Dear Vincent, The Prize is the Rest of Your Life.

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Subject: The Prize is the Rest of your life.

Dear Vincent, 

So guess what? I found my cervix! Also found you on Facebook. Nice (dot, dot dot, In case you're wondering, I wouldn't necessarily not date someone who curled, lawnbowled and/or go-karted)

Never would have guessed your name though I'm sure in real life
(dot, dot, dot. 
One of the many problems with 
Professional Boundaries is
They don't tend to roll off the tongue.)
I suppose PC has never been your thing. 
"40 is the new 30! And Down Syndrome kids are so cute, right?" 
(dot, dot, dot. Yah, he really said this. Rolled right off his tongue.)

Lucky for you, your girlfriend looks like she’s very youthful! And such a glorious high achiever! Hope she has fun with the 
(dot, dot, dot… let’s just pretend she’s off to save the manatees somewhere boring like Florida). There’s nothing like when your dreams come true. 

Too bad your époque baveuse is already over. Seems a little premature.  
(dot, dot, dot. You can say a slug is a bête baveuse and this means they are a slimy creature. 
dot, dot, dot. 
Yah, ten minutes before you promise yourself you’ll block somebody on Facebook forever, the best is to first stalk every available detail of their profile so you don’t miss any mourning of any bygone kinky era that stroking an exotic animal’s ass in some beautiful exotic place seems to evoke. And you don’t want to miss any girlfriends either, especially the ones who evoke your deep seated Mammoth Complex. Thoroughly peruse all the tiny girlfriends, from exotic places, or else ultra overachievers from nearby.)

Benjamin Hunting says that the cervix leads to Narnia. Your Facebook profile led me to paint over all of the Vincents on my wall and can all this self-inflicted torture.  

The only Vincent left on the wall is, Two things I really believe in are Deep Cleans and Mondays without Vincent. Whatever that means. 

One time, I wrote a deeply terrible and embarrassing poem called, 
I cave in and pretend I’m fucking Vincent,  
and one of the most embarrassing parts is, 
"Professionals Boundaries mean that 
I love you is pathology. 
You get all the money. 
And I get all the shame." 

The sad and bitter part of me wants to say, DEAR VINCENT, HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE THE WHITE MAN IN THE ROOM WITH ALL THE POWER AND ALL THE MONEY? 

In fact I doubt the CLSC gives all that much money. 
In fact, I get all the power, since I get all the words. 
In fact, I don’t have that many more words to say except maybe everyone can calm down about borderline personality disorders. 

And I think the way the crush got handled was a mess but if I were you, I’d follow my lead and lovingly forgive yourself. I lovingly forgive you, and will probably go on to blame myself on the whole thing every other Tuesday until it does not matter anymore. 

Oh yah, and wash your lunch dishes and dust your filing cabinet and the poor goddamn headless wooden lady statue! For fuck’s sake! I still feel grateful for what you gave me, even if I never turn it into a brilliant screenplay, and even if I continue to struggle with lunch choices and sleeping and fulfilling my enormous potential for the rest of my life. I am sure I will always remember and cherish the many times I felt safe and seen in your windowless office, plus the satisfying smirks and laughter.  
And I’ll miss these fucking letters. I guess they were more for me than they were for you. And maybe also for Benjamin Hunting who loved my sentence, My greatest gift is finding the trail of infinite grief and following it for infinity, but I thought it was too cheesy. 

Letting go is no joke. I keep whining that I want a prize. At least everybody knows I win for the Best Erotic Transference on the Internet. 

Plus Benjamin Hunting says, “The prize is the rest of your life.” And my époque baveuse has barely just begun. 

Love you, good-bye, Erica. 

BAM! 

The Prize is the Rest of Your Life.

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Dear Vincent, All your sadness is in your lungs. Also the World is a Heartbreaker. 

Dear Vincent, You are not the only person I write letters to. 

Dear Vincent, Now you know I have that thing where you love your therapist.

Dear Vincent, All your sadness is in your lungs. Also the World is a Heartbreaker

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Subject: All Your Sadness is in Your Lungs

Dear Vincent,

What’s deeply embarrassing is that when I can’t sleep I listen to Oprah, and sometimes I imagine that if only I could think the right thoughts and get myself on the right vibes and wavelength, that I’ll manifest some magnificent and magical life and end up on the plushy emerald green chairs in the middle of Oprah’s emerald green Oprah Forest and I’ll get to tell Oprah all about what I know for sure, and what makes my heart sing, and finally I’ll be rich and happy and well fucked.

Circa 2009, Back when I used to believe in Digestive Enzymes,
Also tequila.

(dot. dot dot. Every time I write about toenail fungus, the fungus takes over and then there is heaps of confusion. Like in university, I tried to write a play called, Clap Loud If You Believe In Digestive Enzymes, and the protagonist's name was Amy, and Amy believed in Digestive Enzymes, and she had terrible toenail fungus, and unrelated to the toenail fungus, she quite literally puked in her mouth for a very large portion of the day. Amy's next door neighbour had a five-year-old son, and also vagina cancer. And the five-year-old son liked to jump on the trampoline, and he wanted his mother to live forever.

Now I remember that the kid's name was Gordon, and one day, Gordon was jumping on the trampoline, and Amy's organs - her esophagus and colon and liver and kidneys emerged, human-sized in Amy's back yard. And then somehow everyone became tiny and ended up in Gordon's mother's uterus, or maybe her vagina or maybe a little bit of both? They were trying to fight the cancer and the fungus all at once. There could have been human-sized fungus as well. Either way, it was all kinds of confusing.)

Oprah does not feel embarrassed to feature her own self on the cover of every single Oprah magazine. And she was not too embarrassed to feature herself on her Master Class Podcast. Why I am like Oprah. I feature myself all the time.

Everyone's life is a class you can learn from, that's what Oprah says. And Oprah told her own story of when she really wanted to get the role of Shug Avery in the Color Purple and Shug Avery’s husband’s name was Harpo which is Oprah’s name backwards and so when she got an audition it all seemed like a magical manifested meant-to-be miracle. Then Oprah called a casting director to follow up on her audition, and the casting director scoffed at her and said that real actors were in the running for the part, and the real actors were skinnier and much more experienced. Oprah felt deflated so she went to the Fat Farm to jog.

I have never been to a Fat Farm, or heard of one until now, but it is somewhere I might have liked to go as a teenager. At the Fat Farm, Oprah jogged around and around the track, and she talked to God and asked God to please help her let go of all the grief and resentment around her heart, and she didn’t need to let go enough to be able to go see the movie, but could God please make her a little bit happy for the actress who got the part she so wanted. 

And Oprah jogged and jogged and jogged and gradually the plaque resentment around her heart lifted and she thought, well, maybe I can go see the movie, and after a while, she even became so happy for the skinny actress who got the part, and eventually her whole heart was light and healed, and Oprah surrendered to whatever big or not big plan that God had in store for her and then Stephen Spielberg called the Fat Farm and he said, you got the part. Oprah couldn't believe it.

"I hear you’re at a Fat Farm," said Stephen Spielberg. "Lose a pound, and you might lose the part." So Oprah stopped at Dairy Queen on the way home. She said that getting this role in the Colour Purple was proof that if you surrender fully to God’s plan, he will give you back a life far greater than anything you ever dreamed. Stephen Spielberg will call. People will skip work and lock their doors and unplug their phones to watch your face every afternoon on television. Or something like that. It was approximately 3 o'clock in the morning on some Thursday morning in February when I heard the Master Class that is Oprah's life. 

Ever since the story of Oprah and the Fat Farm and the Colour Purple, I’ve once or twice imagined that someday soon, I'll go to Parc Laurier, and I'll trudge round and round in a rectangle until all the plaque around my heart will dissolve, along with all the cravings for the exquisite prizes in the plushy emerald green Oprah chairs, and the exquisite fucks in the kitchen and this all-consuming feeling that I love you, and I'll be so happy for everyone else's black-out orgasms, and my toenails will grow back all happy and healthy and pink, and then God will reveal his real plan which will hopefully be more beautiful and lucrative and well-fucked than anything I ever could have dreamed of.

More Love from Eighteen-year-old Erica:

“One of my friends said today:  in 200 years Mother Theresa will get about one sentence in a history textbook.   Being young can really bring out questionable contemplations and aspects of our personalities.   I do hope that we can survive it all, without becoming old and bitter or prematurely dead. I am not going to become an academic, because it requires that you be much too logical and sane.  I feel that I have neither of these characteristics and oh well, I'm going to be an artist. …  

Do you think inner peace is possible or do you think I should just accept that I will be forever bouncing off the walls? 

I was thinking that maybe next year I would start hard core yoga and meditation and become composed and un-unstable but I'm afraid that unfortunately I'm addicted to this unpredictability and strangely believe that I'll be bored and uncreative and uninteresting without it."

At Grown-ups Read Things They Wrote As Kids, I was effervescent and I told all my friends how I was doing so great for February, and I gave them the speech about last February, when I wept from deep behind the bottom of my lungs  in the snow in Parc Outremont, and who was that person, and where did she go?

So many views from so many meltdowns.
Where did she go?

In fact she returned yesterday morning on Tuesday, February 12, at 9:32 a.m. in front of the bathroom sink of the Champion Meltdown House where I have melted down at least seven times in the past seven months, while shining the bathroom sink chrome, or while negotiating refrigerator drawers, or while wiping down the wooden kitchen island that seems perpetually covered with tomatoe sauce chunks, and expensive breadcrumbs.

In fact, I wept from deep behind the bottom of my lungs for a bunch of the day and would have appreciated round-the-clock care (dot dot dot by the way the cute base of my tongue dude bought me a beet latte, and I am not sure he is old enough to stand in as a potential father figure; however, he may be a solid candidate for a Wounded Bird Complex.)

At 5:34 P.M. I called my friend Sherwin with a meltdown, and Sherwin was drinking tequila and drawing a pile of garbage for the sixth last page of his tenth book.

“Every time I make a new book, I think, oh, maybe this will be the one that lets me not struggle. After all these books, it’s less and less likely. But I keep doing it, because I enjoy it.”

One of Sherwin’s first books is called,

The World
Is a
Heartbreaker  

and it is a collection of 1600 3-line pseudo-haikus, and me and blank (not Wounded Bird Complex Dude. Also not Sherwin.) and I read them to each other the first time we ever cuddled and made out, and I got to hump his leg and have an ugly-cry orgasm.

The World

Is a

Heartbreaker, by Sherwin Tija

(For sale)

A really great poem by Sherwin is

the

people who

eat pain.

(TWIAHB, by Sherwin, p.68)

and another one is

my inner life

became this

massive thing. 

(TWIAHB, by Sherwin, p. 91)

and another one is

babies screaming

like the end of

everything.
(TWIAHB, by Sherwin, p. 141)

My poem is

This morning 

2:30 a.m.

sleep fucked.

Last night, after I hung up the phone with Sherwin, I'd imagined I'd go to Parc Laurier and under the snowstorm, I’d trudge round and round in a rectangle, until all the plaque around my heart would dissolve, along with all the cravings for the exquisite prizes in the Oprah chairs, and the exquisite fucks in the kitchen and this all-consuming feeling that I love you, and I’d be so happy for  everyone who gets to have Black-Out Orgasms,  and my toenails would grow back all happy and healthy and pink, and then God would  reveal his real plan which would hopefully be more beautiful and lucrative and well-fucked than anything I ever could have dreamed of.

Instead I walked 1.75 blocks to Jean Coutu, and asked how much the toenail fungus drug would cost, and in fact, the cost was better than I thought, 37 bucks for six weeks, and despite anguished vacillation and the risk of diarrhea plus liver and kidney failure, I swiped my Visa card and bought the drugs, and everyone stared as I trudged around the perimeter of Jean Coutu, sobbing intermittently from deep behind  the bottom of my lungs.

After seven minutes, I switched to sobbing and pacing up and down the aisles of PA Nature, and then I calmed down and bought yogurt on sale, and a poppy seed baguette.

Maybe in addition to diarrhea and liver and kidney damage, the toenail fungus drug will bring fame, money, weightloss, prizes, sex, while also curing me of the tragic belief that some generic to extraordinary dude and his cock is the only thing that will ever be able to set me free.

Dear Nandi, love Erica, 2004:

“This morning I am deeply questioning the human condition, mocking and rolling my eyes at today's society, feeling intensely lofty as I come to the existential conclusion that nothing really matters, all is futile and what the hell let's eat drink and be merry. 

But no, something does matter or nobody would have lasted this long.

Oh, who am I kidding, what is the point of thinking anymore, why write, so much has already been thought and written, and it's all doomed to become a blip.”

The World
Is a
Heartbreaker.

Love, Erica. 

Spoiler Alert: This is the second last letter to Vincent. Send your worlds of heartbreaks to the secret email address ericaschmidt85(at)gmail(dot)com.

View from the hole in my crotch,
Also the view from Irreversible Climate Change.

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Dear Vincent, I still wish I / Was Miranda July

Dear Vincent, I forgave myself for not being Lena Dunham

Dear Vincent, It used to be that the last time I felt home was in a tiny blue penthouse apartment in Mysore, India on the 10th avenue of the 3rd stage of a neighbourhood called Gokulam in November of 2014.

Dear Vincent, I still wish I/ Was Miranda July.

Subject: I still wish I/Was Miranda July

Friday, February 8, 2019

Dear Vincent,

I have a saying that goes,

All your sadness is in your lungs.
I still wish I
Was Miranda July.

Just around this time last year, I published a tragic blogpost entitled, Everyone is one with the birds except for me. And I remember trudging downtown to teach yoga to the insurance people who did not like my Animal Flow routine, and on the way, I ignored a call from my optimistic and pragmatic bestie, since I was beyond Optimism and Pragmatism, and, 
adamant that I could not possibly get old if days like this were to prevail, I planned my death for March 18, 2025, the 14-year anniversary of not puking in my mouth, and I’d be 39 and four months and a couple of weeks, which is approximately my favourite age of dude, though soon this may prove to be somewhat too young for me.

Later that week in 2018, while everyone else was being one with the birds, I remember lying in the snow in front of some trees in Parc Outremont, and weeping from deep behind the bottom of my lungs.

On Wednesday night, I walked myself by those same trees, and I'd had the afternoon off, and I'd just bought the domain name Deep Cleans with Erica, and I felt bouncy and happy and I wondered, who was that, weeping from deep behind the bottom of her lungs? What a relief to be someone else, at least for now.

Everyone is one with the birds.

I got in to read at Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids again, and I am reading a couple of the emails from my Hotmail account during first-year university, and I was 18, and the emails are to Nandi who was my boss when I coached little kids on the swim team, and then Nandi moved to Calgary and he was 38 years old, and I had a crush on him, and we wrote back and forth. 

And so I have been into writing to distant 38 to 40 years old crushes for quite some time now. It feels so easy to love who I used to be, with all the hope and all the optimism. It's all very beautiful, though heartwrenching at times.

What I know for sure, by 18-year-old Erica:

“What I know for sure, as Oprah would say, is that life inevitably fluctuates, some days may feel like the act of falling into a sewer while other days see you soaring euphorically around the world.  Everyone around you wonders what it is that causes you to glow so intensely legally, morally, uncorruptly.  It's all very interesting though heartwrenching at times. 

I guess I am discovering that I am a very intense person and though I have to go through some amount of sewer moments, to put it cheesily, the rainbow/butterfly/pot of gold always reveals itself after a time… I don't buy that you're as happy as you make your mind up to be.  I think you're as happy as you're able to love and accept yourself and the people around you, life as it is, with and without miracles, its unpredictability, dissatisfactions, surprises, love, joy etc.  From the movie ‘kiss of the spiderwoman’ I heard the words ‘the best thing about being happy is the feeling that you'll never be unhappy again.’” 

Erica, 18
That feeling that  you'll never be unhappy again.
Plus groomed hair, skinny eyebrows, turquoise lasenza hydralift padded bra
and a watch.

The first half of the Every-Other-Wednesday-to-Thursday Vats-Of-Oatmeal-At-Least-Two-Half-Dying-Ferns-Plus-Expensive-Granola-Multiple-Baby Hump was cancelled this week. During the second half of the hump, the baby twins babbled, and kept reaching for the vacuum cleaner, and then in the afternoon, I got a cleaning buzz at the Self-Mutilating Parrot Family’s and even though my livelihood might be dipping back down to the poverty line, somehow I am not all that worried. When I die, I am sure I’ll have enough money to pay for my funeral. Will you come?

The best thing about being happy is the feeling that you’ll never be unhappy again.

Happy Friday!

Love, Erica.

Saturday, February 9, 2019

Dear Vincent,

I forgot to say that the day after the folding workshop, the base of my tongue told me to give the rest of the anti-keto-diet chocolate chip cookies to (dot dot dot) and his selling points are (dot dot dot)  and it seems he is old enough to stand in as a potential father figure. Let's hope he's not married, or gay, that he has an insatiable sex drive and believes in sexual transcendence, and thinks I’m vaguely awesome and that our attachment trauma is compatible. Yah, no pressure.

I’m just kind of tired of longing for my cells to dissolve in the kitchen as I get fucked. I am worried about menopause, and that it will come on fast.

Bonus from eighteen-year-old Erica:

“Some people have and always will have a tough time being happy.  I don't plan for this struggle to be a chronic aspect of my life but I do believe that an amount of suffering is essential for growth.
I have begun to religiously sing in the shower, I derive much pleasure from creative endeavors, not including essays, and also I think that there is a lot to be said for being honest. 
Real. truthful. 

Barely anyone lets it all out, due to a handicap of language and the human condition, which is apparently fallen, but there exists hope in unexpected places.  And no this does not necessarily refer to mind altering substances.  Anyways, I am eighteen years old.  That's it.  Young, but life can prove to be fleeting sometimes.  Therefore, the endeavor begins, to live fully with no regrets, climb out of the sewer when necessary, sing in the shower, and nap." 

Some days see you soaring euphorically around the world.

Some days see you soaring euphorically around the world.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Love, Erica.

However and wherever you may soar around the world, your correspondence remains welcome at the secret email address ericaschmidt85(at)gmail(dot)com. 

Let's hope he's not married, or gay, 

that he has an insatiable sex drive and believes in sexual transcendence, 

and thinks I’m vaguely awesome and that our attachment trauma is compatible.

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Dear Vincent, You will be so thrilled to know

Deep Unyielding Depression 

Dear Vincent, Some other Vincent coerced me into a blowjob

Everyone is one with the birds except for me.

Dear Vincent, You will be so thrilled to know

Wednesday, January 2, 2018

Subject: Dear Vincent, Happy New Year! You will be so thrilled to know

Dear Vincent,

Happy New Year! You will be so thrilled to know that in addition to weekly penetrative masturbation, my list of 19 for 2019 includes sending you my very last email. After that, perhaps one time per year is acceptable. Maybe I am almost ready. Maybe not. 

[dot dot dot, by the way, I also wished Vincent a happy Solstice and I told him I had a dream that he had a shaggy hippie haircut and this is not something I would not recommend. .]

I got on the podcast, Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids. It is my memoirs from when I was fifteen and the conclusion makes me cry every other time I read it. Hearing myself is neither deeply empowering nor deeply embarrassing. The host asked me if I had advice for my teenage self and before calling in, I wrote out my answer on fuschia post-it’s. 

Grown-ups Read Thing They Wrote As Kids

Episode, The Republic of Dad

[dot dot dot, I ordered Vincent’s medical records of my appointments and they came on Tuesday, December 4, 2018 and in the records, Vincent calls me Mme. and he speaks of us doing a bunch of things together in the première personne au pluriel, for example Concluons, Tramons, Co-regulons, and and Co-regulons means, let us co-regulate, and my favourite part of the records was when he referred to my 2017 New Year’s Eve Oblivion Fuck til you get rug burns from the carpet as empty calories in brackets (calories vides).]

The Fushia post-it says,

I am both humbled and a bit heartbroken by my teenage self’s enormous expectations for perfect healing. I love that part of myself who yearns for life to be deep and meaningful and spectacular. To my teenage self, I would say, keep your courage and sincerity and don’t give up. Try not to measure your so-called successes and failures. 

Though you will struggle for a long time, perhaps even your whole life, you will get to make beautiful connections and meaningful experiences and these bear more weight than the voice in your head that says, you’re a broken disaster and that your life is a series of mistakes. Bam. 

Maybe one day there will be a podcast called, Grownups Read Things They Wrote to Their Therapists and Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Cleaners. 

My friend Benjamin Hunting is coming over tonight to even out my crooked DIY haircut for my pragmatic and optimistic bestie’s wedding.

Love you!  Happy New Year! 

Best wishes as always, Erica. 

Tuesday January 8, 2019

Subject: [dot dot dot Maybe I should get my clients to sign a contract that they will fire me within the next year, forcing me to go to funeral school, or join CSIS, or become a nurse, or a sexologist. Or maybe I can become the next Marie Kondo except I am likely not tiny and sweet and adorable enough]

Dear Vincent,

On January 1, 2018, I wrote on my wall,

My goals in life are, Creativity, Service,

Buy a new roll of masking tape.

deep love for all of my cells, a clear and cleared and generous heart, what is a cervical orgasm? Ultimately, I pulled off the creativity and the service. Nailed the masking tape. The deep cellular love was a little hit or miss, as was the clear and cleared heart, but I would say my heart was mainly generous. What is a cervical orgasm? This remained a question, and so a no-go. Overall, would you say I pulled off 43% of my goals in life? Possibly 52-63% depending on the generosity of my heart.

Love, Erica.

Monday, January 21, 2019

Subject: Dear Vincent, You are my jardin secret

Dear Vincent,

You are my jardin secret. Except I also send these emails to my sister, Maxine, and sometimes Benjamin Hunting. [dot dot dot, one time I had a lucid dream about Vincent, but unfortunately he evaporated almost immediately. Another time I told Benjamin Hunting, maybe I don't need to eat out all my feelings. Plus something about how I might make an excellent sexologist]

The poet Mary Oliver died this week.

My favourite Mary Oliver words are,

'Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.' And,

“You don’t have to be good.”

And I remember one Friday afternoon last winter, weeping pretty hard underneath my pink and purple polka dot duvet, and I’d taken out Mary Oliver’s book of essays from the library, and though I never finished the book, I remember the sentences,

“You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.”

These words, exactly the truth, and yet I stayed weeping under the covers. Maybe I fell asleep. Eventually my pragmatic and optimistic bestie phoned, and convinced me to come meet her at Indigo, repeating Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, all the way there. And it was about -20 degrees and every few fucks, I laughed and every few fucks I cried, and at Indigo, I melted down on the expensive Casper bed that they have diagnol to the kids section and the magazines, and all the pillows and candles and scarves that they have to sell because not enough people buy books anymore. And the Faraway Polyamorous Client walked by with his son, and a gorgeous blonde woman who was not his extra hot girlfriend. He said hi and gave me a hug.

[dot dot dot, I started to interpret my dreams on the advice of the ludicrous bastard Jordan Peterson, of all people. I don’t know much about Jordan Peterson, except I heard he is a ludicrous bastard and I could not stand what he had to say about transpeople]

On Sunday, I tried making a FetLife profile, but then my dashboard was bombarded by enormous tits and asses and impossibly waxed vaginas, and I bailed. I tried Bumble for the seventeenth time. My profile says,

Looking for my next beautiful blogging fairy tale. Acute sense of smell.

Mots préférés: effervescence, exigeant, multiple, humanize, vaguely, impossible, liberation.

I forgive myself for not being Lena Dunham.

My other favourite word that I forgot, is perpetuate. So far I asked two people if they liked the snow, and this seems to be a dealbreaker.

All over Facebook, people are quoting Mary Oliver’s sentence, What will you do with your one precious life? and obviously I am thinking I am probably not doing the best job.

One time in India, my temporary gay travel buddy Hugo and I rented a scooter, and we went for a ride outside a little town in Rajasthan called Bundi, and we found a beautiful waterfall, and standing under the waterfall, I thought about Simon jumping, but I was not sad and I convinced Hugo that we should go swimming in our underwear and as I stood under the waterfall, the words, I am so free, came into my head. About seven seconds later we had to swim back to shore because a bunch of monkeys were stealing our bags and our clothes.

Happy Full Moon!

Love, Erica. 

Monday, January 28, 2019

Subject: Life is a musical quest you’re supposed to dance to

Dear Vincent,

Got cervical orgasms on the brain, and that’s probably not the best spot for them.

On Sunday, January 20, at approximately 1:47 P.M., I embarked upon my third daily 7-10 k walk in a row, and I was wearing one layer of pyjamas, and one layer of enormous sweatpants, and I hadn’t showered, and there was a snowstorm, and I’d spent the entire morning watching a half shit half magnificent Netflix documentary about the perils of root canals, and swiping every male face on Bumble between the ages of 33 and 53, and none of them was you, and none of them seemed to be excellent candidates for my next beautiful blogging fairy tale. For example, they sought someone chill and didn’t want anyone who took stuff and themselves and their lives too seriously. Or for example, they smoked, and/or wanted children. Or maybe they summarized their philosophy as, “Life is a musical quest you’re supposed to dance to.” Or “5’4 is a must. Taller girls please abstain.” Or “I heart curves.”

Approximately 1.7 km in, I found myself weeping in the foyer of the TD bank, even though this is not my bank, and I have plenty of cash hidden in a jar [dot dot dot, I landed four shoe boxes for the folding workshop, and these are meant to mimic civilized dresser drawers], and I mourned the waste of the day slash my life and the endless long weekend, and I took it all so seriously. The Dead Inside Man was not around to hear my meltdown and so I walked down Mont Royal to

[dot dot dot, And anyways, the best thing that can happen to you is not necessarily falling deeply and madly in love and getting your brains fucked and then cuddled on the couch until all your cells dissolve.]

My wall now says, “Listen to the sound of your dealbreakers,” and the colours are two shades of blue, plus bright red.

Got cervical orgasms on the brain, and this likely is not the best spot for them.

Happy Monday!

Love, Erica. 

Monday, February 4, 2019

Subject: 47 377

Dear Vincent,

Happy New Moon, and I suppose also Belated Groundhog Day. So much of my life is Groundhog Day. Do you feel that way too?

If I had been you last week, I would have been so proud of me, and not because I consolidated all of the Dear Vincent emails and blogposts, plus a few deeply embarrassing poems into a Word document, and the total was 47 377 words. You beat the Married Man by almost 15 000 words, and sometimes the Married Man wrote back.

Now is the season for 6-word love stories. My six-word love story is, All my friends are super heroes, and as fate would have it, I am reading a novel by this exact name, which was written by Andrew Kaufman, who I met once, and the novel is short with a whole bunch of pictures, though I should mention that in fact, I am a pretty good reader these days, even if the books do not have any pictures, and if I were a psychologist, I would recommend that my patients try to become pretty good readers, since reading makes for a soothing and democratic activity, that tends to be low in self-loathing.

All My Friends Are Super Heroes,
by Andrew Kaufman
Buy Book Here

Follow Andrew Kaufman on Twitter @several moments

As fate would have it, the best super hero that everyone wants to be is Mistresscleanasyougo, and as fate would have it, this is the super hero who most resembles me.

“The most powerful superhero of all, the one everyone wishes they were is, Mistresscleanasyougo. At the end of every day, she folds her clothes. She never leaves scissors on the table, pens with no ink are thrown in the trash, wet towels are always hung up, dishes are washed directly after dinner and nothing is left unsaid.” [p. 81, All My Friends Are Super Heroes, 10th Anniversary Edition with extra superheroes, and more pictures!  Mistresscleanasyougo wholeheartedly recommends it.] 

I put pens with no ink in the recycling, but this may be wishful thinking. Otherwise, nothing is left unsaid.

My other love story is me and all of my clients, especially the Self-Mutilating Parrot Family. I love all of my clients deeply and equally, especially the Self-Mutilating Parrot family.

Happy Monday!

Love, Erica.

I omitted approximately 7.7 threads of my life, plus 4.3 odours, and 11.9 miscellaneous details. Otherwise, nothing is left unsaid. Email me and/or Vincent at the secret email address ericaschmidt85(at)gmail(dot)com.

Mistresscleanasyougo

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Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go

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Deep Cleans by Erica J. Schmidt (@deepcleanswitherica)
Instagram: @deepcleanswitherica

Dear Vincent, You are not the only person I write letters to.

Dear Vincent, I made it three days writing my daily goals on fuschia post-its, and then sticking these on my refrigerator. 

Dear Vincent, Looks like you got some sun.