May

Strippers and Oysters and Madonna, oh my!

I’m in hand-to-hand combat with an abysmal internet connection.

This is only marginally preferable to no internet connection (i.e. my status for the last couple days).

To catch you up, I’m staying in a little cabin right off the water and shirking all of my primary responsibilities. I’ve come to appreciate that responsibility shirking may be what I was put on this earth to do. That or sleep and have crazy dreams, a skill I possess to a degree that can only be called a gift.

What I was NOT put on this earth to do includes (in no particular order):

Downhill ski
Salsa dance
Keep African Violets alive
Anything involving staring into people’s open mouths and touching their teeth.
Work on a chain gang
Mule drugs across the Mexican border
Ultimate fight
Snowboard
Put false eyelashes on other people
Raise pigeons/squab/any other secret code for ‘pigeon’
Belly dance
Teach at clown school
Wrestle midgets in pudding (learned THAT the hard way!)
Impersonate Madonna
Stalk Madonna
Forge checks drawn on any of Madonna’s bank accounts
Name hurricanes (although I do feel it’s time we dug into the more ethnic names: Huricanes Beyonce, Cheech, and Plaxico already!)
Skateboard professionally
Build a rocket ship that actually works
Swallow swords
Swallow fire
Swallow swallows
Strip dance

I could go on, but it will get boring, and I care about you too much to do that to you.

However, on the topic of strip dancing, I do have something to share: You see, I remembered something yesterday while I was running in the woods. I’m doing a 12K race on Sunday, and I’ve been running a longer distance than usual – and doing so faster than usual – in the hopes of finishing in under an hour. Thus, I have additional time on my hands with which to think worthless thoughts.

So yesterday, I was at about the six mile mark of the run and starting to wonder if I’d maybe screwed up and gone past my turn or gotten on the wrong road when I suddenly remembered this bit I heard on the radio where they were talking to people who’d been laid off in the last year and finding out how they were coping. And there was this woman who was about my age and had been in banking and maybe had her MBA or some other parallel with my old life/old job, and I felt all these synchronicities with her background and career path and was really listening intently when they announced she’d become a stripper to pay the bills and was loving it.

Excuse me?

Yes. Loving it. Wouldn’t go back to banking if they begged. And – get this – her former coworkers would come in sometimes to watch, and she thought that was great fun and super awesomeness and a wonderful time was had by all.

That’s when I knew this lady and I were not kindred spirits, not alter egos, and definitely not twin souls.

For me, this is one of Dante’s seven layers of Hell.

Probably the most humiliating thing I can think of is that circumstances would force me to take up strip dancing, and the people ‘who knew me when’ (as in before my fall from grace) came in and watched.
All I can say is if that ever happens, you’d better tip me DAMN well to compensate for the awkwardness and shame and unfairness about how life has treated me and not you. And because I can work a pole like nobody’s business.

In other news, and lastly, yesterday I spent about an hour in heaven.

That’s right.

You read it correctly: Heaven.

And I even have pictures (which I cannot upload due to varying and sundry technical challenges at the moment, but I’ll get to them to you in the next 48 hours).

Heaven – my heaven, anyway, is a place where gorgeous, fresh oysters are lying about on the ground for you to simply pick up and shuck and pour into your mouth.

And it’s free.

And legal (so long as you do it on the beach and leave the shells where you found them).

And it exists.

And I spent a glorious hour there until the oyster knife snapped in two.

But such is life sometimes.

You leave your banking job, your oyster knife gives out a critical hour, and the next thing you know you’re dancing naked on a pole.

Life’s a bitch.

“I won’t be happy til I’m as famous as God.”

–Madonna