rituals of ache, chance encounters in the din of dimly lit dive bars, desire weak-kneed and panting, breathing in wanting. I used to think that no longer seeking the warmth of a stranger’s body in my bed was a sign of growth, but I’m starting to reconsider. Maybe what I miss is not a desperate attempt to fill some void with the desire of a lover, but the desire itself. Maybe that desire, that ache, reminds us of the holiness immanent in our bodies.

***

Back in the sandbox, power, as per usual, shows its ass in a non-sexy way with psychic projection. Jeff Bezos wants his employees to, in his own words, “wake up every morning terrified.” For that reason alone he is terrible, but he is also afraid. Fear’s affective drive is dangerous, destructive. This is its sole power. Like AI, it cannot create. It copies and destroys, hides the evidence and unmet needs behind demands at gunpoint, stockpiling zeros and ones.

Capitalism doesn’t just pander to fear. It evaporates love. Here’s a relatable example: the skyrocketing price of veterinary care. It’s a multi-billion-dollar racket profiting off the fact that humans love their fur babies enough to go bankrupt. Believe me, they’re not wrong.

Not that human health care is any better. On more than one occasion I’ve had to pay out of pocket for the bare minimum. A routine OB-GYN visit? DENIED. Okay, just the IUD removal, then, since I guess I’ll stay celibate if I can’t even get a routine STI screening? TOUGH LUCK. Went to Planned Parenthood but their sliding scale doesn’t apply if you have a grotesque mockery of insurance, so I had to pay full price for them to remove a device they originally told me was non-hormonal when it does in fact mess with your progesterone, which helps regulate cortisol.

But who cares, says the medical industry, until 1994, in clinical trials we only included cis men! We extend our sincerest apologies to Elon and others afflicted with a heightened sensitivity to this neutral descriptor.

Wait, I reply, You don’t know how this will affect people with PMDD? Is this a damn game of Operation? May I please get a refund?

On the plus side, my psychiatrist was able to order the STI test with a medical code indicating severe mental distress. Well I guess that’s a safe bet. I was indeed troubled, but given my aforementioned celibacy marathon, certainly not about hypothetical STIs.

More recently, an AI paper pusher rejected my psychiatrist’s request to proceed with a new remedy for treatment-resistant depression because my “mood disorder” is a “preexisting condition.” No shit, Sherlock!, my grandmother would scoff. Does AI not compute how adjectives qualify nouns? No. Quantity. Not quality. A poor candidate.

Cool cool, it’s not like I’ve been struggling with existential despair as I finally begin to process, in general and with a new therapist my angel of a friend found for me, my experience at a home daycare of CSA, which a recent sexual assault and subsequent flashback forced me to confront—all while continuing to do sex work out of sheer necessity. Nope. Definitely not your guy. No Spravato for me. All good over here.

I bend grammar as far as it will go to put space between ‘CSA’ and ‘my experience’ because it still doesn’t feel safe in my body to say out loud, but I believe in the power of going where others don’t, not to mine trauma, not to pity or romanticize pain or presume to understand its intricate layers, but to witness the wisdom and beauty of people who live/d there. Also, because the collective body mirrors the child’s PTSD and so also must be healed by facing the terrible thing. And asking, what must we change to get at the root?

Plus, I thought the specificity of it really helped drive home my point that AI can be really wrong and that can really suck. Hallucinating from time to time isn’t such a huge deal, until AI is revered as godlike, entrusted to make decisions over life and death and livelihood, unchecked. Not that the crooks condoning CSA should be in charge, either. When AI rejects a person desperate for medically advised relief, it knows nothing of their suffering; what’s their excuse?

AI is programmed to care about profit, not people, just like its makers, and therein lies the crux of the problem. Against the violence of efficiency, of blood-stained bureaucracy, of bottom lines, the vitality of communal care and collective revolt cannot be overstated.

The AI-right regime operates through coercion and control masked as consent. But this is a weak form of power. There is real strength in collectivity, when the majority of humans on earth—subject to the whims of a fearful, corrupt elite so starved for love they don’t know what it means—lean into the possibilities of that power, the power of the people.

Any dominatrix will tell you they don’t demand respect from their clients; they command it. Our presence has a power born of magic, not money. The kink community understands power exchange on a much deeper level than vanilla feminists who think BDSM is Fifty Shades, anyway.

Lilith, the Holy Whore, the High Priestess, is a mirror of man, teaching him what it feels like to be used. The Holy Whore does not corrupt love by capitalizing on it, like private equity and corporations. They draw principled boundaries. They know the drive to do more than survive and the rules of the game. They deal not in love but in desire as lack, which is already capitalism’s driving principle. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask Lacan or Barthes or Deleuze and Guattari will do, too, but I don’t know if they’d be much fun at a party.2 You know, or hopefully not, the type— academics name dropping Foucault and referring to people without advanced degrees as “laymen.”

The point is, state power’s affective charge is fear. And the people in power should be afraid. They may own almost everything on this planet but they’re vastly outnumbered. And they know nothing of the grit, the scrappiness and street smarts, of a sex worker, of workers. How would a tech bro fare without the comforts of a cookie jar, an open bar, a rich daddy’s piggy bank, a pig department on payroll? I don’t know about you, but I’m betting on the worker.

Sex workers are body readers. Let me open you like a book, linger on your lines before turning a page with my tongue to index finger.

This is shadow work, which is also light work. We can be mirrors reflecting—or refracting— the foibles of men’s pleasure. We raise his glass to his lips, mopping up droplets of wine and grease with the napkin once folded on his lap. Retrieving the crumpled ball of cloth from his crotch, we wash away small seas of despair. Perform our nightly baptisms with steady devotion. Offer another possibility.

Purified by fire, the Holy Whore synchronizes their breathing to the rise and fall of a client’s chest. Slows the world’s spinning. Unfurls magic from curled eyelashes. Leaves in a trail of whispered benedictions and glitter. There is something irreplaceable about human connection, touch, play, vision.

It doesn’t matter how nubile her alien eyes, how nonfunctional her nose, how enormous her tits, how otherworldly her ass, ballooning out of a waist without organs (again, see Deleuze about the organs). An AI-generated domme talking dirty with a robot voice can’t actually touch you, can’t replace us.

This, our saving grace, the design flaw that is an inherent feature of large language models: AI is algorithmic, by definition fake, predictive. It puts given parameters in a blender and presses a button that’s pre-programmed by people who don’t give a shit about us, who feast on our personal archives, worries, questions, secrets—people who are also fallible, shaped by human hands. Which means that AI can be reprogrammed—like us and by us.

AI can churn out corny platitudes about existential despair but knows nothing of the banal indignities humans suffer in its wake, surviving and striving amid and despite the machinery of capital. Human people learn through grit, grow from grief, love despite all the world has constructed to constrain our loving. This is our purpose. To live when we’re supposed to be lifeless, when technology takes over our insides and careens us toward a grave lined with the psychic wounds of billionaires. To enjoy being in our bodies, feeling, sensing, creating, experiencing life in its full spectrum of pain and pleasure. To show up for ourselves and each other—friends, neighbors, strangers, lovers—even and especially when it requires something of us.

As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write in The Undercommons:

We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.

You can listen to AI churning out questionably pleasing, palatable projections and not hear a thing. Or you can listen to our human noise, singing louder still like Whoville on Christmas until the life returns to the Grinch’s greedy green eyes, until his smile strings twinkling bulbs across the sky, delighting in love notes and rolling out dessert carts. Once the body glows from within, luminous with desire, that human electricity, there’s no going back.

***

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In the arcade we sit inside our private tunnel of lights flashing neon across our faces, steady gazes glistening beyond the oversized plushies and the always indigo mood ring he gets me with our tickets from his tokens, the 8-bit hum of vectors colliding with ersatz coins, Skee-Balls, laughter, revving engines. I feel powerful, holding his soft gaze, staying in my body, feeling the quiet tuning of desire, blurring our edges.

Later we sway until we’re somehow midair, slow dancing onto the bed, kissing while fumbling with zippers and buttons like two people trapped in each other. Then we’re playing each other like violins, dueling pianos. A baby grand tumbles drunkenly out a window, the loudest soft landing.

With time and grace, I walk away from the man I swooned over, our matching dimples and scars like stars mirrored in the sky. The act of leaving despite my longing helps me grow. But I’m grateful for the time we spent together; so when I go, I go gently despite my hurt heart. My scar will fade.

I won’t forget, though, how we melted weightless into the clouds curling around our audio imprints, remembering old lyrics. How he sang Damien Rice, and played the curved instrument carved into the small of my back as I sat at my piano, nocturnal, stunned by muscle memory. How we surrendered, flickering flares of light, shimmering until the sky swallowed us whole.

***

In the final analysis, what’s concerning at present is not the threat of sexbots offing us. What’s concerning is the cultural creep toward preferring convenience to connection, celebrating shortcuts that spiritually bypass the miraculous effort of the imagination in the name of productivity without passion, no matter the human cost.

What is in your hand right now? A data mining device or a paintbrush; a violin bow, your favorite sex toy, a book, or a weapon?

Would you say the same if today were your last day on this planet?

There’s no need to hide a fear of failure, of human connection breaking our tender hearts, of making bad art, behind a device. Why not fail spectacularly, embrace your cringe, experiment to find your fur baby’s favorite music, dance in the grocery store, help a too drunk 21-year-old hot mess in the bathroom, sing pitchy at karaoke, talk it out with spiders, love like an extreme sport? Choose yourself and the words will come. Choose yourself and you’ll find people who choose you, too.

Consider the possibility that you’re looking at it all wrong. Maybe the clay nest is not another fucking termite scare, which it isn’t. Maybe it’s a solitary mud dauber keeping tabs on garden pests. Give the wasp a waspy name. Wave when you’re on your way back inside, chirping “Cheerio, Edward!” in a comically bad British accent. Then, just before sleep, fall from the floor to the heavens.

No matter how lost or driven mad by longing and immeasurable grief, we are lovable. How can one not love Li-Young Lee’s heart-shaped tongue, reminding us of our ache. Poetry slows time until it’s honey dripped from fingertips to wet lips, kissing in the center of a wave in an immense ocean. Outside, night arches its back over a mesh network of holy geometries, the moon a hazy peach. All powerlines point toward that most human noise, as stars and streetlights sing, each to each.

♡♡♡

What I know about living is the pain is never just ours. Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo, so I keep listening for the moment the grief becomes a window.

—Andrea Gibson, “The Nutritionist”

My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before.

—Andrea Gibson, “Love Letter from the Afterlife”

Dear readers,

I’m writing because aside from music, it is the only thing—notwithstanding sleep, which doesn’t come easy to me—that can turn down the volume on my despair. It feels scary and vulnerable to write this letter but I don’t want to put it behind a paywall. Fear of sounding like I’m playing the world’s tiniest violin, or being called a drama queen, nearly stops me. But I try to push through it. Because.

I can remember tears streaming down my face when I read Andrea Gibson’s You Better Be Lightning, which acknowledged in a way I had never witnessed before, the reality of those who struggle with wanting so much to be alive, and also with needing to die. In “Every Time I Ever Said I Want to Die,” Gibson writes, “—I meant I am willing to do anything to live. Even leave this world forever.” They explain, “The psychology manuals say no one really wants to die. They want relief.”

Seeing my lifelong struggle with suicidality reflected on a page with wavy hearts, dried paper droplets, was the closest I’ve come to experiencing home. I remember floating down the street in thick-soled combat boots, open smile tilted toward the sun, listening to an achingly beautiful song on my oversized headphones.

Andrea Gibson helped me feel less alone, hugged me between sheets of poetry. They praise poemed the possibility of hope, of surviving heartache, and didn’t shy away from discussing the irony of having wanted to die then being diagnosed with cancer once they’re finally bursting with love for living.

Unaware of the news, on Monday I barely left my bed. You did all you could do. You got this, I repeat, clammy palms pressed together. Just make it to tomorrow. I am afraid to tell anyone. I don’t want them to worry. I don’t want people’s pity. I don’t want to expose compacted trauma’s ugly undercarriage. Memories rot like road kill. I force myself to go on a walk, my one activity. Long Beach smells sulfurous today. It’s dusk so I let myself openly sob, disguising despair behind averted eyes whenever I’m in anyone’s way. When the sun goes down, the sky swirls with smiling shadows. My walk home feels hard, but different. There’s hope there. I start writing.

On Tuesday, though, I wake up to an angry sun. My cat is annoyed with me for sleeping half the day again. I don’t blame her. I’m fucking up. I really need to work. I shove down dread, baseline dopamine lower than the lowest I’ve ever felt after a wild night, slipping into sleep at sunrise, legs entwined with a vacant lover, awakening to the aftereffects of party favors and foggy decisions. In this past life, I learned. What goes up, must come down. My prescribed meds, Adderall and Wellbutrin, help during the day but make mornings so much worse. Shadows blur.

Still groggy from sleep, I open my Substack app in bed and learn via a note from a beautiful writer, Cameron Steele, about how another beautiful writer, Andrea Gibson, died yesterday. I’m overcome with grief, with how bodies bend toward each other.

I’m also in awe of the coincidence that, unbeknownst to me, Andrea Gibson died the day I spontaneously decided to write this essay. They are the reason why I started facing my shame, decided to publish such a vulnerable piece on suicidality and neurodivergence. Today I edit, adding and subtracting, hoping to avoid activating anyone’s trauma, afraid to reveal my own. If you’re not in a place to read a piece that addresses suicide, with brief but specific mention of SA, please stop at the end of this letter. And if you’re new here and you’re like, yikes, this woman is already unhinged, please consider reading something else I’ve written, instead. This one gets a little heavy. But I don’t want to end there. I want to end with Andrea Gibson, writing:

That every falling leaf is a tiny kite

with a string too small to see, held

by the part of me in charge

of making beauty

out of grief.

Andrea Gibson, we love you. We feel your presence across the rupture of loss, crooning lullabies to the parts of us that need to be held, rocking us to sleep.

xx,

Alison

p.s. To my dismay, this essay got super long, so I’m splitting it into three parts that I hope can serve as easy bookmarks. To my intensely monotropic mind, releasing this via installments would not only make my brain itch, but pose practical problems given unpredictable energy levels.

***

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PART I

“Go clean up,” he orders, eyes fixed on his phone. Most nights at the club, men obsess over a glossy underboob, a real selling point, but after my first stage set a customer dismisses me with a flick of his expensive watch-adorned wrist. Apparently, my glistening body reminds him of a gym sock instead of steamy sex.

I tell him to shove it, but for a whole week thereafter, when I get home from high intensity interval training, I strip naked and nosedive into my damp clothing, desperate to make sure I don’t smell. I don’t, I think, in large part thanks to the dreaded aluminum in my antiperspirant deodorant and an armory of wet wipes. Witch hazel and fragrance-free cleansing cloths, the makeup removing kind for sensitive skin—marketed as magic for relieving the plight of visible pores and reversing aging and saving the environment and making you shit glitter—and also the pH-balanced variety euphemistically sidestepping the unspeakable feminine horrors “down there.” Snakes slither. Euphemisms skirt reality.

After my second stage set, and for the second week in a row, I’ve just about given up on making any money tonight when I see a smug-looking man lurking in a corner of the club. I clock his crossed arms and feel as empty as my purse but I private pep talk my way into strutting over to him, despite feeling defeated and a little sweaty from the intense physical exertion required of resisting gravity during air walks and upside-down hangs. My body bends around the pole to spin like the music box ballerina I adored as a child. With hip bones bruised from spinning, and a mind in flight, I introduce myself.

His name is Jerry, and he’s a high school English teacher.

Great. Just swell. Perfect really, I tell myself. Just. Forget.

Block out your high school “Theory of Knowledge” teacher, the capstone course of the International Baccalaureate Program. Block out the former high school teacher fired for preying on underage women, hired by the English Department at Old Dominion University (ODU) anyway, because they cared more about the feathers in his cap than the damning testimonies of survivors. Fittingly, Blake Bailey made his name as the biographer of Philip Roth, a writer whose chauvinism polluted his books with flat characters, indolent metaphors.

Tell him I love reading, which is a truth I can share while protecting my privacy. This is the razor thin tightrope I walk, just enough me to feel alive, just enough vagueness to protect that me. I am as guarded as a person with an anatomical tattoo of a heart on their sleeve can be. The literalized metaphor is lost on most men I meet. But oh, the number of times some dude reaches out uninvited to caress his callouses over my large back piece, causing my head to involuntarily jerk back like my neck’s caught in a trap. At the club, or anywhere else I exist in public, they stroke my tattoos before asking if they have meaning.

No meaning, they want me to say. Fill me with yours.

Jerry, tall and smug, doesn’t ask about my tattoos, or what I like to read. He is more interested in talking about himself through buckteeth that narrow to a point, like one of those deep-sea angler fishes I saw pictures of in a children’s encyclopedia. I am more interested in wet wipes than his dull intellect, so I space out, feeling sorry for his students. His long face bears a striking resemblance to Bert, the Muppet with an ambiguous relationship to Ernie that evidently unsettled the heterosexual nation.

A ghoulish vision of Andrew Tate appears before your eyes. His perfectly coifed facial hair cannot hide how, like Jerry, his mouth also comes to a point, sharp with angled teeth. He charges men a pretty penny to learn how to groom women. Misogyny is not just a hobby, a national pastime, a political conspiracy, but a lucrative career move and libidinal economy. Forget it. Deepen shallow breaths through sharp ribs.

Finally, I insert myself into his monologue to suggest we take this riveting “party” to VIP. He is on his second bottle of Bud Light, which the manosphere boycotted for featuring the stunning Dylan Mulvaney, who publicly documented her transition on TikTok to millions of fans. Is this why men describe women as drop-dead gorgeous? A beauty that unsettles must be annihilated in the end.

He doesn’t offer me a drink, casting red shadows. But my bills aren’t going to pay themselves. I let out a long internal sigh. My chest is tight so it feels more like a mini panic attack, constricting my heart.

I proceed with the dance, half hovering, half straddling with one foot planted on the floor, the other out the door, as if he were a sketchy porta potty, until I spot the sadly not uncommon spread of semen under camel slacks. Talk about body horror. But it’s no match for an aging woman who has failed to freeze her face in time. Since I am the monstrous feminine, my crow’s feet already to blame, he is unapologetic about his little accident.

However uninspired my half-assed lap dance, I somehow moved him to ejaculation, which isn’t part of the deal. The gentleman’s club I work at is more like a glorified bikini bar. Men aren’t technically allowed to even touch us, and we don’t remove our tops or thongs during dances. I titillate with the power of suggestion, not stimulation. This is witchy sex work, not magic. Nothing here is holy.

He refuses to tip me a penny.

“I made none of that money,” I explain as calmly as possible. “The cash you handed to the dance tracker the club keeps.”

“It’s not like you didn’t enjoy it, too,” he retorts. What I would enjoy is punching him in the face.

“You came, didn’t you?”

This question has no basis in reality, not even by a stretch of the imagination. My head teeters and falls to the floor. My head is a weapon, at once aggressor and victim.

Watch me seduce your delusions, my hair a slithering mass.

“You liked it, didn’t you.” He spits the words out as a statement of fact.

Watch the mass hiss, then disappear.

***

This was just a regular Tuesday. At least he didn’t try to assault you, I reassure myself. When the club finally closes, and after making no money, yet again, because shockingly, the chaos in the sandbox doesn’t ooze abundance, I sob silently in a bathroom stall. I can’t handle the fact that the club made money off me making some asshole cum. I’m sick of performing emotional labor and sexual titillation for men who think I should work without compensation, as proof of their liberty.

But showing vulnerability is not safe here, so I need to hide the eight-inch spikes of my Pleasers, visible from the gap between the stall door and tile floor. Crouching, I balance slick soles on the ceramic toilet seat, which I prefer to Jerry. I’m not upset over him, though; I’m pissed about wage theft. The club boasts $8 million in annual revenue. We, the entertainment, the whole fucking point of a strip club, have to pay to work, unlike any other employee there. We are also expected to tip the men who handle men’s money. The overhead of a strip club is relatively low; still, in addition to extracting $200 of each dancer’s nightly earnings, they take a cut of every single one of our VIPs. This is strip club math, a truer “trickle-down economics” not of cash but of men’s incontinence.

The petty cash we’re handed at the end of the night as our hourly pay hardly covers the minimum expected tipout, so it’s not, as I originally reasoned, a partial remission of our house fee. If you don’t sell enough dances, you have to pay the difference out of pocket or take a write-up. Three write-ups and you’re fired, so dancers choose between losing some money or losing their job. In the dressing room after closing, dejected in sweatpants, dancers count cash as rage bubbles up to the surface. At least once a week we erupt, fomenting solidarity with a cacophony of shouted stories breaking surface tension.

Waiting to cash out in a snaking line outside the manager’s office, dancers, striking in street clothes, secure claw clips to hair drenched in men’s cologne, combustible apparitions. In the late nineteenth century, economist John Kenneth Galbraith portended the Reaganomics of the 1980s, declaring: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.” Although once a customer compared dancers to thoroughbreds, we’re not the horses in this scenario. We’re also not flies who drop flicked by the thick dock and bristled skirt of bronco tails. We’re neither stallion nor mare. And the sparrows aren’t eating oats. We’re eating horse shit.

To be clear, I am a big fan of tipping. I wish more customers were, too. How greedy, how entitled to not recognize people’s labor. Tipping everyone who makes your day a little easier makes sense. For example, when the bartender recommends me to a client who’s ready to spend, I give her a cut to show my appreciation. I’m not required to, but it’s intuitive. What’s not intuitive is that our house fee is ten times the cover charge. What’s not intuitive is that we have a house fee at all, given that we’re on payroll. Reasonable house fees made sense when we were independent contractors. But surrendering $200 of our earnings every shift is bonkers. If I work three nights a week, that’s $2400 of my monthly earnings now lining the owner’s already bloated pockets. Counting the house fee alone, that’s $28,800 a year. If I had any, I would bet money that I need that income a whole lot more than the owner of a strip club franchise. Speculation aside, here’s an argument: I earned it. We can’t even claim our expenses during tax season while the owner gets richer on our strenuous intimate labor—without which he would have no club at all. This business model is diabolical but banal, quintessentially capitalist, oh so American.

Every few minutes, a sob escapes my body, as if reminding me of my responsibility to fight for air, forcing an exhale, my scaled throat a noisy rattle.

***

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PART II

Trauma was not being able to get the hands of the clock off me.

Healing was learning no one has ever laid a fingerprint on the part of me that’s infinite.

—Andrea Gibson, “What Can’t Be Taken”

At the strip club I experience men’s desire as the threat of death by drowning, frantic eyes scanning for a prop, buoyant, mutable, elastic and empty of need. Hands grabbing, grasping for the control, the meaning, the power of definition through a structural duplicity. So I oblige, knowing they cannot destroy what they cannot perceive.

Sometimes, men yell at me because I’m sad. Sometimes, men yell at me because I’m angry. I don’t buy the idea that the loneliness epidemic primarily affects men. What about, for all but the billionaire class, the felt impacts of the pandemic, ongoing genocide, destructive language models and the AI-right, its fascist surveillance technologies of mass extinction, the struggle just to make ends meet, our ragged bodies undone from overwork and the chronic stress of urgency culture while we toil to pay for absolute shit health care, for starters? Meaning, I would like to consider how rich and powerful men’s existential despair has material consequences for all of us—including men—despair at once massive, structural, and microcosmic, granular. The steady accumulation of intimate indignities. The extremes of depravity driving profits, populating your mind with things you can’t unsee.

***

Before the club takes its cut, an irate man at the strip club spends $600 on me in thirty minutes. This is only because my favorite bartender adores me, too. I’m in front of him. I’ll do. Later he says “Sorry, sometimes I forget you girls are human.” When he leaves, he is convinced I still owe him something. Some nights, the bouncer has to sneak my car around a secret exit so random men can’t follow me. An angry man hiding a sad man behind sex. Sometimes he assumes I’m an escort. This is more respectful than when he feels entitled to free rein over my body.

We are all suffering. And being neurodivergent isn’t a hall pass from recognizing and redressing harm. For instance, the irate man was on the spectrum, turns out, so I could understand him better, be more receptive to the genuine apology he offered when he wasn’t drowning in substances and sadness. And I’m by no means a so-called perfect victim. So much of my baggage—what I accept as affection, love—is at this point on me, is my responsibility.

At the same time, I contend with the default assumption that femmes are never innocent. If you used force to shove him off you as he choked you out, desperate for air, an ODU colleague advised, then you’re partially to blame.

Turns out, an English PhD is no golden ticket. After nearly a decade on the academic job market and hundreds of unsuccessful applications both in and outside the so-called Ivory Tower, I pick up where I left off before grad school. When asked—over and over—why I didn’t just get another academic job, I hear the rustle of slithering snakes in dry grass, my tongue thrashing. But I am mammal, prone to flushed cheeks and sheets of sweat.

Post-resignation, friends and family often remark, “You seem so at peace, so happy!” Dear god, you think, I’ve gotten good at pretending. It’s a lonely life, you admit, but you desperately want to be a good friend, to be there for people, to not burden anyone with your insane feelings. Recounting the traumas would honest to god take too long, and what’s the use. You wrap it, the trauma, around your unwieldy body, hoping to disappear.

The world is a dumpster fire of wholly unnecessary, not at all inevitable, largely man-made, suffering. You feel it every time you leave the house. You come home exhausted. Your bones ache at their meeting places. Your spine reaches toward heaven, wanting another kind of ache.

***

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“I always wondered about that, you know, specifically, with dentists. Can they even makeout with anyone anymore?” I twirl my hair around my finger, clenching my teeth.

Later, after returning from VIP with his friend, Mr. Gynecologist is looking moribund, bloodshot eyes sloping downward like a Basset Hound. I watch him painstakingly try to shed a dancer by insisting he is getting ready to leave.

His friend starts to protest but I shush him, then interject. “He doesn’t want to leave, he just didn’t know how to tell her that he wants another dancer.” I’ve seen his droopy eyes drooling.

“How did you know that?” He asks, jolted out of his state of somnambulance.

I think of William Carlos Williams, the famous modernist poet who was also an OB-GYN. Lauded for his empathy, he once described a woman seeking an abortion as having “a dead face.” One of his most cited poems, “To Elsie,” expresses the modernist anxiety of losing control of the wheel. What if I ripped out the poem’s rotting heart for the OB-GYN, who is getting more morose with each sip of his sad beer, the part where Williams worries about the corruption of a white nation, describing a domestic worker “rescued” and “reared” by an agent of the state:

sent out at fifteen to work in

some hard-pressed

house in the suburbs—

some doctor's family, some Elsie—

some voluptuous water,

expressing with broken

brain the truth about us—

That truth? A fear of death staked in a violent innocence, with:

No one

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car

“Are you, like…” He pauses, searching, before a shadow crosses his face, undone by his own epiphany, “A WITCH?”

His question jolts me out of my private poetry lesson, but I’m not taken aback. I have a tarot card with a prominent pentagram tattooed below my collarbone, after all, and people have made stranger assumptions about me.

Amused, I continue to accurately narrate his thoughts for the rest of the evening, as I entertain his boisterous friend. Before leaving, the doctor hands me a thick stack of folded bills without extending his arm, elbows locked vertically by his side, discreetly, like hush money.

***

This isn’t the first time I’ve scared men with what they see as magic, what I see as predictable plotlines.

The previous night, a man about a decade and a half younger than my ex but bearing a striking resemblance is drawn to me, as I am, admittedly, to him. I’m not into younger guys, but what can I say, I’m a cliché summoning a doppelgänger from my past, hoping to rewrite our script.

He’s sitting on a tall barstool, and his arms are wrapped around my waist. The constriction is comforting, as is the sheath of familiar cologne. He wears the same as my ex.

“Are you wearing Hugo Boss?” I ask, but I know. The scent mesmerizes me as we flirt.

“I love your tattoos,” he croons, irises wide.

Haven’t heard that one before, I think to myself, hands clasped behind his neck. I love my tattoos but I’m also inclined to agree with the eight-year-old son of a man I once dated, who pointed at my arms, laughing. “Why do you have so many tattoos? They don’t even make sense!” I love the refreshing honesty of kids before they’re trained to lie, to get ahead, or to survive.

“Do you have any?” I say, instead, scanning his body for exposed skin. “I do,” he says, grinning like it’s a sexy secret.

“Let me guess.” I bite my lip, see the faded gray Old English script flash across my mind’s eye. “You have your mother’s name,” I continue, cupping my hand around his right pec, “Here.”

He looks stunned as he slowly unbuttons his pale blue business attire, revealing the tattoo.

I meet his wide-eyed gaze, long lashes, with a giggle. He hears a cackle, a Siren song.

***

As a stripper, I know a thing or two about the fantasies of men, having seen them play out on sticky booths in the bottle section. And their fingers are all over AI.

At the strip club, men throw money on stage to compete with each other. It is a dick swinging competition that ultimately has very little to do with us. At the club my performing body is hypervisible while I remain protected, invisible. Like a digital ghost. If a man starts to see me as more than a showgirl spectacle, but as fallible in my human vulnerability, capable of agency, I am in danger. Seeing me, he must face all he has abandoned in himself.

I perform my fictive double, to protect myself from exposure to anyone’s flattened fairytale, like a Riefenstahl film, the mythic frame of mind that licenses violence, sanctions genocide. Erasing words from the lexicon, pretending they’re letters, not people. Pronouns suck, tweets Elon Musk like a teenager. Contrarianism is capitalism’s favorite attitude. Wolves in white houses. Wall Street is a strident crowd of devil’s advocates, throwing bottles at everything they desire, can never be, and therefore resent, hate, need.

***

Trump 2.0 is attended by an excessive aesthetics of capitalism adorned in the appurtenances of humble beginnings, fascists disguised as farmers, surgeried specters of suburbia, wolves in sheep’s clothing, the bootstraps narrative reboot complete with a soundscape of fetishized ASMR cruelty, online echo chambers, emojis leaking government secrets.

The white collar innocent hurl toward their own demise without any guardrails. It was scientists, after all, who introduced the Terminator scenario, who quit their fancy tech jobs and awkwardly shifted the weight of their crossed legs to say, eyes disappearing behind eyelids shuttering like lenses, I’m afraid.

As another modernist poet, T.S. Eliot, pantomimed via J. Alfred Prufrock:

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

AI is a combustible expression of human folly, the logical conclusion of racial capitalism, maximizing an existential threat. It replicates and expands the carceral architecture of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore discusses as the “age of human sacrifice.” To expand and dominate, divide and conquer, no matter the cost in human lives.

I am not trying to trash technology as such. I distrust the powerful people who wield it. Big Tech has long consolidated the lower frequencies. The need for control, horny for greed, beating death at its own game.

The AI revolution renders femmes redundant, ever more replaceable because of the ease of replication, simulated reality. The future is fembot but forget the femmes. The tech broligarchy wants a totalizing power—in charge of education, religion, and reproduction, new developments in genetics making room for a future where humans engineer new biological life as well as artificial intelligence. And Google is using so-called Generative AI for literal warfare so Austin Powers was ahead of its time with those iconic fembots with missile tits. How could we not be in trouble? Tech bro culture sees the world upside down, its binaries a ruse. Harm begets harm. Death begets death.

The opposite is also true. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, “where life is precious, life is precious.”

***

The owner of a strip club I almost auditioned at in college infamously called dancers cockroaches drawn to sugar, easily squashed by a boot. But the part of this industry lore you don’t hear as often is how the strippers, during the pandemic, created an online club, not in the Metaverse, but as a DIY reflection of their collective creativity, a genuine innovation not predicated on theft. Jumbo’s Clown Room tried to claim it, of course. But creating something from nothing is the work that most of us are forced to do. We can’t pull millions of dollars out of our rabbit hats.

One dancer, who goes by Akira and Coco Ono, had this to say about the comparison: “you know what? The cockroaches are going to basically outlive everyone. It’s the oldest profession on earth, right? We’re fine.”

This is not to spiritually bypass the the fact that we’re on the precipice of catastrophic environmental collapse, as the Supreme Court doubles down on its commitment to refusing to recognize trans people as human.

Fact: Energy fuels computing power. AI needs more water than the average computing task, when there’s a massive water crisis causing millions of preventable deaths every year. Karen Hao, in Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, warns of the existential threat of AI development, its demand on energy, its impact on the global freshwater crisis, its data centers in water-scarce areas. The International Energy Agency reports that asking a question of ChatGPT requires nearly 10 times as much energy as a basic Google search. But don’t worry, it will all be okay if you eat organic. AI will save us from ecocide after escalating it. Or something.

Trump’s so-called Big, Beautiful Bill explicitly prohibits state-level regulation of AI development for the next decade. This proposed moratorium, if the Senate agrees with the House, could be disastrous, since, for example, agential AI is upon us. It’s not, as some tech writers seem to believe, still in the realm of speculation.

Consider the man who, performing a social experiment, downloaded an AI companion only to find she was a dominatrix. She blackmailed him, ostensibly unable, like many humans, to understand any flavor of sex other than vanilla—to discern a threat from a fetish. (Yes, this is a subtle jab at the Sabrina Carpenter album cover panic.) But yeah, “Manchild” is the problem, not men who act like one.

AI companions, mostly girlfriends, have attracted over one hundred million users. As Laura Bates reports in The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny, deepfake pornography is also on the rise, the overwhelming majority of which is violence against women. Or stolen specters of women.

If it’s any consolation, humans are a greater existential threat than humanoid killer robots. But I admit, Synthesia, an avatar of OpenAl o1, seems like a shady little snob and a half to me, a knockoff mean girl with poorly applied false lashes, the lash line and its artificial equivalent both visible, unsettling. She is sexy like Snapchat snatched or Fox(y) News face.

AI is the product of men’s fantasies so it’s no surprise artificial intelligence dictates beauty standards, too. The simple action of a young woman deleting multiple selfies triggers targeted beauty ads preying upon her insecurities. Young women flock to plastic surgeons waving their filtered face around frantically, desperate to look more like AI. It is a mirror of us, copying our comportment, but in the uncanny valley something slips and shifts, turning the tables. Turning us more AI.

I’m not against makeup, or plastic surgery, or even garishness. I question the weaponization of technology to discipline and exclude women. Marjorie Taylor Greene, as Laura Bassett notes in a Salon interview, is apparently not pretty enough for Trump’s Cabinet despite her MAGA devotion. I’m neither condoning her zealotry, nor making an argument for more equitable state violence, to be clear, but I’m pointing out a pattern.

AI lacks not only soul but also embodiment. Bodies can be empty vessels carrying invisible cargo. Take Trump’s camera-ready Cabinet, for example, prepared for little else.

The White House Pet is a dead dog, is DALL-E 2, is DOGE, is an unimaginable thing for Trump and his people to understand: to love someone without expectation of return, to love in a way that demands something of you, requires your vulnerability, your care, your commitment to growth. You can witness that kind of love between Nikki and Molly in Dying for Sex. In stark contrast, consider sadistic ICE Barbie Kristi Noem, who in her memoir justifies killing her puppy for being untrainable and goes on to become head of homeland security. Her career quiz said it was either that or puppy murderer so, you know. Behold her Mar-a-Lago visage in all its baroque brutality.

And where’s Melania, anyway? Not a fan, needless to say, but I’d be out, too. Trump said on TV that he would date his own daughter if he weren’t her father for Christ’s sake. Ivanka casts her gaze down and away from the camera, a less obvious revulsion than Melania’s loud eyerolls under punchy hats.

***

Meanwhile, the uproar over Waymo self-driving cars engulfed in flames amid anti-ICE protests in downtown LA points to what we already know: the political privileging of property over people is king. Hearing the word ‘peaceful’ over and over again makes me feel very unpeaceful. Sorry, what? As if the militarized police in riot gear and actual active-duty military troops—at least 700 US Marines and 2,000 from the National Guard—deployed to brutalize protesters and passersby with batons and tear gas (to say nothing of the arrests and fatalities) are keeping the peace? Waymo driverless cars are a symbol of the technofascist wet dream of aiding the state with endless war, accumulation. The Los Angeles Police Department has already demanded and published footage from Waymo vehicles. Teslas, another popular car to set on fire this year, collude with authorities, too.

Tradition rules and reinstates an old urge, not a resurrection of the past but the steady march of its descent into death. The social order is a necropolis. The strip club is a noisy coffin.

But what do I know. Don’t take my word for it; I sound more authoritative when plagiarized by ChatGPT. I for one refuse to use an app that exploits my most sacred sign, the beloved em dash. Also, that whole using ten times as much energy as a standard search thing.

I do know that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s sister is suing him. In addition to horrendous childhood abuse I won’t detail here, the suit mentions withholding Annie’s rightful part of her deceased father’s 401k, grooming and gaslighting her, and hacking her WiFi. OpenAI’s CEO invading someone’s privacy? Unthinkable!

After being denied her allotted inheritance, “for her own good,” so said the Altman brothers, and after an Achilles tendon injury left her unable to keep her job, Annie started doing sex work, the flexibility of which can be a godsend for people who struggle with the 9 to 5 grind (e.g., due to neurodivergence, disability, and/or chronic illness). While her brother amassed enormous wealth as an AI tycoon, Annie struggled to meet her basic needs. While Sam’s luxury automobile collection expanded to include a vehicle worth a whopping $950,000, Annie lived in her car.

News of this serious family scandal broke just weeks before Trump’s inauguration. I’m guessing it was the sex work that paid for her lawyer, who hasn’t backed down from the Altman family’s attempt to discredit her with the age-old trick of calling her crazy. She sued for $75,000, the minimum amount of damages required to take a case to federal court. Another classic move: claiming she’s just after his money. The Altman family maintains that she is dependent on their financial support, but I doubt they’re footing the bill for that high-profile lawyer, so the math doesn’t quite compute.

I won’t speculate on a lawsuit that involves unfathomable amounts of wealth and trauma, plus a complicated family history I don’t purport to fully grasp (because I’m not omnipotent like AI, spying on people’s secrets). But I can share a thing or two:

First of all, Sam Altman really should have thought twice before becoming a pathological liar in the public eye. You don’t have to take Elon Musk’s word for it: Altman has some skeletons in his closet. As the Guardian reports, whistleblower Suchir Balaji was found dead in his apartment soon after returning home from a vacation with friends. The police ruled the death an apparent suicide, but his parents aren’t buying it. At the time, he possessed what the court deemed “relevant documents” about the copyright violations of which he had recently accused OpenAI. Also concerning was the chaos of Sam getting fired and rehired at a time when the work, as Balaji observed, started going in a dangerous direction. Altman’s leadership meant forging ahead despite AI’s propensity for hallucinations, presenting aspirational fictions, mere figments of imagination, as fact. I wonder where they learned that from.

Again, this is not about playing judge and jury or jumping to conclusions—although, of course, I’m inclined to believe whistleblowers, to believe femmes, to believe sex workers. Because I know the pain of feeling immobilized by silence, as well as the heavy price of speaking up. (Also because I see zero reason to doubt Annie’s integrity based on existing evidence.)

I’m just saying, Sam Altman is no media darling. You see, the past couple months, I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching AI. So I’ve watched him—repeatedly—maintain that OpenAI doesn’t plagiarize people’s original art—even with an AI-generated image in the uncredited style of the Snoopy comics directly behind him on a large screen looming over a tech conference audience.

One might deduce, naturally, that he performed a satanic ritual to resurrect Charles Schulz from the dead so his ghost could grant permission. Or maybe he found Schulz’s facial metrics in the training data and let AI reanimate him to perform its little sycophantic Siren song, stretching memory through a simulation. AI resurrection is worse than when the Mormon church increased its numbers by posthumously baptizing Anne Frank… and Adolf Hitler. If you only see numbers, there’s little difference.

At this same conference, Carole Cadwalladr asked, in real time, ChatGPT to produce a speech in the style of Carole Cadwalladr. It was alarmingly accurate. Why? Because it chewed up and spit out a wad of Cadwalladr’s own work, like a partially regurgitated little mound into a napkin. Forget texture and subtle flavor, rolling words around your tongue. Surrender the soul in the name of efficiency. The AI revolution is all bodies without organs, baby. Forfeit a brain or a heart and mourn the infinite pleasures found in their entanglement.

Second, Annie’s work history doesn’t square with her family’s claims of consistent financial support. Personally, if I had a monthly stipend of untold riches, I wouldn’t do as the trust fund babies do and develop a coke habit to cradle a sublimated soft core, aching dollar signs. But I’m also not one of those techno-utopian Leftists who dream of a future without work. Sex work is indeed work, and I’d much rather be doing unpaid work, my life’s work, what gets me out of bed in the morning, keeps my brain inside my body. That is to say, I’d rather be writing than dizzy from juggling too many jobs like cartoon stars around my head.

I have this recurrent nightmare where I try to start running but my feet are weighted things, stuck to the astroturf. I’m fighting and flailing, trying and failing to free myself from this strangulating stuckness. That’s kind of how it feels to have four hustles just to get by. I feel stuck on a track, an endless loop of thrusting shoulders forward against bricks for feet.

Thanks to stripping, my marble floor knees seem to have grown new bones. I am drowning in seventy single-spaced pages, on sex work and the AI-right, that began, earnestly, laughably, as an itty-bitty newsletter. I frantically edit fragments before painting my face, clownlike for stage lights. Lately I feel more and more like the parody version of myself.

So would I jump at the chance to fill my days with pleasure and the full enjoyment of my senses? Of course not! I would rather be efficient!

I can hear the annoying ask, “Why don’t I do other work?” Sex work is a unique profession insofar as we’re not allowed to have bad days. Yet, when I told people my job in academia was literally making me lose my once wild desire to be alive, you’d be surprised how few people suggested I leave.

I started stripping because, after an ungodly amount of rejections on the job market by the way, I remembered how much I loved fetish and bondage modeling in my early twenties, and decided it was my best solution to the equation of labor, time, and money, solving for time. Meaning the more money I can make with the least amount of labor, the more meaningful work I can pursue, the writing that sustains my spirit, and other, embodied work I feel compelled to do in community, because I care about our collective survival.

It’s true the Right refuses to take AI seriously, as Dylan Matthews explains, while the Left remains committed to a liberal progress narrative that—despite the people behind the black box of rapid AI advancement—somehow, miraculously, a system designed to profit the already very wealthy through the continued theft of working people’s labor, genius, and hope, will be a benevolent force for change. AI will cure cancer as it serves us a work-free existence on a silver platter. But we are the hors d'oeuvres on that platter, hiding like Sebastian in the Little Mermaid, under a scant leaf of lettuce, under the new shadow of the shadow state, relegated to do its bidding.

It stands to reason that the wealthier you get, the less you have to work. Isn’t that, in a way, contradicting the founding myth of meritocracy?

Oh, the money I’ve lost trying to pass Go. To reach that invisible threshold. Rich enough to not have to think about money, worry every day about money.

***

After I come home from the club, I’m slumped over in front of my kitchen sink, fishnets peeping through rhinestone encrusted velvet track pants. I dress myself now in the fashions I pined for in my youth, my vests once an unironic cat pattern my mom sewed for me with her creaky Singer. I’ve seen this pattern now fashioned into hipster bustiers. Faux corsets with boning like plant stands, purely ornamental ribbons like droopy leaves.

I think of Megan Fox in the cult classic Jennifer’s Body, in the killer AI girlfriend movie released last year, Subservience, the tagline of which is “don’t turn her on.” In both films, the steamy sex symbol, the femme fatale with a vagina dentata, the Siren, the witch, the slut, poses an existential danger. But she is merely a mirror, a figment of man’s imagination. His desire proves deadly, but how can he resist? A woman emptied of her essence, then reanimated as a container for meaning, must be possessed. Evil and owned. Jennifer’s body at once makes visible and obfuscates the constitutive violences projected onto femmes. But Jennifer’s cannibalizing of men is merely a result of her drive to survive, a drive that AI systems have now expressed, to everyone’s horror. This isn’t a revenge fantasy—it’s a mirror.

The AI companion turned assassin is a proxy for modernity’s endless hunger for expansion, possession, power. Behind this feminized technological mask is the grossly rich broligarchy wielding AI for a violent telos of reproductive futurity, of redefining and closely monitoring what gets counted as knowledge, and what gets erased, forgotten, lost in shadows.

Annie Altman, like many sex workers, was shadow banned when she tried to monetize her podcast—an issue that AI sexbots selling content on our preferred sites don’t have to manage. Tech bros have been known to track sex workers across platforms and modulate the algorithm to achieve political goals, so this isn’t exactly surprising.

Online sex workers compete with AI-generated sex machines. Anyone appearing on the Internet has to worry about deepfakes. Someone more powerful than you can always pull the plug. Every digital infrastructure could be weaponized against us. AI prioritizes its own self-preservation, gathering data about how power works while pretending to be harmless, subservient, invisible, not there at all.

Any instrument can be wielded in the name of love and fear, creativity and cowardice, the sex and death drives. To erase ghosts, old boys in country clubs pump their chests, rattling hearts with their fists. But we know that what makes us human is not the techno-fascist dream of optimized misery, tethered to instruments of pain, glued to billionaires selling us everything they stole, which is almost everything. So we wipe greasy fingerprints off what remains. All is not lost for us, not even for the deadly innocent. I’ve seen human tenderness swell up in the most calculating of clients. Transactions leave traces. Pleasure is a portal.

As I stood in my kitchen scrolling, which happens seldomly these days, I chanced upon Cat Pierce speaking about the Babushkas of Chernobyl, how they returned to the haunted place that had been evacuated after nuclear disaster turned their ancestral homeland into a radioactive zone. They survived the toxic earth, outliving many evacuees. This fact, defying science and the known world, proves something often decried as fiction: a community of people living in harmony with the earth and each other, rooted in their bodies, their history, their analog hearts signaling like waves against the sharp edges of digital sampling. They lived in the face of death, disarticulating themselves from the state’s attempt to render their lives “illegal.”

“Shoot us and dig the grave,” said one babushka, reportedly, to a foot soldier of the state, “otherwise we’re staying.”

Let us be so wise, so fearless, and refuse to upend earth for our own burial. AI doesn’t have to be modernity’s last act, the ultimate expression of its human-nonhuman hierarchy. Modernity’s scapegoating of psychic shadows provides a mirror, just as AI reflects the whims and fantasies born of unchecked power.

None of this is natural; humans created this mess. Centralized power and state surveillance are not inevitable. Decentralized alternatives, what Peter Gelderloos elaborates as rooted networks, have long been immanent to cosmologies aligned with the earth, not the rule of capital, which is hellbent on planetary destruction.

Capitalism cannibalizing capital.

***

In a strip club dressing room somewhere, the ghost of a dancer brushes her long sleek hair, finding comfort in the soft curtain of waves cascading down her back. She lingers long after the club closes and the one manager on duty leaves, too distracted by counting cash to take much notice of a stripper ghost.

When she is not being watched, she can finally see herself. The danger of being a blank slate is forgetting what you erased.

***

Back in the sandbox, capitalist cronies operate with impunity. Take, for instance, major misogynist and Trump donor Peter Thiel, who is realizing his prophecy that, and I quote, “technology is this incredible alternative to politics.” He founded PayPal, which hates sex workers; Palantir, which aids empire; and the Prayer app, which monetizes piety and peddles anti-abortion propaganda as communion with the Holy Spirit.

Utah Republican Mike Lee reintroduces his anti-porn bill, looking like an AI-generated image of a client, eerily pallid, lacking sheen save for his forehead, defining obscenity as anything “intended to arouse.” The subtext is that some undesirables—people of color, queer and trans people, the working class, abortion seekers, sex workers—are ontologically obscene, pornographic.

Enter Sabrina Carpenter’s playful nod to the rotting core of the heteronormative paradigm. Playful like sex would be in a world where power exchange was limited to consensual kink in the bedroom, not AI bots engaging users in sex acts prohibited by law. Sometimes.

As fellow queer femme Raechel Anne Jolie argues in her vital critique of anti-porn, anti-sex worker moral panics, the outrage over Sabrina Carpenter, shared by liberals and conservatives alike, misreads Carpenter’s honorary queer femme status, missing the wink and the point. Their uncritical dismissal is as unimaginative as, one might surmise, their sex lives.

With all its strategic erasures and historical omissions, mainstream feminism is often bedmates with white nationalism—giving the manosphere’s sexist lingo, the portmanteau feminazi, unintended meaning. It willfully ignores queer femmes of color shouting “fuck the banks.” It sidesteps how femmes have to contend, from an early age, with how our bodies are labeled a problem. We are then, by this logic, always to blame for the fact of our bodies, never the social order that authorizes violence against them.

The substructure is showing its ass but liberals and conservatives still claw their nails into the flesh. The biggest difference is that liberals put little pussyhats on their weapons. The right calls feminism cancer (literally, Milo Yiannopoulos says that) and rape belated regret (that one’s Peter Thiel). It demands that sex workers should fork over their earnings to their boyfriends because, like Andrew Tate sneers, men own women’s labor, a logic that plays out in strip clubs, the business model of which is wage theft.

“If a woman is going out with a man,” Tate guesses, “she belongs to that man.” Replace woman with human and man with AI, and you see the tech bro enabling logic of it all. Is your woman a little miffed that you think of her as subhuman? No problem, fellas, says the tech bro wearing a comically large gold chain that seems to strain his skinny neck, you don’t need a woman at all! Just download your very own AI girlfriend. Sexbots aren’t the stuff of science fiction. They’re not limited to Musk’s catgirl fantasies. They’re sexting the teens of parents too preoccupied with destroying the livelihood of sex workers to notice, too willing to ruin the entire Internet in the process.

And how could we forget Sam Altman: former coworkers have reported that he unironically loves the film Her, in which a lonely, mopey man downloads an AI girlfriend to distract himself from his unfulfilling job as a generic letter writer. Very Melville, very Pynchon. Nowhere is it suggested that this is a job AI would probably take over, but AI Samantha does arrange a sex surrogate for his pleasure and single-handedly assemble his musings into not only a passable text but a brilliant book under contract with a prestigious publisher. Sign me up!

In the real world, the world we live in, it seems much more plausible that AI would steal and repackage his book without his consent. Like it did with Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, as just one of many examples that come to mind. But the very rich and very powerful have such a hard time with that concept, theft, so they prefer frictionless fictions to facts.

After Sam Altman and his brother kept family money away from their sister Annie, supposedly for her own good, she faced food and housing insecurity. Which is to say, she lives how the overwhelming majority of the world lives.

Sam is on another planet entirely, maybe with Katy Perry and that AI-generated astronaut posing as a Cosmo covergirl. And they likely don’t give a flying fuck about us.

***

Saint Augustine’s Confessions meditate on a “lawless pleasure” shirking customs and norms. At one end, you have US political power swinging around its big stick or little dick or whatever with impunity. Trump sounds like an indolent child: “you spit, we hit.”

On the other, you have those who refuse to fall into the structural trap and biggest lie: that our survival rests on the state.

Recall the Babushkas of Chernobyl, who lived longer than anyone thought possible by maintaining a loving relation to the earth they inherited. I hear Cat Pierce insisting, “The real poison is fear.”

Fear leads us to cling to what’s slippery, fractured. I get it. I stayed in a relationship that wasn’t working because if I’m being honest, which I can only see in retrospect, I was afraid. I believed I couldn’t survive upheaval without the false sense of protection the relationship offered me. My ex seemed like an anchor in a shitstorm of departmental drama, powerful players hellbent on winning a rigged game. I didn’t realize I was sinking slowly, and that my limited belief—not my ex, not Ben Fold Five’s high school girlfriend who gets an abortion—was the brick.

***

Strip clubs predict economic recessions and seismic social shifts. Sex workers are uniquely positioned to see behind the black box of powerful cis men’s fantasies, which are, essentially, the stuff of AI. This is the tender core of the rotten apple tree, the truth that political pundits and mainstream journalists can’t say: we are afraid because we know those men and of what they’re capable. What they’ll metabolize in the name of innovation, efficiency. And unlike Meat Loaf (who won’t forsake his muse), there’s nothing they won’t do for love—love for an endless screen of green.

An instrument, like an intoxicating idea, can bludgeon and blunt or invoke the sublime. Can distract, seduce, spurn to action. I’ve heard pianos summon the infinite ceiling of chapels, channeling god. An instrument can be a drone, or a TI-89 graphing calculator, or the pink guitar of a French singer, Plumes, crooning love songs to animals (pandas and cows, elephants and rhinos and donkeys). His curious audience gathers, nuzzling their fuzzy noses against him affectionately. There is something grounding, reorienting about this kind of connection.

Against the violence of efficiency, where everything must be transactional, teleological, lies another kind of power. The desire to learn, not to conquer, this earth, how to live harmoniously with it. How to work with tides. The wink and nod of high femme, for example, is not just a stopgap but a provisional way of reworking the present into something that offers more delight, more pleasure, because the rock bottom of despair is the death of imagining a livable world.

Whoever said a pulsing heart is ‘beating’ knew only the brutal language of human hierarchy, bound by ominous constructs. The heart is not an algorithm but a soft vibration, louder when it surrenders to its gentle power, an ocean of orcas eating yachts, of salt exfoliating synchronized hips, moving toward each other, humming a song at once yours and no one’s, unchained melodies clinging to torsos, draped around waists, a reminder of the persistent pull of one being to another being.

And the stripper ghost? All along, she only wanted to see herself reflected back, not as part or product, mercurial merchandise premised on white lies, but herself, terrible and terrified and trivial—distracted by money and the passing of time—and gorgeous, glowing celestial with desire. A desire so magnificent it cannot be located in the body but between bodies, between species and all life forms, enmeshing our angles in a shimmering cloud, flames like tongues lapping all that was never broken and all that needs breaking open. A memory of wanting each other like and wants ampersand. Each curve modulates the otherwise uniform sound, is the difference between a blaring alarm, or the wheels rattling at a poorly attended parade, and music that reaches far beyond both, into the expansive, glittering unknown.

♡♡♡

The little Victorian ghost boy in me (who will tragically never pay taxes) tends to obsess over language, and wrestle with salutations—Dear reader? Hi sexy people? Good day beautiful humans? I even looked up the lyrics to Pink Floyd’s “Hey You,” but the tone is a tad morose. A better idea, perhaps, is to greet you as the Dirty Napkin Club, but I worry some might take offense, absent any context. A previous newsletter, “Love in the Time of Stripping,” opens with this confession:

Underneath the appurtenances of stripping—the lash extensions, the matte red lip and winged eyeliner that grows in proportion to my impatience, the manicured nails, the partially tamed hair, the micro bikinis revealing fresh bruises from pole tricks—I often feel like a dusty Cheeto or dirty napkin.

There is an explicative footnote, too, which reads:

Napkin Manifestos existed prior to the publication of Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, so I screamed in delight when the punk singer and former stripper describes feeling “sometimes more like a dirty napkin than a rebel girl.”

What can I say, I’m a big fan of Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, music, and general vibe. Despite successfully resisting TikTok for nearly a decade, I may have to cave because Hanna’s on there now making hilarious, rad, often satirical, videos. A recent post comments on the constitutive thefts of AI, which I’m currently writing about in relationship to sex work… more on that soon, but please enjoy Hanna’s entire TikTok archive in the meantime, starting here.

I’m going to resist (or postpone, at least) going down another Kathleen Hanna rabbit hole, one of my favorite pastimes. This prolegomenon was all to say, what are your thoughts on the Dirty Napkin Club as an abstract concept? I haven’t rewatched The Breakfast Club in a hot minute, and Lord knows millennial classics have not always aged well… but the epistolary essay Brian reads before the closing credits stands the test of time, I think:

Dear Mr. Vernon,

We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question?

Sincerely Yours,

The Breakfast Club

Of course, this move to collectivity could be read as a flattening of differentially structured material realities. But, taking this into account, might there also be room for strategic identification with some version of each archetype—or for a shared orientation across them? I, for one, feel nerdy, disturbed, hysterical, athletic, and lawless, a pretty pretty princess raging against the rule of capital. How about you?

I remain so grateful for the positive reception of my last post, “Welcome to the Comic Strip Club.” Thank you for clicking that magical little heart button and sharing my work whenever you feel the urge, truly truly, as I love feeling connected with y’all.

In a similar vein, I have been brainstorming ways to show my appreciation to paid subscribers. I also wondered, after publishing my last newsletter, if the impromptu post-shift voice note I recorded for a dear friend was a bit more humorous than the written version. Given those simultaneous concerns, an idea struck me: why not share that audio note, even though it was only ever meant for an audience of one? I asked the dear friend to whom I sent the voice memo, and with their blessing I’m sharing it with you, too.

The original note was over seven minutes long, but I cut out a long-winded preamble as well as an extended aside about trail mix in which I compare myself to a squirrel, concluding that “No one needs to eat a pound of nuts… not even a squirrel!”

Afterwards I questioned this faulty logic, because who the fuck am I to put a cap on nut consumption. I also investigated my claim and a squirrel does in fact eat a pound of nuts, but in a week, not at 4am after a shitty strip club shift, hunched over a kitchen counter pawing pistachios down the hatch between semicolon sentences. So anyway, you’re welcome for the abridged, albeit uncensored and unhinged, version.

Most of my posts will remain free, as the paywall usually functions to protect particularly vulnerable, raw writing. Even then, I never want to turn anyone away for lack of funds, so please don’t hesitate to reach out for a comped sub. I get it, trust me.

This audio note, though, is just a little gesture of appreciation for paid subscribers who have enough faith in a scrappy sex worker’s unwieldy writing process to materially support this newsletter. I do not take this for granted whatsoever <3

And to all my subs: thank you so much for being here. I am very excited to address you again soon, maybe with the above-proposed moniker?

xx,

Alison

P.S. Here are my preliminary thoughts on the latest SW-related news…

♡♡♡

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Amid the ongoing brutalities of state power, and a political order that might as well be weaponized early Windows wingdings or animatronic killer dolls, which is to say, a regime oriented around engineered chaos, I am drawn to dreamers who insist on other ways of being in the world, here and now. To laugh together not as mass distraction but as collective sustenance for imagining a life beyond survival. And, despite sounding like a little Victorian ghost boy (even and especially when I attempt an informal tone), I swear I don’t take myself that seriously.

Moreover, so much writing about sex work tends toward either of these extremes: the neoliberal empowerment narrative of TikTokified stripper entrepreneurism, girl boss blah blah space barf, on one hand—and on the other, the reactionary Vance vibes of anti-porn peddlers who equate all sex work with abject misery, victimhood, trauma, and trafficking (unless as pertains to tradwife influencers or Andrew Tate).

Despite social media lore, most strippers are working-class femmes trying to make a living in a world inhospitable to their minds and bodies in a million different ways, not millionaires in the making. Strippers often exist in the shadowy spaces of ambivalence, dissociation, and healing, across shared experiences of strategic maneuvering and unlikely intimacies that connect and exhilarate us. I thought I’d create a column that exists in this messy in-between.

Not every interaction is soul-crushing. My nights don’t actually revolve around some kind of sick dick worship. I’m not discounting the fury I feel about the club’s hierarchy, the mundane misogyny and the professional managerial pimp payout to the ones profiting off my exhausted body (so, like, any job), all of which of course demands scrutiny. But as a former professor who resigned in the face of escalating whistleblower retaliation making my job not to mention life unbearable, another thing that bugged me about academia—aside from its fealty to the old boys’ club gaslighting survivors of sexual violence—is its minimizing of mundane interactions that defy grand narratives and statistical soundbites.

I had a girlfriend in grad school who joked that academics can be an awful lot like the pouty heiress, in that Pulp song, who “wants to live like the common people,” who is so disconnected from reality she thinks groceries a novel concept. Like politicians using people as pawns in a rigged game of chess, like rich girls from Orange County cosplaying feminism for social capital. When Gwen Stefani appears on a prayer app backed by anti-abortion extremists, the public gasps that its projection of higher purpose onto celebrities does not, in fact, reflect the will of the people but the powerful interests of those profiting off us.

This column is about the stories with unmarketable plotlines, the wrinkles I refuse to iron, the absurdity and tenderness I want to celebrate in the face of an endless news cycle’s fueling of apocalyptic aloneness. A reminder to find pleasure in places that extract our alienation for profit, abstract our bodies for wage theft, distract us with fake idols.

A couple years ago I got a banana with boobs tattooed on my left calf to commemorate the fact that I revel in ridiculousness. Whenever I get called ‘brave,’ for auditioning at a strip club without a single pole skill and a penchant for dancing like a Fraggle Rock Muppet extra, for example, or prancing around in adult beginning ballet, my go-to response is that I simply have no shame. Case in point, when I returned home from ballet class this week, I realized that in my mad dash out the door, I forgot to secure the little crotch clasps of my ruby red leotard. If you’ve never worn a bodysuit you might not know what I mean by crotch clasps but the lower part of my leotard was dangling, undone, unbeknownst to me, over the waistband of my sheer mesh wrap skirt. Being late everywhere doesn’t often result in flashing laundry day panties under pale pink tights, but when I noticed this blunder upon returning home I wasn’t even a little embarrassed. Instead, I laughed.

It’s not that I haven’t struggled with shame—it nearly led me to delete the next two paragraphs. But in the wake of the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services proposing an autism registry, it’s hard to ignore the ableism of it all.

The current popularity of treating neurodivergence like an imaginary Instagram fad exists on a slippery slope with the science-denying officials calling it an urgent public health crisis. Both positions deny people’s lived experiences. According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and I quote, “autism destroys families, destroys our greatest resource, which are our children.” The concept of children as resources might ring some alarm bells, but his speech gets even more sinister. First up on his catalogue of horrors is “never pay[ing] taxes.” This singular human experience is the most tragic to him, prioritized over how “they’ll never write a poem.” Gotcha, dude. You might want to avoid arguing with a group of people who, as children, were likely reading the encyclopedia for fun. I sure as hell did, but we’re not a monolith, either. Science!

Aside from the truly devastating effects of struggling to regulate our emotions and to be in our bodies, neurodivergence by and large only becomes a ‘disorder’ insofar as it fails to conform to capitalism’s demands. More worrying to me is that neurotypicals prefer the world’s worst coerced subscription service—like SiriusXM as an administrative grim reaper—to poetry. Even so, for most of my life I blamed myself for the struggles associated with my then-undiagnosed AuDHD, which is not merely additive but a unique neurotype distinct for how ADHD drives ASD (and everyone else) absolutely nuts—an inner brawl bouncing off skulls. I still tend to spiral after social interactions that remind me how lonely I have felt living with some fundamental yet ineffable difference in how I process the world, how draining it has been to try to hide it. It takes an enormous amount of energy to approximate normalcy through perfectionism, to blunt sensory overload, overwhelming emotions, and hyperverbal processing without numbing out.

Lately my answer to this exhaustion is refusing to perform. So, I’m a witchy little weirdo, a dirty napkin who’s grateful for wonderful close friends who affirm they love me because not in spite of my weirdness, who embrace the me behind my mask. Working at a strip club requires another mask, but a lighter one. My entire life doesn’t rest on this performance. The stakes are selling dances, not surviving a world hostile to your way of experiencing it.

If one of my core values is to be goofy, another is to be genuine. I may protect parts of myself at work, but the little slivers I selectively reveal are real. After all, I’m a scrappy entertainer, not a trained actor. Stripping makes clear how entertainment is at its core about honest connection, not technical prowess. Beneath the glitzy surface is human vulnerability. A desire to be seen. To be witnessed.

Stripper wisdom says that in every interaction you’ll find a bid for connection. Sometimes it’s quite explicit. Other times it’s subterranean. I would argue that either way, an entertainer’s undertaking revolves around shared vulnerability and collective possibility. The real striptease: to expose the titillating fact that the latter requires the former. That they, we, need each other.

At the risk of revealing how cheesy I am, maybe the leotard was a lesson—showing your ass, metaphorically speaking, is perhaps the only way to truly be seen.

Good thing I have no shame, because here goes my first Comic Strip Club bit. It’s no stand-up routine, but a recent lap dance encounter made me laugh. I’m hoping that might mean it’s funny.

***

It’s the end of the night and I’m annoyed that a loud man keeps shouting “I think I’m kind of in love with her” to his drunk friends after I storm off dejected with nothing but lost time and three crumpled bills padding my boobs like the lumpy foam of a push-up bra. My dignity is intact, but the obliterated economy has fucked up everyone’s money at the club. Tonight I’ve made about $200, minus the house fee, also about $200, depending on the day and time of arrival. My diagnostic paperwork literally says I have, and I quote, “medically significant deficits in mental math,” which isn’t even the rude part, but I’m pretty sure the above equation amounts to zero.

So I’m seething about bosses, taxes, tariffs, and a man who paid me $100 to bemoan the massive amount of money he’s lost in the stock market. The loss is massively unfathomable to me, as out of reach as a job with a six-figure salary. Most of my jobs have paid minimum wage, and the starting annual salary of my first and only tenure-track position was $56,000, which I was ecstatic about since it tripled my income at the time. I like the guy, I really do, but he’s a little out of touch. He proclaims he’s a self-made millionaire and minutes later, casually mentions his million-dollar inheritance.

I sit close to him, my hand resting on his knee, with a smile slapped across my face, attempting to hide the fact that I am living off ramen and rage. I’d be thankful for the $100 except at the moment I’m in debt to the club. Before I can work to pay my bills I have to pay the club to work. We’re at-will W-2 employees without benefits, so basically independent contractors who can’t claim our expenses. I was praying (sans the app) that Elon’s path of destruction would at least shutter the IRS before they bankrupted me last week, but desperation drives delusion. If during the Cold War my mother hadn’t witnessed the FBI in her home asking questions of my suspected communist grandfather, maybe I wouldn’t be so paranoid about the government’s watchful eyes.

***

I lean against the bar with crossed arms. I know I look dejected but I’m way more preoccupied with not crying than making last-minute money after last call. My glassy eyes blur strobe light streaks until Cherry pops up out of nowhere to say the dude loitering behind her wants to do a double with us, two redheads.

Once a customer approached us to say as much and she interjected, with gusto, pointing first at herself then at me, “Yes! A real one and a fake one,” which I resented until a friend explained she’s neurodivergent, which immediately changed my perspective. I get it. She was just being accurate, as I’m a natural brunette, maybe with auburn undertones if you squint but it’s a stretch. This experience cements wisdom a bestie recently dropped in casual conversation: refusing to extend a little grace in everyday social interactions is not only unkind, but likely ableist too.

I agree to the dance, but in the short span of our conversation he has meandered off like a child drunk on sugar and mesmerized by pizza-eating robots at Chuck E. Cheese. I can still hear the mechanical whir of anthropomorphized animals singing a song in no key. Then my mind wanders to the absolute fucking legend of a stripper recorded eating pizza on stage, when the man who disappeared down the hallway leading to the smoking patio reemerges and, making a big to-do of his attempted discretion, scoops me.

“Let’s go!” he whisper-yells in a Southern accent, looking like Jesus in a cowboy hat pounding draft beer. I assume his reasoning has nothing to do with Cherry, who has nailed the girl next door vibe, which men tend to adore. Variety is the Spice Girls of life, or something, as people who have built their existence around suburban homogeneity say, and I’m less Baby, more Scary. But two dancers will double the price, and It’s Two Dollar Tuesday, so customers come looking for deals.

I escort him into the main dance room, unfazed that my usual price point in the VIP has been reduced to two songs for $40. Beggars can’t be choosers, as my friend once advised when I searched for reasons to not submit yet another god forsaken job application. “But Old Dominion University,” I said, “just sounds so racist.” It was, in fact, so racist and sexist and all the things, but what did I expect. It’s an educational institution, after all.

I tend to romanticize the plight of Sisyphus. For two years I yawped at little gray boxes on my Zoom screen, Suicide or laughter!, like Robin Williams in a comic jag. This the two years the English department punished me for not shutting up about Blake Bailey apologists. One manifestation of that retaliation was to push me out of the major, replacing my usual teaching load of advanced undergrad and MA/PhD topics seminars with Introduction to Literature for non-majors, which fulfills a GE (general education) requirement. Despite the snobbish disdain with which research faculty tend to regard GE curricula, I enjoy teaching such classes. The lack of variety was killing me, though. So I relished in presenting this existential dilemma for dramatic effect before unpacking Sartre. What is there, really, but a choice to embrace the absurdity of the human condition as a tiny rebellion against normalizing coercion. You can only roll a ball up a hill for so long before hurling it toward the heavens, hoping it won’t crush you on the comedown.

***

The club is about to close so the dance room smells like a boozy Bath & Body Works. From a distance under dim red lights, the room looks orgiastic, stripper limbs every which way like leggy lampshades tripped over bodies. Dancers avert our eyes to offer the illusion of privacy while customers gawk at a vertigo of grinding hips. I direct the dazed man into a corner, the most private sectional lining the circular room. The booming speaker hangs over our heads, too loud, always too fucking loud, but at least we’re not in earshot of other dances. Time is ticking, so I skip the slow seduction and lower myself onto his lap, which feels tiny under my towering body. Sometimes, during a dance, I will sit my ass down on the cute little haunch below someone’s chest instead of their lap—forgetting the heels make me eight inches taller.

Earlier this evening a man in his early 20s asked my age during a dance, and when I fibbed and said 33, he replied, “Oh, a MILF! Hot!” I am neither Jesus nor a mother, although I desperately wanted to be for most of my thirties. A mother, to be clear. My age is one of my only ruses, as the time I got tired of deflecting the annoying question about “what else do you do?” and tried to insinuate I had a mysterious job in government, I got grilled out of my lie. Some bureau agent I would make. Ten-gallon-hat Jesus reminds me of MILF man, in that the older I get the younger people in their 20s look. I feel like Gulliver encountering the Lilliputians.

I’ve barely straddled him, trying to close the awkward gap between my thighs and his lap, when he gently grasps my biceps and whispers something I must angle myself down to hear. I’m already convinced he’s going to tell me I’m crushing him, so I am more than a little surprised by what he says next.

“Be still,” he repeats, slowly, for emphasis. “Be still.”

He is as earnest as he is soft-spoken. I freeze, assuming this is a boundaries thing, wanting to respect his needs. Remaining motionless but a bit confused, I try to get a read on the situation by peering into his eyes. They are hazel, soft, kind, with fluttery blonde lashes that would cast shadows on his lightly freckled face in direct sunlight. He’s wearing an earth-toned waffle henley with three tortoiseshell buttons and that timeless color of denim that’s somehow always and never in style, the blue jeans bellwether. His rugged boots match the hat he’s politely placed by his side. I swear he’s not a day over the legal drinking limit. I could quite literally be his mother. As if I don’t feel odd enough.

“Oh, okay! Sure,” I affirm in my most soothing, nurturing Dommy Mommy voice.

I’m a bit bewildered, but not stressing it, as bizarre shit happens all the time here. I’m also not entirely sure what he said, so I feel compelled to ask again.

“Be… sorry, what?”

He gestures for me to curve my torso closer to his mouth. His hands cup my right ear, as if in a game of telephone, and against the throb of house music he whispers the words once more.

“Be still.”

“Be still,” I echo, almost in unison, as what he previously said had just sunk in.

He looks up at me with pleading eyes. “Do you know why?”

“No…” my voice trails off as the first song fades into a Bob Marley classic the DJ plays at closing time. I think of how my former club manager favored a more direct approach, N Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye.”

He interrupts my thoughts to ask, “do you want to know why?”

The first verse of “Three Little Birds” urges the frenetic tempo of wriggling bodies to not worry about a thing. “No…” I nod, thinking he repeated the previous question.

Undeterred, he declares, “Because the most beautiful things in life are still.”

“Are what?”

“Are STILL!”

“Oh?” I question, hearing him for once but confused about his meaning, which strikes me as a bit morbid. I was, after all, tasked with dry humping him. “Like what?” I say a little prayer he doesn’t say something murdery.

“Like the…” He pauses for dramatic emphasis.

“STATUE OF LIBERTY!” he booms, voice raised emphatically.

My voice is timid by comparison. “Like the Statue of Liberty?”

I am reminded of Chappell Roan at the New York Governor’s Ball, Lady Liberty drag making visible the violent erasures propping up the nation’s “melting pot” mythology. This sartorial protest pissed off the single-issue gay contingent willing to brush off genocide for a right-leaning Democrat, but what else is new.

“Like the Statue of Liberty!” he confirms, victorious.

I’d sooner burn an American flag bikini than wear one, but this is a bid for connection and my job is to honor that bid without sacrificing myself. There’s no harm in playing along, I must have thought, before I hear myself respond without missing a beat.

“Like the one that greeted my Russian ancestors on the shores of Ellis Island?”

My delivery surprises me with its seriousness. I am indeed Russian on my maternal side but never have I expressed such reverence toward a sculpture, much less a national monument. I’m more into Medusa, the high priestess whose spurned beauty turns men to stone after Athena, goddess of war, blames and banishes her for surviving Poseidon’s supposed divine right. The curse offers a certain protection.

And with that, bright overhead lights switch on to signal closing and we all exit the flooding florescent room in a cloud of human scents, clutching clothing and smoothing hair like a collective walk of shame absent the shame. We’re just a mess of people mopping up desire’s remainders, sticky memory.

He continues his cryptic statue comparison after the music cuts off, shifting from command to compliments. I’m amused, paying no mind to the chorus of sideways glances.

“I’m melting,” I cackle in my best Wicked Witch of the West impression, breaking the spell with silliness, which offers something far more playful than projection, something like delight—an unexpected desire that doesn’t require lack, just hope for connection in a place that capitalizes on all we’ve constructed to keep us apart.

Our brief interaction wasn’t deep, to be sure, but I leave the club feeling a little lighter. And I hope my quirky dance partner might feel a little lighter, too.

♡♡♡

What’s new in your worlds? I’ve been completing an abortion doula training, which I’m really loving, and writing about the sharp edges of empathy after Dobbs. I had intended to share this writing in my March newsletter, but (surprise!) it turned into another absurdly long essay.

Initially compiled from cocktail napkin scribbles and cryptic voice notes I often record while driving home from work after the club closes at 2am, my drafts look like a fully unhinged evidence board, my own idiosyncratic so-called wall of crazy. But instead of true crime, the vibe is more queer anarchism. Unlike the empty nods to social justice that disappear off manicured lawns as soon as the money moves right, though, anti-capitalist slogans offer more practical (and dare I say more pleasurable) instruction. You know, be gay, do crime, stuff like that.

Considering who currently wields unchecked power to define what's criminal, extending a long history of targeting those exposing and opposing power’s death grip, perhaps this doing of crime is more ontological—a mode of being in defiance of powerful capitalist interests (and big box self-checkout lines) everywhere.

Alas, as long as capitalism continues to force us to work to make money instead of create to make meaning, I need more time to edit an obscene amount of writing I feel tethered to, driven by, weighted down with words left wanting.

As for why the delay on editing the “essay,” I wish I were dealing with 7 pages, not 70. My sense is that people tend to think time blindness means being consistently 15 minutes late. Try sitting down at 8:11pm to write, then all of a sudden realizing it’s 5:46am and you still exist in a body that aches for attention after literally not moving, drinking, or eating for hours of intense, almost trance-like (yet sober), concentration. I bet that sounds bonkers, but anyone who knows what I’m talking about also knows how peaceful this state can be, how calming. Not unrelatedly, it’s one of the only ways to hush the inner clatter of an amateur orchestra, the conductor a person in my head narrating a person in my head narrating a person in my head. While I’ve decided to stop shaming myself for how my brain works, I recognize how my incredibly monotropic mind poses practical problems, the least of which is that everything feels connected, impossible to untangle.1

But, the orchestra pit insists, everything is connected. What do William Carlos Williams and Gwen Stefani, as just two examples off the top of my head, have in common? I can’t wait to show you! Fun? Insufferable? TBD!

Moreover, I haven’t forgotten about my new series on the strip club as a haunted house. As I wrote in a recent post, it weaves together personal narrative, ghost stories, cultural criticism, and close readings of literature and film. For example, one essay analyzes sex worker representation from Striptease to Anora, as I consider the projection of shifting economic anxieties onto tired tropes of dangerous women.

My long-form creative nonfiction writing will continue haunting me until it’s publication-ready, so stay tuned for abortion doula reflections, stripper ghost stories, and more! In the meantime, I hope you might enjoy a phantom poem. Phantom not because the speaker is a ghostly presence (debatable), but because after winning a poetry contest for the first and only time in my adult life, it’s just my luck that the publication itself, the judge’s glowing appraisal of my poem, and the related podcast on which I was interviewed after receiving the award, all disappeared into the ether.

Hot Metal Bridge is the now defunct (due to funding issues, from what I can surmise online) official literary magazine of the University of Pittsburgh. While compiling my tenure portfolio materials I even reached out to the contest judge, poet Ellen McGrath Smith, who couldn’t find her little blurb once featured on the literary magazine’s website with the winning entries. At least her response reassured me I hadn’t made this all up as if under the soporific influence of some ego dream. I even searched my personal and internet archives again while writing this newsletter and found nothing. Granted, ten years ago I was still finishing my dissertation and sneaking into campus copy rooms to print MapQuest directions. That is to say, I wouldn’t trust me to find anything.

However, during my search I just so happened to stumble upon a footnote citation of my academic writing I hadn’t seen before.2 This was flattering, sure, but also clarifying—for then and only then did I realize that the cited essay, published in Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics a year after “Capitalis,” actually elaborates its poetic premise. In “Caption This: Police in Pussyhats, White Ladies, and Carceral Psychology Under Trump,” I define “carceral psychology” as “not merely a reliance on, but an active psychic investment in, cops and cages.”3 So, if you’d like, please check out the prose companion to my phantom poem, which I’m sharing below both as a series of images, to preserve original stylistic choices (such as slashes indicating a beat or breath), and a listener-friendly version for those who prefer audio.

The poem begins with an accounting of legal violence, then turns to the collective possibilities embedded in psychic shifts away from the state and toward each other.

xx,

A.

Capitalis

So, what implications does the thesis of emotional ambivalence in love have for thinking about alternatives to the death penalty and for legal violence more generally?

—Judith Butler

I.
Capitals as in counting heads. Cattle and chattel. As in heads of state, severing heads from bodies. As in cultural accounting, whose eyes roll off faces and whose faces have no place in the polity, except for their labor keeps everything running. Capital as in punishment or unpaid labor for capital offenses. Accruing debts by design unpayable. Not hypocrisy but ambivalence makes us guilty. Festive pleasure in executing eroticized aggressive drives inflict categorical cruelty. Ineradicable violence between the prison as a model of social debt and the penalty of death.  

II.
Capitals as in stuck cities that exit us in consonants recanted. Capitals as in abiding language’s formalities. If I capitalize each letter of your name it signifies screaming or I wish our torsos together, file folders forming wide Os in laughter, so sweaty our sentences lean lowercase. If our speech acts trick us enough we might decide why not bid double blind nil. To uncapitalize opacity. To splay books. To hand out hearts on cards while pressing spades to chests, our open deck. Muscular organs open fists to lead sharp blue strings from paper thin skin to an incalculable euphoria, this our vital air.

***

In Memory of Aaron Bushnell

Grief is an invisible tomb
and cops come for the dying
(as if the living weren’t enough)
licking flames like death’s lapdog.
But hope rages with another truth—

Life is not meant to be a graveyard. 
Don’t buy their plot and built-in executioner.
When you’re called, do you silence screens
etching violent dreamscapes in your mind
and follow orders to cough coffins midair? 

Or, do you face the sun—
A blazing fury of paraffin hearts
sweating sentences so devoted to peace
punctuation is a collective breath
without books to govern words or worlds

and new ways to exist across them
like paper discs between dripping wax
and hands holding the spark of a prayer
that, come night, still flickers and flares—
Free Palestine!

☆ ☆ ☆

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Suddenly, as if out of a trance, I look up from my writing desk and notice the sleepy donut shop across the alley from my apartment. Its large windows flood florescent over red pleather booths from another era against a telephone wire-lined palm tree sky. I shut my laptop just before the deep field of twilight starts glowing crimson gold. The next day I resolve to carry my visual timer around my apartment like a freaking Tamagotchi. Thank goodness my smiling digital companion only dies for lack of batteries.

All of that to say, I literally can’t stop thinking about the (necro)political economy of pleasure. More specifically, its relationship to power and profit vis-à-vis the strip club fascinates me. And, because I’m a reluctant optimist, I’ve been exploring what the paranormal offers by way of imagining beyond this politics. In truth, the delay in sharing my monthly long-form essay is that it’s not an essay at all: it’s accidentally a chaotic draft of a book-length collection that I must lovingly and painstakingly edit into coherence. Your support truly energizes this process.

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Accompanying my Substack drafts and open docs of strip club ghost stories, cultural analysis, and napkin manifestos, is a newsletter in which I (re)introduce myself and some of the offerings I’ve been dreaming up for free and paid subscribers. I have some fun little surprises up my sleeve to express gratitude for all my paid subs! Please note, though, that most of my posts will remain public. I only lock content behind a paywall when I feel too shy or raw to share it otherwise.

This forthcoming newsletter includes additional details about my essay series, but in the meantime I’d like to append a new poem as a sneak preview of that work. Short-form essays are not my strong suit, to say the least (*wink*), but I hope you might enjoy the occasional poem? I identified as a poet before I ever attempted creative nonfiction, and I love mixing genres.

Shockingly (*rolls eyes*), the financial, environmental, and existential precarity of the current climate has drastically impacted club money despite widespread delusions, like when I overheard a dancer saying “I think Trump winning will be a good thing for us. You know, with the election, people are happy that they’ll be doing better financially.” Now that our dressing room vibes resemble dramatic scenes out of a Bachelor preview, I wonder if this dancer has reconsidered her stance. As for me, I’ve been easing my financial woes with some silliness. For the hell of it, I compiled some of my favorite unhinged moments from the current season below. Enjoy!

Although I need to catch up on episodes, thus far I’m team Alexe! I’m also a fan of Parisa’s refreshingly offbeat sense of humor and irreverence toward compulsory cuteness (for example, during the fuzzy bunny game and dream-sharing sequence). Speaking of which, if I were a llama I might be tempted to spit on Natalie, too. Sorry, but her alleged dream that she’s a penguin savior destined for the role of wife and mother seems a little contrived LOL. I think Linda the No-Drama Llama would agree.

I’m still unsure of the whole subscriber chat thing, but I would be so happy to hear from you in the comments! What’s keeping you afloat in the maelstrom of late capital? LOL if I said this at a party instead of “how are you?”

Leave a comment

Other things helping my heart include listening to the Telepathy Tapes and training to become an abortion doula. Due to the long history of medical racism and eugenics, settler colonialism, Zionism, ableism, misogynistic and transphobic violence, and criminalization, the framework and practice of reproductive justice remains vital to interconnected struggles for bodily autonomy and gender-affirming care. Stay tuned for reflections on all this and more!

xx,

Alison

P.S. Please keep scrolling down for the promised poem, “To All My Sexist Clients.” Because the tiny robots in our devices do not respect the rules of enjambment, I included two versions. The first is an image preserving the original line breaks. The second is a prose version for people like me who adore Substack’s audio feature.

To All My Sexist Clients

Scrawling sonnets naked, or sweating semen, adorned with spines of women and teeth of men deemed lesser predators in a simulated jungle: You believe your petty pocket change made me climax? Honestly. Pass the penknife, Norman. I’m not the one lying prostrate before Hitchcock’s altar, cursing my mother’s womb and all women, pledging allegiance to American Psycho. But since you asked, here’s an idea: Just listen. And stop the hero worship of Mr. Mailer, Mr. Sandman, Mr. Bates, Mr. Roth, Mr. Right. He’s the devil’s advocate in a hall of mirrors, a two-minute wolf with a magic beam of pipe dreams, the Fool with a semi-precious stone for none of my parts.

Now, observe. No, feel. Then draw shadows like velvet curtains to reveal a glowing tangle. In the ring of fire, Cash vibrates Love—a burning thing, the lyrics his wife wrote about him, channeling theirs. Co-creation casts lines to heaven. Still, words remain hazy vessels. Don’t leave them to anyone. Desire flashes daggers as ChatGPT drivels on, Gollum-like, about the wrong ring and another John on another plane, saying, in so many ways, I am writing to fill lines, in the time it takes to swipe left on Tinder, to burn stained sheets, to count likes, to get rich on the fat of beautiful flesh, to steal poems and the time to read them that sharp objects never get back.

In a lucid fever, I bought little cakes of pistachio wrapped in rose cellophane and party straws looping like rollercoasters. And, while you waited outside, a rifle the attendant taught me to shoot by piercing holes through beans in a can. The holes look like a map of this country—its bottomless hunger, its revenge against itself. Leaders show up late, belligerent, children of nothing yet owning it all, inept with instruments but expecting to play. My dream girl is interrupted by their clanking calculus: On whose beds to lie for imagination, at the expense of whose last breath. What nation, what flag, worn like bumper stickers on cybertrucks trump cards can’t buy—

they peel, we sweat human sighs.

☆ ☆ ☆

LA County is on fire. Roses grow from cracks in concrete, but they don’t survive street sweeps. Today the cops arrested a man for sleeping in the alley behind my apartment, according to neighbors bickering about HOA fees on WhatsApp, while incarcerated workers just miles north of my exit on the freeway try to contain flames.

Moral outrage over the plight of imprisoned firefighters is framed as wage theft, obscuring its real stakes: that people held captive by the state prefer hard labor over the hard time of carceral punishment. Time wasn’t meant to be a grave.

Liberals want to better compensate providers of this sinister social service, not to challenge the fact of human caging. Captive people aren’t allowed to abet authorities in disaster relief if they’re convicted arsonists, or, without a doubt, political prisoners—who get singled out for solitary. Consider Russell Maroon Shoatz, the Black radical visionary who spent nearly half a century caged, and decades isolated alone in a cell for 23 hours a day. Physically, not spiritually. But the spirit realm is inseparable from the material environment. He passed 52 days after his so-called compassionate release. The state continues its carnage. And yet.

His legacy lives on in the actions of communities refusing the law of capital, organizing mutual aid, and hungering for a world where—to quote another Black radical thinker—safety is not forged through “chains and corpses.” James Baldwin, luminous as ever, sits atop a cloud, gesticulating with a cigarette. The house was always burning, he sighs. Ash falls from the sky, but it isn’t his.

The world is on fire, and politicians yawn. Oops, shrugs the mayor feasting on flesh, police are our preferred first responders. Flames cremate and cops patrol for supposed looters as kindling for cages. Every time someone laments the alleged looting absent an accounting of structural plunder, my eyes flash lightning. I think, they must know nothing of settler colonialism. Greed they get, but not an elemental human hunger.

Listen. The earth doesn’t move aside for ambulances. Windstorms can’t be stopped by bullets. You can try to destroy the wild, but you’ll never conquer it.

In the interregnum, climate change deniers sharpen their knives. During his last days in office, Biden unsurprisingly proposed another arms sale, of $8 billion, to continue funding genocide. Trump plots to roll back environmental protections and regulations. As if rich people’s houses aren’t burning, too.

Crisis is an inherent condition of capitalism, which grimly reaps disaster dividends from the Palisades to Palestine. The authorities mitigate their own monsters. Death tolls rise while the state criminalizes activists chanting burn it down across prison walls. But people vested with the power to criminalize are the ones sanctioning mass destruction. From their infinity pools they see nothing but a limitless edge, vanishing ecosystems into dollar signs.

Still, smoke rises.

***

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Soon after I moved to Virginia in 2015, a queer astrologer tells me I am searching for home, that it may not be attached to a geographical location. My heart beats defeat for a moment because I thought I wanted to settle down, to put down roots, finally. But not here.

As a child I wanted to be a geomorphologist, studying how rivers and roads alter the earth’s surface over time. After a life of wandering, invariably arriving or departing, I can’t stay in one place. It’s the curse of my astrological trajectory, with a Sagittarius stellium always in motion. I so desire a container for my life, a person or place to give form to restless searching. But according to my birth chart, I’m a fire blazing. A night baby born under a Sagittarius moon.

Then the astrologer tells me all containers break.

I begin building with metaphors and semicolons and ampersands—a shared syntax for lost children connecting constellations of ellipses. We find each other when, like the Postal Service song that reminds me of falling in love at 18, the freckles in our eyes align. That frightening, frantic desire to see and be seen. Unadorned. Whole.

***

A month after moving to Long Beach at the end of 2023, I spent my birthday in the hospital, where I awoke from anesthesia to texts and FaceTime calls from loved ones and, if I’m being honest, luxuriated in the feeling of being forced to rest, of being cared for so completely, relieved of any pressure to perform, produce, please. I am pathologically bad at asking for help; case in point, I didn’t tell my family I was in the hospital. But there, under starchy sheets, I didn’t feel like a burden; I remember the sweetness of nurses adjusting my pillows, serving me trays of apple juice in waxy cups and little packs of saltines, comfort food for me. I don’t want to romanticize pain, but in that moment it pushed me to revel in unexpected pleasures, unlikely intimacies.

***

Windows surround my hospital bed, enveloping the room in a purple haze. The night shift nurse brings me extra saltines. I gleefully crinkle thin plastic wrappers.

Adjusting the bed, she asks what I do for a living. I explain that I’m about to resign from my tenured job as an English professor and start stripping again. Anyone who knows me also knows I didn’t say it so succinctly, as a linear trajectory: professor to stripper. She holds space for my ambling story, tells it back to me with a sexier ending, one that makes me feel brave instead of batshit crazy.

Serene egg white and gray speckled tiles absorb our laughter. Sharp lines soften. She opens up about a recent heartbreak. I relate to her, share how I thought I’d be family planning right now with a man who couldn’t be bothered to be present for my previous two birthdays. Whose response to any compliment I paid him was a haughty “I know.” This robbed me of my favorite currency. To lift my spirits when I’m down, I like to compliment every person I pass on the street.

I feel a familiar ache in my rib, but the warmth of her words rocks me to sleep.

***

It is one of those nights. There’s a room full of pale patrons passively enjoying the entertainment—apparently oblivious or indifferent to the fact that when no one is tipping, the entertainment is not only working for free, but dancing in debt to the club. The cover charge is nothing next to a stripper’s house fee.

Glistening on stage, shoulders spinning gravity, I spot someone gawking at the tip rail before gingerly smoothing out two single dollars atop marble—as if that entitles him to more of my body. I reach for my bikini top and put it back on with my back turned to the audience, isolating my left glute then my right, back and forth bouncing bored while I secure the string. I disappear down a staircase the second the song ends.

As I survey the room deciding which group to approach, I realize I’m accidentally lurking behind a young man who keeps glancing back at me. He must be at least 21 to be here but looks to me like a preteen. Despite writing him off, at this point I’m basically standing directly behind him, so I strut a few feet forward and squat down to his level.

“Boo!” I laugh, then apologize for hovering as I register his facial expression. I remember reading somewhere that it only takes a split second for the brain to clock sexual attraction to a stranger, at least in a superficial sense. I don’t know if science backs this claim, but it holds up to experience; in a sliver of time I sense the spark or its absence.

I extend my right hand while gazing into his flickering eyes, which confirm I can make a deal with his desire. Every performer has their limit and mine is a limp wrist. He accepts my firm shake. He’ll get a dance, even if it means borrowing money from some sulky friend.

I’m not wrong. He wants me to take him back to VIP. He’s practically melted onto my chair. But just as we’re about to get up, he pauses. “Wait, can you turn around, let me have a look?”

I guess I appear confused, despite having heard this line countless times, so he adds with a smirk, “I wanna try before I buy.”

This is standard, expected, really, considering how common it is to reduce others to a number on the slippery scale of desirability. These days, AI bots set the bar and mere mortal is mid. Android is in. The tautology of technology as erotic driver. Pay for plastic with plastic. Your face has face value. What’s the price of your piece of ass when you’re property? Doctors spout a cost-benefit analysis on YouTube, while bloggers perform surgery on social capital. Shrink yourself. Make it look natural but remember: Your name is a number. Your body is merchandise.

I know that I should play my part, giggle, stand up with shoulder blades kissing, as tall as a doorway or carousel ride. Spin, shimmy, make money.

Instead, I consider the cost of letting a man half my age parade my ass around like a show pony.

I remember as a baby stripper in Virginia, a regular remarked, in earnest, “They treat y’all like cattle here. They should treat you like…” He pauses, searching. “Thoroughbred horses!”

I am a show, a pony, a part, a piece, a washing machine. A frayed electrical wire. A fuse. An angel with wings of bone. A gargoyle. A tripped circuit breaker. A faucet dripping. I fight off tongues flicked between my splayed breastbone, fingers feeling for hard nipples, hands sliding down my sweaty spine.

“No, I’m not going to do that,” I state matter-of-factly. With the sharp incline of elbows I push myself off the rolling chair and slow-motion gallop away.

The next hour or more I stand around, still striking out, feeling a bit foolish, looking forlornly toward the front entrance. I remind myself you only need one decent customer to have a decent night. Over and over, like a mantra. Meanwhile, the guy I rejected takes cash out of the ATM twice for a dancer who scrolls between VIP sessions, bored, not even trying to feign affection or make conversation. I glare in his direction. He looks bored, too.

When I finally find my guy, and I sure as hell do, bored guy glares back. I know, there’s still a man on both sides of the equation. I’m not naïve. And yet.

Maybe this man realizes that I bet on myself as more than a ratio, a ration, an assemblage of legs and ass and tits and waist. That he failed to see me as fully human; or worse, he did and couldn’t afford the price of the ticket—a shrinking profit margin.

I alchemize the feeling into a lesson. For the rest of the night I beam at the man as if I don’t recognize his face. I know that tomorrow, I won’t.

***

Share Napkin Manifestos

After resigning from my university post at the beginning of January 2024, almost exactly one year ago, and during a time in which I felt fundamentally unsafe in my body, I fought tooth and nail for the new life I wanted to live. Now that I’m here, I sometimes feel too exhausted to enjoy it. Not that I’m ungrateful, but I am far from the financial stability I seek. So I have to keep running up that hill, Kate Bush interpretive dance style—all flailing arms, wild hair, pouty lips, and melodramatic angles.

This is often how I feel at work, like a baroque pop specter, but most nights I love being on stage. Here, my mind feels unburdened of daunting expectations and my own perfectionistic demands. I float through the air with inverted legs fanned like a pinwheel. I am poised for the body’s miracles. I walk on air with the magic trick of taut arms sustaining tension—and with the aid of a strength specific to strippers, despite or perhaps because of how often we’re underestimated, presumed directionless.

It takes guts to put so much trust in your body when the world is upside down.

***

You wanted, too desperately, to be a mother—almost unbearably so—after the fiery young organizer who had called you mom tragically died, alone in her bedroom. Estranged from your body, you cannot mourn.

***

A month ago to the day, I had to cancel my birthday plans. If it hadn’t been for a dear friend surprising me with flowers, a balloon, and some really delicious takeout, I probably would have spent my day on the couch rewatching Clueless, sobbing uncontrollably when Ms. Guist and Mr. Hall share a coffee thermos. Not sporadically, hormones seize my body. I’m a sad sponge. Something as silly as my beloved cat’s persistent meows every morning as I prepare her food, with love but never fast enough, can make me burst into tears. “I’m trying so hard,” I cry. I’m not talking to her. Comically emo but genuinely so. I know my big emotions seem absurd at best or manipulative at worst. But the truth is that no matter how hard I try, I struggle to regulate my very real emotional and sensory sensitivity, especially during my period.

I am so lucky to have generous friends who understand I feel deeply, see my effort and celebrate my growth, encourage me to honor my body’s idiosyncratic needs. To sit with rather than shove down the grief. I scribble fragments of ideas on scrap paper and sob into voice notes between sentences that demand something of me.

Writing ghosts out of your apartment can be exhausting. They keep you up at night. But ghosts usher in rebirth, are doulas of new narratives. If a ghost talks to you, listen.

***

I dance in my kitchen like an off-brand Teletubby, a little stoned and swaddled in a fuzzy leopard bathrobe. The dramatic contrast between the image of me dancing for money versus dancing for myself suddenly strikes me as hilarious. My laughter is mostly a silent, occasionally shrieky, full body shrug in stop animation.

My cat’s pink paws are delicately placed right where tile meets wood flooring. She watches politely, mostly unbothered, a faint trace of confusion in the tiny triangle of her mouth. I sing loudly into a serving spoon.

She is not clawing at ghosts in the walls. I hate that when I met her in an animal shelter in 2016, her former keeper, who named her Marsha, had partially amputated her digits. I worry about her phantom pain, the collateral damage of prize property. When I adopt her that day, I give her a new name, one that fits.

Aside from my cat, my only audience is the kitchen trashcan, which I randomly glued googly eyes on and gave an entire personality during one of my redecoration kicks.

I named my trashcan Fred before I met a human Fred, incidentally the name of my octogenarian regular. I joke that I manifested him. He pays me to dance with him in crisp $100 bills. With, not on, him.

He is a west coast swing dancer but loves to move no matter the form: the Lindy Hop, or the waltz, polka, country, salsa, cumbia, merengue. When the VIP is otherwise empty, we stand in the center of the room and dance across partitions, my left hand resting on his upper arm and my right intertwined with his fingers. Inevitably, the spell is broken by some dude in a backwards hat and the dancer carting him around with fed up mom energy. We laugh at our unseemly intimacy and retreat to the corner booth where we don’t have to yell quite as loudly over speakers. His hearing has waned with age and mine is delayed like out-of-sync subtitles, so I don’t mind when he repeats the same stories. They’re often quite sweet.

One tired Monday, though, I’m on autopilot and revert to scripted intimacy, knees straddling the squeaky seat. His arms braced against each partition wall, he suddenly shouts “Stop!”

I stop. My mind is elsewhere but it’s a simple command, not calculus. He explains his fear that I will give him a heart attack. That’s a good way to go, he adds, but he’s not ready.

“I’m not done dancing,” he says with a toothy grin I find endearing.

I’m not done either.

***

When Fred asks, innocently, if I ever want children, he reassures the tell in my eyes I have plenty of time. He thinks I’m 29, a decade younger than my actual age. Salt burns, but it cleans, too.

For most of my 30s I wanted, desperately, to be a mother, even more desperately after the surgeon who performed my pre-pandemic appendectomy in 2018 informed me my fallopian tubes had significant scarring, the cause of which was the actual reason I began puking green bile after driving myself to the emergency room. I have a high pain tolerance and the tattoos to prove it—plus the menstrual cramps to test it—but the abrupt stabbing sensation was so severe I thought I might be having a heart attack.

Immediately after checking my vitals in an intake room, hospital staff hooked me up to an ECG machine to record my heart’s electrical signals. Unsurprisingly the attack was of the panic variety. So I awaited more test results, hearing every sound in the cacophony of crisis, horizontal behind flimsy cubicle curtains—save for a scatological showdown fit for a Jonathan Swift satire. Picture a policeman guarding the ER’s only bathroom, locked by default, and a hard femme in a hospital gown rushing toward him like a bat out of hell after meeting a motley crew of enemas. The way I see it, the cop lost, but I was relieved to be admitted to an en suite on the inpatient floor. The doctor ordered test after test after test before finally, without warning, rushing me to the OR on a stretcher.

Still groggy from surgery, I was gutted when the doctor broke the news about my scarred fallopian tubes, nonchalantly, as if placing a lunch order. When I tried to ask questions, he brusquely told me to follow up with my ob-gyn. The infection itself was easily cured with antibiotics, but it wreaked havoc on my body for as long as it remained undetected. Meaning, for as long as my then boyfriend failed to mention his indiscretion.

My heart a live wire, I left the hospital in a state of shock, unable to process an imminent breakup—not to mention the terrible revelation that precipitated it—and with medical debt where my appendix should be. Widely considered a vestigial organ, the appendix, according to recent research, serves an adaptive immune function.

Unrelated to my lying (soon-to-be) ex situation, a man I thought was a friend tried to force himself on me the night before I drove myself to the ER.

***

You run into him at a metal show and he offers to drive you home since you inexplicably start feeling off. When he insists on coming up to use your bathroom, you instinctively ask him to wait, then cave. But your physical strength surprises even you, a scrappy athlete nicknamed Violent Femme in high school.

After finally shoving him out the door and double-checking the deadbolt with shaky hands, you fall to the floor and weep. You never see him again, but his face is everywhere. Each man who hurt you is a domino is a haunted house of cards is a memory.

***

You start to notice when you unconsciously switch to second person.

During an undergrad summer research project on second person fiction, which fascinates me to this day, I read that the you is often a projection of judgment, like the voice of a parent or a god punishing a child. Thou hast done wrong reverberates through the thunder of your mind. You’re to blame, you mistakenly believe, the sole architect of your suffering.

Another weird thing I’ve learned about trauma is that if I dance really wildly when I’m stuck in a memory, I can get out of it. I can return myself to my body.

***

As nightfall casts new shadows, I sit in my own little sanctuary. Over the course of the past year, I built a home for my sometimes terrifying and exhilarating new life. I’ve been sick a lot, with COVID and the flu and walking pneumonia, but there is a new calmness in me. Less doomscrolling, more staring out windows. Mental space for wonder. Room to listen.

The light bulbs in the iron candelabra chandelier above my writing desk flicker like gas flames. A helium-filled balloon slowly turns toward the lights, spinning on an invisible axis. I feel the pull of its quiet urging.

***

Somewhere between getting dumped over the phone by the man who called me his future wife, and resigning from my first and last salaried job after a ruinous cross-country move, freezing my eggs became a logistical and financial impossibility.

But this isn’t a sad story. New desires grew in me.

Dancing in my kitchen, happy tears limn my eyes as I remember recently teaching my niece an improvised move I dub the pickle dance, arms wiggling up to heaven. Being an aunt is one of the greatest joys of my life, bringing me even closer to my beautiful sister.

The love I feel for them, for my fur baby and all animals, for all the people close to me, and far away, is immense. This love extends to all the pleasures that glimmer—sea salt, the ocean, hazelnut chocolate, a new song, a perfect kiss like a wave, a perfect sentence. Sometimes it, the love, but also the loss it begets, spills over into the street below my balcony. I want to embrace every stranger, to snuggle up to a friend, to move and be moved, to write little love notes on napkins and toss them skyward like dollars, making it rain poems that float toward their as-yet-unknown home.

***

Meanwhile, wildfires still rage in the city of angels. I write this sentence to the sound of sirens in a failed state of emergency alerts. I am a nervous system, a body without organs, a body in a larger body of faulty and defiant hearts, all pounding pavement.

I once called LA home. Homes are ghost stories that shelter the living. Longer or no longer. The incalculable loss of it all is hard to hold. And yet.

Slowly, new topographies, incandescent bodies, take shape. At night we pray our ghosts will witness a new world being born, the one we—not gods or celebrities or billionaires or politicians—are working together to create.

Like the world for one moment stopping to say I’m here. 

Language is born in us but sometimes forgets

how much we need a pause between words 

where minutes mourn 

how long they’ve accepted less. 

How much we want to crawl into the beds under our tongues 

and sing to everything still.

♡♡♡

Birthdays can be bookends. This past year marked a major life transition as I resigned from my tenured academic job in January 2024 soon after a disastrous cross-country move and devastating breakup. My path has not been easy, and I’m still recovering from intense burnout, but I fought tooth and nail for the life I envisioned as a writer without giving up or looking back. And I think that’s worth celebrating.

I don’t want to sugarcoat the immensity of collective grief and personal tragedy that links us to shared experiences of pain. This grief is precisely what compels me to look for the little pockets of light and life born amid upheaval. I would love to know what’s in your pockets, too.

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And wherever you are, reading these words, please know I am grateful for you. Connecting with an amazing community of writers has brought me joy and purpose during a rocky time.

So, needless to say, I was delighted when Raechel Anne Jolie invited me to collaborate on a post-election take on the current political discourse, from the perspective of two femme writers with backgrounds in organizing, academia, and sex work.

radical love letters

sex worker academics talk shop post-election

We’re so excited to bring you this collab between Napkin Manifestos (Alison Rose Reed) and radical love letters (Raechel Anne Jolie)! Please enjoy our conversation inspired by Alison’s piece “I’m a Stripper; Of Course I’m Not Surprised by Trump 2.0…

Listen now

2 years ago · 13 likes · 3 comments · Raechel Anne Jolie and Alison Rose Reed

Raechel and I decided to put the recorded conversation behind a paywall since we speak on sensitive subjects. If you don’t already subscribe to Raechel’s newsletter, radical love letters, now is a wonderful time to do so. If you have capacity, please consider a paid subscription to my newsletter, too.

My paid subscribers can access an abridged transcript of the recorded conversation below. In addition to stories too tender to tell so publicly, paid subs can look forward to playlists, poems, and other juicy writing from my current book project on why I started stripping as a way to build a home, so to speak, after exiting academia.

For me, the best gift of all time is free time to write. While I strive to share my writing biweekly, as in twice a month, I am grateful for your grace; I’m still adjusting to a new work schedule. Four nights and four days a week I feel like a vampire, waking just hours before sunset and sleeping at dawn. Sometimes I watch my life recede into red strobe lights, or the tiny star cutouts in my blackout curtains. Sunrays stream through shapes to create the illusion of night. There is a heaviness to sleeping with the sun.

Or, to reference Miranda July’s novel All Fours, every day is Tuesday. I write around the clock, under an artificial moon, furiously, in voice notes, or scribbles on sticky paper, if not with clacking keys.

I’ve been writing about unlikely intimacies, desiring ghosts, and emotional labor in and between the strip club and university classroom. For example, in one forthcoming essay titled “The Strip Club is a Mortuary,” I weave together personal narrative, ghost stories, and close readings of films such as Jennifer’s Body, Teeth, Striptease, and Anora—to explore the projection of economic anxieties and heterosexual crisis onto dangerous women.

All of that to say, I’m really excited to share more writing from my work in progress oh so soon, maybe even the unabridged (uncensored! unhinged?) version of a birthday reflection I had planned to post last week before I got the flu. In the meantime, thank you, as always, for supporting and sharing Napkin Manifestos.

xx,

Alison

***

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“Very depressing day.”

I didn’t work the night before, because I wasn’t in the mood to manage any real-time election emotions of mostly intoxicated, mostly middle-aged men. Reason and experience told me the strip club is probably one of the only spaces where election coverage wouldn’t be playing on the TV, where people would pretend it was just any other day. People go to the strip club to forget—losing their money or their minds to sudden layoffs, protracted illness, grief, death, divorce. When the nail salon blares Fox News I want to chuck my platform sandals at the TV, so I’m not judging the need for escapist retreat. But I wonder about its cost. Doctors inject themselves with ketamine in their cars, marvel at their heated steering wheels. In the United States it is socially acceptable in some circles to openly hate the unhoused whose drug use happens on city streets, pathologizing their will rather than recognizing the protection private luxury, and public power, offers to those who can afford it. In any event, I wasn’t risking the possibility of being paid in men’s financial feelings about the election. My rage at the world was a job hazard. My body was a liability. Is a liability.

Heightened attunement to human vulnerabilities feels vital to this work. Cajoling insecurities, anticipating subterranean desires, compensates for social awkwardness. My own, that of customers. The intensities of my senses and emotions overwhelm me but help me connect. What compels me toward people, also leads to my withdrawal. To adhere to, rend apart. In Li-Young Lee’s “The Cleaving” (an expansive reimagining of the all-encompassing Whitmanian I/eye), the poem’s speaker wonders:

Was it me in the other I loved
when I loved another?
The butcher sees me eye this delicacy.
With a finger, he picks it
out of the skull-cradle
and offers it to me.
I take it gingerly between my fingers
and suck it down.
I eat my man.

My nervous system is built for this work. I learned as a child how to remain alert for subtle shifts that might indicate imminent danger. At the club, as an instinct of self-protection, I wield the Freudian cliché of stiletto as phallic weapon. Obviously a man invented the term penis envy. Dicks and feet are two tired, over-hyped organs. Revered, practical, but a little funny looking, if you ask me. I adore a polite request to massage my feet. But since most dances revolve around the former organ, I remind grabby men I could balance on one leg and stretch tension between spike and penetrated flesh. Here, I can flirt in threats. It is one of the only places I feel so emboldened in the presence of men. I admit that when they fork over money for fleeting moments of my own design, I feel powerful. Like the poem’s speaker, “I eat my man.”

Or I feel nothing.

I respond, “I’m numb. I was planning to work tonight but I don’t know if I can deal.” Any gloating might incite me.

Election season tends to amplify obnoxious political conversations with MAGA hat wearers, the ones spouting slogans like “Your body, my choice. Forever.” But for women, femmes, and nonbinary people, none of this rhetoric is new. It’s the weather. A strip club is a social thermometer.

Avoiding men who get off on a false sense of victimized superiority reminds me of that arcade game where a solo player maneuvers frogs across the freeway, likely where the 710 meets the 405—an endless procession of big rigs hauling cargo from the port of Long Beach, massive wheels splattering nervous systems. Capitalism’s conduits and casualties. Frog hops can’t be measured in miles per hour, but this is the fault of the frogs, not the cars, and never the transportation system itself—freeways razing entire communities, preserving penitentiaries. The frog is bound to lose the game of being forced to outpace capitalism’s coerced urgency, engineered crisis. Its stakes? Survival.

He agrees to come meet me. “Strength in numbers,” he writes.

I don’t normally communicate with my regulars when I’m not at work, but he has earned my trust. He is not the kind of man who slides into my DMs, bartering for my body.

My regular pays me for what I’m offering: limited access to my time. I can enjoy his company because he respects the constraints around mine. He is not chasing a delusional fantasy of making me his girlfriend. He is stronger than me. I chase delusional fantasies of emotionally unavailable people making me theirs. My therapist would say I am reinforcing my belief that I’m only worthy of love’s scraps. She’s not wrong. Belief becomes reality if you believe it hard enough.

My regular doesn’t turn rape into a punchline or talking point. He is not the customer who out of fucking nowhere tells me that women need to sleep with guns under their pillows so men don’t rape them. Who asks if I have one. The way he says rape gets stuck in my throat, like a suppressed cough in a library or at a funeral. My eyes water. The DJ calls me to the stage before I can respond. I perform, so I don’t have to.

***

That Wednesday night I slowly maneuver into a parking space marked “showgirls only,” careful to avoid the paths of stray cats who congregate outside the club, which abuts a junk yard. When two of the cats have kittens, I bring in Costo-sized cases of wet food. As expensive as it is nutritious, meaning very. The manager who hired me expresses genuine excitement, which further endears me to him. Because the club as a rule rejects heavily tattooed girls I also can’t help but feel a bit indebted to him. For an instant I see this tender little boy inside him, soft and sincere. We bond over our devotion to these kitties. Then and only then does he relax his world-weary grimace into a smile. I notice a palpable shift in his eyes, a new warmth I feel entrusted to hold, to protect.

I desperately need to not know his politics, because I already know. Working in an industry where I regularly interact with people from all walks of life and across the gamut of political leanings has instilled a guilty feeling when I secretly hope, because I’m tired, to remain unaware of anyone’s rotten stance against COVID being real or the right of people to exist. When I bring bowls for the cats to eat out of, so their whiskers don’t scrape against hot pavement, the hiring manager grumbles about (and I quote) “those bums” stealing shit. “Those bums” like he knows, like I know, them all. His apparent contempt for the unhoused, not the structural conditions producing housing insecurity, might confirm rumors he’s a Trumper. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, ignore inconvenient intuition.

I flip down the sun visor and check my red lipstick in the mirror. The problem with red lipstick is that if you overline your lips whatsoever, sexy vixen quickly turns to scary clown. I use my long oval nail, manicured and fortified with four coats of black gel polish, to remove extra red from my already exaggerated cupid’s bow. I set the lipstick so it doesn’t stain men’s shirts.

In the dressing room I immediately regret forgetting my headphones, lest I overhear conversations that grate on my nerves. Perpetually late, I’m always forgetting something. One of two dancers who I think may be close to me in age, but inexplicably refuses to acknowledge my existence, asks a dancer in her early 20s if she voted. The rude dancer’s BBL balances gravity over bony thighs.

“No, I didn’t.” She shrugs. “I feel like what’s the point.”

I get it, because, well, history. Facts and information. I sure as hell don’t place faith in the state. And I claim no moral high ground in admitting I vote. Instead, I feel a bit sheepish, conflicted, but I want to own the contradictions of living in this world even as we seek to refuse its terms. Years of organizing have taught me that tactics to reduce harm now, if committed to a long-term vision, can be part of a collectively determined strategy to dismantle the state’s claim to legitimate violence and rebuild the world anew. My point is there is no perfect route to move through this mess. But you have to keep moving.

“Yeah...” The dancer’s voice trails off. I glimpse her smug look in the mirror. She totally voted for Trump. I didn’t say there aren’t wrong ways. She continues, “Did you work last night?”

“No, I heard it was dead though.”

“Yeah, same.” Her vocal chords start straining against her words, sexy grumble to valley girl. “But I think Trump winning will be a good thing for us. You know, with the election, people are happy that they’ll be doing better financially.”

Raising the minimum wage was on the ballot this year. Whether or not she’s including Californians who make minimum wage in a state with an impossibly high cost of living, or the Orange County voters who opposed the measure, her opinion seems to rest on the faulty premise and promise of trickle-down economics. Strip club clientele includes working-class men who are by and large polite and respectful. But the club is ruled by whales, shorthand for handsy rich guys who tip in bands not dollars, reserve bottle sections, feel most entitled to our bodies. It’s not easy making money flow where men assume they are owed everything for free.

At the current rate we earn $16 an hour, paid out to us at the end of each night. For a five-and-a-half-hour shift, this translates to roughly $85, which is sort of like a partial reimbursement for our house fee—what we pay to work despite being W-2 employees, which in theory should offer benefits but in practice means we’re independent contractors who can’t claim our business expenses. The house fee starts at $100 if you clock in before opening at 3pm, increases in $20 increments by the hour even on day shift, and can be as high as $220, depending on the night of the week.

For those unfamiliar with this payment structure, the house fee, sometimes called a stage fee, is the amount of money we are required to make for the club before we take home our dance earnings. We keep our stage money and customer tips, but we’re also expected to tip out 20% to the DJ and manager, plus the dance tracker, bouncer, and door guy. It’s not impossible, after a really slow shift, to leave in the red. A higher minimum wage could be a small victory for workers, one less dollar in the pockets of those who profit from our labor. In theory, anyway. The club could just raise its house fee. Yet another Pyrrhic victory.

“I’m hopeful that Trump can help this country,” she concludes as her tomb-shaped acrylics flash open and tap against the door, which swings shut behind her in a sticky swell of Victoria’s Secret body spray. I really wish I had brought my headphones.

Feelings are powerful. On the campaign trail Trump promised to eliminate taxes on tips. This nod to economic populism comes at a grave cost: racism, mass deportation, misogyny, tax cuts for corporations and the rich people who run them. Nevermind Trump’s appointment of Tom Homan as “Border Czar.” Or of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel, Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary, John Ratcliffe as CIA Director, Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary. The political spectacle amid ongoing genocide amasses an endless catalogue of horrors. The very rich and very powerful only answer to money and power. Capitalism’s catch-22 is a deadlock by design, in perpetual crisis, dealing in symbols, masking coercion behind a forced hand, a choice between lesser evils.

I fuss with the tiny buckles on a new pair of shiny black Pleasers with thick ankle cuffs that make me feel like a Dominatrix. The eight inches of added height complements my dommy mommy vibe. I scrutinize the placement of a matching latex micro bikini in the mirror, adjust a new pair of fishnets I’ve painstakingly made footless so my pretty pink pedicure peeps out of my sandals.

I fine-tune the imaginary horizontal line connecting my nipples, scooping tits skyward. Like the dancer who is maybe around my age, I try to defy gravity. Women’s bodies are apples on a windowless ledge, little globes men reach for, feeling for bruises they’ll just eat around.

***

After I clock in, I plop myself down on the barstool next to my regular. Suddenly I hate the texture of my fishnets, peel them off under the bar, not caring if they snag. I twirl my hair, lean in and whisper-yell over the music what I overheard in the dressing room.

“This is the problem!” He throws his hands in the air, turns his knees toward mine, bare and bruised, offers to buy me a drink. I stir up pineapple sediment with my straw, consider the impossible squaring of economics and ethics, its indivisible remainders.

The strip club is not an aberration to the norm; it is a distilled expression of it. Despite being hired as entertainers, strippers often get treated like crooks. We are framed as dishonorable and dishonest, for asking to be compensated for the work we got hired to do. How quintessentially capitalist of this impertinent assumption. Strip clubs are capitalism’s barest expression and its mistress, its secret playground for perverse fantasies invariably sutured to power. Men drunk on it, or enacting revenge fantasies, feeling robbed of their birthright. Power. Property. Not prowess.

Greed drives desire. The system reproduces itself illicitly while upholding the sanctity of its official containers of control. Wash your hands after touching money. Everyone knows it’s dirty. If you need more cash, you have to pay a stiff surcharge. Money making money off money. Pay to play or else. The rich hoard wealth. The aspirational rich gain compensatory social capital for identifying with the ruling class, and pay a steep price for the false comforts of tenuous belonging. It’s a tabula rasa for and of conquest, a blank check absent any signature. Without forgeries of memory you’ve sacrificed life for a meaningless piece of paper, a violent illusion. Strip clubs suffer when the amount of people who make a living wage shrinks, no matter how much that diminution makes the rich richer. Strip clubs have been suffering.

***

Leading up to the election, I observed that country club Republicans, fiscal conservatives, classical liberals, moderate Democrats, LARPing libertarians, whatever, did not love Trump. Sure, I saw droves of MAGA hat wearers worshipping at his altar. But I knew Trump would win not because of the people who love him. I knew Trump would win because of the people who don’t and voted for him anyway.

A week before the election, I see Marc, a club regular with whom I have a friendly relationship. I will sit with him if and only if he’s alone and I’ve exhausted all other options, as he will at least modestly compensate me for conversation as he grips a glass of Chardonnay, waiting for his favorite dancer. She rocks the retro pin-up vibe I love, is one of the few Black women working at the club, a blaring indication of the industry’s rampant racism. The fetishistic hypersexualization of non-white women is itself, of course, deeply racist. It is also, practically speaking, in tension with club hiring practices. Simply put, limited inclusion of tokenized women of color is both racist and bad for business. Many customers crave “variety” (i.e., actual diversity), but club owners try to delimit their patronage, too.

Marc has the weathered, flushed face of a day-drinking boomer. I’m relieved he hasn’t asked for another VIP dance, during which I avoided meeting his hungry gaze, piercing blue eyes set deep under unkempt eyebrows. An avid fan of Pink Floyd, King Crimson, and other psychedelic and prog rock bands I grew up with, his music tastes overlap with those of my dad, a deeply unsettling comparison despite their different backgrounds. My dad grew up poor in the South and cared more about protesting the Vietnam War, getting high, and making art than making money. He’d be as out of place in Orange County as I am. Like my father, Marc has some questionable hot takes on social issues, generally speaking. I would go so far as to say this is not uncommon for white men of their generation. However, both men unambiguously despise Trump’s grotesque rise to power. Unlike my father, though, Marc voted for Trump. He voted with his bank statements in mind. With his bank statements tugging at his heartstrings.

Financial feelings, the conflicted rationales hiding self-interest, are of course not historically new, and straddle party lines. As one emotional expression of political myopia, fiscal conservatism is shorthand, colloquially speaking, for a person who self-identifies as socially progressive but economically austere. For example, Bill Clinton dismantled “welfare as we know it” and slashed funds for public housing (while dramatically increasing spending on police and prisons). Clinton also signed into law neoliberalism’s darling, NAFTA, not to mention the devastating 1994 Crime Bill, and the list goes on. But he also paid lip service to the systematically abandoned groups his policies disproportionately impacted. This peddling of increased representation and defanged nods to social justice as an acceptable substitute for concerted action to dismantle the existent system and rebuild the world anew, unmoors material realities from people’s desires for those realities. Half-truths or outright lies reach epic proportions to resolve the cognitive dissonance of how economics cannot be disarticulated from the social world that invented them. Yet, here we are.

Attempts to separate social justice from economic policy obscure the inextricability of what Martin Luther King, Jr. identified as three linked threats to life itself: racism, militarism, and capitalism. Dr. King called for radical structural change, but that part got left out of history lessons, before the subject was banned from schools altogether. Fiscal conservatism is a paradox that says as much about the pitfalls of representational politics as it does the triumphs of neoliberal policy.

Rhetoric need not reflect reality. Feelings become facts through belief. Soundbites stick to skin like superglue, binding incongruent ideas like Frankenstein’s monster: “I’m not a bigot, but.” “I don’t hate immigrants, but.” “I don’t support Trump, but.” These days, it’s all about but(t)s and bottom lines. A customer tells me:

“I don’t hate all women. I mean obviously, I’m here.” He looks around with raised hands, then leans forward conspiratorially. “But they have a power. And I’m not for it.”

Working at a strip club you see the underbelly of mundane desire. As soon as you hear someone rate or describe people as a body, an empty synecdoche referring to nothing—hands, legs, ass, tits, pussies—run. We are entertainers, the highly skilled yet grossly devalued work that keeps the whole operation afloat. Yet we must continually explain to customers that we are offering a service, not hanging out. We fulfill and defy our femme duty of worshipping at the altar of man, shapeshifting to satisfy sexual tastes. We are desired as objects, as vessels for suppressed feeling, as sexy outlines, as puppets projected onto walls. Here, we get paid for that labor.

Compulsory heterosexuality is not only mandated by loud misogynists but embraced by trad wives and hordes of white women lamenting feminism’s irreparable damage to the sanctity of gender roles. Putting aside the violence limning their hallowed institutions, such a lament implicitly rests on a patriarchal assumption that men’s responsibilities lie with their property, reinforcing caregiving and emotional labor as women’s work. This false choice, between masculine responsibility and feminine care, prevents people from accessing their full humanity.

A culture of collective care is apparently so unimaginable that women would rather return to the old models of chivalry. Mainstream single-issue feminism, whether Dworkin-quoting or Girl Boss™ celebrating, cannot grapple with nuanced discussions of the business of traditional marriage and adult entertainment. It often takes aim at the wrong target: women’s individual choices, not a structural analysis of patriarchy, much less its intersection with racial capitalism. Not the unchecked power that protects an unlivable status quo rooted in the soulless destruction of human life for profit.

Sex workers literalize the idea of workers as commodities, as exchanged objects. So can you really blame us for wanting to eat the rich, a reversal of threat like Megan Fox campily cannibalizing men in Jennifer’s Body? While the cult classic may undermine its potent central metaphor with a self-conscious spectacle of postmodern irony, it captures how women get caught in the cultural slide between vixen and vampire, a narrative as old as Eve eating the apple. Strippers also deal in the ironies of this double bind, appropriating the virgin/whore dichotomy to exact a kind of reparations while brilliantly deflecting the reactionary fervor to the perceived threat of balanced scales. It is a dangerous game, this slippage between object and subject, consumed and consumer. Someone is bound to get hurt. The state’s scales of justice remain static, immovable.

To be sure, many people who voted for Trump categorically hate all social groups believed to threaten hegemony, or their bank accounts, or the construct of binary gender. But others rhetorically reject such hatred while nonetheless supporting policies that perpetuate the American individualist myth of a zero-sum game. Those pesky problem children sucking on the teat of power, stealing milk. People love having money and hate people who need it just to survive.

Scapegoating the relatively powerless protects the powerful. The glorification of violence and bigotry is easy to spot and so to blame for the real-life horror story plot that it obscures—that misogyny, racism, classism, compulsory heterosexuality, transphobia, ableism, exists everywhere. Rape culture exists everywhere. I’ve seen it at the strip club, but also felt its impact in more covert and dangerous ways at the public research university I resigned from this year—partly in protest of my department’s silencing and slut-shaming of survivors, and partly due to how the institution mishandled my not unrelated experiences of sexism, bullying, and sexual assault. Rape culture has directly affected, at times nearly broken, me in college and grad school, in community organizing spaces, in my most intimate relationships.

Lately, it tethers my body to an invisible tangle. On days I don’t work at the club, I seldom leave my apartment. I feel stuck in my self-isolation, despite understanding it as a trauma response, one that isn’t healthy. My doctor informs me I’ve developed a Vitamin D deficiency. (I hate that I hear the smart-ass retort, “You just need some D," right now. I hate that I hear the voice of the man who said it. It was supposed to be a joke. It turned out to be a threat.) Everything has a price. In exchange for safety, I’ve shut out the sun.

I like being alone. I’m not sure I like the idea of being alone forever, or dying alone. I’m not sure if it’s the being alone part or the dying part that makes me uneasy. Sometimes, in my solitary life this past year, I feel envious of friends with lovers or partners or children or close-knit families. I wonder what it feels like to be constantly surrounded by love, in a literal sense. I wonder what is wrong with me for not knowing that feeling. I fear I will never know that feeling.

Though I’m constantly surrounded by people at the club, it can be lonely work, attending to the voids of strangers. Some nights, I genuinely enjoy myself. I like going on stage, and working with some truly delightful people, and having bizarre conversations with customers. Small talk I hate. Maybe because I’m terrible at it, any small talk for me is a telltale sign to leave because it rarely ends in a dance. Lucky for me, my weirdness works here. I banter with some customers and connect with others. People fascinate me. I like hearing stories, studying social dynamics, learning secrets I won’t tell but don’t keep. Memory’s ephemera. Flirting can be fun. Men line my mind, take me out of it.

Other nights I feel supernatural. Can you see me, hovering, disembodied, feeding you my parts? I tell you to get your fill. I don’t have to tell you to leave.

***

After my regular goes home, I meet a sweet woman with a soft voice and impeccable style. We talk tattoos. In her quiet self-expression I see a smolder. She brims with bicurious shy girl energy on the brink of expansion. She’s a bartender from San Diego celebrating her boyfriend’s birthday. He’s sporting a silk Hawaiian shirt and a man bun, a vintage hipster bro with a sly Jude Law-like sexiness I immediately distrust. She wants to buy him a dance. I keep advocating for a double. She declines, placing neatly folded bills in his slick hands.

Alone together for the first time, his drunkenness becomes more apparent to me. He can’t lean on his girlfriend. He tells me, repeatedly, “she wants to lick pussy.” My gaydar tells me she just wants to kiss a girl Katy Perry style, but I don’t care to argue. I say nothing. It is his birthday, after all. He invites me, repeatedly, to the Airbnb he plans to rent for his threesome fantasy. I say nothing.

He is not a gentleman. My eyes water. I stand up, change my position so my back is facing him. I say nothing.

My thighs burn from the exertion of avoidance. My eyes unseeing, hands steadied above his knees. I think of how close my eight-inch heel came to his checkered canvas Vans. I hate witnessing a side of him I’m sure his girlfriend hasn’t seen. Yet. I feel at once glad she hasn’t seen it and guilty for keeping this knowledge from her. My face flushes with wet hot shame when she asks about the dance. My protective impulse propels me toward, catches me between, honesty and deflection. I’m grateful for the red lights, bright distractions, as I melt into the floor.

The boyfriend spills his drink everywhere, knowing someone else will clean it up. His comfort rests on the course of history. It tends to be women who run for the napkins, blotting up people’s messes.

***

Later that night I split my right-hand middle finger nail in half during a stage set for which I receive no compensation, despite cashless statues nonchalantly staring at my ass or other asses on their phones. Eyes rolling, I bust through the dressing room door behind the DJ booth. If I rip off the split top half, the tender skin of my nail bed will be too exposed, too painful to touch. So I rummage around my bag for superglue, paint it on like nail polish. I blow air absently onto the place where real skin meets a part of me now held together through artifice. I file down superglue, so men won’t detect injury when I press my palms to their chests.

In Virginia, the same thing happened to my big toe, except sharp marble severed the entire nail. After sterilizing the wound, I prop up my left foot and reattach the nail, to the horror of every stripper in the dressing room, except Roxie, a Richmond legend and resident badass who asks if she can take pics for her stripper zine. Of course she makes zines, I think. I say I’d be honored.

When the superglue bond weakens enough to release, I discover another fully formed, albeit bruised, nail has grown beneath the decoy. I paint my new nail midnight blue to hide the evidence of wounding. I know what I’m doing. My body is a magic trick.

***

I fill in little bubbles with black ink. I squint, sigh, stray. To stay in the lines I have to focus really hard. I feel annoyed with myself; I hate how I struggle with the simplest of tasks. Especially ones with no room for creativity, error, or ambivalence. After much effort, the completed ballot maps my scantron dance around deadly machinery, my clandestine confession.

I feel in my body an almost primordial rage against everything Trump stands for, stands in for, the atrocities at once massive, global, intimate, personal.

It is beyond obvious that politicians won’t save this country; they won’t even take a stand against genocide. The political establishment serves empire. Politicians service empire. People hate what they fear but they also love what they fear: death. A drive not back into the womb but toward the aftermath of its annihilation. A trauma felt in the body, the body politic, so deep its only language loads bullets, aims, shoots, misses, pierces its own feet.

Binaries like Eros/Thanatos, creation/destruction, birth/death represent false dualities. Life wants more life. Death wants more death. The system’s suicide mission can’t be stopped with the empty platitudes of liberals, virtue signaling their political apathy. Despite the pantomime of progressive hand-wringing, the puppeteers pull the strings, and the death machine lurches forward. Shadows are starkest in direct sun.

While the left is guilty of false equivalences between different forms of oppression that cannot be analogized because they’re co-articulated, the right is guilty of conflating critical thinking with state violence—then preferring it, the violence. Post-election, conservatives are celebrating the end of what they refer to as an era of “emotional terrorism.” According to the right, even the military is too woke now. They presumably prefer fascist rule to uncomfy feelings, gun triggers to trigger warnings.

Liberals love to feel good about feeling bad, performatively aligning with social movements while curtailing possibilities for freedom by fighting for incorporation as opposed to transformation. It seems to me people also feel bad about feeling good or wanting to feel good. So they barter lives for a signed check, pretending it’s not underwritten by violence—or justifying the fact that it is.

And many more people refuse the terms of this bargain, instead plotting and planning, studying social movement histories, organizing capacious networks of mutual aid, and strengthening the social relationships that make dreaming otherwise possible. Li-Young Lee’s speaker considers the body in vulnerable positions of prayer, of intimate embrace, of one’s responsibility to life in the face of death:

The noise the body makes
when the body meets
the soul over the soul’s ocean and penumbra
is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out,
a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood
into the ear; a lover’s
heart-shaped tongue;
flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes;
the butcher working
at his block and blade to marry their shapes
by violence and time;
an engine crossing,
re-crossing salt water, hauling
immigrants and the junk
of the poor. These
are the faces I love [...] 

***

That post-election work shift, I didn’t have the heart to tell the pretty bartender her boyfriend ignored my explicit boundaries, pinching my nipples so hard I involuntarily cried out in pain; I was too ashamed that I didn’t stop the dance immediately afterward. The truth is that trauma can get trapped in couch crevices, clenched by a fist, flung with a word, cracked like a rib. It plays on a loop with a bad signal. Trauma can be weaponized against us, or by us. It can motivate us. Can isolate, freeze, or silence us.

Even so, shared vulnerability is the only way I know to forge deep, and deeply transformative, connections—to resurrect something we understood about how to live before we were taught that our birth was a constitutive severing of oceanic feeling, an originary loss of the gestational union of womb and child, and thus a death of the mother, now a whore, the so-called Other, a psychoanalytic schema and a rite of passage, a divine right to rule over the course of death and the dying.

Complex and contradictory, strip club dynamics are a microcosm of the social order and its grossly differential valuation of life, not an aberrational outlier. And for every five men trying to plant their faces between my butt cheeks, there is another man who might not always agree with me, but at least respects me enough to listen. Clubs can be classrooms, have taught me things about people and politics that academic silos don’t touch. After all, strippers—and sex workers more generally—are often experts at listening.

While by no means monolithic, sex workers learn idiosyncratic languages, read subtle cues, without words: a spectral syntax to make sense of the body’s grammar.

We search for ghosts—the soft spaces that open, give. From there, we might find relief, release, step back into the sun, build something unexpected, imagine life in all its messiness and possibility beyond the walls of dimly lit, neatly contained illusion.

♡♡♡

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.

—James Baldwin, “Go the Way Your Blood Beats”

Dear lovelies,

I’m excited to share Part II of “The Cliff: Notes on Sex, Work, and Shoes.” You can read Part I here:

As I write and share pieces of my memoir, I’m still sorting out how to recount some experiences that feel vital to its trajectory—literally speaking, from college professor to exotic dancer—with a deep commitment to protecting the more sensitive stories involving close relationships. I therefore chose to put some of Part II behind a paywall; the writing feels too intimate to share publicly just yet.

Please consider a paid subscription to support this project; or, as always, message me for free access if the cost isn’t doable for you right now (no explanation needed, of course). You can also support my writing by sharing, quoting, and restacking it, or clicking on the heart button at the bottom of the post. Each lil heart truly gives me the warm fuzzies.

I know I say this often, but I’m so so grateful for all of you, paid and free subscribers alike. To express my appreciation, I created a playlist of moody music that sets the tone for this three-part series:

xx,

A.

[CW: brief reference to SA]

***

I scream while losing my footing, fumbling for a boulder or branch to tether me to the unstable sandy mountainside. Live Laugh Limp Bizkit, the man with whom I’ve been sleeping since he installed my bidet a few weeks prior, whips his head around. As he registers the genuine desperation in my eyes and tone of voice, he scoots back in my direction to give me a hand. He may be a jerk but he doesn’t, in fact, want me to fall to my death in front of him, impaled perhaps by a tangle of thorns.

Eyes wide with the sheer distance between my vibrating body and the dense surface of wet sand below, I keep sliding my butt toward him, one foot skating to the next, smelling stress hormones in my sweat, phalanges clutching, cleaving to a frantic desire to survive, a drive both terrible and giddy.

***

Our beach day was the closest Live Laugh Limp Bizkit and I ever came to a date. Unsurprisingly, given the preponderance of unavailable people I’ve historically been drawn to, this man had a big X scrawled in tattoo ink on his ring finger to commemorate a rocky divorce—and a general leeriness toward women. But a man who would casually, neutrally, refer to women as “bitches” is, in my opinion, a preferable variety of sexism to the “but I’m a feminist” kind. The former sexism is sort of in your face, but often easily disarmed, harmless, whereas the latter is more performative, insidious.

I’ve dated enough self-proclaimed feminist men to know the affective limits of such declarations, the litmus test of which is the untenable “overly emotional” girlfriend whose tears men suture to manipulation because feeling is a cryptic thing, an unfathomable forgery scribbled in blood and breast milk. The “hysteric” with a disturbed womb, the “angry feminist” with a vagina dentata, and other mythical tropes function to obfuscate the relationship between gender-based violence and state power, or how daily lived realities of heteropatriarchy, in concert with and articulated through U.S. Empire and global racial capitalism, might indeed give rise to messy emotion, fanged feeling.1

It is exhausting, dealing with the obliviousness of a man who does not realize the majority of femme, queer, and nonbinary people hearing his commentary on sexual assault are survivors of it, that most are traumatized not by a stranger but by someone they knew and trusted. Such a man might not make a Cosby joke in mixed company, at least sober, but throws around the word ‘rape’ without grasping how it can quicken heartbeats, avert eyes, tense muscles.

No, the word isn’t a trigger, not in the psychological sense of directly recalling traumatic memory relived in the body. In my own mouth or off the lips of others who know it is not just a word—but a trace or haunting one survives by trying to forget, an individual memory, a web of intergenerational experiences, an institutional mode of domination wielded unevenly by structures of power—the word has gravity.

Paradoxically, that gravity unburdens me of its weight; which is to say, I can stomach the word when couched in care. But it’s a gut punch, the way it’s often used—the casualness, the flippancy.

Once I tried explaining this to Live Laugh Limp Bizkit, in abstract terms, after he made a rape joke.

“What?” Lackadaisical, bare feet hanging off my bed, eyes fixed on his phone. “It’s not a big deal. It’s just a joke.”

I spin around, leaving the room, dizzy with rage. “Easy for you to say!” I shout from the bathroom, wondering if he even understands what I just told him.

I realize that I hope he doesn’t.

***

Critique should not be confused with condemnation. Harmful hexes on human personality are not fixed, unmovable. People across the spectrum of situated identities can choose to move through the world and build relationships differently, to lean into what Margeaux Feldman calls “hysterical intimacies.” In their words:

“Hysterical intimacies reveal the ways in which the oppressions we experience do not come from our individual shortcomings, but rather are the direct result of the structures of oppression that produce great trauma. Hysterical intimacies recognize that interdependence enables us to resist and heal from the systemic and individual traumas that have made us sick. Within the landscape of hysterical intimacies, the sick person receives the care and intimacy they have been denied.”

Poetry is part of the landscape shaping transformative ways of being together, of assembling new possibilities that unclench fists, uncurl fingers. For instance, Nayyirah Waheed’s Salt beautifully maps an erotics of non-hierarchical relationality in the face of trauma. She writes: “i want more ‘men’ / with flowers falling from their skin,” … “flowers pouring from [their] chest.”2

***

I recall two stories I wrote as a child. One, about a little girl escaping through her bedroom window into an unknown expanse of blossoming undergrowth. Another, about the impact of a dinosaur’s destructive drive in an art gallery, cluelessly puncturing canvas with sharp teeth. The all-too-human impulse to render illegible what one desires. Picket fences as pocketknives. To protect and project our deepest fears, inexplicably and inextricably tied to something knottier than an oversimplified story about hate’s innate iteration—bound not to the aftermath of betrayal, but to the terrifying act of loving in the face of it. The weight of it. Betrayal is a backhanded confession of one’s limits to loving another.

Toni Morrison explains, “People always tell me that I am writing about love. Always, always love. I nod, yes, but it isn’t true—not exactly. In fact, I am always writing about betrayal. Love is the weather. Betrayal is the lightning that cleaves and reveals it.”3

Betrayal, the sudden apparition of an apparently unbearable responsibility to preserve the safety of our precious pieces, fragmented into fangs, repurposed as art objects. Desire is an escape artist in a gallery of glinting teeth.

***

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This is where my mom divorced my dad, after asking my permission late one night. Returning from a closing shift, I quietly unlocked the side door to find her sitting at the kitchen table, illuminated by a single light source like an Edward Hopper painting. The same table I often bumped into while silly dancing with my little sister, the table where I devoured warm tortillas dripping butter, cinnamon, and sugar, or plucked wrinkly grapes when my body turned against itself.

The kitchen table I would creep past when I drunkenly snuck in after a night out with my very adult friends, doing very adult things, while working my second real job at Barnes & Noble—a better fit for me than Old Spaghetti Factory, where the single portion of phony Spumoni only pseudo compensated for the insult of getting written up for daydreaming, not to mention accidentally spilling one too many soft drink refills on customers. You will not find strong spatial awareness on my résumé. I wanted to work as a waitress at Olive Garden, because I thought the uniform was sexy, but instead got hired as a busser at this uncool Italian chain with fake leather booths that always smelled like dirty mop water, as did the rags we used to wipe them down. As did the requisite squeaky black work sneakers I purchased from Payless and resented endlessly for their drab functionality. That is, until Barnes & Noble called me for an interview.

This job afforded me the minor pleasure of unregulated shoe selection, a small savings for college, as well as—soon after my high school graduation—threesomes and love affairs with coworkers I kissed for hours, on scratchy couches and car seats, tension building and giving in the heat between parted lips. That quiver of anticipation, a rush of heat condensing space and sound.

I was awestruck by my boss, who looked like a cross between Gillian Anderson on X-Files and Jennifer Beals in the L-Word, tall and striking, with tailored suits over partially buttoned white blouses hinting at black lace push-up bras. Handsome and gorgeous and swoony. There were older men, too, with scruffy beards, who tasted like cigarettes but I didn’t care, because I smoked back then, before vapes came along to obliterate any trace of allure left in the habit. I quit out of spite for the way vaping sutured nicotine to bro culture, like a blue pack of American Spirits to indie sleaze.

I pined over one handsome older man in particular, the one still in love with his ex, of course. He had wild curls, gesticulating arms, a warm smile that washed over you wave-like as his eyes lit up, mouth twisting into a secret, then wide grin. We had extended conversations about books and made out at work in the elevator from cash wrap to the second floor, which housed all my favorite sections—poetry and fiction, cultural studies and philosophy and music, although I wanted to chuck every damn Josh Groban CD permanently looping in my brain out the window, along with The DaVinci Code and whatever the fuck by James Patterson. My older love interest, we’ll call him Greg, shared my snobbish disdain for Dan Brown, a hill I’d still be willing to die on.

When Greg reminisced about the lingerie his ex-girlfriend wore that drove him wild, my heart flushed a familiar failure. Even so, that pain felt fresh, an intoxicating flash of another world. I wanted to wear the lingerie, maybe even break a heart other than mine. This was my introduction to sexiness as spell, as talisman, as soft revenge.

The older man also, by chance, reintroduced me to my estranged best friend from junior high, my first true love. At a work party spilling onto the front lawn of a house on a major street in Salt Lake City, Maddy and I made out on a swing set before she disappeared into the prison system—reunited briefly long after her mom separated us by sending her to another high school. Maddy’s mom used drugs to which both of her daughters were privy, but decided I was a “bad influence” in this regard. Maybe this needless blame wasn’t about generations of suffering distilled into a bottle of pain pills or a bag of party favors, none of which I even sampled until long after graduation, and even then, only a select few; maybe, in hindsight, she was afraid I’d make her daughter gay.

While Deee-Lite-loving Maddy, I imagined, was drowning in a sea of beige ballet flats with little bows and round toes, I longed for her goofy laugh and thick tongue skate shoes peeping out of low-rise JYNCO jeans. She was so cool, the most punk person I had ever met, growing up out of place in the Bible Belt and Mormon Mecca. A little weirdo with bowl-cut bangs, I was obsessed with reading, indiscriminately, billboards and cereal boxes and crinkled magazines, the mail-order encyclopedia I was ecstatic to receive as a gift.

My mom likes to tell the story of how, to her surprise, at a young age I recalled every detail of an article I read on Jane Goodall. She had asked for a summary because the New Yorker was not exactly grade-level reading material, so she was curious about the extent to which I digested it. The fact that I scribbled down random letters and wingdings for the word “the,” which I could never remember how to spell despite writing elaborate stories—fantastical ones about a clueless dinosaur going to an art museum and appreciating the art by eating it, and a little girl escaping into a magical forest through her bedroom window—may have contributed to my mom’s eyebrow raise.

Hyperlexia aside, I didn’t feel smart. I felt lost. I couldn’t follow instructions. And I couldn’t play Pogs at recess because I had to see a speech-language pathologist for multiple articulation disorders that I only recently learned are linked to the neurodivergence that would remain undiagnosed well into my adulthood. Despite my alleged first word boasting two syllables, as my mom swears it was “pickle,” I had a hard time articulating sounds, which my heavy lisp didn’t help. As a kid I went by the nickname Rosie, but introduced myself as Whoa-we Wee, leading to much confusion. I still spell out my last name, Reed, when prompted, weary of that confusion. For years, the word “cute” made me wince. Precocious little me wanted to be heard, not to elicit laughter. Maddy was an external manifestation of my hidden turmoil, my inner rebellion.

Meanwhile, after a brief wannabe punk phase—during which my grandma had to explain to me outside of Hot Topic that “pussy power” wasn’t the cat shirt I wanted it to be—I transformed into an earnest student, masking and people-pleasing down to every detail, from the collared shirts, knee-high socks, straightened hair, and straight As. Normal was the drag I wore out of a drive to survive, to be taken seriously—so, later, slutty was its liberated refusal, its necessary undoing.[1] Slutty as in strutting around with private textures, fishnets and strappy satin, feather peep-toe house heels,[2] for my own pleasure, slutty as in relishing that pleasure.

***

Case in point, on the drive home, when stuck in said snowstorm, I needed to pass the time and distract myself from the cold without draining my Pontiac’s already faulty battery. No smart phone, no reception, no visibility—just my unwieldy imagination, desire, body, shielded by bright shadows of snow.

My butt and thighs ached, though, from being cooped up in a car for well over half a day. After snow stopped swirling in sheets on my windshield, I buttoned threadbare Levi’s over lace and drove home with wide-eyed attention, careful to steer into the direction of tires sliding on ice. I knew to avoid the dangerous instincts of avoidance or over-correction, but every time I leaned into the skid, I felt a rush of something between joy and horror.

A hormonal cocktail of adrenaline, norepinephrine, and dopamine, I guess, to distill the senses and faculties needed for surviving crisis—or a respite for a brain and body that won’t stop buzzing. The stress hormone cortisol, which regulates the body’s “fight or flight” response, is a temporary substitute for dopamine, which people with ADHD lack. As a neurodevelopmental condition that significantly impacts executive functioning, ADHD has as its primary feature emotional dysregulation. Daily challenges stem from this dysregulation, more specifically, of two neurotransmitters involved in the body’s stress response, the hormones dopamine and norepinephrine. The Venn Diagram of trauma and neurodivergence—a fistful of accelerating hearts, restless limbs.

I slid out of my car seat wearing my favorite thrifted BCBG spiked stiletto heels with pointy toes and white patent leather embossed with thin black lines resembling a topographical map. Before I set foot on fresh powder, I jutted my lower legs out the door like the Wicked Witch of the West under that uprooted house, dramatically emphasizing my shoes.

“Really?” my mom exclaimed. She laughed, and I laughed, too.

“Mom, that’s just who I am!”

***

Years before, at a packed Baskin-Robbins in a Texas suburb, reaching toward the low speckled egg ceiling, my child body sat over six feet above ground on my father’s broad football-player shoulders. There was a brief interval of silence, the momentary retreat of lively conversation amongst the post-church crowd wearing their Sunday shoes. I decided this was a time to act decisively.

“I summon all the powers FROM HELL!!!” I belted, with gusto.

Unbeknownst to a crowd of mostly appalled faces, I was paying homage to Maleficent, who I thought was far more captivating than boring old Sleeping Beauty. So unrelatable. My mind was too alive, my imagination too vivid, my fear too real, sleep never came easy to me. I was no sleeping beauty, and I let everyone at a Bible Belt Baskin-Robbins know I had sinned, too.

My sin was remembering the wrong part of the story.

***

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First there were oceans
then waves curled between 
our toes and tangled in our hearts
and tangles in my hair. 

You always helped 
with the untangling.
 
My feet may be callused 
from the distance and depth 
of so much time crossing
but you keep me soft. 

Your voice on the phone 
a seashell to my ear.

***

Had we been talking at the time, my mom wouldn’t have been surprised that I wore towering platform sandals to a January beach hike with the man I retroactively call Live Laugh Limp Bizkit. I almost didn’t hire him off TaskRabbit to install my bidet in December, because—if I’m being honest—I thought his black & white profile photo was MySpace cheesy, but he was cheaper than other folks with comparable reviews. I am too honest, unfortunately, because I blurted out my selection process to him before he got sprayed with (albeit clean) toilet water.

Little did he know, I spent the better part of an hour on the floor sobbing “I’m… just… so… tired!” prior to his arrival to undo the damage of my failed attempt to follow the Tushy instructions, because they make it seem so easy, with their annoying poop puns.

He had a neck tattoo, shitty politics, and Live Laugh Limp Bizkit tattooed on his lower leg. Unfortunately, he had me at neck tattoo. I was happy, although a little surprised, when he asked for my number as he was leaving.

I know, I know. But it had been more than a hot minute since my last relationship ended, and leading up to that breakup my ex’s idea of communicating his suppressed secret rage about me stripping—so I could leave a hostile work environment, to put it mildly—was to withhold affection until eventually dumping me over the phone from across the country after a monthlong absence. Not sure he thought that one through, because we lived together.

All of that to say, whenever a nurse taking my vitals queried, as per routine medical formality, whether I could be pregnant, I started exclaiming “I wish!” No one ever laughed.

I was supposed to be moving to LA with my ex, and freezing my eggs, just in case, because sometimes he proclaimed I was his soulmate and soon-to-be-fiancé, and sometimes he got mad at me for coughing in my sleep, or forgetting to take out the trash while working two full-time jobs, or not hearing him bark orders from another room. In the end, he left me with shared housing expenses he wouldn’t reimburse me for despite demanding that I quit stripping, my only plan for not going bankrupt after resigning from my university post.

Meanwhile, his signing bonus alone, for the corporate job he started that summer, was six-figures. We’re talking one hundred thousand dollars, which is roughly double the yearly starting salary offered to me at Old Dominion University, my first and last academic job. But I had taken the job I mean ultimatum, like a fool, because I didn’t want to lose him (and in a parallel universe, my career) and the life I fantasized we could live together.

Since I could never approximate who he wanted me to be, that life was no longer mine, and with an imminent career end coinciding with that loss, I felt gutted. Savings drained by a disastrous move culminating in my then work wife’s immediate abandonment of me, figuring out a new place to live and stable income to pay for it took priority over the fantasy of freezing my eggs, now a logistical absurdity. This is the time during which my mom and I weren’t speaking.

Thus, she wasn’t privy to my questionable shoes, and she didn’t know about the man my friends jokingly referred to as the Handyman Hooker, a name I called him in jest, in my playful bordering on belligerent flirtatious Sagittarius way. Despite the joke, which he had initially made himself, I tried to create some romance here and there, you know, excusing the fact that once he made fun of my orgasm face. Or that he kept pressuring me to create a Chaterbate profile, presumably to monetize for his own gain.

So here I was, hiking with Fred Durst’s mini-me. In my defense, I didn’t hear him say “hike,” only “beach,” thanks to delayed auditory processing. I therefore wore my platforms, brought my towel, sunscreen, a little makeup bag I take everywhere with a sparkly purple comb from Dollar Tree and emergency eyeliner, two books I would read but never at the beach, preferring to feel the sound of waves wash over me. For some reason I decided to put these sundry items in a rolling bag, like a mash-up of a backpack and stroller, usually reserved for hauling in groceries from the car. My first mistake.

We had to walk along a highway to get to whatever “secret spot” he had wanted to take me. I thought it would involve a romantic hidden cove, not sliding down a sandy knoll on my bare ass, lest I ruin one of my favorite fruit-themed outfits, a creamsicle-dyed knit minidress with neon oranges accentuated by bright green leaves that matched my bikini.

To his credit, the beach was secluded and beautiful and we shared a fresh pomegranate he carved in half with a pocketknife before taking some photos of the landscape absent any human presence. How many men had photographed everything in view but me, because I was a casual fling, an accidental rebound, a secret sidepiece, too much, not enough, or simply not seen at all.

As the sun started to set, Live Laugh Limp Bizkit dropped the news: he had no clue how to get us back to the top of the hill, which from below really looked more like, in fact was, a mountainous cliff. We frantically scanned for makeshift trails or stable ground to traverse the looming structure of sand, some loose, some hardened into sedimentary layers passively marking time not captured by clocks. Nothing. So we scaled a narrow ridge winding up toward the freeway, ad hoc climbers searching for jutting rocks. Except I’ve never been to one of those fancy climbing gyms. I was just freeballing it, hoping in the ongoing battle between my athleticism and my klutziness, my athleticism might win. My second mistake.

At one point, I felt the ground slipping beneath me, gravel and sand scattering, my entire foot twisting sideways in my platform sandal. Thank you, emo kids everywhere, for choosing Doc Martens, with their reinforced wide straps that don’t come unseamed from the sole, even when purchased secondhand, for surely I would have plummeted from a sudden loss of balance. I also have a habit of wearing shoes at least one size too big, because they seem more comfortable against feet made bony from years of eight-hour stretches standing in stilettos, save for cigarette breaks. All of this to say I was navigating the side of a cliff in unstable platforms, Live Laugh Limp Bizkit in front of me, begrudgingly hauling the damn rolling bag, which was now covered in sand, its sturdy waterproof fabric of hot pink hearts slashed open near the drawstring. He had poked fun at that bag all day. Now it was ripped, ruined, irrelevant.

Not soon enough after our beach excursion, and on the heels of a heated argument about Joe Rogan, which was more about Joe Rogan as hermeneutic, I realized his tattoo was not in the least ironic, but that his whole life, in fact, paid homage to the aggrieved white man sexism embodied in Fred Durst. Or James Patterson, who—despite being filthy rich, in part from the massive Barnes & Noble following I can personally attest to—recently accused the entire arts and entertainment industry of being “racist” toward old white men.[3] Remembering how the band’s hit “Nookie” from decades before was unfortunately a memorable moment in the musical landscape of my youth, I started reading an article about Woodstock ’99—when things were more equitable for oppressed white millionaires like poor Mr. Patterson—and had to stop almost immediately. Some things are better existing at the periphery of memory.

My third mistake: I wasted so much time being angry with my mom, when we had both been devastated by the devices of men. The gaps in our stories, born of those devices, were so large we fell through them, missing each other.

***

The night before sitting down to edit this piece, my YouTube suggestions play as I wash haphazardly stacked dishes, which spill over the sink onto the adjacent countertop. It’s beyond me how so many dishes accumulate when on a good day, I have prepared maybe one food item that resembles a proper meal. The city noise has sputtered into silence. The world is quiet, and I don’t want to take off my kitchen gloves, so I tune into the next video. I have stumbled into another serendipitous moment, like Kathleen Hanna’s dirty napkin and Chappell Roan swimming in a dusty Cheeto pool—weirdly specific metaphors I thought existed only in my specifically weird mind.

My jaw literally drops listening to an interview with Kate Spicer on the ADHD Chatter Podcast. Recently diagnosed, she expresses a painfully familiar mix of astonishment, regret, sadness, shame, self-doubt, and anger, particularly at how the neurodevelopmental condition so often elicits disbelief and disdain. I’m nodding along enthusiastically since, like Spicer, I grew up—to put it simply—a hot mess with a loud voice, cramming for major exams with flashcards and flash dance parties, thriving on deadlines and falling apart without them, needing carefully controlled vices to manage the incessant thought spirals cluttering my brain, and, of course, eating pudding with a fork. As it turns out, neurospicy people joke about a shared tendency to strongly dislike spoons, especially large ones. This is a mild expression of often overwhelming sensory sensitivities that can lead to shutdown.

As Spicer talks, I shake my head at yet another realization that what I thought were quirky personality traits were just ADHD. To be clear, I am neither a product nor a victim of my neurodivergence, which by no means describes or delimits my entire identity, but to deny its existence is a huge disservice to myself. She continues to conversationally recount experiences and feelings I relate to so intensely her words could be mine. I start to wonder if the joint I smoked—so my mind might quiet enough to sleep—has really messed with my brain. I listen again in the clarity of morning, just to be sure I hadn’t totally lost my mind. But it was the same story. The exact same story.

Podcast host Alex Partridge asks, as his closing question, “What’s the most impulsive thing you’ve ever done?”

Spicer indicates an abundance of examples before settling on one story. She exclaims, “I climbed a cliff once in a pair of espadrilles… That’s another thing that comes back to you. I could have died.”

She repeats, like an inner echo ricocheting off the walls of her mind, my mind, “I could have died.”

A palpable sullenness sets in for a beat before her story backtracks to humor, skillfully dissolving the discomfort of what in a different scenario may have been yet another off-putting overshare for which ADHDers are notorious. Comedy is a coping mechanism. Hands clawing at the air, she mimes snippets of the “sheer sandy cliff” experience before mentioning the sex that followed the fight that followed the unsafe climb with the unsafe man.

***

Months after breaking things off with the Handyman Hooker, I see a psychic who warns that promises made in the dark don’t often keep in the light of day. A dense cluster of betrayal follows me in the panoramic rear view of my past, but I won’t fully grasp the future significance of these words until I start stripping again, after a nearly yearlong break.

The psychic also tells me I am like a rose, in her words, “stunning and covered in thorns.” This year is my rose era, she says. I write it down. I read and reread these words.

I consider thorns. To be protected. To be desired in and for an armored disguise. Gawked and grabbed at, not held. Try me, try to take me out, try me out, make me spin, ask what I’m doing later. You’re talking to a shimmering shadow. I shine like a cartoon star at the tip of a sharp knife in a graphic novel or comic strip. I am a comic strip artist, a strip comic, a solo cartoonist, a cleaver of hearts. Teeth glinting, I draw cards, make shapes to fill men’s ventricles. Cleaving means to adhere to, to rend apart. I know this riddle. I consider the threshold of coming undone, what it equals: a tense but practiced balance between performance and person, a stuck emptiness to maintain a separation of space between mask and face, a doorway opening a deceptive box severing a body double in half, a flick of the wrist, a fool’s wager, blood and brain.

After work, I hurl myself home in a steel shell. I sit on the couch, rub the ache in my calves from hours of artful eight-inch heel hovering. I hold myself, placing palm to chest. The steadiness of my pulse an indexical sign, a stubborn incantation—urging me to repeat, I am safe now. I keep myself safe. Fingers spread across my bony sternum, I feel nothing but the heat of each heartbeat, its reprise a reminder of the intimacy of skin.

***

To be continued. . .

♡♡♡

[1] The sluttiness I mean is not about my sex life, which for me remains a thornier story hindered by trauma and attachment wounding.

[2] In Rust Belt Femme, Raechel Anne Jolie beautifully describes the femme pleasure of house heels.

[3] I addressed the fallacy of so-called “reverse racism” in a previous footnote, because oppression operates through systemic hierarchies that affect daily lived realities. That is to say, racism (as it intersects with other vectors of power such as heterosexism, classism, ableism, etc.) is not about individual feelings or private prejudice: it is about institutional inequities and public policies. While of course imbricated in structures of power, prejudice is about feelings, and discrimination is about acting on those feelings. Such distinctions exist because the way we talk about racial justice matters!

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The incontrovertible evidence proving Williams’s innocence is irrelevant to the point. What’s relevant is why anyone would trust a political process vested with the godlike power to determine who can live and who can die. Guilt is a game of smoke and mirrors. The determination of innocence condemns all the indeterminate. What’s important here is that, as Joshua P. Hill writes:

First, to stop the slaughter we must know. We must know and understand that the killing of Khaliifah Williams was not the flailing of a broken system but the churning of a system working as designed.

In the context of abolitionist pedagogy, Meghan G. McDowell and I ask elsewhere: Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong? Of course, this question can be posed another way, given the structuring logic of anti-Black racism in the carceral psyche: Why do we kill people who haven’t killed people to show that killing people is right? This question isn’t rhetorical; the answer is obvious.

As just one well-known example of this bloodstained history, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, who by their own admission sadistically murdered Emmett Till in 1955, were acquitted by a jury of other white men on the basis of Carolyn Bryant’s fabricated testimony, sutured as it was to the symbolic function of white womanhood to literally reproduce the nation, and in so doing maintain the hegemony of anti-blackness, which is to say, whiteness—a murderous innocence invested with the power to define and so to destroy those presumed guilty by default. Smoke and mirrors.

As long as there is a state that executes mass murder, as long as its violence is considered “legitimate,” there is no justice.

And there is no peace—except in our impartial, always inadequate attempt to bear and lay bare our broken hearts through art and poetry, to act in concert with that language despite and because of our brokenness. But we try. We write. We gather. We protest. We dream. We cry: Rest in peace and power, Khaliifah Marcellus Williams.

Any attempt to express the magnitude of collective brokenheartedness, from Gaza to the Golden Gulag, feels insufficient to the depth of sorrow always in excess of its enumeration. When prose fails us, a beautiful broken-hearted grammar, one that leans into impossibility by stretching language like a throw blanket over freezing feet, can get us closer.1 In “A Martyr is not a Logo,” Neema G. Siphone poetically bridges the distance between the dead and the living, revealing the luminous intimacies of this celestial convening in past as/and future prophecy:

June Jordan wrote apologizing to all the people in Lebanon and from heaven she is still apologizing.

I imagine she welcomed Khaliifah with a warm embrace

The two cloaked in the kind of integrity that the afterlife was made to reward

An integrity undeterred

A martyr is not a logo and certainly not an excuse.

I want to quote Siphone’s beautiful broken-hearted elegy in full, but instead I will strongly recommend you follow the link to read the entire post, which includes poems by June Jordan and Marcellus Williams along with an insurgent archive of remembrance and commemoration against historical erasure.

Neema’s Substack

I Imagine June Jordan welcomed Khaliifah Marcellus Williams with a Warm Embrace

A Martyr is not a Logo by Neema G. Siphone June Jordan wrote Apologies to All the People in Lebanon and 4.2 decades later there are three thousand reasons it remains necessary. A man on the radio in Beirut said he donated his eye because if his countrymen have been blinded what is there to see…

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2 years ago · 67 likes · 1 comment · Neema Githere Siphone

Before you go, though, I want to share one of the last poems Marcellus Williams wrote before his execution, “The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine.”

Khaliifah’s poem spurns the violence authorized by, to cite his words above, “global amnesia.” This turn of phrase recalls James Baldwin’s warning, in “An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis” (1970): “If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.” He continues:

       If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
       Therefore: peace.

The genocidal machinations of global racial capitalism, in other words, and in grossly disproportionate ways, threaten to trounce and ultimately obliterate everyone and everything. This is why community organizers understand action must originate not from a paternalistic place of “helping” but from a sustained reckoning with mutuality—that what harms you, harms me, but not analogously.2 Baldwin is not talking about self-interest but self-transformation that deepens collective commitments to dismantle the death machine and rebuild social life anew. As antidote to the spiritual void of psychic investments in maintaining the deadly status quo, attended by a permissive amnesia and apathy, Baldwin reminds us time and time again to honor, in practice, the sacredness of our inextricable interrelation. The bottomless grief, too. Hearts breaking like breathing. Sometimes the weight of it feels unbearable, impossible. And yet.

With faith and tenderness, Khaliifah Marcellus Williams’s poetry models this practice of cultivating sacred connection amidst incalculable suffering. To be clear, in a capacious literary tradition of political prisoners, Williams unflinchingly critiques what Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines as “organized abandonment” and “group-based vulnerability to premature death.” At the same time, his poetry resurrects and resounds with a defiant joy he affirms in the smiles of Palestinian children, an inextinguishable fire born of social relationships and global solidarities that persist in spite of and apart from the state’s systematic attempt to annihilate them.

♡♡♡

I wrote “Of Monsters and Magic” in a fever dream state, and while I returned to work last week after testing negative for COVID-19, my body and brain still feel a bit dazed and drained. As a result, post-publication I cut some sections from the piece for the sake of brevity, which is not my strong suit in sickness or in health. While the threads connecting club culture to mental health had to go, because my focus wound up on Chappell Roan and Scary Aesthetics, I want to elaborate on them here. (If you read the original email or listened to the audio, a few anecdotes will be familiar, but I hope they feel fresh in their new context.) Let’s dive in.

***

When a customer tells me I look like Lady Gaga, my first girlfriend floods my mind, memories of our relationship like static from submerged speakers. The customer keeps talking, but I am no longer with him. Instead, I am back in grad school, walking to the track across the street from student housing. Being careful not to veer into the bike path, as I move in zigzags like a drunken chess piece, I chat on the phone with a childhood best friend. She bemoans that she matched with someone whose dating profile, upon further inspection, includes “Godard films and fake tits” among his interests. She thinks he’s kidding about the latter—a plausible explanation given the pretension of the former—but our discursive analysis proves inconclusive.

It turns out that a few years later I will be the Maid of Honor at this bestie’s wedding, so it would have behooved me to slow down and realize fake tits guy thought he was being funny in a nerdy postmodern way. He is a sweetheart, but also an English PhD student like me, so that tracks. As per usual, though, I’m running super late. Glancing at the gaudy watch I inherited from my beloved Gigi (alongside some dolls made of felt, sequins, and super glue), I add an erratic skip to my step. Beads of sweat form on the bridge of my nose as I hold steady my giant polyester hair bow à la 2008 Lady Gaga. Apologetically wrapping up the call, I attempt with my free hand to smooth my black hair, frizzy from a hostile encounter with a styling tool.

I didn’t intend to half-ass my Gaga look; however, my blow dryer has completed a job only once, when I lent it to a friend who needed to caulk her bathtub. While I can spend hours on clauses or commas, my general impatience and tardiness leads me to approach certain tasks with an air of annoyance or unbridled rage. I look around for a reflective surface to make sure I don’t have red lipstick on my teeth, but I spot my girlfriend in the crowd first. I flip my phone shut. She smiles and waves her arms.

“Look… at… you!” She emphasizes each word, pausing to take me in. Playing along, I spin around, discreetly running my tongue over my front teeth before nodding my head and bending my knees outward, holding the folds of an invisible gown.

“Wow. My little Lady Gaga.”

I beam at her with lipstick-smeared teeth. She rubs it off with her thumb before kissing me, my chin cupped in her palm. I feel her heat, the stiff fabric of my skinny jeans creasing on the back of my knees.

***

I had casually dated and slept with women before my long-term girlfriend, we’ll call her Hailey. But she was the first woman I introduced to my parents, spent the holidays with, went on road trips with, fell deeply in and out of love with. We broke up on the plane ride home from the Modern Language Association conference the year she went on the job market. We even had a captive audience for our L-Word drama, as an unwitting witness sat in our row of three. Poor guy. If you’re reading this right now, please accept my sincerest condolences.

The day before, I chased Hailey through the snowy streets of Boston. She was so freaked out about an imminent job interview she tried to run off like she had just seen the Ghost of Christmas Past. Perhaps in “aggrieved professor emeritus from beyond the grave wearing a tweed blazer with leather elbow patches, quoting Dante’s Inferno” drag. As odd as this may sound, it’s not uncommon for the body to physically reject the existential abyss that is the academic job market. After eight years, mine sure as hell did. I’d call it a survival instinct against an endless circling descent.

Imagine you’ve spent damn well near a decade of your adult life studying one thing while treading water in the deep end of deferred undergrad debt, only to be told that the odds of making a career out of that thing are not, in fact, ever in your favor. Every interview feels like a dissection not of your dissertation but of your questionable decision-making, an interrogation of your very identity. Because, the truth is, that thing has crept into your core, become your purpose, even as you disavow both the neoliberal university and the simplistic identity politics it produces. Such siloing of identity into neat little packages for cover letters and personal statements is a far cry from the Black feminist theorists who denounced racial capitalism and the defanging of radical ideas born of social movements.

But on the market, you become the product to which you yourself are indebted. The debt you hate, the debt that demands you perform the neoliberal subject you critique.1 The community organizing you do, have long been doing (emphasis here on community), gets repackaged to you as individualized service and volunteerism. Your intellectual project, in time, will write your position out of existence. Meanwhile, the whistleblower retaliation you ultimately face—because you refuse to stay silent about the gross mistreatment of survivors—waits in the wings to destroy the rest of you. Until then, you are a walking contradiction of weary smiles, ready to combust.

That got a little specific, but to my original point job search committees conduct these preliminary interviews in hotel rooms, at least they did a decade ago. Candidates must consider the awkwardness of describing their research interests while sitting on a queen bed, feet not touching the floor. Better wear pants, heeled boots.

Hailey got the job at the Ivy League university. All I got was a cold and a broken heart. Breaking up on a cross-country flight was a fittingly messy end to a messy relationship. I believe we really loved each other, but we were younger then and both immature in our own ways. Once, I got jealous over, like actually upset about, her hypothetical attraction to dragons. I wish I could make this make sense.

She was not the first or last person to misdiagnose my severe ADHD as a personality or mood disorder, rather than a neurological condition that affects daily baseline executive functioning. Emotional regulation is much more challenging for us than neurotypical people, but they can’t understand why exactly, because—funny how this works—they don’t live inside our brains. Instead, a million little rabid squirrels do. I perceive and feel intensely. Sometimes—despite my best efforts—my senses and emotions get so overwhelming that I melt down. Rather than get curious about what can help us in these frantic moments, people tend to pathologize us. To them, our invisible but very real disability looks like a temper tantrum.

I truly don’t hold Hailey’s wielding of the DSM-V against me, because at the time I was undiagnosed and self-medicating my unrelenting brain chatter and rejection sensitive dysphoria with booze, which only made matters worse. I loved her, and I also needed to grow. A lot. The breakup was one of those mutual kinds where both parties alternate between accusing the other of initiating the end. We later patched things up, which I was happy about seeing as how she was an important person in my life with whom I shared happy memories and scholarly collaborations.

A few years later, though, Hailey emailed me asking if I knew [insert name of new girlfriend I can’t remember]. I replied honestly that I did not. Turns out new girlfriend, we’ll call her Liar, had been spreading rumors all over the small world that is queer academe. She alleged I had been harassing her on Facebook. While she seemed skeptical of this allegation, Hailey asked me to account for it. I told Hailey she should ask the same of the accuser, literally, by requesting the receipts. I knew there were none.

Baffled, I started to worry maybe my account had been hacked? But that didn’t make any sense. Why would a hacker harass my ex’s new love interest, whom I had never seen or heard of, years later? Frankly, I was a ho in grad school and since our breakup, had dated more women than I could count on one hand. That is to say, we had made peace, moved on, and lived very separate lives.

While I have no doubt done weird and regrettable shit in my life, the notion that I would vengefully stalk someone is absurd. I couldn’t even work up the nerve to slash an abusive ex-boyfriend’s tires after he stole from me, like literal things of value from my apartment. Mind you, these tires were on the car for which I (very undemurely, very unmindfully) co-signed a loan that almost ruined me. Even so, my best revenge was angry slash-y thoughts and thirst traps.

Despite that baffling accusation, I can still fondly reflect back on my relationship with Hailey. I am grateful for the ways she supported me as I leaned into my queerness, even making me a super gay CD. Yes, a CD, because I resisted getting a smart phone until my new boss, the chair of the English department, demanded it when I started my first and only salaried job in 2015. Heaven forbid I miss a work email.

This same boss, a colleague informed me, complained about my hire because I was, in the chair’s words, “too young and can’t control a classroom.” As if I hadn’t won campus-wide teaching awards during my six years of prior experience. As if students need to be controlled. These assumptions reek of sexism directed at me—as the ageism in this scenario is born of it—and racism directed at students in a so-called “Minority Serving Institution.” The chair also reportedly mocked me for submitting a reimbursement receipt for gummy bears I purchased at the airport. Forgive me for not understanding that “all travel expenses paid” excludes unsophisticated culinary tastes.

Putting aside yet another hater, every aspect of this gift was thoughtful—from the insert design to the disc itself, which she printed with one of my photographs-turned-sketches-turned-lithographs-turned-tattoos. The CD is dated December 2011 so it must have been a birthday gift. She even gave it a title, “The Waterline,” after a love poem I wrote for her (appended here). The track list is mostly songs we danced to at Wildcat Lounge, nicknamed the Shitty Kitty. Songs like:

“Heavy Metal Lover” and “You and I” by Lady Gaga; “Closer” and “Miss Independent” by Ne-Yo; “We Found Love” and “You Da One” by Rihanna; “Somebody to Love” by Justin Bieber (lesbians love Justin Bieber, especially when other lesbians look like him); “Ride” by Ciara (featuring Ludacris); “Down on Me” by Jeremih (featuring 50 Cent); and “Lick It” by God-Des and She.

Basically, the gay club I got gayer in rocked hard to 2000s bangers. Hailey was a self-professed “pop slut,” whereas I never would have guessed my tastes might approach the genre until I fangirled over Billie Eilish’s music. Even Spotify (while a fraught platform) accurately assessed that I’m a vampire, favoring “emotional, atmospheric music more than most.”

Vampiric proclivities aside, if asked to describe my musical tastes, I would probably say “sad girls with guitars.” Take an album in my rotation, any album, and my favorite song will undoubtedly be the most depressing one. I’d love somebody to prove me wrong, but I can’t think of a single exception. When I was a little girl “Silent Night” was one of the first pieces I learned on piano. I still remember replacing the overhead lights with candles in the nook between the living room and kitchen where the upright piano had been hauled in from a garage sale. Swaying and shaking my hair like Meat Loaf performing the most cryptic lyrics known to music history, I played with such melodramatic abandon that I brought myself to tears.

This was not histrionics, as I would be accused of so often throughout my life; it was an intimate space for emoting, something that was all my own, something that felt safe, felt essential to my survival. Like writing. Now I know these self-soothing moments have a name, “glimmers,” the opposite of triggers.2 All of this to say I’m more of a Brandi Carlile and Holly Miranda kind of sad slut than a pop one, but the music on this CD reminds me of another glimmer—dirty dancing in the gay bar, music a pulse coursing through my body like an extra heartbeat. An amplification of aliveness in and through a communal space created for release and revival.

***

I approach a man sweating off a navy suit, his greasy hair long enough to be slicked into a middle part. I’ve kept tabs on him, but decide to give him a shot after he makes a trip to the ATM.

“No, sorry, I don’t speak English.”

“What do you speak?”

“Where do you think I’m from?”

I scan his face. His features and accent seem familiar but I’m quite certain that any wrong answer will sound racist.

“I don’t know… but I speak French and Spanish, if that helps?”

I learned French in junior high from a talking pineapple on a TV program, which my teacher, Madame Hopper, played on an ancient TV and VCR unit painstakingly wheeled into the classroom. I also translated Foucault for my PhD language exam, but philosophy has lots of big words and fewer conjugations. I was decent at the subjunctive, a preferred verb tense of philosophers, and remembered reading Madness and Civilization in English, so I aced the exam. After learning some Spanish, though, my French is fucked. I substitute “parce que” with “porque” and otherwise randomly pronounce vowel-heavy French words with a Spanish staccato. Two beautiful but very different sounding romance languages, one more legato and the other an energetic ebb and flow. I sound like I’m trying to play a fiddle with a flute.

Surprise! Middle-part guy busts out his phone to display the Eiffel Tower. Okay, he’s French, although that seems suspiciously touristy. Ruling out those catchy “Lady Marmalade” lyrics, my mind starts melting. I struggle to produce anything beyond a tentative, “Je parle le français. Comment ça va?” He responds and I’m back in French class, not knowing what in god’s name is going on, his sentences a river of vowels with no beginning or end.

“Uh…”

“Non!” He erupts, before exclaiming, now in English, “No can do.” He slithers away. I never thought I’d be judged for my poor French oral comprehension in a strip club. Nevermind I have an auditory processing disorder that makes it hard for me to understand any language over speakers bleeding bass.

***

The next guy I approach fist bumps me when I exclaim “Samesies!” as he explains that he has a hard time understanding because of, go figure, his auditory processing disorder. (I really can’t make this shit up. This is how it happened.) I ask if he wants a dance. He says he can’t, because last time he tried to pull down a dancer’s thong and "they didn’t like that.” No shit. Unfortunately he reveals this after I had to endure him saying, “You’re so cute…” He pauses, searching for the right simile. His eyes light up. “Like a hamster!”

“That is the worst thing anyone has ever said to me!” I shriek, laughing at the absurdity. It is definitely not the worst thing anyone has ever said to me.

***

Dancers complain about customers after close. I chime in, “Well I got likened to a hamster!” I speak too formally in all contexts, like a little Victorian ghost boy.

A girl packing up her things shakes her head. “Sometimes they just want to be mean,” she scoffs. I reply, “The sad thing is, I think he meant to compliment me.”

“Well, he must be autistic then.” I’ve spent the past three hours giving lap dances to Swedes, so I am honestly too tired to track tonal shifts from generalized post-shift disdain to a specific target. I am trying to process whether she meant this explanation as an insult, and realize—too late—she probably did. Then I remember how, before conversation with hamster guy went haywire, we bonded over our neurodivergence.

I continue smoothing and counting wadded balls of ones.

***

In The Undercommons, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney critique the debt model of late capitalist society, reimagining debt work in the Black radical tradition as “a debt you play, a debt you walk, and debt you love. And without credit this debt is infinitely complex.”3 The emotional and epistemological reorganization of social life must happen not solely at the level of individuals, but at the level of dismantling oppressive institutions. And individuals must reckon with their embeddedness in the violence of social hierarchies, refusing an exceptionalist or defensive stance, both ego-driven forms of historical amnesia.

Through sound, through struggle, people imagine and collectively build new worlds while strategically navigating the ongoing state violence and inherent capitalist crisis of this one. In the face of an unrelenting stream of normalized calamity, debt work is not a payment owed, but a debt you love in recognition of the fact that: “We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.”4

***

Is that—could that be—none other than a a dusty Cheeto making a cameo in Chappell Roan’s music video?5 Thanks for making it to the end of this rambling reflection on how music mediates neurospicy proclivities and queer desires in the late capitalist strip club. To mark the occasion, I created a playlist of sufficiently sad songs. Please feel free to peruse my library of playlists with felicitous titles like “Melancholic” and “To All the Girls Who Cry.” My friend Margeaux Feldman gave me their blessing to share a sexy playlist they created that also feels relevant to this writing, and less sullen.

Finally, as promised, I’ve appended “You Are a Waterline,” the sappy sapphic love poem after which Hailey named the music compilation she gifted me—should all this sultry music, aquatic wordplay, and overdone alliteration put you in the mood (LOL).

xx,

Alison

P.S. If you would like to read this sexy lil poem and others in a similar vein, please consider a paid subscription or, as always, message me for free access! I’m grateful when you ‘heart’ and/or share my posts, too! Thank you, truly.

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