(no subject)
I have always been a pretty angry person. Seriously, ever since I was a little kid. Just mad, even when I had no good reason for it. But the way shit went down with Schad, heartbreak on top of humiliation on top of getting screwed over on top of physical and emotional abuse, well, that just brought me to a whole new level of rage. So I took the logical next step:
Stripping.
I know, I know; all strippers claim that they only do it for the money, but I'm going to let you in on our Big Secret: The money is just how we justify it. And, I will admit, it is a very nice perk. But the real reason, the only reason beautiful young women turn to stripping is because some man has made us very very angry. Treat me like all I did for you wasn't good enough? Watch this.
The reason we keep doing it? We like the attention. Seriously, that's a no-brainer; we are still women, after all. So maybe some desperate single mothers and/or crack-hos just get desperate for cash and think they have nothing else going for them (which many of them don't) or can't get other work short notice. But I'm still quite sure that most of the single mothers in the industry probably had some man do them wrong along the way as well. The oft-heard line about paying for school? Bullshit; there are many other ways to do that. The truth is that they just like it. But that's analyzing a tangent.
The reasons I personally like it? Getting told daily how beautiful I am. The power trip. Being desired and doted on. Being able to do something nice for a man yet still have the power to have him removed from the building if he decides to push the envelope. Getting to meet sufficient numbers of scumbags to continuously reinforce my generalized hatred of mankind. Not having to put out in order to have a man pay attention to me. Feigned intimacy. Closeness. Contact. Yet absolute superficiality. No feelings at stake. No pain when men do that thing men always do which I no longer find surprising: be assholes. Just disgust. Just intensifying and justifying my bitterness and mistrust. What can I say? I'm a Virgo. The only way I know to handle emotions is to feel them to the fullest extent possible until they are spent. Anymore, I only like relationships where I'm in control. It's the only way I feel secure. They have to like me more than I like them or else I'm a basket case, a habit notorious for driving men away, which only serves to deepen my fear of being left. Rejected. Deepens my lack of self-esteem.
Love really is for fools that fall behind.
I stripped for four months, then went back to the racetrack when it opened for training last spring. Rode through the summer. Rode some races, badly, and never won. Hooked up with another jockey for the duration of the meet. We had fun. He was kind to me. Was a fairly 50/50 relationship. Major sticking point was my total lack of any kind of libido, and often total repulsion at the idea of sex. Turned out to be just good common sense that I didn't want it. Turned out that I was essentially just a tool to him. Just a toy. Just a uterus. Which is still a lot more than he was to me. I was in control, which is the only reason I allowed the relationship at all, because I certainly had no interest in him outside of facilitating some semblance of security for myself.
July 12th I had a horse leave the track with me during a race. Just hooked a right coming down the stretch and went off the gap back to the paddock. I wasn't smart enough to jump off before we hit the outside rail. It came down, thankfully, but so did I. Nicknamed "The Human Anchor" for the fact that I don't often let go when I fall off a horse, I somehow ended up underneath her and got either stepped on or hit by her hoof as she was swinging it through her stride. Fucked up my ankle. Didn't even look like a foot the next day for all the swelling. No breaks in the x-rays but tore some ligaments. Thanks to the track's insurance company it is now too late to fix them. Spent two weeks on crutches then rode six or eight more races before the end of the meet which was absolutely the worst thing I could have done. At the time I was under the impression that it was just a bad sprain, which I have pushed through many of in my life.
At the end of the meet I went to Texas, intending to ride more races for the fucking idiot of a trainer who put me on the horse that hurt me, while the jock I'd been "seeing," for lack of a better term, went to New Mexico. Such is the life of a racetracker. A transient life. Brief marriages of convenince. Anyway. I had given the idiots at Arapahoe Park the only copy of my physical (required to get a jockey's license) so when I got to San Antonio I needed to get another one. Couldn't pass with my ankle how it was. No way to support myself. Fuck beans.
I ended up with my sister south of Oklahoma City. Closest relative I could get to on my limited funds, still depleted from the Schad fiasco.
Thought nothing of it at first when I started gaining weight; it was the first time in my life I'd ever been sedentary. Couldn't figure out why my ankle wasn't getting any better. Turns out, all the nutrients I was consuming were being diverted elsewhere. A parasite. Or should I say, another parasite. The mother-fucker from the track had lied to me about having had a vasectomy. Told me the truth about a couple other things I didn't think he would have, so my dumb ass trusted his reassurances, based on a story that sounded plausible at the time, that he'd been fixed and couldn't get me pregnant. Won't go on hormonal birth control cuz I can't fight the weight and I don't like my natural state being fucked with. Skipping periods is fairly normal to girl jockeys because we frequently get pretty lean. I was eleven weeks by the time I figured it out, and there I was, less than a year and a half later, staring at abortion number two. Daddy had stopped answering his phone and returning calls when he left Arapahoe Park.
So, really. You can't be surprised when people lie to you. It's like being surprised when horses buck. It's in their nature. He could have lied about say, not having wives in three other states, and when I find out, boo-hoo, I get my feelings hurt but I'm fine in two weeks. But when you lie about something that has lasting physical and financial ramifications for the other person, I have a serious problem. He tried to use me as a broodmare against my will. Tried it knowing how I feel about children, pregnancy, labor, lactating/suckling, diapers. Like what I want for my life doesn't matter. Like I don't have the right to deny him a child, to shun my womanly duties, my sole purpose in the world, the only thing I'm good for: procreation. Hi-jacked my uterus. For those who have never experienced this particular situation, it is about one notch below getting raped; I would never have consented to sex if I'd thought there was any danger of this happening again. The consent was absolutely conditional on a colossal lie. Adding insult to injury, when I retutrned to the track this year, I found out he'd been bragging all over the place about how I was going to have a baby. This is why pro-lifers can get bent.
Guess I showed him.
Took a job at a convenience store to pay for it. Had no interest whatsoever in making friends there. Made it a point not to, actually. Didn't want connections to some shit-ass little town and it's shit-ass little people. No roots. Just a quick getaway, unlike my sister, who got tied down by, you guessed it, a man. Unfortunately, for the time I was there I was bored out of my mind, and social isolation does take it's toll. I finally grudgingly agreed to go out with a man who was relentless yet polite and witty in his advances. Just out of boredom. Suffocating boredom.
Ended up having a fight with my sister about it and staying with him instead. Good, good man. Kind of took my notion that there are no good men left in the world and turned it upside down. I now know that there are very few of them, and that most of the ones that are left are in Oklahoma. (My sister happens to have one of the other ones.) He was about as smart as you can expect, for an Okie, but held exactly zero interest for me. And he was relentlessly horny, a death sentence to any relationship with me. I left him just after Christmas, homesick for my friends and my mountains, and a house where my animals would be allowed inside out of the winter weather, since, all things considered, I love them the most.
Peter Pan Syndrome. Boomerang Children. Phrases typifying my generation, a generation which hates nothing more than to be typified. And yet here I am, at my dad's house once again, freeloading. Went back to stripping in February, a dangerous endeavor given the height of the shoes combined with the dubious strength of my ankle. Did that until the track opened again in April and now I'm back to riding. Carefully. Better than last year. Dated Nathan for awhile; The Nathan, if you recall from back when I worte a lot. Still feel the same for him that I always have, but we're both so petrified of relationships that it was kept torturously superficial. He broke it off citing his busy-ness with school as the reason, which reeks of a cop-out to me. I'll probably delve further into this at some point, but right now I'm fighting off a nap.
Someone suggested that I might be depressed as an explanation for my constant fatigue. Truthfully, I've been extremely well. Don't be fooled by the bleak and angry ramblings of these last four(??!!!) of my famously long-winded entries. This is all past; my present is actually pretty pleasing, other than being lonely and wondering incessantly whether the only guy I ever really wanted just got bored with me, or if I'm just leaping to the worst-case scenario in my mind. I told him that women do that unless we're getting our partner's input on the subject.