Do you struggle whenever you have to distill your life down into a few sentences for any kind of “about me” blurb? I know I do. Figuring out where to even begin to tell a story that is complicated and contradictory and still going on overwhelms me every time.
So. Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Opal, your friendly neighborhood dominatrix. “Opal” is not my legal name, obviously, it’s my sex worker name. I picked Opal because I wanted something that suggested luxury and wealth, and I liked the hint of rarity. Gemstones are classic stripper names but ‘Opal’ is not commonly used. I also like the actual essence of opals. I love iridescent and opalescent things. I love when colors have hidden depths to them, that’s very much my style. I could go on about how opals are formed, the geologic processes that make them, but I don’t want to bore you. Suffice to say that I find a lot of meaning in the stones themselves.
My professional name is not simply ‘Opal’ though, it’s ‘Evil Opal’. My style as a dominatrix is very seductive and playful and I frequently prefer dressing in colorful silk or spandex over the traditional black leather. So I felt it wise to remind my audience (and potential clients) from the outset that just because I may seem sweet doesn’t mean I won’t leave you bruised, broken, and begging for more.
I have at times considered changing my name & dropping the ‘Evil’, particularly since I retired from doing in-person session work. But I always come down on the side of keeping it. I figure that the people who are going to be really put off by my moniker are the ones who would see a person like me – a kinky person, a sex worker, a powerful, independent female – as evil with or without such a title.
I’m semi-retired now. Not because of my age; I didn’t even really get started until I was well into my 30’s and I’m really just now hitting my groove as a GILF Goddess. No, it was COVID that did me in.
It’s always been vitally important for me to be able to have hope for the future. And the pandemic really slaughtered my sense of optimism. Witnessing people who had been perfectly willing to accept the necessity of vaccinations for everything suddenly losing their damn minds over getting one more shot, even if it could save their lives. Witnessing the trauma of healthcare workers caring for people who insisted they weren’t dying of covid to their last, gasping breath. And then those same workers left to deal with the hostility of their own communities accusing them of being in on some conspiracy. And all this fucking bullshit because a bunch of rich assholes want to stay rich and powerful.
You see, I thought once people started actually dying that folk’s eyes would be opened and the spell woven by the rich assholes would be broken. I genuinely believed that once hospital emergency rooms were filling up, and people were actually getting sick and scared, that they would wake the fuck up and start listening to doctors instead of politicians. But boy was I wrong.
Here’s a thing to know about me: I’m a horror fan. And one of my favorite genres of horror is the medical apocalypse, aka pandemic thriller. That’s right, there’s a whole genre of fiction dedicated to pandemic stories. Why? Well, partly because the idea is such fertile ground for human storytelling. But also partly because there has been SO MUCH SCIENCE on the subject. World governments weren’t prepared for this pandemic because they knew about it ahead of time; they were prepared because they have been taking steps to prepare for such an event even before appearance of HIV and Ebola back in the 80’s. Scientists knew that disease outbreaks are like hurricanes, it’s not IF but WHEN an outbreak would hit. Therefore those scientists have been preaching for decades that we must be prepared AND THEY WERE RIGHT.
Some of us have been following the science news on these subjects, and also following the science fiction inspired by the science news. So we were not at all surprised when it finally happened. Nor did we fall for any of that “plandemic” bullshit. Again – it wasn’t a matter of if a pandemic would happen, it was when. And if you recall we already had several scares with bird flu and swine flu and even Ebola. Thank fucking god it was a respiratory virus and not a hemorrhagic fever that went global is all I can say, seriously.
Back when the COVID19 pandemic started I predicted that it would end around 2023. This was an educated guess based on how long previous global pandemics have taken to burn themselves out. And I was right about that. What I got dead wrong was my hopeful estimate that folks would start following the science about how to deal with it once they actually started getting sick & dying themselves.
After the pandemic started I stopped doing in-person sessions, obviously, but at first I kept doing my thing online. For a while I even considered it my way of contributing to our collective mental health. If I could help folks relieve some stress that would be awesome, right? But as time wore on I saw people stubbornly clinging to their political beliefs even as those beliefs were literally, in real time, killing them. And eventually this brutal evidence of human folly coming after the events of the previous few years was enough to push me into a deep depression.
Here’s another thing to know about me: I’ve struggled with mental health issues since I was a teenager. Mood swings and chronic depression are simply part of my life. So I have, by necessity, developed a range of techniques to deal with these issues to allow me to survive and even thrive.
Anyway… I witnessed the evidence that an overwhelming mass of my fellow Americans would choose to cling to their partisan beliefs even as those beliefs literally killed them. And that was enough to drive me into a suicidal depression of my own. My way of dealing with that was, for a while, to stop interacting with other people outside of my family circle at all.
I decided instead to focus my creative energies on my garden, which had been neglected for a long, long time. And this blog is sort of the result.
