art.medicine.sex.work

I have a new game at work. It's called "pretend I'm in NYC circa 1980something". See, pretending I'm in New York during it's dark days of drugs, crime, and disrepair makes me think of myself and my co-workers as trashy queens of the sex industry, working a peepshow in spite of it being the lowest rung of the sex industry ladder and working it. Loving the weirdness and the strange and wonderful and disgusting customers. And since it's the 80's I can fantasize that when I walk outside the streets will be dirty and the skyscrapers will be almost derelict, there will be empty shop windows and I'll be able to walk down the street feeling the freedom of knowing I have no farther to fall in life, and go home to a bunch of crazy freaks in some echoing building somewhere, a warehouse or an office building or a dilapidated house and because it is the time and place I am imagining it to be nobody cares how psychotic we are and we can build strange public art pieces and frolic and experiment and be terribly, horribly depressed and inspired in our poverty and brilliance. Or maybe just our 1980's drug habits. Whatever. It's a fun game.

Except when I actually leave and Seattle is shiny and clean and gentrified as all fuck and I do have those friends I was imagining, but we have no great echoing spaces and not much freedom to make huge incomprehensible art and be ignored by the world to gestate new demons and beautiful things.

We live in small houses smooshed together, escaping to the forests or neighboring cities when we are fed up of trying to make enough money to pay rent, our projects and ideas hemmed in by numerous jobs and lack of physical space in which to grow.

I am not really this bitter.

I like my life, it is busy and it is made of change and discoveries and learning.

For the first time ever I will be able to file for unemployment. For being a stripper. And I can get money to go to school from the government. So I will. This fall I should be going to school. Out of character, I know. But it's free. And free is always good, right? And if I freak out I can always take a break. These are the things I tell myself.