high heels to pitchfork

*There are so many aspects to the events in our lives, and an infinite number of ways to portray them. This is just one of many windows to the many layers of my own complicated history.*

In the mid nineties, i found my mid-20’s self working in the sex industry of the s.f. bay area.
Actually...the last sex-job i had was in albuquerque in 99’ or 2000. That one was some modeling gig. I wish i had a print of the one photo in which my legs were in the air and i held a little american flag in front of my girl parts.
There’s a conversation piece.
I remember that before we could take that shot we had to stop so i could clean my dirt packed fingernails...
heh.
Scratch a porn model find a dirty farmer dyke underneath all that nylon and girly glitz.
Staged with my wigs and garters
my dream of green silence and clean air galvanized in the wings.....my escape route.
I slid into sex work because it worked with my disability. I hadn't been able to hold a regular job for quite some time.
With sex work, I was in, i was out and with good cash in my hand. Then i could crawl off to recover and maybe have a bit of a life for a moment before i sought out another gig.. There is no way i could have...or could now... work a 9-5 everyday thing.
Best money i made in my sporadic career was 300 bucks in 45 minutes. Some rich older white dude, he ran an ad in the paper and i replied. He had a fetish and fancied himself the master of pussy licking...
oh sigh.
The scene was in the dungeon where i worked at the time and so the backdrop was all this s/m equipment like slings and crosses and a wall of implements. Its was a warehouse space in Oakland that these women rented and remodeled so they could run a work/play dungeon place.
2 moments that are still clear to me from that scene are...
1) The moment i realized i had this rich guy blindfolded and tied down to the stretching rack while his shucked pants were lying right there in front of me....i remembered his wallet being crammed with cash when he took out the 300 to pay me up front, but since prison scares me way more than poverty...i resisted and decided to focus instead on the task at hand.
2)The moment i pretended to come. Since he was still blindfolded and restrained I was able to ignore him completely and watch my self in the mirror to check my technique. I looked fabulous and sounded great.... if i do say so myself.

For tax purposes this place my employers ran was considered “theater” and thats mostly what it was.
I just became someone else.
But no matter how consensual it might seem in the right light,
unusual maybe the stuff of tall tales to folks that don’t know this kind of work
Some would say privileged
since i didn’t ever work the streets or get busted or raped.
How within that relative privilege i learned
about the bare bones of desire under the boot heel of profit.
How sex and love might cross paths but they sure as hell ain’t sewn together at the hip.
Even with all of my fierce pride i can’t ever quite wash clean of coercion the sale of my carnal talents.
Consent is hard to achieve under capitalism.
From where i’m standin’ anyway.
Can’t place the nauseous blank space that lingers with the memory of this strangers cold tongue lapping at my cunt.
My brain doesn’t know where to put that in the collage of pride and survival i’m making of my life.
Keep in mind that this wealthy old man was just the tip o’ the iceberg. I was quite the variety pack whore.
I tried but failed miserably at incall erotic massage..too much body contact, it freaked me out.
I made 100 bucks off this guy that liked to buy dirty underwear.
I pissed in some dudes mouth while he was trussed up by his balls to a bathtub faucet.
I pranced around in stillettos while some joe whimpered at licked at my shoes.
I made movies and did numerous ridiculous photo shoots.
I wrestled, whipped, scolded, jerked off, made men crawl and beg and always pay.
All kindsa men.
Old young rich working class white brown dis/abled
You name it, they pay for it.
So at the end of this elaborate scene, after my explosive finale straddling this rich dudes face, i freed him from his restraints then sat in awkward silence while he slowly dressed.
He was old enough to be my grandfather.
Before he left he kissed me politely on the cheek with his steady hand on my shoulder and for a fleeting moment i felt the edge of a deepest sadness.... a bone weary ache.
This....the state of the world and my life in it.
Years i waited for the day that i would be too “old” or sick to do that work anymore, for the option to just go the hell away.
Before i finally found home here on the mountain i stubbornly opted for homeless and putting up with crappy girlfriends, garages, mouse infested cabins, sleeping in state parks and saying constant grace to the gift that was my friends and families support.
Finally, after years of hoop jumping, i got my disability benefits and settled with this old house on this even older mountain top.I've got all the clean air and green silence i can stand, even if i sometimes go hungry.
I've come to keep company with animals more than humans.
Animals don’t have wallets... empty or crammed with cash heavy desire.
I revel in my farmer life
dirty fingernails and all.
You could say i’m retired.....an ex-sex worker friend of mine jokes that SSI is the “old whore retirement fund”.
how true.
how true.

wind dictates day

not much goin' on around here.
sold 2 lbs of yarn!
these 2 ducks have begun flying east over the house every morning.
i'm mostly stuck inside today cuz its too damn windy to enjoy the sunshine. so i keep my hands busy while my mind daydreams, problem solves and remembers....memories so intact i can make myself laugh or cry or gasp with sudden desire or sadness. a scorpionic talent. i did well in drama class back in high school.

in other non-news...
i caught this sheep configuration this morning. those colors are just screaming to be a big heavy blanket.

just when you thought it was safe to put on your sandals

just yesterday i was gleefully watching the ponds fill with runoff and the pasture turning greener and greener....last night was filled with loud cracking lightning and thunder rumbling and the lulling sound of rain on my tin roof. Then i woke up to 6 inches of snow.
this is spring in the high mountains. tomorrow will be 60 degrees and muddy as all get out. I foolishly left my work gloves in the garden yesterday after mulchng my garlic with llama poo.they are now lost beneath the snow....my gloves and the garlic. I'm left to chopping wood bare handed....good thing i've got hands like leather.

its funny how much less daunting a post equinox snow storm is compared to a snow storm in january. theres a light at the end of the tunnel!!!!

lupe photo shoot

used to be that godiva (the magical smilin' sheep) was my loviest....but right now she is going through some kind of -don't touch me- phase so i've been working instead with lupe. Lupe has discovered that human hands have these long finger things that can get down into that thick wool and scratch her like she can only dream of.....

which is what i'm doing in this photo.....moments after this she began licking at the air and making little grunting sounds but i was laughing to hard to take a photo


once she's into scratch mode i can literally do anything i want to her and she sknows its worth it since i might choose to once again apply the fingers.

and if all else fails she can look for oats in my ear.

my teeth

( which a few of you have kindly commented on) remind me of those movie sets for old westerns. From the street side it looks as tho its a string of fully functioning groovy little businesses but if ya head around back you'll see the store fronts are just a facade..propped up by sticks.
I've had 6 teeth pulled, a couple crowned and almost every one is filled with metal or plastic.

class and teeth....they're deeeply entwined.

My single struggling mom managed to finance braces for me right when i was colliding with puberty. It truly was hell.....most of my teeth were sideways or overlapped as i " had too many". So they got rid of a few then for a while i wore this contraption in the roof of my mouth...every night before i supposedly slept my mom would insert a key into this contraption and when she turned the key the 2 halves of the device would push outward in an attempt to make my upper jaw wider. This hurt like living hell. So i'd go to bed in pain and wake up with a dull ache which subsided slowly throughout the day until bedtime came round and she'd do it again. I used to cry and beg her not to turn the key.
She thought it was all for my own good and survival in the world as a girl. That "prettiness" would save my ass....along with talent. I was in beauty pageants, dance recitals, modeling school....learning to walk a t-ramp at 13 yrs old.
To her, these were the survivals skills i needed....college was never the plan. That just wasnt where girls like me ended up.
and in some ways she was right.....kinda.
but i can't shake the thought that i don't have my own face....it was reshaped by the minions of patriarchy.
So after all that face re-shaping i then became bulemic in my teen quest for poor girl survival which ofcourse slowly rotted all those newly aligned teeth. My molars took the brunt of it...
which brings me to to the old western movie set analogy.

I have dreams to this day of trying to free my mouth of metal wires that are woven throughout my teeth...knowing that if i succeed, my teeth may just crumble, sometimes pieces begin to fall into my hands....but i don't care...i want to be free.

close to slavery

now, i'm a habitual democracy now! listener...but i found this segment from yesterday particularly informative. It gives a detailed explanation of what all king bush's push for expanded guestworker programs really means...and no big surprise...it invloves a slew of human rights abuses, debt and profit. I guess i knew that much, but its good to get an idea of how it really really works.

and ya know...fuck free trade....i really see it as one of the root causes of all of this in that it creates the economic disparity that drives folks from central and south america away from their homelands and families and into the arms of the empire...desperate for income.
grrr.

photo posting test run success

stay tuned for the adventures of big teeth...

queer farmers for peace

this is what my sign will say that i'm going to make tomorrow for the anti-war march on saturday in santa fe...i need something for the backside as well..sustaining life not empire....something like that? suggestions?
i hear theres a marimba band so there'll be lotsa dancing .

In other news my day was whacky and really toxic so i'm kinda sick which blows but emotionally i made it thru un-scathed. managed not to panic.
truck wouldn't start so after much fiddling involving gas fumes (which totally kicks my nervous systems ass) I got it to start but then when it started all i could smell was this horrific burning chemical kinda plastic meltdown smell so i shut it off and left it for a bit. Meanwhile i keep smelling this fucking burning chem smell thinking its just eminating from the truck so i decide to risk getting it outta here to my neighbors where my car is for the winter. The goal then would be to come back in my car since the roads are dry and also rid myself of this toxic smelliness.
magically the truck made the journey just fine and i brought the car back up here and the second i got out of the car...i could smell that fucking smell. So i go up to the backside of my place to get a view and lo and behold ...a small fire burning amongst some old junked cars on my neighbors neighbors land....little puffs of acrid blue smoke swirling into the air. No one is there...this guy lives down below. So he came up,dumped the trash like he's been doing his whole life, started the fire and left.
So i'm then having to take buckets of water with me thru 2 barbed wire fenclines and scramble up a thorny hillside to this wretched flaming pit of trash and put it out....this took several trips with water.I was worried the water might react with something and blow up...or spit at me. all the while i'm trying not to breathe but having to breathe the smoke. I saw caulking tubes and spraypaint cans.
this happens everywhere in rural poor areas...my place has its own decades old landfill/burn pit right down in front of the house. I tackle a bit of it everysummer...cans, glass, blobs of melted somethinerother.

I've got this pain in the top of my head...very acute....and i can't remember where i put somethin' 2 minutes after the fact.
I've brought the sheep in so i don't lose track of em'...its one of those days.
i even came close to trapping my ass in the attic by fidging with the ladder while i was up there...its a long way down!

but the days almost over ....and soon i'll just lie my ass down on the couch with some potatoe pancakes and collards and watch "the office"...if i can get the channel....that show is my guilty pleasure. its makes me laugh.
and don't i need a laugh.

at least it was a gorgeous day.

and hey! blogger won't let me upload photos....whats up with that?
its very boring.

animal appreciation day

Mucking...spinning yarn...talking to either myself , pretend other people, or the animals....same old same old.
I thought i’d share some about the four leggeds here besides just the sheep...just cuz...its been a mellow day and i was outside with camera moochin’ around.

these are the llamas fast asleep after breakfast. when their heads are down like that it means they are really out for the count. I ‘ve walked up close to neffe before and just watched her head bobble back and forth deep in a llama dream....what do llamas dream about? A field of alfalfa? they aren’t supposed to have too much alfalfa...too rich for their high mt. bolivian/peruvian blood...but they love it like chocolate.
their sleeping pose always reminds me of “the dark crystal”...remember this movie? I believe it was made by jim -puppetry master- henson... I think its a great movie...even as a grown up. but anyway...they look like those peaceful creatures that draw pictures with sand and meditate a lot.



and this is eva...she is also enjoying a post breakfast snooze. I found her last spring, a tiny pup (still had puppy breath), at the post office down in the village. Chacon is a common dumping ground for dogs by people who are too damn lazy to even take em’ to the pound much less get their animals sterilized. I’ve had them dumped up here by my place...but the truly lazy just leave at the p.o.. So there she was just sitting on the stoop....too cute to ignore..so i swept her up and tossed her in the truck with agatha.

Now, agatha i picked up at the pound in las vegas some 3 years ago. They don’t get long to live there,like 3 days, its a poor pound. She’s some kind of pyrenees/cattle dog mix...both are common enough round here. She always sits back on her pelvis like that...cracks me up. She’s great with the livestock since she has NEVER put her mouth or feet on anyone but eva (see pic below)....its great.Big gentle pushover. the cats make bread on her while she sleeps.

and the cats i couldn’t find anywhere...with the nice weather they’ve been killin’ up a storm of big and little mice...and rolling in dust...and climbing trees.
cheers!

spring on the mountain tops

Today i traveled to taos for groceries and animal feed. To get there i have to go over the tippy top of the sangre de christo mts as i am on the eastern slopes and taos sits at the base of the western slopes. Todays trip was extra gorgeous...i mean, its always gorgeous but today was so so spring like. A small storm system made up of fast moving scattered storms that were some keep-you- guessing mix of rain, snow, hail and bright sudden sunshine. I only got fleeting views of the highest, snowcapped peaks since on one curve of the road it would be sunny and then just around the bend would be a hard rain/hail.

the food store portion was uneventful....sometimes it is teeming with queers which is such a treat for me (i tend to grin a lot at everyone like a homo starved fool) but not today...boo.

on the community radio station during the drive there some woman was going on and on about how magical taos is..." a fairy tale life"...and when i got into taos on the multi-lane mainstrip highway full of texans and californians and walmart and mcdonalds and way too much traffic eventually jamming itself through the tiny, oldtown, once groovy streets i had to wonder what fairytales this woman grew up with....

anyway... heres a perfect example of spring weather. Someone down there is getting rained on...it was lightly snow-hailing on me while i took this and when i looked up there was only blue evening sky.

happy day

Today was everything i'd been praying for....musta been close to 60 degrees and not a drop of wind...yesssss.I even let the woodstove go out for the day after the morning chill wore off. How great it was to be outside for hours, sporting my straw hat and sock free sandled feet even!...mending fencing, clearing the irrigation ditches...and mucking...lots of mucking....not just the barns but the whole main holding pen is deep with waste hay and if i don't get to it then the warmth of spring brings this horrible sort of rotting fish smell...which i suspect is some tasty anaerobic composting action benath the top layers.

I tried not to over do it...but i'm guessin' i'll be sore tomorrow.

This evening an owl was hoo-hooing across the road....if i could post that sacred sound to this blog i would.

Suzanne was there...she saw the whole thing...

On sunny still days its such a pleasure to put some music on and dance around while cooking food in the sun bathed kitchen...and today i sorted thru my music selection and stumbled upon Suzanne Vega which for me is a total throw back to high school and all of my inner city art school teen angst and art fagginess. I think I even choreographed my senior solo piece ( i was a dance major) to her song “the queen and the soldier”.
and i still know all the words to every song...despite my best youthfull efforts to destroy my brain cells.
oh yeah ...Vega was whitey urban artist girl 101... she was part of my hippy feminist emergence after far too much club scene
swank like the cure and the smiths.....oy veh. i started going to the bars at 15....thats 1985 baby.
My Vega habit even persisted into my heavy goth chick phase that was after highschool...you know, lots of acid dropping, black clothing, Bauhaus, Dead can Dance, watching “the Hunger” and kissing my girlfriends on the dance floor even tho i wasn't officially gay yet...ha.
Suzanne i reserved for those quiet at home days where i painted and took long baths.
Alas within a year or two poor Suzanne was forgotten beneath the blare of my official coming out music like the Indigo Girls, Throwing Muses and Ani Difranco...the older dykes that owned the cafe i washed dishes for were so good to me and my musical backdrop at that awkward righteous time in my life. I kept it loud in the kitchen while i earned my $4.25 an hour.
ahhhh the soundtracks to our small self absorbed worlds.

here i am (on the right...doin' the kissin;), still lost in the closet at 17....posing for a queer schoolmates photo assignment. She obviously knew something i wasn't ready to know quite yet.


...”she would rather be a riddle
but she keeps challenging the future
with a profound lack of history...”

lost and found # 2

again...i'm journal sifting for wayside poetry.....right before i moved up here to chacon the u.s. invaded iraq. So while still in albuquerque i took part in an event called peace buzz in which a group of folks read statements or poetry against the war then shaved their heads. I had't cut my hair in 8 years.
anyhoo....this is the poem i concocted for such an event....


constructive rage

I’m thinking
it’s the first thing I can do
to remember that homeless guy that set himself on fire
back in N.Y. when I was 19
his life a sudden torch to the truth of it
said fuck this shit
and just set himself on fire

and when I tell folks that I’m gonna join a group of others to shave our heads
in protest of war
in mourning of the sudden dead
they say “oh erin don’t cut your hair, it’s so pretty
it’ll take so long to grow back”
but…. consider the swelling rolling waves of the dead
on the shores of living
now a title wave encroaching
consider what they say
and really what’s some hair to the crater of bomb and reconstruct
what is it but my own history holding on in a high wind of urgency
what is it to the sound of massacre
a sound I cannot even imagine
swallowed by the ocean of empire
it’s the least I can do to remember the children
torn to pieces
lives buried just buried
the hospitals
have stopped counting
theres too many too many
and it’s the first thing I can do to honor the dead
igniting the truth of it
remembering
recounting
everywhere just everywhere
the mourning of the dead
and the struggle to have life
just life
never mind a latte laptop dsl dvd verizon horizon of pharmaceutical sleep
just even a heartbeat

and holding on in a time of letting go
it’s the least very least and the first thing I can do
to recount the untold dead
staring back at us
recounted
shocked and set aflame
and how awesome the might of the soulless blowing children into bits
and how resilient the souls of children
throwing stones at the empire

and so when folks say “oh erin don’t cut your hair, its so pretty
it’ll take so long to grow back”
I’m thinking
what is it to the crater of bomb and reconstruct
what is it but an arms length of history holding on in a high wind of urgency
and what are we
but a small group of raging beautiful people
what are we
but a ripple in the ocean of hope and resilience
now a title wave encroaching.

the fusion of house and human

The big spiders are emerging from wherever it is that big spiders go in winter. They really love the couch...unfortunately for me. Soon i'll have all those little baby spiders suspended on many threads from the ceilings.
Sure sign of springtime.
The birds are getting louder too. Including the red tail hawks with their emotionally charged screeching.

So i'm finally allowing my brain to begin a list for the warm season of things i'd like to get done. I've decided this year is to focus again on my house, (after i fence the damn pasture ofcourse...ok...i'd like to get chickens too...ugh) its faaaaaar from finished and it's obvious in the super cold that i need to deal with the ceilings and some other drafty old house things. Last year went almost entirely to improving life for the animals...now its my turn.

The first summer was all about the house out of sheer necessity.There were no windows or doors, the roof tin was flapping in the wind and the house was full of garbage and manure and rat shit. In the above pic thats myself and a friend putting new tin on the roof. It was all i could do to have it cleaned out, re-tinned, windowed and doored by the time the first snow came 'round. I was finally installing the woodstove and chimney in mid-october....still living in a canvas tent/dome and starting to freeze.
I didn't get around to mudding till the next summer and i'll tell you that first winter was really fucking cold. There were holes in the walls big enough for a fist. Bats lived in the holes in the walls.



The following summer that i spent mudding the house my weight dropped to a nerve wracking 114lbs,which was 15 lbs below my already too low weight....i was a wirey, muscley, too skinny, mudding machine. my hands have touched literally every earthen inch of this house...and shaped it...brought it back to life.The interior still needs its final plaster and god only knows when that will happen. Which is the hazard of moving into a house thats far from finished...but then i doubt it will ever really be finished. When i was doing the exterior i experimented with a llama poo plaster which seems to have potential. I think it needed more sand than i had on hand as it is a bit flakey.
This is the house nowadays.The porch i built a couple of years ago...thats local red fir...such a gorgeous wood.I'm hoping to finish my ceilings with the same.

All of this intimacy with and dependancy on my shelter is why i feel like a part of me is missing when i leave here. I'm so accustomed to the forest views out the windows, the sounds the attic makes in a high wind...where the sun shines in the windows depending on the time of year, the creaks and shifts of the old wooden floor.We've been through a lot together. Its a deep connection. If i hadn't come along this house would be falling down....so would i for that matter.