Hobo Stripper

Carrot and I are both reading on Whole Wheat Radio at six! Six Alaska time, seven Cali time, ten Eastern time. Click on it and you can listen to us! I’ll be reading a never before seen story from my future book, and Carrot will be reading one of her artfully written train riding stories.

Come listen!

That’s what I wrote in my book of magic a couple weeks ago and it becomes more and more true every day.   The other day when I asked if you guys would subscribe to my new blog I jumped like 100 miles on the luck-o-meter.  Imagine if I could stay home in the woods and write and not have to go to towns to make the land payment money. 

If you want to subscribe…

Click here to pay five dollars a month. After you paypal subscribe, it’ll take you to the new blog and you’ll set up an account there to be able to read. Please use the same email address for that account as your paypal came from.

Click here to pay ten dollars every three months.

For the technologically unsavvy: when you click the buttons, it will take you to PayPal. Probably you already have a PayPal account and you just need to sign in with your PayPal email address and password, and then follow PayPal’s instructions. I’m not getting your credit card number or anything like that, PayPal is handling it and then letting me have like 95% of the money. When you finish paying through PayPal, you’ll end up on a new site, which is my new blog. Make a note of the invitation code you see there, and then click the button to register. You get to pick a user name and password, and put in your email address and invitation code. Then it will send you an email to confirm your account. Click on that, log in, and you’ll see my blog. You probably won’t need to log in again until you clear your cookies, so don’t worry, after this it will be super easy to get to the new blog.

People who are making other arrangements with me: I’m gonna send out a mass email really soon with your invitation code.

If you’re getting this as an email and you’re clicking to read it, thank you! At the end there are some almost naked, almost political, almost thought provoking pictures of me as a reward, so keep reading!

I’ve been writing a memoir, and I don’t want to publish it. The thing about all good memoirs is that they’re intensely personal. Once they’re published, anyone can read all your intensely personal angst for $14 or whatever that you get like $2 of, and it sucks. I’m really grateful for Michelle Tea, Ruth Fowler, and all the people that have been willing to put themselves out there like that. I’m not. Right now, and probably ever.

The other thing about book writing, is that there is no interaction! When I wake up in the morning and look at what I wrote the night before there are no comments! I miss you guys! Even more than missing you guys, I wonder about the value of writing when it is done, and then read, in isolation with no interaction between the reader and writer. I’ve wanted to have a conversation with every single author who’s book I’ve read. And I’d like to have a conversation with everyone who reads anything I write, to at least know who they are and how my stories relate to or mingle with their lives.

But I don’t want to blog again, not like this. I really never want to make my life an open book on the anonymous internet ever again. It was great while I was doing it, but I also learned how it can change relationships when a town full of people you’ve known for years are suddenly given the url to your life (mostly, oddly, because a lot of people apparently have low reading comprehension, and they read A and then assume B, and tell your customers C and D).

What I want is to blog intensely and personally like I did here, but more privately.

And, maybe I just have an inflated sense of worth from stripping, but I feel like my unique experiences, weird passionate thought processes, and hopefully kind of good writing are worth something. Think of it like a serial novel or a book in progress that updates most days.

Here’s what I’m going to do - if you have stuff in common with me and I want you in my little internet world (like, if you’re a magical music making van dwelling stripper, or you’ve ever lived in a vehicle, or we’ve stripped together), or if I read your blog for free, or if you love me but have not so much money, you’ll get the password for free. For everyone else, the password will probably be like $5/month or $10/3 months.

Here’s the survey part: raise your hand (I mean, leave a comment) if you’d pay a few bucks a month to read my awesome writing about cabin living and stripping and berry picking and birch spirits and phone sex and ghosts and sugar daddies and beautiful weird people almost every day.

Okay, if you read this far, here’s your reward:

I’m changing this whole post, because all my phone sexin’ has changed! I started out just doing regular vanilla phone sex, with lots of sweet fantasies of lovemaking beside streams and one guy who told me every day what he’d like to cook for me before we made love. When I mentioned in my listing that I knew hypnosis, I started getting way more calls. I love hypnosis - and it turns out there’s guys out there who want to be hypnotised into giving me all their money! So now I mostly do hypnosis - from heightened sensation and tantric experiences to financial domination.

You can click on the call button over there —> on the sidebar, towards the top (whenever I put it in the post it makes everything go wonky) to call me now, and get three free minutes.

Or, if you just wanna see pictures of me naked in/around a pretty stream in southern Alaska, click on this:

Topless, hoboin’ it up in my van:

And all strippered up:

And the obligatory cheap pussy shot:

So.

I don’t live in a van anymore. I don’t travel the country stripping anymore, tho I might when I run out of money.

When I started this blog I think I felt like my experiences were significant. I’m not really sure, because I don’t feel that way anymore. I mean, my experiences are significant to me, and maybe a little to the people around me, but I think the further they go the less they matter. Most of my experiences at the moment are tied to this land that I’m falling in love with, and I think it would be kind of creepy to tell the whole wide internetz all about that.

Go outside. Fall in love with the dirt under your feet. Why should I write to you about the dirt here (it is lovely and varied) when you aren’t here? Read things by people who share your dirt, or just listen to the dirt.

I used to feel this actual physical anxiety, that so many beautiful moments were passing without being written down. It was imperative that I record all those little moments before they faded from memory. I don’t feel like that anymore (which could be a good thing or a bad thing, I guess, depending on how you look at it).

To sum it all up:

I won’t be blogging here anymore.

I’ll maybe probably be starting a naked-Tara-in-the-woods website so I can make money without coming to town.

I might possibly start another blog. One of those boring ones that I update once or twice a week about how much wood I chopped or the otters teasing Bro.

I’ll probably be putting together a chapbook or two of poems and stories. I might write a book, but I don’t really feel like it right now.

If you want to hear about any of that (all of it, actually), put your email address in below to get an email when it happens (no spam, I promise).

Hatma gave me directions and I followed them all the way to this huge mansion. A guy in pajamas answered the door.

“Hey,” I said, “this must be the new stripper house. I brought my shower bag.”

“Umhm,” he said and wandered back to bed.

“Tara!” Hatma came down the stairs and Sweetness came out of another room.

It’s this huge multimillion dollar hunting lodge that the uber-rich stay in during hunting season. Marble, steel, hot tubs, the works. When season ended, one stripper moved in. But you know how strippers are. They multiply, and soon the lodge was overrun.

Sweetness and I went for a run on the beach, first with the resident dog, and then with Bro, and I took pictures of the dead bloated saltwater-preserved salmon who never made it to their rivers. I miss my river.

Diamond and Lucy were leaving when we got back, and we had one of those beautiful dramatic superficial goodbyes. Off they went, into the world, leaving behind only tomatoes and memories of soup.

This lodge is so fancy it’s got a hose that runs hot and cold water, so I gave Bro a bath because he’s been stinky lately. The van’s been stinky too. It’s kind of circular.

Then Sweetness made shrimp and beef tacos with the most amazing sauces and salads and fried ice cream and other yumminess. It was like those people who live in my sister’s TV in the playboy mansion, except instead of this old wrinkly token man, they have a young accomodating muscley guy who washes the dishes.

I had come for the running water, after all, so I finally made it to the bath tub. It’d been a while since I’d bathed, so I decided to soak for a while. I got all absorbed in the Continuum Concept (one of my favoritest books - I got it for Hatma and then borrowed it back from her to read in her tub), and when I got out just now it was 11:15. I could go to work, but it doesn’t seem especially compelling. Especially since last, after driving all the way over here, I only made $21.

So here I am in this dark house, sitting at a fancy marble counter in an industrial luxury kitchen with a fully stocked fancy bar, wishing I was home on the river. I hope no bears have broken into my cabin. I hope the otters are still happy and the squirrells that live in the roof aren’t getting cancer from the insulation and the wood I chopped lasts a long time and more wood is easy to saw up and chop and the river keeps being beautiful every day. And I hope I make enough money to live on for the rest of the winter really soon and get home before the river starts freezing and I can’t get home.

There is finally a new stripper forum! It was made for strippers, by strippers and retired strippers, and will keep being for strippers. It’s easy to join up, but to get access to the stripper only sections you need to send a picture to the admins showing that you are who you say you are. Best of all, guess what it took to make it? A few people sent in ten dollars and it was up within two days. If you’re familiar with other stripper forums, you know how cool that is. Go register:

ExoticDancerNet

(Strippers: Keep reviewing clubs at my new review site, and use it to research new clubs. It’s turning into a great resource and I’m going to make it prettier.)

It’s the end of a long slow night. I had made twenty dollars, which left me in the hole, until an hour before closing when a kind gentlemen came in and dropped a few hundred on me. Credit card money. You know, virtual money that exists in machines and wires until the end of the night, after you’ve dressed and gotten the manager to sign your slip, when the bartender turns it into the soft green of well worn bills in your hand.

Last song, and neither of the two customers want it. In fact, they are busy looking at naked women on the internet in their phones, which they find hilarious. I wander over to the bar.

“Hey,” I check with the bartender, “you charged his card for six VIPs, right?”

“Yep. You know I gotcha, girl.”

The manager, at the end of the bar in her patchwork vest and old lady glasses stares at me. I smile. When I make me money, I make her money, because the bar takes a cut of VIP dances here.

“You know you ain’t getting all that money tonight.”

“What?” I’ve certainly gotten all my credit card money every other night I’ve worked here, often much more than a couple hundred. And I need the money, because I’m leaving tomorrow, and because you never leave without your money.

“You heard me, missy.” She grins, gleeful. I’ve heard about this, about how these managers used to run whores and they’ll lure you in and then cut you down. I always thought it was sensationalism, because they’ve always been reasonable and respectful with me, but I see it now in her sick smile.

I turn around and walk to the dressing room to get dressed. I think of all the things I could say to her. Subtle things, like, you know, missy, with all the emloyment laws you break in this bar you’d think you wouldn’t go out of your way to make trouble. Or direct things, like fuck you bitch.

Usually I keep my mouth shut, don’t burn bridges. But looking back in life I always regret the things I haven’t said more than any bridges I’ve burned. The thing is, though, that I really do want to be able to work here again.

At the bar, my slip is waiting. Three sixty. This is a game, I tell myself, and I know how to play it.

I hand my slip to her and she asks what we’re deducting.

Sixty for house, I say, and sixty for dances.

She raises her eyebrow. Anything else?

It’s my turn to smile. Am I getting my money?

That, she says slowly, doesn’t have anything to do with my tip.

I tip according to the service I receive, I tell her. If I’m getting my money I’d like to tip you twenty dollars. If I’m not getting my money then I don’t feel like I’ve received any acceptable level of service.

She clears her throat. We can’t have direct conflict, because she can’t give in. She writes the slip out without her tip, but she brings it to the bar with me.

Do we have enough in the till to pay Tara, she asks the bartender. Of course they do. There have been a lot of drinkers tonight, a lot of guys buying drinks for all the ladies but no dances.

He hands it to her, two forty. She fingers it all, lingers on the last twenty giving me that sick smile, before handing it all to me.

I smile back, just as sick but at least I won, and hand her the twenty dollars. Every day extortion in the titty bar.

Thank you, I say. Here’s your tip.

By the time I get to the van I don’t want to punch her anymore, and I’m actually really happy to find that Bro hasn’t thrown up the rotten meat he got into earlier like I’d expected.

From Democracy Now:

Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations

Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.

In other words, they’re taking a bunch of jumpy traumatised guys with guns and (”nonlethally”) sicking them on those who don’t kowtow to the people with lots of peices of little green paper. With all these banks collapsing though (I hear Bank of America’s next), who knows how long people will continue to behave as if peices of green paper mean something significant? I’m gonna go hole up in my cabin and hope civilization collapses before I run out of money.

(I hope this works)