It’s a Question of Perspective

I recently had a strange epiphany in the most unlikely of settings.

Maybe my tumor was acting up or maybe it was just one of those days. For whatever reason, by mid morning I realized I was going to need an emergency desploogination before the day was over.

I have a sexy young wife who is always ready to flush out my pipes for me, but as a friend of mine once said, “why get it for free when you can pay for it?”

There was no doubt about it. My emergency desploogination HAD to be performed by a beautiful young woman I had never met before.

Don’t ask me why. I don’t know the answer.

I came up with a credible alibi, stopped off at an ATM and then made my way through Houston’s traffic choked freeways to Centerfolds, one of my favorite dens of depravity.

It was early, not quite noon, when I arrived at Centerfolds. At this hour the club would be mostly empty and the pickings on the pink meat buffet would be very limited. But at least I could sit alone in the dark, having a gin & tonic while awaiting my naked Nurse Nightingale who would release my sticky inner demons, temporarily restoring my sanity.

When I first entered the gloom of the club, I was assaulted by the sick, pungent smell of smoke, crappy buffet food, stale beer and dried splooge. As I walked to a table near the empty stage, I could feel how sticky the floor was under my shoes. The floor seemed to be laminated with a thick, gummy residue of dried spilt beer, cum and ennui.

A solitary stripper sat on a stool by the bar, her face illuminated only by the glow of her cellphone. She never even looked up at me as I passed her even though, at that moment, I was her only potential customer. Focused on playing Candy Crush on her cellphone, she probably failed to notice how badly my pants were bulging with cash and salacious intentions.

“It might be really a long wait today,” I thought to myself.

I picked a table that gave me a good view of the stage, the bar where the unoccupied dancers hung out and most of the rest of the cub. The stripper playing with her cellphone at the bar was not bad looking. Her face was a bit harsh but she had a great body that was maximally displayed by her daring G-string and skimpy top.

With nothing happening on the stage, I sipped on my gin & tonic while staring at her cute ass.

My mind drifted. I considered what the club meant to me. It was a den of debauchery sometimes filled with barely dressed women, sexual intrigue and the potential for nude therapeutic personal encounters of the third kind in the VIP room. The inside of the club was every bit as dark and dingy as my soul. Perhaps that’s why I felt so comfortable there.

The stripper at the bar looked up from her cellphone and made eye contact with me. She squeezed off a wan, unconvincing smile in my direction before returning to her Candy Crush game.

I wondered what the club meant to her. Was it just a place of employment where she hoped to earn enough money to feed her children and/or her cocaine habit? Did she dread coming to this place every day to sell her last remaining shreds of dignity? Did the club appear as dark and gloomy to her as I suspected her life might be?

I ordered my second gin and tonic.

Centerfolds was still quiet. A few more patrons had shown up. Some were sitting in the lap dance section, unaccompanied by any strippers but looking hopeful (in a desperate, pathetic sort of way).

A few more strippers had also shown up. I saw them enter the club one by one in their street clothes. One of them looked really hot. The others not so much. The recently arrived dancers were all still in the “dressing room” ... presumably undressing.

My mind continued to drift. What did this dank and smelly place mean to the DJ? Was he proud of his job? If he had children, what did he tell them he did for a living?

It was time for a third gin and tonic.

My left eyelid itched.

I scratched it.

It itched some more.

I scratched it some more.

My eyelids don’t usually itch. I wondered what was making my left eyelid itch today. Did I have eyelash mites (healthline.com )? I read that everybody has at least a few of these microscopic mites on their eyelashes (tuscl.net ) but sometimes the mites can become too numerous and cause some irritation.

The hot looking woman who I had seen entering the club earlier stepped out onto the stage. She was among the last to arrive but the first to get up on the stage. She was one of those truly sexy, café au lait octoroons. Her G-string was suitably minuscule. Her young body was taut. Her skin fit extremely well on her.

I had an excellent view of this lovely woman from the table I had astutely picked out when I first arrived.

Probably it was the effect of the third gin and tonic, but I kept thinking about the possibility that I had an eyelash mite infestation. I wondered what the mites thought of their view of the club from their vantage point among my eyelashes. Were they as impressed as I was with the nearly nude woman gyrating provocatively on the stage? Did they wonder if her eyelashes were real or fake?

There were innumerable wildly varying alternative visions of Centerfolds, all of them perfectly valid. It was just a question of perspective.

I remembered that at a fundamental level, everything we see and experience consists of nothing more than a thin mist of elementary particles, baryons, leptons, meson and photons flitting silently through the empty space between them, vast distances at the Planck scale. At the Planck scale, the sexy stripper now humping the pole on the stage, the sticky grime on the club floor and the splooge in my tanks were all indistinguishable.

It was all just a question of perspective. (tuscl.net )

The gorgeous woman with the café au lait skin finally got off the stage and joined me at my table. We chatted for a while before making our way upstairs to the VIP room.

When I eventually left Centerfolds, I left a few trillion elementary particles behind, making the floor in the club even stickier than it was when I first came in.