Collage of Compliance Part 5

Memes From a Former Stripper

The other parts of the series can be found below.

Collage of Compliance, Part 1

Collage of Compliance, Part 2

Collage of Compliance, Part 3

Collage of Compliance Part 4

My “cousin,” as I’ve mentioned before, is a former stripper. I really don’t know how deeply involved she got into that stuff, but I know she did it for a time in Toledo, and Las Vegas, and perhaps a few other places in the US. She now has a “respectable” job in healthcare, as a respiratory therapist.

I remember the first time I met my “cousin” the summer when I was 12. I was hanging out with Beth and a few other friends when she approached me at Longfellow Park. Apparently somebody in our group had told her my name, or more specifically my last name.

“You have the same last name as me!” She exclaimed excitedly. “Maybe we’re cousins!” She lived close by my house and started visiting. My father, being the family historian that he was, asked her a lot of questions about her background. He thought we might be related through two brothers who had lived in West Virginia in the 1800’s, and thought we might be around fifth cousins in biological terms. The term cousin stuck.

My cous had a rough adolescence. Her parents were going through an acrimonious divorce and her Mom was hitting the bottle a bit too hard. As my friend got into her teenage years she started raiding the liquor cabinet herself. It was all over once she discovered that boys thought that she was pretty.

That all came to a head during an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where my cousin’s mother came in, drunk herself, and began hitting and verbally abusing her daughter as she accused her of stealing booze. The police were called to the AA meeting and she had to live with some foster parents in South Toledo. I visited her once down there she said they had 10 other foster kids and everyone was treated like slaves. She got a boyfriend to jailbreak her from that place after a time.

She got into a lot of stuff and our paths diverged for quite a while, though I will post about our infamous car accident for paid subscribers. She reconnected with me through social media in around 2010. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that she was going to nursing school and was graduating soon. In retrospect though many of the girls I knew who worked in the sex industry in some way got into medical care and especially near death care later in their lives. I know of two others who worked at a nursing home and in a hospice facility, respectively. Is there some type of connection between sex and death? It sounds a little kinky to contemplate.

As a respiratory therapist she is the person who puts the ventilator on patients in the hospital. For many people I suspect that she was the last face they saw on this mortal plane. Since Covid happened her obscure some-type-of-nurse job began receiving a lot more attention for both better and worse. I was extremely curious about her experiences in 2020. Why bother trying to decipher third hand news media accounts when your cousin works on the front lines in a hospital putting ventilators on people?

“We were losing about 60 people a day during the height of it!” My cousin informed me in June of 2020 as I sat at a Mexican restaurant with her in Toledo. “They were interviewing people at our hospital on the news.”

My cousin worked at a hospital in Detroit, Michigan, which is the nearest large and commonly known city in our area. Where I grew up in Toledo was only about three miles from the Michigan state line and the Motor City is about 50 miles north. They had supposedly gone through a disastrous Covid outbreak in the Spring of 2020 and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer had imposed some of the most baffling and arbitrary restrictions in the entire United States. She outlawed the sale of garden seeds during spring planting season, outlawed boating, shuttered churches, all entertainment venues, and most “elective” surgeries. Despite this she kept liquor stores and head shops open and infamously declared that abortion clinics needed to stay online because they were “life sustaining.” I had no problem with everything being kept open. But I found the logic of her choices highly suspect and infuriating.

Some other US states had recommended that people limit their orgy size while outright banning weddings. I have no personal issue with what two or more consenting adults want to do in their free time, but this standard should be applied equally and if anything skew towards wholesome, uplifting family fun. I really had to wonder what these politicians were doing in their own free time based on what they felt was too important to shut down.

I had certainly heard that Michigan had a huge Covid outbreak, but the idea of people dropping dead on the streets flew in the face of my on the ground experience in Las Vegas delivering food during the height of the pandemic. My cousin was a bit like me, it turns out, in that I think she needed to work out of the house during that time. She had to see what was happening on the ground for herself based on her own observations. It gave her life a meaning she craved.

“We’re just their Guinea pigs at the hospital. They’re testing us every week for antibodies for some type of survey. I have antibodies they can fuck off.” My cousin told me. She had been sure that she had had Covid in February of 2020, but when she tested at the time three PCR tests came up negative. Two months later, when she felt perfectly fine, she tested positive for antibodies. So much for those highly accurate test strips.

I had read on a lot of more conspiracy minded forums that the overwhelmed hospitals story was fake news, and that hospitals in the USA remained mostly empty. I saw less ambulances in the Spring of 2020 delivering food in Las Vegas than I had seen in times past. I was able to reconcile these two conflicting viewpoints after reading about a directive from Governor Whitmer that all suspected Covid patients would be routed to certain designated hospitals. This made perfect sense in light of the mass panic. Some hospitals, such as the one my cousin worked at, would be designated with Covid wards and suspected patients would go there first, so they would appear overwhelmed. Other hospitals designated for other types of patients would probably be near empty. It was the only way I could reconcile these disparate data points.

My cousin had never been politically active but voiced extreme dissatisfaction with hospital policies that affected her. She was lionized as a hero during the early days of the pandemic but felt the hospital was trying to buy her off with cheap baubles and free pizza. She channeled this energy on Facebook into memes that were often banned. She tried to join Parlor and get off facebook, but that got shut down. Now she just stays on there, going to facebook jail for posting politically incorrect things. I think just like her job she doesn’t know what else to do. She’s one of very few facebook pages that I regularly check anymore just for the laugh.

She was not interested in the Covid “vaccine.” She posted a popular meme in late 2020 about “Things I trust more than a vaccine from Bill Gates” which included things like “Tap water from Flint, Michigan, One Million Dollars From a Nigerian Prince, A One Night Stand With Charlie Sheen”, and “A Date With Bill Cosby.” In early 2021 she made clear that she did not feel that she needed the “vaccine,” as she had superior natural immunity.

I messaged her in the summer of 2021. She told me that she was facing extreme pressure to get the shots. “I wouldn’t trust that thing.” I messaged back. She told me that all of the nurses had gotten their conjabs, all of them seemed perfectly fine, and that they insisted that it was no big deal.

“They’re going to mandate it soon.” My cousin told me. I messaged back that I had a bad feeling about it and that I would hold her ground if I were her. She did for a while, but then in December of 2021 posted a quickly deleted facebook post complaining about how sick she felt after her second jab.

I messaged her some days ago to follow up. She had gone out with my sister in law (my brother remarried as I did) drinking. She seems to have sprained her ankle and is taking a little time off work. She got back to me this time.

“The hospitals aren’t as overwhelmed now, but the nurses are quitting in droves. I left for a better paying position. They’re consolidating the hospitals, which is worrying.”

I asked her how she felt after the conjab. “I am not getting a booster.” I asked her why not. “I was way sicker over that shit than I was with Covid.”

I find it sad and predictable that the original reason for shutting down everything was so that hospital capacity would not be overwhelmed, when now it seems that actions positioned to push the jabs might end up collapsing healthcare as we know it. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Why don’t doctors make house calls any more? Why is everything so regulated according to top down, ineffective treatments instead of targeted to what is in the best interest of individual patients? Why are there so many administrators and bureaucrats dictating policy and so few actual staff doing the real hands-on work with patients? And of course, how are they going to find effective treatments for “vaccine” injuries when they refuse to admit that such a thing even exists, because money?

I hope my cousin is well, but I feel like she lost a part of herself in this, like she was needle raped. I understand her: this job is everything and she always felt like too much of an outsider to go against the tide. I remember her loving when I wrote about our car accident but she made a point that she didn’t want to be tagged or named in any way, because of course she works in a respectable field now. We were driving to her strip club that night. The hospital staff are starting to sound like military veterans who saw the ravages of war and are trauma bonded to each other. But just like stripping, it’s just a job.

I’m starting to personally think sex work is more honest labor…