Why am I awake?

No seriously.

I'm still kinda snurgly, especially due to the fact that yet another chunk of LA is in flames, spewing carbon residue into the atmosphere and polluting my delicate bronchioles. I finally hauled my carcass to the circus gym to teach a class and do some desultory training that only confirmed how hopeless I have become after three entire days off from training. My hip flexors feel like piano wire and my lower back feels like it full of rusty ball bearings. All squeak and crunch, no bendy bendy.

I did enjoy teaching. Teaching people how to stretch is different than teaching dance. I do enjoy teaching dance when I have students who actually want to learn, rather than bitch about how difficult it is and how they just want to look like Shakira (good luck chubs). But stretching is more of a self-selecting bunch. Stretching kinda sucks. It hurts. It's scary. It's intense, emotional. You quickly discover that the gates to heaven and the gates to hell are closer together than you might expect. You want to stop. Now.

And going into teaching this class, I tell myself the probably most people will stop. They do with SB, after a semester or two, or just one class. Hell, I stopped a couple of times when the pain and frustration was overwhelming me. But like me, there are people out there who know that on the other side of that pain there is something beautiful. Is it freedom? Self-knowledge? Some featherlight touch of the divine? I'm still not sure, but it keeps on pulling me in deeper, sinking into the maw of the bend. I like the idea of initiating other people into this weird-ass journey. Maybe it will help me to better understand why I do this to myself. Why after every contortion performance I have to sit and cry hysterically, not from fear or pain or sadness, but something else. A profound release. A crazy river.

Plus I think I'm pretty good at teaching this. And I like being good at stuff, because I'm no zenned-out guru, I'm just another neurotic artist.

So anyway, after the gym I came home and ate a frozen dinner (shut up, it was Trader Joe's so it must be healthyish) and was almost ready to retire when a flurry of text messages called me out to Jumbo's Clown Room.

For those of you gentle readers not familiar with the LA uberhip, Jumbo's Clown Room is a hipster strip club. The girls don't get naked, and most of them have tattoos and no obvious surgical modifications, and there is clown art, all of which make it "cool." You can hang out and have a drink and imagine yourself in the nightclub where Alex (Flashdance you fools!) got her start, and you can tell yourself you aren't a perve 'cause its kinda artsy. The girls are all attractive, my friend being the by far the yummiest and one of the few that had any kind of facial expression beyond the typical stripper moue: mouth half open, lips hanging slack, eyes drooping in an indifferent stare that burns a quick passage through you, through the bar, through the dusty floorboards and the autographed pictures of porn clowns on the walls into a world without sweaty, crumpled dollar bills. Or a world with more sweaty, crumpled dollar bills, a lot more.

Then I come home, and still I'm awake. Isn't all that enough to tire me out?

Wait, I think I just got sleepy. Could it be? Yes! I'm yawning and my eyes feel a bit droopy. Gonna get on the next bus to the other side.