Lithium Sunset

I have this friend whom we will call Cherry. This is not her real name. I am not friends with any strippers from the 1980s.

Note that this is not because I'm not OPEN to the idea of being friends with strippers from the 1980s. The stigmatization of sex work can lead to a generic, moralizing hostility that creates a breeding ground for draconian, wrong-headed legislation, doing no good for anyone except for lawmakers who enjoy flexing about law and order in the hours they're not spending actually meeting up with sex workers.* What I'm saying is I would totally be friends with a stripper from the 1980s, but odds are she's too busy with her grandkids to hang out with the likes of me.

So obviously I screwed up by choosing Cherry as a pseudonym because, look, it got us all sidetracked. But I already typed it all out, so it's too late. Go ahead, try to change it. You can't, can you? See? Stuck with it forever.

My friend Cherry is a special-needs school teacher. In the modern United States, where people are essentially financially prohibited from being actually helpful to other humans, this is the closest equivalent we have to an actual saint. Please note being helpful in this way is also financially prohibitive (after taxes, it's more or less a volunteer position), but luckily her spouse makes enough money in his conventionally transactional profession that they can afford to not starve to death.

Cherry and I used to work together. Note that I'm not saying I've ever worked as either a 1980s stripper or a special-needs school teacher. Before she transubstantiated into her sanctified form, she sullied herself in my profession, which for the purposes of this story we will say is stripper from the 2010s. It's like stripper from the 1980s, but with a better class of spray-tan to hide the stretch-marks.

The things about special-needs school teachers is that they emerge from the womb more or less fully formed as special-needs school teachers, meaning that even in the points of their lives where that is not their title, it's who they at an atomic, essential level. This became obvious to me very on in our tenure as co-workers. Of course it then became my primary goal in life to erode this person's outermost level of optimism and grace.

Psychologically we could speculate all day about what would make someone like me want to/have to undermine the basic decency of a basically decent person. I'm comfortable with the premise that sometimes I'm just kind of an asshole. Feel free to speculate on your own, but for the purposes of this story, we can leave it there.

This took the form of basically feeding her depressing news stories or presenting work scenarios to her that were so patently absurd that they bred the kind of cynical frustration one can only truly develop in public sector or public-sector-adjacent workplaces. The fusion star at the core of her being was enough to burn away my wispy tendrils of darkness, but every once in a while I could get her to agree some aspect of the world or our work was "a bunch of dang bullcrap" and that was good enough. The little triumphs mean the most. Well, I guess not on any kind of true value scale next to the big triumphs, but one takes what one gets.

Cherry left her job next to me at the 2010s stripper factory before the Trump election. We've kept in touch on facebook like middle-aged white people do and the occasional texts. I'll hear from her every once in a while where we catch up on how our kids are doing and the typical whatnot.

She also likes me because she knows I'm a gross lefty pinko. She's very much more middle of the road than I, but the company around her (by the nature of her job and who she is) tends to be the kind of aggressively Lutheran nonconfrontational that leans center-right for one and avoids all conversation that might betray a strong feeling. As a result, she likes to check in with me to blurt out the occasional texted position in favor of feminism or immigrant rights or something you don't say while manning the booth at the school fair fundraiser cake walk.

And so it was with all the glee and satisfaction in the world when last week, out of the blue, after not having heard from her in a few weeks, I get the following text: "Oh my god. He's going to start World War III on fucking twitter."

Yeah, OK, maybe Donald Trump will start World War III on twitter. I'm not looking forward to that particularly. In the meantime, do what you can to take pleasure in the little triumphs. That's what I'm doing. Thanks, Cherry.

---

*There are actually about five zillion stories I could have linked to about this, obviously. I just chose the most recent one.