Hello!

Thanks for giving me grace when I sort of disappeared after posting my last essay, “To Build a Home.” I’ve been thinking about you, though, and wanted to break my radio silence to announce a new series I’ve been writing furiously behind the scenes, “The Strip Club is a Haunted House.” By furiously, I mean forgetting I have a body bound by time. More than once, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, I have been so wholly absorbed that I wrote through dinner—and bedtime.

To Build a Home

Jan 12

How do you build a home amid the everyday dread of apocalyptic ecocide roaring fascistic horror across screens?

Read full story

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.

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.

☆ ☆ ☆