"I Read Memories. I Read the Future."

More Cathouse photos.  I swore away from them, I know.  But it is like crack. I'll need a sponsor, a counselor, a social network, some Antabuse, someone from the priesthood, and some welfare money if I am going to quit.  The girls won't leave me alone.  Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in.

Last night I did a shoot with Drug Skinny for her website.  I don't do things like that, but I did for her because. . . I'm a good guy?  I feel I owe her?  O.K.  O.K.  She knows I'm writing stories about her.  Said it was fine.  Last night, she said she was writing stories about me.

"?!?!?!?!?!?," I said.

Never thought of that before.  I think she's been taking pictures of me, too, with her shoe phone.

"You don't know anything about me," I protested.  And that's true.

"Oh, you don't know what I know," she said.  She sells herself as being paranormal.  She makes money on the web with that.

"You're paranormal for subnormals," I told her.  "What do you read?  Cards?  Tea leaves?  Auras? Bumps on the cranium?"

"I read memories," she said.  "I read the future."

How can I resist a girl like that?  She may not be paranormal, but she's far enough outside the realm of normal to be interesting.  Para-usual at least.

So we dressed her up like a gypsy.  Or she did, rather.  I wanted nothing to do with styling this.  I was just the camera guy.

Afterwards, we went to dinner.  Her phone kept dinging.

"What the hell?"

"It's responses to my YouTube site.  I made a forty second video this afternoon and posted it.  I got four hundred hits the first hour."

"What was it?"

"Just a dominatrix thing."

Ding.  Ding.

She checked her phone for a minute.

"A guy just sent me 100 Euros.  Another guy sent me $90.  In the last two hours I've made almost two hundred dollars."

"For what?  What are they buying?"

She looked at me like I was needy.

"They just like the video, I guess."

"What?  They just watch a YouTube video and send you money?"

She started reading me comments.

"OMG.  You just made my pants tight.  I hope there are many more of these.  You're so beautiful.  I love you.  I want to be your slave."

These were separate comments, not one person.  She showed me the video.  She didn't look like a dominatrix.  She was sitting in a bra talking into the computer.  I couldn't hear what she was saying, but she wasn't even made up.

"Jesus Christ," I said.  "I guess this is what happens when people lose religion."

The girl's a born money maker.

"You pay for dinner," I said.

Do you think you know what's going on in the world?  You don't.  Nobody does.  It is impossible.  We have a small little piece of it and enlarge that in our minds to encompass others.  But that's not it.  I've sheltered myself away from the weirdness for a long, long time, but now it is back on me like a hurricane.  The world has gone mad.  These are surely the Last Days.  You'll see.  Revelations.  There will be no shelter from the storm.

But I must button up and get ready for another day at the factory.  There is that.  It is the regular, most pernicious horror.  It is like sunrise and clockwork.  It is what I have.  It is what I count on.  It is what we call normal.