Inner Dialogue with Buttholes and Strippers

Note: In lieu of butthole and stripper artwork I present a random assortment of photos since my last post. Above is my new hat, found while walking the dogs in the neighborhood.

The prompt was “inner dialogues,” hence the name. To be clear, this is an inner dialogue in which buttholes and strippers have a role rather than an inner dialogue in which I am conversing with buttholes and strippers, although I’m not saying that’s outside the realm of possibility.

There’s a Chinese proverb about an invisible red thread that guides you through life. The way I heard it is that you can’t see the thread ahead of you, but when you look back on your life you can see how your path made sense.

My earliest memories are of Texas, but I lived in the Midwest from 3rd grade til I was about 40. My brother moved here in the mid-80s, about 20 years before I did. I came for spring break soon after he moved here and he took me to Esther’s Follies. They told a joke that I’ve never forgotten about how HEB and Whole Foods were merging and renaming the store HEButthole Foods. My red thread led me to work as a lawyer for Whole Foods for the first 11 years I was in Austin. I found out the buttholes really were there, but they were in leadership rather than the store name.

My Whole Foods cell phone number spelled I BE A HO 7. Did I mention I was an employment lawyer? I was a little offended that I was number 7. Who were numbers 1 through 6 anyway, and what did they have that I didn’t?

For reasons I never understood my brother and I became estranged for 15 years starting soon after I moved here. The invisible red thread led me to a Whole Foods coworker who became a dear friend who has helped me through the hardest of times. My brother’s name is John Morgan Groves. My dear friend is John Morgan from Groves, Texas.

Anyway, back to buttholes: earlier this week, in the space of 24 hours, I received two separate messages about buttholes from two separate friends. These are friends from different parts of my life who don’t know each other and who have never even lived on the same continent. Why does the red thread keep guiding me to buttholes? One message was a video about butthole sunning. I have no idea what the context was but in the video, in which the buttholes were mercifully blurred, one man expressed a willingness to try butthole sunning if there were a way to do so modestly and another encouraged him and demonstrated, all the while maintaining unbroken eye contact.

The second message began “Thought of you, my haiku friend” and attached a post that said “show me that butthole” is five syllables if you’re ever writing a haiku and don’t know how to end it. My friend thought of me because 30 years or so ago she andI wrote a series of haikus about our dogs. I don’t know why, but I still remember one that I wrote from the perspective of my golden retriever, Daisy. My neighbor Brian desperately wanted a dog, but he was a Mormon with 5 kids and that makes any house feel small. When he passed our house on the way home from the train he would always stop to give Daisy some love, sometimes even getting on the ground in his suit to play with her. The haiku I remember went like this:

Oh Mormon neighbor

Brian, I love you. Take me

As one of your wives

Returning to the red thread, I left HEButthole Foods a long time ago and I am currently woefully unemployed. The woeful part is not because I want another job, but because I love getting paid and having health insurance. The startup I worked for for the last few years failed and though I learned 9 months in advance that this was happening, I still have not found a job. I had an all remote job for the last 7 years and at first I was looking for another all remote job with similar pay to my recent jobs. After a while I expanded my search to include hybrid work, and then to full-time in-office in Austin, and then to in-office in Austin at lower pay and then much lower pay, and now to full-time in-office at much lower pay just about anywhere in the country. It may be time to broaden the kind of work I’m prepared to take.

When my daughter was in high school the school had a bake sale during the West Austin Studio Tour. An older woman wanted to buy brownies for her friends but didn’t have any cash. One of the others stepped up and paid with a big wad of ones and when her friends asked why she had them she said it was from her stripper job. My daughter told her own friends that that would be me. I think she meant I’d make the joke and not that I’d be an elderly stripper, but there’s still some invisible red thread ahead.

Speaking of strippers, you know how there are all those things passed around the internet where you get your Star Wars name or your Pro Wrestler name by combining the names of various things from your past? They’re really ways to get you to reveal information you might use in your passwords, but they’re funny anyway. The formula for your stripper name is the name of your first pet and the name of the street you grew up on. My stripper name is Droopy Harvest. Let that soak in for a minute. It goes perfectly with my bra size of 36 long. If somebody tossed me Mardi Gras beads I’d give them a free show by lifting my skirt.

The red thread is telling me to close with a haiku:

The red thread knows the

way, even when you feel lost

Show me that butthole

Harmless vandalism. I’m not saying I did do it and I’m not saying I didn’t.