A Touch Of Poignancy Followed By A Dissatisfied Customer Quiz. Or, Meet The Team, Part Two.

  This is yet another hodgepodge frankenstein of an installment, stuck together from handy parts I had laying around and jolted into life by an infusion of fresh material brought on by recent club events. It knows both goodness and evil, pride and shame, rejoice and resignation.



  Therefore you may find it a bit more patchwork than my standard semi-coherent and uncompromising style, but don't let that fool you. A whole bunch of emotional fizz went into this installment, it just didn't do it all in one night.



  Let's begin on a high note. You know, for something different than the norm.






                    Fare Thee Well, Evil Penis Gobblin





  God doesn't completely hate Floor Guys. Mostly he does, that much is obvious to any rational human being. But every now and then, and probably just to keep a tiny flicker of hope guttering away in our hearts, he does something nice for us.


  Like tonight when He allowed an annoying mule-mouthed skeeve to be fired and she took her best friend and weeble buddy, StubbleGut*1 with her. It was like Christmas, your birthday and the best head you've ever had all rolled into one and served in a free Bentley.


  It was, quite simply, the best thing that has ever happened to me at this club. I felt what I have heard described as 'happiness' and I enjoyed it. It was a state of being where I didn't want to be a dick to anything at all. In fact I wanted to pet some kittens and give Jordans to homeless kids. I wanted to hug the whole world and reassure it that that evil goddamn braysnatch*2 could never hurt it again. At least not my small portion of it.


  It was a good night and those are rarer than the albino alligators that I enjoy making jerky out of.

                                                     Our dayshift team.
   







I Am A Dissatisfied Customer I'll Have You Know.







  In this industry we have a pretty fair number of what would refer to themselves as 'dissatisfied' if we actually cared to poll our customer base on their thoughts and feelings as they were exiting the club. This can happen for any number of reasons, the majority of which are the patron's fault and may include:


  -Unrealistic expectations

  -Failure to receive head in a champagne room

  -Getting ripped off by a dancer

  -Our ATM's are too difficult/too expensive to use

  -You didn't want to pay a cover charge

  -You didn't like your drink

  -You lost something

  -It turned out the stripper you had a 'connection' with was a soulless cunt

  -You weren't allowed to do whatever the hell you want

  -Our state's laws differ from the ones you're used to

  -We didn't allow you to sit in a VIP section without purchasing something that might actually qualify you as a VIP

  -Our dancers weren't hot/numerous enough for you

  -You couldn't buy coke from anyone in the club

  -We didn't have an Asian stripper

  -We were out of shrimp

  -You got thrown out of the club for doing meth in the bathroom

  -A hammered stripper said inappropriate things to you

  -Your hat looks different after you get it back from coat check

  -You feel like we should give you free passes to come back to a place you clearly didn't enjoy
 
  -You were WAY too drunk to be roaming around free with a credit card

 

   "I spent $200 at your club and my fingers still don't reek of quim. What kind of operation are you running?"





  The list is practically endless. The bottom line is you didn't enjoy your titty-club experience. What separates you from the animals, or those about to get beaten/go to jail is how you handle the situation. I've based all the correct answers on the assumption you were sober/smart enough to make reasonably intelligent decisions, so don't disappoint me.




  1) A dancer has just done one and a half private dances for you and says she did three. She demands money and when you try to explain that she is mistaken about the amount of cash owed she gets all wild eyed and angry and uses her thrice-a-day power to Summon A Bouncer. You:

  


A) Curse her out vehemently as you pull a knife and start slashing wildly at anything within reach.


B) Elaborate calmly and without being a dick what just happened and hope the bouncer will work with you. Explain that you were even willing to pay full price for the half song that she did, but there was no third song. Hope as you do this that there's some sort of system in place to protect the likes of you from stripper depredation and that the stripper in question isn't a good tipper.


C) Explain to the bouncer/manager WHO you are, let them know in no uncertain terms that you are an Important Person and a Very Good Friend of the Owner and that if the situation progresses any further down this unacceptable path that you will be forced to call the owner and have everyone fired immediately.



D) Call the cops and tell them a stripper ripped you off. They like it when you use 9-1-1 for this purpose.





2) Because you're an idiot, you lost your cellphone at a strip club. You:




A) Look for it yourself, carefully retracing your movements through the club ecosystem and checking every possible crevice you may have lost it or set it down in.


B) Accuse the bitch you've been hanging out with of stealing it and make a huge fucking scene, yo.


C) Enlist a Floor Host's help locating your lost item, and tip him something when he finds it for you. Doesn't have to be anything big, even a fiver says "Thank you Godlike Giant. I am a drunk, mongloid wastrel of a man but even in the depths of my own booze fueled stupidity, I can still spare a little something for someone who saved me a boatload of anguish."


D) Call the cops to report a stolen phone. See how that works out for ya.




3) Your wasted friend just racked up $300 in dance fees because you left him unsupervised long enough to do so. Your next move is:




A) Deny any knowledge of your friend's existence and pretend you don't know him when the bouncers drag him before you, piss stained and wailing. Wrinkle your brow in confusion convincingly; calmly exit club.


B) Sigh to yourself for having retarded friends and pay his dance tab, making sure to include a little something-something for the put upon bouncer who had to haul your worthless, vomit scented friend in front of you and offer you the unique opportunity to keep your stewed buddy from going to jail.


C) Say that you need to go out to your car to get some cash. When the club staff expresses their doubt about this plan, offer your driver's license as ransom to hold until you get back, it'll only take a moment. You have to sell it or you'll have a bouncer on you like ironic work boots on a thug.

  When you reach your car, leave. Fuck your friend. A new license will set you back $15.


D)  Call the cops. They will be very sympathetic to your friend's situation. Maybe use the word 'kidnap' or 'extortion'.



4) Your food took 93 minutes to arrive and when it did it tasted like something unfortunate that had died in a chimney and then got scraped onto your plate. You can already feel it sowing discord and anarchy in your bowels. You:




A) Curse your decision to eat food from a titty club, what were you thinking? Head for the men's room to execute an emergency evacuation, dreading the shame and noise/stench that is likely to occur. Hobble from the club a broken man and pray for a life of anonymity.


B) Refuse to accept the dried out remains of what you ordered and complain to the Manager. If you're polite and non-twatty about, he'll likely comp it or take it off your tab.


C) Be a complete and total asshole to the waitress and anyone else who comes to talk to you about your dissatisfaction with the bland, uninteresting and potentially deadly food you've been served.


D) Call the cops. They relish the thought of helping you in a dispute over a subpar $12 quesadilla.

 "I am appalled that the guy you pay $8 an hour can't make sushi."   

5) In an altercation that began over a Long Island Iced Tea, you end up sustaining serious facial injuries from a South American stripper's fearsome stiletto heel. You:




A) Wait until you're released from the hospital and then immediately go get a dance from that same fiery Latino gal who maimed you. She's so fuckin hot...


B) Threaten to sue the club but never actually do it because lawyers want cash up front to take on the club's intimidating legal team and you've spent all your money on strippers.


C) Sue the club and settle out of court for your medical bills plus $30,000 in the club's funny money and a VIP card good for 7 1/2 months.


D) Marry the stripper who disfigured you and care for her children, happy in the knowledge that she lets you stick your nose in her hoo-ha every couple of weeks for your trouble.






               Meet the team, part two.




  Consuela-Another fun thing that happened was when one of our Puerto Rican employees got her thong all in a knot because because I called one of her friends 'Mexican'. I legitimately thought the girl was Mexican. It was a reprehensible, horrible mistake on my part and I have no idea how I made it. She continued to bitch and moan and make disparaging remarks about people from Mexico until I started getting aggravated and eventually screamed at her:


  "I can't tell the fucking difference!"


  Man, if I thought she was upset before, I was wrong.


  She went critical. Starts screeching at me rapid fire in at least two languages. I thought I caught some Peruvian in there too but couldn't be sure because I don't know what Peruvian sounds like. I let her run down while I drank six beers. A Puerto Rican complaining about stuff while they're upset can take a long time...


  Finally she said her piece or simply ran out of breath and I took the opportunity to ask her "So if one of them's NOT wearing a kilt, could you tell the difference between an Irishman and a Scot? What about a Korean and someone from Hong Kong? South African and Dutch?"


  Didn't think so, Suzy. Shut your fucking blowjob hole.

                           "We Puerto Ricans are much more animated than Mexican people."






  Sir Grendel Berserkerheim Von CrushaHo VI-A Manager with teeth. Sir Grendel doesn't put up with much shit from dancers and has, in fact, fired more of them in his time there than any other manager. The fact that the owner forces us to hire most of the worthless twats back notwithstanding, Mr. CrushaHo is like a breath of fresh air in the middle of a dysentery outbreak. He's fearless.


  A fight in the club? No problem, Sir Grendel relishes hurting douchebags. Cater to pretentious high rollers? He's got you covered. He's not afraid to comp a $50 bottle to someone about to drop $5,000 at the club.


  He's everyone's favorite manager and as a result I only get to work with him maybe once in every ten shifts or so. Fucking typical...

                                  "Fine her $50 for being late or I'll put her in a chokehold. Her choice."







  Delores Bleedalot-Useless. Unmotivated. Waitress. These are words which describe Delores, a girl who has about the same level of aptitude as a waitress that I would have if I was to be thrust into the role of a ballet dancer or a theoretical physicist. To say that Ms. Bleedalot is not good at cocktail waitressing would be missing the opportunity to say that she is only slightly better at it than a belligerent, myopic walrus would be, and I'm not going to do that.


  I call her 'Bleedalot' because if you were to believe her every work related excuse concerning her monthly cycle, you'd be forced to believe she menstruated 22 days a month and that her uterus occasionally prolapses. In addition to this she seems to possess a magical talent for cutting herself at work. If there is a broken glass anywhere in the building, which is pretty much every night, her body will apparently give itself a sympathy wound. Kinda like drunk stigmata.


  It's fucking weird. Happily for me I won't have to put up with her much longer because she will be fired any day now. I personally can't believe she's lasted this long...




  Eternica-A dancer who is rumored to be 314 years old. I estimate her true age is much closer to 600 or 700 based on some conversations I've had with her, but I'm not an anthropologist so I'm just guessing. She appears, with the benefit of extensive makeup, dim lighting and alcohol diffused perception to be somewhere in her late 40's or early 50's, but no one of that age should know as much about the Thirty Years War or Renaissance Europe as she does without a Master's in history.


  I choose to believe that she knows all of this information because she lived through it. It may or may not be the case but it amuses me to think about her interacting with Michangelo, giving a lap dance to Gustavus Adolphus or possibly even groping the crotch of Isaac Newton for four pence and a farthing.

                                          

                         Eternica napping between dances in her custom made Tupperware sleep module.


















*1 She's called StubbleGut because her bush comes up to her bellybutton and encircles it like a besieging horde surrounding a neolithic hill fort.




*2 It means exactly what it sounds like it means.**


  ** But if you insist on thinking of a braysnatch as a mythological beast that you may encounter in a role playing game (which I know many of you are already doing, you fucking geeks), then be aware that it is stunningly resilient, wildly hard to kill and that its many Special Attacks include:


Painful Frequency (unlimited per day)-Stripper unleashes a scream that threatens to go subsonic and destroy larger mammals' nerve centers. Extremely painful for Large Class humans and other species such as dolphins, bats and wendigos.

Brass Tears (unlimited per day)-Uncontrolled sobbing saps the will of beings with low Wisdom, Intelligence or Constitution, making saves vs crying chick highly unlikely.

Badger of Misery (once per day)-Enables the stripper to become a whirlwind of raking claws, gnashing teeth, flailing spike heels and often, a rocks glass. Unbelievably dangerous, like trying to tackle and subdue a threshing combine.

Summon Hood Rats (once per shift)-Stripper calls upon her clan mates to rebel against the local authority.**


  **And authority always wins.

Mothers Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Floor Guys. Or, Despite Many People Being Of The Opinion That It's NEVER OK To Put Your Hands On A Girl, Every Now And Then A Little Light Throttling Somewhere Off Camera Is Perfectly Acceptable For Some Bitches.

  Several alternate titles for this installment read as follows:




1)  "I See Your Samonella And Raise Your Some Botulism. Or, My Child Raped Yours And Is Currently Being Held Without Bond Awaiting Trial. My Bad."


 2)  "I Can See How Being A Floor Host Would Suit You Perfectly If You Were Raised As A For-Profit Catholic. Or, Your Morals Are Like A Mighty Anchor On Your Livelihood, Mr. Cleaver."


3) "I Once Knew A Sasquatch Named Gur, Whose Movements Were Always A Blur.... Or, I Am A Cocktail Waitress, Therefore, By Definition, Pretty Worthless."





  If you look up 'wasted potential' in a dictionary, my face really should pop up next to the definition. Sometimes in the small hours of the night I think about all the lives I've disregarded, all the possibilities I've turned my back on and all the roads I never went down. I feel as if I could've made some sort of positive impact on our world if I'd only made better choices and applied the big thinky-thing in my skull to helping mankind instead of encouraging it to get an hour champagne room or buy a bottle of vodka.


  But rather than bettering my world, I've just crawled deep into the slimy underbelly of a degenerate industry and made myself comfortable, not unlike a tapeworm with a body hair problem. And why not? I justify to myself, it's an easy road to travel, my simple needs are fulfilled and occasionally I get to rough up a fellow human being.



Honestly it's an ideal profession for me. I'm large, I'm lazy and I enjoy ruining drunk people's good time. I find it hard to imagine another job I'm so perfectly suited to. (Outside of Dictator/Evil Overlord, of course but the job market's a bitch for Dictators/Evil Overlords these days. Everybody wants 'freedom' or some such nonsense...)



  But 'Herdin isn't for everyone. The occupation will eat away at ones moral fiber like a cheerfully determined cancer and only those who've already strangled their self respect to death*1 and hidden away it's gruesome remains can expect to succeed and survive within it.



  Take young Billy Hawkins for example. Billy was a Floor Guy I used to work with who I just made up solely to provide a character for something awful to happen to, which reinforces the above sentiment about how working in strip clubs is really hard on the soul.



  So Billy was what I refer to as 'dangerously suburban'. Webster's Dictionary defines 'Dangerously Suburban' as:



Adjective

1. Referring to those who use 'Golly!' and 'That's Swell!' in every day language, vote Republican because that's how Mom and Dad vote and believe in stuff from the Bible.


2. Characteristic of a town or village where the worst crimes committed yearly are littering, jaywalking and the occasional and highly scandalous DUI.



Noun

1. A future crime statistic


2. A naive person. Like big-time naive. See Brooklyn Bridge and Magic Beans.







  Billy was the most idealistic, open hearted kid I can ever remember working with. He didn't swear, drink, smoke, work on Sundays or take the Lord's name in vain. He didn't covet his neighbor's stuff, was kind to small animals and thought everything would all be OK if we would just take a moment to talk to one another like human beings.


  Then he started working in a titty club and it was like 15 years of cynicism and misanthropy cock punched his spirit all at once. If you could've observed him long enough, maybe with the help of time lapse photography, you could've actually seen tiny bits of his soul sour and die right in front of you. Billy was like a tragic ongoing science experiment for us Floor Scum who had already mortgaged our souls to pay the bills and upgrade the transportation sector.


  We wanted to help him. We urged him to run like hell from this business, that it wasn't for him. But he was suburban stubborn, which is sort of like garage-veal if you catch my meaning. This industry just plain overwhelmed him. It devoured him. He never stood a chance. It was like expecting one twelve year old boy armed only with a kitchen strainer to take out SEAL Team Six.


   He was destined to fail.


  Within a year he transformed from a mild mannered 24 year old virgin with dreams of really making a difference in the world and saving the family Ebay business*2, into a broken, raving, booze soaked husk of a man who craved blowjobs and bourbon. By the end of his time at the club he would have happily ran a quarter mile with adorable baby hounds taped to the bottom of his shoes, slapping a dancer every 20 feet.


  It was sad to watch. Too much reality, too fast.*3 It fucked him up good and to this day he's still institutionalized and fed a constant diet of Thorazine to keep him calm and unkilly.


  It takes a special breed to be a dancer wrangler...




  It goes without saying that there are a lot of dudes running around wild in this world who would benefit from having some of their facial bones broken by someone who didn't want to fight, but was forced to in order to defend himself from unwarranted aggression. If only more bullies got their asses handed to them by their would be victims, then the world would be a much better place I feel.


  Alas, the same also holds true for some females. A much smaller percentage to be sure, but still there are some...


  I'm not advocating domestic violence here of course, it's (almost) never right for a man to hit a woman. Yet even in the face of this undeniable fact, I have witnessed exceptions to the rule. In rare occasions, it's not only OK to hit a girl, it would probably do her some good or at least bring her reign of terror to an end. To persons in the security field, like myself, she'd still have to hit first. Being attacked opens all kinds of doors to the carnage-ly minded; it invites self defense, which in and of itself may actually be a really crippling attack.









  Six reasons why I can't hear you in a loud club, for the dumber, more timid waitresses:





A) You're tiny. Which means your mouth is roughly level with my anus, which doesn't hear so good because it's an anus. A fucking anus.


B) I've been in several metal bands and have attended hundreds of metal concerts which means my hearing is fucked. Especially when there's loud background music, like Rihanna.


C) You're talking like we're alone in a tiny camper together. I can see your wee bitty mouth moving, but none of the meaningful sounds are registering in my brain because you're talking to me like I'm a special needs kitten.


D) Whatever you're asking me is something you should already know and I don't care about any of it because I'm tired of helping you do your job. You should tip me every time I point out a new table that you didn't notice walk through the door because there are a lot of them and you really suck at your easy job.


E) I am a total dick who doesn't care about any of your problems or any of your offspring's achievements, thus negating any possible content we could have to interact over outside of me telling you there are new tables to wait on.


F) I have an earpiece in my 'good' ear and it's usually spewing useless, unimportant bullshit that not only impedes the efficient execution of my duties, but makes your rodent-like mewling seem contrived. Almost like you're part of the problem...






  For REALZ*4, why is it so hard to have a competent wait staff in a strip club? A girl can make really good money here if she just knows her game. It's not difficult at all. It's not like a busy restaurant where you really have to be at your best and have to have some sort of specialized knowledge, like the day's specials. We don't have specials. Our food sucks and is cooked by idiots.




  Which is as good a segue as any to explore the topic of our cooks, which is, quite frankly, frightening.




  Our cooks don't just murder food products, they desecrate them. It's like the difference between just killing other humans as opposed to killing them and making interesting rain gear and useful household items from their skin and various internal organs.


  The main problem is what we sorta refer to as our 'Kitchen Manager'. He is what could charitably be called Blanco Garbige, or more domestically; one car payment short of being homeless. And as I have elucidated before, birds of a feather flock together. Therefore if one is a lazy ignorant wretch, it only stands to reason that the majority of one's friends will be uneducated troglodytes with a poor work ethic as well.


  And this is the case.



  I'm not Gordon Ramsey by any means. There is so much culinary stuff that I can't do that it doesn't even bear thinking about. I can't dress a carcass, nor fillet a fish. I am a modern cook who is accustomed to working with shit that's already been neatly cut up for me.


  That being said I can be drunk in a wheelchair, blind and half-heartedly masturbating and still cook better than our entire kitchen staff combined. Their knowledge of food safety is laughable if you don't ever intend on eating their dishes, or an intestinal gamble if you do.


  I'm just going to list a few of the things they do wrong here to illustrate my stance. Those of you with no culinary experience and who have never seen the Food Network or were even aware of it's existence may not appreciate the following factoids I'm gonna throw at you, but it doesn't make them any less startling nor valid.



1) The first is simply a waste issue, but it bears mentioning. When you take a food from frozen to thawed, you do it in cold water or in the fridge. Most restaurants do it in cold water because it's much quicker than simply letting sit in the fridge.


  When you thaw stuff in cold water, you place it in a container under a running faucet. You do this because bacteria has an incredibly difficult time reproducing in water that's not only chilly, but non stagnant as well. The faucet doesn't have to be running full blast, it merely needs to be dripping enough water to keep the surface of the container that is thawing whatever it is you're trying to unfreeze continually over-spilling its confines.


 So the reality is that it's not the running water that's actually thawing the subject material out, rather it's the immersion in less-than-freezing water that's doing so. The water just needs to be running enough to keep the surface of the thaw water moving, which is incredibly confusing to bacteria apparently.


 But our cooks say 'fuck all that' and keep the water on full blast while they're thawing stuff. They believe in their heart of hearts that it's the running water that will successfully unfreeze stuff, and like medieval peasants, believe in the power of running water to repel evil spirits.


  They have wasted, in my conservative opinion, roughly six billion gallons of water in the last three weeks or so. They do more damage to the environment than NASCAR or Mel Gibson.



2) Try to know when something is rotten, it's sorta important. Usually the intense stench of decaying organic matter is your first clue. Serving food that is rotten is bad.*5


  I say this because our kitchen staff almost uniformly refuses to date anything, even though it is a food code violation to NOT date EVERYTHING. Anything at all that goes into a fridge must have a date on it, but our cooks are rebels without a clue. No dates, yo.


  This came to terrible realization for me recently when a brand new cook we hired did something horrible and unforgivable. He received an order for hummus and pita chips which is an appetizer we offer but none of our cooks can actually make. They produce large containers of a glue-like product that looks and acts like hummus but tastes like rendered slug and has the consistency of something badly infected with a random jungle parasite. All leaky and shit.



  Now I was standing 10 feet away from the new cook when he opened the lid to our current batch of 'hummus' and I could tell by the smell that it was past the prime of it's life by a fair margin. It smelled like it was only weeks away from forming a government or inventing television.


  New cook never even blinked. He filled a dish with it and shambled off to the microwave, oblivious to the hummus's impending sentience. I mentioned to the 'senior' cook that he might want to smell the hummus container and thus stop the new cook's obvious agenda of manslaughter and intestinal turmoil, which, to his credit, he did.


  Needless to say, all hope for new cook shattered.



 
3) Cooking steaks to temperature is something that takes practice. Hell, cooking any kind of meat to perfection has a little bit of a learning curve, I'd be the first to admit that. But with at least a couple of months of hands on practice, and with proper mentorship by an experienced chef, anyone who intends on continuing to make their living by preparing food should be able to do it by instinct and touch alone. Anyone who cooks meat for a living should have a 80-90% success rate at cooking a steak to correct temp.


  I say 80-90% because it is a restaurant industry fact that a fair portion of the steak-consuming population doesn't actually know how it likes its steak cooked. People who request and think they enjoy Medium Well often in reality prefer Medium and those that claim to favor Medium Rare are frequently fans of Rare and just don't know it.*7



  Our culinary wizards are like blind squirrels-every now and then they find an acorn and by that I mean they cook a steak correctly.
 



  What other gastronanigans*6 have they been up to you ask?



  Well, we make orders of mashed potatoes in plastic bags. I'm gonna pause the narrative for a moment and let that sink in.


 
                       (insert intermission music here)



  I'm going to assume there's a least a few people who read this blog that haven't worked in a kitchen before and aren't very handy in their own kitchens either and therefore the following statement is intended for them:



    Mashed potatoes aren't made in plastic bags. 






  Fuck it's late and I can't even begin to cover them all. It's motherfucking 10:15 AM and I'm really tired and sorta drunk. I really want to do pictures, but at the same time I want to just publish this already and pretend I did it in time to be a 'year-end special'.




  Happy "New" Year and fuck your goddamn pictures.

-The StripperHerder


















*1 Quietly, while no one was looking.




*2 Hey I said 'suburban', not rural. There was no farm to be saved even though it would've made a more compelling narrative.




*3 I was going to do a song parody of Mother's Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys here, but when I got to looking at the actual lyrics of the song I noticed something kinda fucked up. Here are the lyrics from the first chorus and the first 2 lines of the second verse:


"Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
Don't let 'em pick guitars or drive them old trucks.
Let 'em be doctors and lawyers and such.
Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
'Cos they'll never stay home and they're always alone.
Even with someone they love.

Cowboys like smokey old pool rooms and clear mountain mornings,
Little warm puppies and children and girls of the night.."


  Um, children and girls and possibly even warm puppies of the night? Surely I can't be the only one aware of the older and somehow more polite term for a prostitute, 'Lady of the Night'? So presumably, judging by the original lyrics, a cowboy may indeed like a girl, a child or in a pinch, a warm puppy prostitute? No wonder you shouldn't let your baby grow up to be one.


 Imagine the conversations between doting mothers:



Miriam: "Hi Nancy! What do you want you babies to be when they grow up?"


Nancy: "Hello Miriam! I want them to be doctors and lawyers and dentists. That way they can make a good living and help others at the same time. What do you want your babies to be when they grow up?"


Miriam: "I want them to be pedophiles and zoophiliacs who have the moral convictions of drunk jackals. That way they can make a good living and destroy others at the same time."

*4 Can't believe I just typed "For Realz". I'm be on crack.





*5 Except in certain quaint regional delicacies, most of which predate refrigeration.





*6 Gastronanigans: Short for Gastronomic Shenanigans. Having fun at the expense of, or torturing others with food. This can be intentional or otherwise.





*7 I myself am one of those crazy people who prefer my steak Medium Well to Well done. A good quality cut of meat cooked to Well by someone who knows what they're doing can be every bit as tender and delicious as a medium rare one. The problem is that there are many folks out there who equate 'tender' with 'squishy'.

You Call This Winter? Pah. In My Country Summer Lasts Four Hours And There Is No Spring Or Fall. Or, If You're Working At The Club Tonight, Who's Hooking At The Trailer Park?

  Things have taken a turn for the ugly at the club lately, on several levels I might add. The money's been down, problem customers and fights have been up and our dayshift is like a Carnival of Horrors, heavily seasoned with 'scary drug clown'.


   Not good math in other words.


  This past Thursday was a hallmark example of this. We threw more people out of the club this past Thursday than we do on any given insert local NFL team's name here home games, which are like a St. Patty's Day but with more jerseys and other kick ass officially sanctioned NFL gear.


  Our tally for a single night shift was eleven people. We threw eleven fucking people out of the club that night. Normal for a home game is 5-10 and on those nights we're really busy. Tonight we never had more than thirty bodies in the club at any given time.


  This is also not good math.


  It all started when our Floor Bastard, Boris, overheard some sort of eastern European dudes talking shit about him in the bathroom. They had no idea he was Russian and that he understood the mish mash of jagged, discordant consonants that comprise whatever language they were gargling out. At least enough to understand they were insulting him. Had it been me in the bathroom instead of Boris they could've said anything they wanted and I would have never comprehended a damn thing.*1



   So, much to their surprise, Boris calls them out and tensions escalate from there. He alerts me and the Manager, Sir Humphrey von Warjibber II, that he is about to commence hostilities in the men's room and that we may, if we so desire, join him in glorious combat if we're quick about it, but that our presence wasn't mandatory unless we brought mops and tarps.


  Now I don't know what sort of frightening Bratva/ Spetsnaz history or training Boris has. He doesn't talk about it at all and we have ceased to ask questions we probably don't want to know the answers to anyway. What I do know is that although Boris is gruff*2 in the face of rude customers, he is possessed of a very patient demeanor until such a time as things have become irrevocably stupid*3 or suddenly violent.


  Then maybe Boris not so patient, comrade. Da?


  When I heard Boris declare war, I rushed to the bathroom not to help him against some former Soviet Bloc D-bags, but to help them against Boris. It may take a great deal of effort to get my Russian co-worker to snap, but when he does he gets very enthusiastic and matter of fact about it. Boris is so precise and crippling when he starts throwing various body parts at people that I have never seen him need to hit someone twice.




  Once is quite enough, hvala.*4




  My Mission was to get to the bathroom in time to save some Eurotrash cunts from grievous bodily harm and/or sudden death, or failing that, to help Boris process the bodies assist the wounded and sanitize the crime scene men's room.


  Thankfully I arrived quickly because I was lingering near the patio anyway watching a couple of potential Lawn Darts*5 talk about throwing their unsuspecting buddy onto the stage. I ran in just as Boris was flicking an internal switch from 'Dour Russian Floor Guy' to 'Blurry Killing Machine'. I was able to wrap up two of the little buggers and keep them safe from Boris but unfortunately he happened to the other two.


  When all was said and done the two that I had saved were able to guide their less fortunate companions to their Land Rover. They didn't want to call the police, their lawyers or the state prosecutor's office, which is what is usually threatened in these situations and they refused our offers of an ambulance for their wounded.


  I imagine it will all culminate in gunfire and I hope I'm not scheduled that night.











Strippers beget strippers.




  It's true. Tragic, misbegotten and poorly thought out as it is, most clubs offer some sort of bounty on new strippers. I'm not talking about just cutting off their heads and dumping them on a table in some forgotten warehouse somewhere, you sick bastards. No, some clubs offer free house fees to a stripper that brings in another stripper who manages to make it for more than a week. This seldom produces anything useful but goddamn it, every now and then it fucking pays off.





  Just not tonight.





  Look, here's the intrinsic dilemma: birds of a feather flock together. Say what you want about the phrasing, but it's a social truth. This is not an absolute of course, nothing is with humans, much less strippers. But if, for example, you have a very trailer-iffic stripper working for you and she says she has a cute friend that wants to audition, it's OK to assume the friend is gonna be a bit trailery herself. One wind storm short of homeless so to speak.


  This held true for us tonight when one of our 'rural' strippers, Winne-Bella, brought in her dear friend, Trucka-Sarahus to grace our stage and join our team. Trucka-Sarahus told me she drives a truck and trailer for a living. I completely hid my shudder of terror and wondered to myself, "Then why the hell are you working here?"



  She will not make it in this industry. I'm making that call right away. Time will prove me right and if it doesn't I'll lie about it and you'll never know the difference unless I write 'Plight of the StripperHerder: Deathbed Confessions'




  Well that's about all I feel like doing tonight. Fuck the pictures.



-The StripperHerder














*1 Like many English-only speakers, I always just assume when someone slips into another language in my presence that they are talking about me and have nothing nice to say.





*2 He's actually gruff with everyone but since he's Russian, this is considered being pretty fluffy.





*3 Irrevocably Stupid [noun]: The critical point in any verbal or nonverbal interaction between two or more parties when it becomes obvious that further discourse in any length will result in no further change in the present situation.


    Irrevocably Stupid [adjective]: Characterized by tedious repetition without any meaningful advance in logic or solution.





*4 Hvala is Croatian for thank you. For some totally unjustifiable reason I always assume the heavily accented miscreants I'm dealing with are Croatian. Not sure why this is.






*5 This term is actually misleading since the club has no lawn anywhere near where theses idiots are going to land when we toss them bodily out of the club.**



    **Pavement Darts would be much more accurate but doesn't sound as good nor bring to mind a pleasant summer memory.

To Move Up to My Weight Class You Must Consume 90,000 Calories A Day For The Next Seven Years. Or, A Drunk Girl Crying? Huh, You See Something New Every Day...

  An open letter to the small Arab man who took a swing at me tonight.


  Dear Sir,


  Once upon a time a really small man met an equally petite woman and they fell in love, or were introduced just before their arranged marriage took place, please fill in correct phrase.

  So as I was saying, these two presumably wonderful and diminutive people were married (I'm assuming they were married since neither of them appear to have been stoned to death before they were able to breed) and as happens, they had sexual intercourse and a few months later the woman grunted you out into the world. The doctor (or village handywoman, whatever the case may be) presented your parents with a small wrapped bundle and said "Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. ShazamalammaLam (sp?), you're the proud parents of a healthy 3 1/2 lb boy, with ten little fingers and ten little toes. Now get out of my hut."

  A lot of that is speculation and casual racism on my part. For all I know your family name is something much more ridiculous than ShazamalammaLam, you were born in a modern metropolitan hospital and you weighed five lbs.

  I guessed at some stuff.


  Here's what I do know. These are facts, son. Facts weigh a lot.


1) It was instantly and piteously obvious that you have zero fighter training, no fight experience whatsoever, poor decision making skills when intoxicated and know virtually nothing about physics.


2) When all I had to do to defend myself from you was to reach down and grab a handful of your shirt and straighten out my arm, you should have been able to hear the ghosts of your ancestors crying out "Dude!"

  But you didn't.


3) When you swung at my face, missing it only by 6 inches or so, I realized that if you'd been standing on a stepstool, you might've actually connected. Luckily for you you left it and your platform heels at home. Things might have gone less goodly for you had you been wearing one or carrying the other.


4) I would've been perfectly within my rights knocking you back into Biblical times, or what you refer to as 'last Tuesday'. I chose not to do this because it was far more humiliating for you to be conscious as I carried you out in a full nelson like an angry, hissing bearded seven year old who been at the cookies baklava while Mom and Dad were out kidnapping photojournalists.*1


5) There are ways of escaping a full nelson, none of which are foolproof. There are substantially fewer ways of escaping a full nelson that's been applied by someone who's done it many times before, is well over twice your weight and strength and while your feet are no where in the vicinity of the Earth.*2


6) I know all of the tricks to get out of this hold and had you attempted any of them, I would have quickly and with very little concern for your well being, executed the following series of actions.


  A) Rotate 90 degrees and smash your wee grumpy goat face into the nearest available wall.

  B) Withdraw your face from the drywall it is imbedded in.

  C) Step smartly one pace to right or left (depending on wall availability)

  D) Repeat steps A and B. Check for continued resistance, then repeat steps as necessary or until I run out of wall or you run out of the will/capability to fight.


7) Despite the horribly emasculating experience of being carried out of a strip club like a naughty toddler with its little feet kicking impotently, I regret that I didn't have the presence of mind to enhance your abrupt exit and my enjoyment of it by whispering any of the following statements in your ear:




A) "Daddy likes it when you kick around like an unwilling goat. Struggle for me, that's right. I feel like I owe you $20, you give good struggle."


B) "Oooooh! Iz'm Mummie's widdle man all an-gwee? Ooooooh! Him so wiggly when him mad! Who's a widdle mad guy? Who's a widdle mad guy? That's right, you are! Him a widdle mad guy all struggly and cuddly! All fuzzy like a Teddy bear! Momma's widdle smoogums gets picked up because him all cwabby and needs to go sleepy time! Awwww! Widdle man still twying to get fwee? So cute! Now snoogums get to meet Mr. Sidewalk!"*3


C) "Snobar! Addiss!" The only two words of Arabic I learned while working at a middle eastern restaurant. They mean tomato and pine nuts. Bear in mind all you authenticity loving, fact checking ghouls out there, I was drunk a lot of the time I was there, I'm not sure of the spelling of course and I don't know which word means which anymore.





  Right. Now that that's out of the way you may be wondering what led up to this whole situation. Well, I'll tell you because that's kinda the point of this blog and I enjoy helping other humans.



  As everyone reading this undoubtedly knows, at most strip clubs photography and videoing are strictly prohibited. Some of the girls may well one day run for public office and they don't want any compromising videos of them to surface at a critical campaign moment. Totally understandable.

  So I catch my little brown friend just openly videoing with his phone. Wide openly. Like Spielberg. So I go over to him and say 'hey man, you can't video or take pictures in the club, I need you to delete that please. DO NOT DO IT AGAIN.' When I say that last bit he gives me this look like a constipated badger that just had something slimy and gross ooze across its paws. Like I was beneath contempt and if I lived in his country I would have all the rights and respect normally shown to shit-stained furniture.

  I didn't hover over him and watch while he deleted the video like I would normally do because the dancer he was filming never even noticed him doing it and because I fucking hate her in any case. Cheap bitch.


  So as far as I was concerned it was the end of the saga, although I had stored the look he gave me for future consideration.


  About a half hour later I was out on the patio enjoying a cool, refreshing cigarette thinking to myself how great it was to be alive, when my 'lil friend and his equally small but much smarter friend came out and lit up. I kept my distance and pointedly ignored them, but there's always a bit of tension in the air when you have to be in close proximity to someone you issued a stern warning to.


  Not two minutes later one of the other Floor Tribesmen comes out to the patio and tells the same little guy that he needs to delete the other video he took while I was eating and paying him no mind. "That tiny fuckwit." I thought to myself and moved in to box the small Middle Easterns between our imposing Anglo Saxon frames.

  The other Floor Guy's name is classified, I'll refer to him by the codename Strider because he's 68% leg. Strider's one of the nicest Floor Dicks around. He's very good at establishing a camaraderie and fellow feeling with most of the club patrons on all strata of the titty ecosystem. He is one of the best of us...

 Anyway Strider's trying to get this guy to delete videos, the guy brings up the videos and then suddenly the phone powers down. Drunk accident, right? I was willing to entertain the notion, just this once, if only for the novelty of it. Strider flashes me a look, I raise an eyebrow and then the story continues.


 When his phone turns back on, he shuffles through his apps like he just can't remember where he left that pesky camera function and then, lo and behold, his phone mysteriously shuts off again. "Motherfucker" I hear Strider say. I look up in mild surprise because he doesn't normally swear at customers until we're way deeper into the "How Much Of An Asshole Can I Be?" game. I raise my other eyebrow at him. I'm ambibrowstrous*4 like that.

 Strider's clearly getting kinda shitty, and no wonder. I know it doesn't seem like much when you read the above paragraphs, but this went on for some time while we pretended our little Arab friend wasn't doing it on purpose and tried to remain polite about it. At this point in similar situations I've been in before, a Floor Guy would just grab the phone out of the dude's hands and either he'd delete the videos or pics in question, or we'd be fighting because the dude got all attacky when we seized his fucking phone. Hell, I woulda already grabbed his phone if I had even the slightest notion of where the incriminating stuff was, much less how to get to it.

  Picture me stomping around a smashed phone with my arms beating my chest while I made enraged chimp noises and you're not far off.

                            "How many times do I have to hit it before the pictures spill out?"




  Finally Strider says "Goddamnit dude, give it to me! I know how to do it." And he makes a grab for the phone. The little bastard twists violently away from him, sheltering the phone away from Strider. And then his phone mysteriously turned off again.

  That was it for me. The camel that broke the straw's back. I said, "that's it gentlemen, you need to leave the club" and I put a hand on both of their shoulders and very gently nudged them toward the door. The smart one was on the same page instantly. He was very apologetic, which was refreshing really.

  The other one, our little amateur Scorcese, decided violently knocking my hand off his shoulder was a much better plan than just leaving and going home to enjoy whatever poorly lit, nearly useless bits of video he had successfully fled the club with.

  I felt he was wrong of course and unsurprisingly, physics agreed with me. I really hate when people do this but when they do it gives me the justification to protect myself. I did this in this instance by pushing him so hard that for all intents and purposes, he teleported six feet away.


  And I could've gotten much more distance if it wasn't for that meddling wall...



  I'll give him this, he got back up fast and came right the fuck at me. No hesitation at all. Like an emaciated Wolverine who was lacking every single attribute that made him tough except the anger control issue. I saw right away he was gonna try to hit me because he'd raised his fist immediately on rising and was coming at me with it held fingers forward somewhere far behind his shoulder. Like a classic example of how you should never, ever punch someone.

                                       "Yes I film bitches. No I not erase. I fight now."




  At that point I just stood there and let him run into my left hand which I had sorta put out there in front of me like a smallish oak branch. When my hand met his chest I grabbed a huge fistful of shirt and chest hair and extended my arm out while leaning slightly back as his poor engineered fist came sailing by my nose, smelling of fattoush.

  It was insanely easy at that point to pull him in, duck under his right arm and snake my right arm up and around his to land the full nelson. Then all I hand to do was stand up and it was goodbye ground, hello embarrassing-mobile-powerless-hissyfit exit from titty bar.

                               "Oh, it's so cute that you're attacking me. You're doing really super!"







  In other news a drunk bitch lost her keys tonight and no one cared even though it was obviously someone else's fault, not hers. She was just the victim here and couldn't possibly be blamed.

  Contrary to the average 'Herder reader's opinion, I am not a monster. I will and have cared about the trials of hammered strippers in the past and fully expect to do so again at some point in the future. But when you're one of those girls who's fucking wasted two out of three nights she works, I'm done at like the third time in a month. At that point I will gladly load you into your car, start it for you, put it in gear and run for my life.

  Like a majestic yet ungainly elk.

  We're adults. If you can't curb your occupationally sanctioned alcoholism to like once a month or something, then I can't curb my apathy for even a night.

  God Speed, wasted chick. May Dog have mercy on your bowl.





Have a great repurposed pagan holiday,
-The StripperHerder












*1 More casual racism. I apologize for degenerating into this kind of narrative chlamydia but at the same time am going to leave it in. So.....






*2 Believe it or not, getting caught in full nelson applied by a person of superior size and strength used to happen so often in ancient warfare that the famed Chinese general and author of The Art of War, Sun Tzu, had this to say on the subject:


  
  "Endeavor not to let this happen." 


And

  
  "If it does happen, surrender because you're fooked, boyo."




*3 The problem with all of these is that he was really Arabic and either spoke very little English, or was good at pretending he didn't speak any. So I may very well have wasted some effort here.

Still, would've amused me.




*4 [Ambibrowstrous] The ability to arch either eyebrow at will, thus conveying more information than a five minute phone call or three pages of cleverly worded text.

The StripperHerder Wastes Your Time And His With Groundless Gripes And Baseless Bitching Because It's What He Does. Or Ukraine Surpasses Russia In StripperHerder Readership. What Does It Mean To The Global Economy?

  It's amazing to me the kind of things I can find to waste time that would be better spent working on my movie script. Like writing this for example. Or playing Galaga and Elevator Action on an arcade emulator with a joypad that is awkward and frustrating to use, thus killing any actual enjoyment I might've experienced from playing them.


 

                                      Foolish Human, your controller is useless against us






  My neighbors are probably still wondering why screams of "Cunt!" and "Motherfucking Dickbag Jizz Eating Horse Twat!" were echoing through the hallway from my apartment a few minutes ago. It's a miracle I didn't break anything but I'm getting better at that, and getting into a baseless rage just seems like an awful lot of work nowadays


  So that being said, I'm going to explore things unrelated to strip clubs and my occupation in general that aggravate me. Why? Because I'm bored and seem to enjoy doing stuff that makes me no money over things that might actually make me wealthy.


  Fucking weird, huh?



  So let's jump in, shall we?




                           
                              Pop Culture
                                                 



  When anything starts to get really popular in America, I generally start disliking it. Since I have little to no respect for humanity in general and Americans in particular, I figure if a large portion of the population likes something then no matter my previous inclinations on the subject, it must suck. Into this category I can confidently throw things like beards, music, craft beer, cocktails, our national obsession with food, skinny jeans, eyeglasses one doesn't actually need, headphones, tattoos and designer anything.


  There's so much here to cover I don't even know where to start. So, in the continuing theme of this blog to avoid any kind of involved and cohesive narrative, I'll just break it down in one of my sorta famous lists.


Beards) So facial hair has become popular again for the first time since the 80's told us that a nice even face full of stubble was pretty fucking cool and the 90's convinced everyone that sideburns (in the face of all available evidence) looked good on a man. Now we have shows about facial shrubbery and get to look at all kinds of dudes more famous than us sporting some hairy faces.


  So like all things the public at large embraces, if everyone else is doing it, especially celebrities, then it must be awesome to do and will make you more awesome by imitating it. Nothing lower primate/ovine about it at all!


  Let me put it this way; for some reason many dudes feel completely comfortable approaching a total stranger and saying something like "Dude, you're beard is awesome!" because beards are now popular and no one thinks anything of it.


  But suppose a random guy came up to you and said something like "Dude, your eyes are enchanting!" You may feel slightly less OK with a statement like that because it would be weird.




Music) I realize that beauty is in the eye, or ear, of the beholder and at a base level I respect that. No matter how much I rail against the travesty that the American music scene is, there's a small voice in the back of my skull which acknowledges the right of anyone, anywhere to like whatever kind of music they wish and that my opinion is completely irrelevant on the subject no matter how much their musical tastes suck sloth cock.


  I blame this voice on either a tumor or an extradimensional entity who inhabits my brain whenever it can be bothered to do so. I don't enjoy listening to the voice, but will grudgingly admit that maybe it's right every now and then.


  It still doesn't explain, to my satisfaction, why large amounts of the human population will willingly, nay eagerly, listen to and enjoy music that sits like a hot, steamy pile of runny shit-pudding on the brain. Music that has nothing meaningful to say and requires very little musical talent to produce.

  Now before I go any further on this topic, I'd like to throw out a little disclaimer:

  I am forced by my occupation to listen to music. Forced I say. I have no choice and don't seem to possess the filters that some titty club employees have that allows them to virtually be oblivious to the ravaging effects of horrible music. I wish I did, but there you go.


  So having got that out of the way I hope that you, Venerated Reader, may have a more sympathetic ear for the approaching tirade.


  I respect musicianship above all other attributes when it comes to, you know, music and stuff. This is not to say that there aren't many bands out there comprised of highly skilled artists who nevertheless manage to churn out crappy music. Take the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Rage Against The Machine for examples. All the dudes in these bands can fucking play, but still I hate all of their music.


 

     Rihanna is the trifecta of musical torment: Hideously Overplayed, Not Particularly Talented, Cross-Racial Stripper Anthems.






  Part of this can be blamed on repetition or course. Listen to a song you love 50 times a week for a year and chances are that you'll be OK with not hearing that song again any time soon.


  I don't blame the artists for this, I blame the public. If, as an artist, someone came up to me and said I will give you ungodly amounts of money to make simplistic, repetitive shite that takes virtually no thought whatsoever to create, I'd say sign me up.


  But then again I wouldn't know a chord if it leapt out of a cave and savaged me, so what do I know?





  

                                                   "Argh! Are you a G Minor?"*1











Craft  Beer)  I love beer. I love drinking it, I love consuming it and I love pouring it down my throat. I like the way beer tastes but would never drink it at all if it didn't get me drunk. Being a high functioning alcoholic has it's pros and cons, chief among them being an utter lack of regard for the craft and art of creating alcohol.


  Oh I dabbled with being a beer snob back in the early 90's when the first microbrew revolution hit America and suddenly you could get any number of tasty, sophisticated beers that weren't Bud, Bud Light or Miller. It was like a whole new world for practicing boozers, full of flavor, character and a sense of superiority over others who stuck to their mass produced garbage-water. It was the first time in US history that the rest of the world took us seriously as a beer producing country, and I proudly waded in and drank a bunch of expensive beer.


  That was then and this is now. Today I mainly stick to Labatt Ice as my beer of choice for three reasons: 1) It's $3.99 for a six pack of 16 ouncers. 2) It's 5.6% ABV which provides a bit more kick than your average shit beer. And 3) It is slightly more beer flavored that anything else you can get for a comparable price.


  What bothers me about the popularity surge of craft beer is that it somehow becomes a badge of belonging to certain elements of society. Take IPA's for example. IPA's taste like gnawing on the side of a hemlock tree. They're bitter as an old nun's taint and flat as Kansas in every other flavor category.


  They fucking suck.


  But Jebus-onna-stick they are very chic at the moment if you happen to wear plaid shirts, brightly colored pants, retro jackets or a particularly gay hat.


  Seriously, if these are the advocates of IPA's then I can't think of a better reason to avoid them.



  

              Tastes like a Calcutta goat's yam-sack with layered hints of grapefruit and gently used latex gloves.







Craft Cocktails) While the idea of paying $20 something dollars for a drink that takes a long time to make sounds kick ass, I'll take a pass on it. I figure if I'm buying something that's really just hastening my death, I don't want to overpay for it. But if it's your thing, then run with it I say. Some sort of carefully prepared cocktail may very well be the tastiest drink I've ever had, but unless someone else buys it for me I'll never know because paying that much for a drink is fucking idiotic.

  I simply don't care if it contains fresh shaved ginger, locally grown fruit, premium liquor and the bartender hacked the ice cubes out of a giant block of ice harvested from an Icelandic cave instead of some made from an ice machine. Details like these are irrelevant to us HFA's. I don't drink to experience astonishing flavors, to have credibility within my chosen subculture, to say I've done it, or to feel a vague sense of smugness at my own coolness.




Tattoos) This one's probably going to irk at least a few of my friends who work in the tattoo/body mod field. Sorry, just my feelings on the matter which are as valid/meaningless as anyone else's. The bottom line is I don't like tattoos anymore and will probably never get any more ink.

  Once again pop culture has killed something I used to love.


  When I got my first tattoo way back in 1990, it was still a pretty uncommon thing to do to yourself. At that time only people with a rebellious spirit who were willing to put themselves at odds with mainstream America got tattooed. It stigmatized you, set you apart from the ordinary and if it couldn't be hidden under a tee shirt, severely limited your job prospects unless you happened to be a criminal or a tattoo artist.


  Nowadays however, celebrities and reality TV have shown us that getting slathered in ink is actually super cool and that you can sport full sleeves openly so that people will know that you're:


A) A super rad hipster in touch with all that is cool in America who in addition to being a walking doodle, probably owns many interesting and totally ungay hats.


B) An NBA player


C) Someone so edgy and atypical that you have to mimic what other edgy and atypical people do so the public at large will know what an edgy and atypical kind of person you are. Understand and respect!

  


  I especially enjoy tattoo trends, because it reinforces my point that humans are much more lemming-like than any individual human will ever admit. We're masters of self rationalization. We can look upon something stupid that a thousand other homosapiens are doing and can construct in our own minds a personally valid reason that we should do it as well.


  Tattoo fashion is a brilliantly illustrated example of this. Remember 'tribal' tattoos? Know anyone who's got one of those in the last decade? Didn't think so. How about asian symbols? So five years ago....


  Today's tattoos are much more well thought out. No, really. Stop laughing.


  My favorites are:


1) Angel wings: You saw some other silly twat with tiny, cherub sized wings tattooed on their back and thought to yourself, "I am going to get those imbedded in my skin too, but bigger and for much more meaningful reasons than that dumb skank."

                                    "That other girl is too thick-waisted to be an angel."





2) Memorials to the dead: "I am pretty likely to forget the death of someone very close to me, therefore I shall have a reminder of them etched into my forearm so that I will never forget them and so others can see that I've known someone in my lifetime who has died. Because that's instant fucking street-cred, yo!"

                                               "Shit. What was his name again?"






3) Anything on your neck: Nothing says 'parolee' like having a sweet neck tattoo. All of your peer group have one and they look fucking bad-ass, mowwa-fakka.

  

 Feathers look like loaves of French bread and Blessed is, for some reason, correctly spelled. 

                                








Headphones) How did we manage to survive as a species from 1997 when the Sony Walkman died out, until 2001 when the iPod came out? How could anyone manage to exist without constant and instant access to music? It seems impossible...


  But for four long years we did it. That and the rest of pre-1980 human history of course.*2


  Thankfully today we know that it's OK to be a self absorbed, distracted and hopelessly cool person who escapes social interaction by not being able to hear the world going on around us, thereby saving us from unnecessary human interaction while damaging our hearing in a totally cool way.


  Two dozen professional athletes in inspiring commercials can't be wrong...

                                  Secretly listening to Enya, terrified someone will find out.*3



  
  Thankfully these very same athletes are now letting us know that headphones with wires aren't cool any more and that to be more like them you must upgrade your headphones to wireless. Because being cool is sweet as fuck!

  





  Potential Gunfire And The Lack Thereof) This is kinda a long story so I'm just gonna go ahead and shorten the living shit out of it. If I had to get into every subtle detail of each time there was the possibility of gun violence rearing its ugly head in my occupation, I would spend a whole lot of time writing the words 'motherfuckah!' and 'Go ahead and skin that smoke-wagon and see what happens.'

                             "Are you going to do something or just stand there and bleed?"





  So to not belabor the point, we had a situation tonight where a customer lost the keys to his ghetto-wagon and after we exhausted every possible means of finding them for him, he got all hostile and stuff. We didn't let this bother us too much on the surface because there were four of us and I alone outweighed this guy by 150 lbs and he was unaware I was behind him as he threatened my fellow Floor Guy.


  Picture Great Dane vs Surprised Corgi and you get the idea.


  So after all was said and done the Floor Guy who got threatened wanted to blast the windows out of this dude's Hood Cruiser with my handgun at around 5 AM. I was willing to entertain the idea at first but realized that I was the only one of the three of us who could hit the asshole's vehicle at 150 ft which is how far we had to go to get out of surveillance camera range.


 At this point, despite my alcoholic impairment, I decided to do the responsible thing and declare the whole concept a bad idea. I don't own small cute guns that go 'crack' and 'pop' and wouldn't be noticed by the surrounding apartments. I own giant, death spewing shit-cannons that make jolly fucktons of noise and fire and put massive holes in stuff. Because...


     
  If I am ever forced to shoot something, by God it's going to stay shot.



 


  So we hid behind a parked Suburban and threw rocks at it until all the driver side windows had been broken, totally without gunfire. 


  

 Safety first.





  Well folks, that's it for this one. I apologize for the slow down in recent posting, but I have other irons in the fire and someday you may be able to enjoy one of them in a classy theater near you. Maybe even in 3D or TittyVision™!


  Until the next post I'd just like to thank all my loyal followers who stop me in the street and ask me for money and then tell me how much they enjoy my blog when I tell them I don't carry cash. It means a lot to me that you thought I was so good I actually made money from writing the Plight.


  Warms me bollocks at night.




Peace, Rihanna and Reasonably Priced Love-Substitute,
-The StripperHerder

                                               










*1 I realize that this is a horrible caption. I accept it. I acknowledge it. And most importantly, I embrace it.






*2 But who cares about that?






*3 Enya has zero street cred.

It's Getting Cold Out, Throw Another Stripper On The Fire. Or, Scientists Theorize That Semen May Cause Pregancies, Story At Eleven.

  This whole post is going to be about stuff I talk about on a regular basis, namely human stupidity and other shit that happens all the time at our club.




  Human stupidity is an unfortunate side dish you're going to eat a lot of when working in the booze slinging portion of the service industry. It is the curse of a vengeful God who is pissed off because you're able to make a living without intense and protracted physical labor, or the blessing of the Church.


  Now that being said, I'm going to offer up some justification for my hostility towards dumb people.


  I, myself, am not dumb by any means. I are actually pretty smart. I have the ability to learn anything at all that I am interested in without expending all that much effort.


  The problems in the path of my intellect, not unlike tree trunks laid across a bullet train's tracks, are as follows:


A) I'm not interested in anything that is practical, useful or could make me large amounts of money.


B) My intelligence is hampered by a healthy dose of poor impulse control, laziness and the inability to deny myself instant gratification.


C) It's easier to be smug about my intellect than to really apply it to something outside of trivia.


D) I am afraid of failure, therefore it's easier to just not challenge myself in any way rather than to venture and lose.


E) I hate 95% of mankind so I wouldn't want to accidentally make any kind of breakthrough that might benefit them.



  So stupidity is one of my all time pet peeves. I can accept ignorance I suppose, but I feel like the truly stupid should stay at home and work on being less of an idiot rather than going out among other humans and spreading their stupid-spore.






-The ATM: Listen, I know I've pretty well covered the ATM in at least 3 other posts I can think of. How can I possibly have anything amusing left to say about ATM's and the morons who try to use them?

  Well, I don't. ATM's aren't intrinsically amusing machines, they are not built with humor in mind at all. They simply give you money from your account when you perform a very familiar and simple set of tasks that you've performed thousands of times before. In fact here is a list of terms that don't describe an ATM whatsoever and may literally be construed as antonyms of the ATM experience for most people.

    -Baffling, Mysterious, Enigmatic, Confusing, Alien, Conundrum, Riddle, Mathematically Impossible, Fiendishly Difficult, Like Super Hard Dude, Lottery and Utterly Flummoxing.


  Let me take this opportunity to point out that there are only 4 possible ways to begin an ATM transaction, thus leading to a random 25% chance of getting it right on your first try, and leading to a 25% gain in odds with each successive attempt, unless you're a fuckwit in which case you could be there forever.



  The card can only be inserted into the machine in four ways:



-Mag strip up and to the left.
-Mag strip up and to the right.
-Mag strip down and to the left.
-Mag strip down and to the right.


  That's it. Four possibilities. There is no fourth dimension, no secret language and no esoteric alchemy involved whatsoever. Therefore if you feel like you've tried all four of these possibilities and you still can't make the ATM give you money, you're drunk-go home.

  I would never think to ask a stranger to help me use an ATM because that would be admitting that I'm a complete fucking lipdragger and I won't do that unless it's a close friend of mine (who already realizes that I can drink myself back to fetal stage). Seriously, in the annals of defeat, being vanquished by a bank teller machine ranks really high on the list of stunning idiocy. Children use ATM's.

  These conquered people will always make it seem like the ATM is somehow at fault, not them. The poor abused ATM will even spit out a receipt when it fails to yield money saying why it didn't give you any. All one has to do is read it for a valuable clue.


  Frequent drunk hurdles to successful ATM use are:


-You've gone over your allotted withdraw limit or exceeded the number of transactions allowed per day.

-You've asked for too much money. Most strip clubs have a transaction limit so that someone who wants an inadvisable amount of cash will have to do multiple transactions thus making the club more money through it's insane ATM fees.

-You entered an incorrect PIN code, you fucking retard.

-God hates you and so does everybody else.

                                                A world of infinite mystery awaits.

  



        More Stupid Stripper Tricks, Vol 17





-Champagne Room Ninja: At any club you care to name, the dancer gets paid a certain amount for a VIP room and the club takes the rest. If the room is $500 an hour, chances are the dancer is only going to get $200-300 of that.

  SO some stwippers think that they can just sneak into a room with a customer, have him pay the full amount for the room and keep it all. Like the Floor Gripes aren't going to notice. We may be big and simple, but we're not big and stupid...


-But the Manager Said: Sometimes a stripper will come up to you and say something horribly wrong sounding and follow it up "Insert Manager's Name Here said it would be OK."

  You fuckwit stripper. I have a radio. Your machinations cannot outrun a radio signal.

  Never stopped them from trying though.


-I'll Tip You Next Time: Yup, the check is in the mail. Payment is forthcoming. No seriously, I got you. Sure, Jesus is real.


  Based on these fleeting guarantees, I figure I'm owed $72,334 over the course of my career, give or take a few dollars. I keep telling myself I should keep a small notepad and pen handy at all times and always make a note when a dancer tells me this and make sure she sees me doing it.

  Not that this would help any.



 

And finally...I'm giving myself a medal tonight. It's not a medal for doing something great, it's a medal for not doing something terrible.

                                           First Prize in the Failure To Choke A Bitch category.



  "Don't you fail to choke a bitch every night?" you ask. Well yes, yes I refrain from throttling a loony cunt every single day I work, but tonight was something a bit special. You see we have this dancer named, I don't know, let's refer to her as Toby because she's built like a 12 year old boy whose parents inexplicably decided to ram some fake C cup titties into him.

  So Toby and some other daffy twat we'll call Stinky claim they did 5 dances for a guy and that he owes them $125 each. I caught the guy as he was trying to flee the club and said gimme me a minute and I'll get this worked out. So I contact the Counter to find out how many dances these girls actually did.

  Well it turns out the Counter was busy doing something else and had failed to count any of their dances at all so we had no proof as to how many dances this guy did or didn't do. Add into this equation that unless he gets physical with me first, I can't actually put my hands on him at all without opening myself and the club up for a lawsuit. So all the man had to do was make his way in a determined and nonviolent fashion out the door to sweet, sweet freedom and there was fuck all I could do about it.

  So taking into account all these facts, plus the added tidbits that stacking dances is (still) not allowed at the club and that Toby is a shitty tipper, my motivation level wasn't very high. I get the guy to agree to pay them for 3 dances each for a total of $150 and, having explained the situation to the girls, get them to accept payment for 3 dances. I get his credit card to run the club's funny money to pay the dancers.

  What I failed to mention is the upcharge on the funny money, the 15% the club tacks on to rape customers. I return to him with a receipt for $172.50, not the $150 he was expecting and he flat out refuses to pay the extra $22.50. As if somehow he wasn't still getting away with fucking murder, financially speaking. We finally convince the guy to go to the ATM (which to his credit he was able to use on the first try) and get $150

  SO at the end of the night the mismanager, Sir Oswald Cabbagemaster VII refuses to let Toby slide on her house fees, a paltry $25. Both Toby and Sir Oswald start screaming, she about losing out on $50, he about losing $25.

  I'd like to pause for a moment just to mention that I've seen Toby walk out with $500-1000 on many nights. Despite her lack of physical charms, she gets by on a latent pedophile gene some men obviously carry which makes them crave young boys but feel OK about it if the boys have breast implants.

  We're talking about $50 here folks...

  Toby of course resorts to tears but Sir Cabbagemaster was unmoved. She had to pay the house fee.

  Stinky for her part, rather than appreciating she was gonna get paid for some of the dances she did, rather than none, just got all shitty and said that if she had to suffer then everyone was going to suffer.

  Fuck you, Stinky.



 







  You know, I thought I was going to be done here, but I have a final gripe to add inspired by Stinky bitching about how she was raising a child all on her own and that men like tonight's asshole didn't understand how hard that is.

  Well I can sympathize, but only in a limited manner. What I'm really tired of is how some parents complain about how hard raising a child/children is. Fucking duh. Turns out it can be pretty challenging, huh?

  Who would've thought?


  My problem with all this is they make it seem like offspring are just something that happened, like your car breaking down, or the bus running late. Like they have no culpability in the matter whatsoever and we should somehow have extra pity on them for making poor decisions or a lack of planning.

  I've said it once and I will reiterate it because I believe in it strongly, it's no mystery how kids are made. They aren't dropped off by random watershed inhabiting birds and they don't just spontaneously appear in patches of leafy green vegetables. Accept a load of happy little sperm in your vagina without using birth control and you may just have one of the wee buggers start growing in you.

  

  Absolutely zero rocket science involved.

  
  So, why the fat hairy fuck should I feel some sort of extra sympathy for you because you didn't have to foresight to demand a load be pumped onto your face rather than in your hoo-ha? Just because you didn't have to presence of mind not to use birth control, or decided to have a child with someone who you didn't know well enough to realize he was going to disappear when you told him you were pregnant?

  I don't get it. 

  Ladies, I'm not exonerating men for responsibility here, far from it. But most of my experience in this area stems form females, not males, so I'm a bit biased and extremely fed up with women who think the world somehow owes them some sort of indulgence for being sexually stupid or irresponsible. Grow the fuck up.

  And while I'm on the subject of irresponsible breeding, why the hell would someone who makes $10 an hour, can't drive and indeed doesn't even own a car, impregnate a chick? Seriously, can anyone tell me? That's what one of our cooks did and he even managed to do it with a girl he really hates as an added bonus.



  I just don't understand the way some people think. I was listening to the radio a few months back and there was an interview with a sad Spanish couple. They were sad because with all the economic hardships and fiscal austerity measures going on in Spain, they couldn't afford to have a child. It was simply beyond their financial means.

  Well fuck, I thought. Move to America. Not being able to afford having children stops absolutely no one from doing it anyway. Don't worry about it, there's plenty of dumbshit taxpayers here, like me, who will help you feed your poorly thought out offspring. Continue your careless breeding, we're here for you.


 
  All that being said there is no fucking rules at all about how to proceed through life. It states, absolutely no where, that you are born, you grow up, you get a job, you get married, you have kids and then you die.

  There is no obligation to reproduce. If children are your idea of happiness, then by all means start squeezing them out, just ask yourself if you can support them first because I'm tired of paying for them.


  That is all. Hate mail can be sent to stripperherder@yahoo.com. I relish it.



  Fuck your couch,
-The StripperHerder