Everywhere I go I’m the stripper from Alaska. At least here my liscense plate blends in and I don’t get people randomly stopping to visit because they saw the Alaska plates and I’m definitely the only thing happening from Alaska.
I’ve been in town for a week.
Today I woke up at 4PM after having originally been woken up by the sun trying to cook me to death in my sleep just a couple hours after I went to bed and then driving all over town looking for shade before conking out again. Sleep is very important to me, and this made me very grumpy, so I went to the grocery store salad bar for breakfast. Just as I was contemplating the cucumbers a young man with glasses and a backwards hat came rushing up to me.
“Ohmygosh, are you that girl? I mean, do you, um, er… are you…”
You mean am I a stripper? Yep.
“Ohmygod I think you are that girl, did you say to me, last year did you ask me if I ever made love on a gravel bar in the middle of the river while bears ate fish and watched?”
Why, yes. Yes, I am that girl. But right now I’m hungry and I’m looking for cucumber pieces that aren’t brown.
Now I regret saying that last year. I mean, I don’t remember particularly saying it, but I’m sure I did. And this young man seemed just dumb enough to go out and fuck around with the bears. So I did set him straight on that before sending him packing.
Finally I settled in at the deli with my salad and my soup and my peppermint candy and the Sunday newspaper. Cause I’ve been here about a week now, I should take a look at the paper and see what’s going on. I adore small town newspapers, they make me fall in love with a place and imagine a life there like nothing else. But I have a bad habit of buying them and then not getting around to reading them until a couple states later. So I was determined to read this damned paper.
Except that I think that boy must have put out a stripper alert or something, cause two more customers showed up in the next fifteen minutes, and I barely made it through the comics before retreating to the van.