Strippers and dogs years

Justice

They say dogs age the equivalent of seven years for every one human year. My 49-year-old (in dog years) hound dog is snoring next to me. I've had him since he was a puppy. In what seems like a few lazy months, I've seen him go from a wide-eyed energetic baby to a sad-looking old man. His eyebrows and chin turned white, and he's always ready for a nap. He likes to sit on the bench next to me at the park while the other dogs play.

I kind of love it, actually. His dull old teeth don't chew up my spike heels anymore. He's not compelled to tear up any furniture. I'm also sad, though. Cliche as it might be, he's my best friend. He's the only man that sleeps in my bed, and I never get tired of kissing him. It's sad to know he's aging. I haven't been frozen in time either.

Strippers, I believe, age in accelerated dog year increments as compared to civilian women.

A few days ago I ran into a stripper I met the first day I started stripping. She looked like she had put on 12 years in the past five.

The day I met her, she looked like she could have been underage. She was thin with fine blonde hair and a face that Polansky would love. She wouldn’t have looked out of place at a high school. I remember being jealous of how perfect and perky her boobs were.

Nowadays, her face is puffy, red and headed south. She has dark under-eye circles. Her eyes are always half shut from being wasted. God knows what she's on anymore. She used to give me swigs of whiskey from a bottle in her locker, but what she does now, I'm guessing, is much harder. She hides her now shapeless body in a dress made of too much fabric. Her fine blonde hair is flat, greasy and always a mess. And those nice boobs she had? They look more like my dog's floppy ears than anything else. She got chewed up and spit out by the industry.

I wonder how I would look if I hadn't been stripping all these years. What effects have all these blacked-out, drunken nights had on my face? I think my saving grace has been my poor work ethic, which has kept my time at work to a minimum, but I still feel like the job has taken its toll on me.

While the second-hand smoke, drug use and alcohol abuse play a big role in the accelerated aging effects of this lifestyle, I think a huge part of it is the stress and misery of it all. There is something about it that makes me feel like it drains the life out of me. I can stay up late, drink all night and be fine the next day unless I do it at work. Lately, I haven't even been able to work two days in a row. More than once in the past week, I've gotten completely ready for work: hair, make-up, nails done and then fallen asleep with the dog on the couch just because I couldn't bring myself to face it all again.

Maybe I haven't visibly aged much. People guess I'm somewhere between 19 and 30. I'm 26. It's hard to tell how old you look, since you see yourself every day. I'm not entirely in touch with reality, and I have the good sense to know it. I feel like I should get on the face injection wagon pretty soon, though. Maybe start eating organic. Things like that. The old Botox and detox combo.

It wouldn't hurt to quit stripping either.

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