How was your eclipse? I cleaned all the way through it. Cleaning is
healing for the grieving and traumatized people. My Magical Hoarding Client told me
that the Navaho people consider it unlucky to watch an eclipse and prefer to
stay inside and do something they find sacred. For example, cleaning. What a
fucking relief. Hopefully you too were protected from bad luck in your
windowless office where you treat people with both delicate and indelicate
weeping skills.
Over the weekend, my Monday client consulted me about how to ride her
couch of her semi-geriatric cat’s stale vomit and urine residue. I replied with
a story about my semi-geriatric Big Black Dog who used to have highly irritable
bowels and who used to be the star of my blog. One time my ex-boyfriend,
Robbie, the Boatman, the other former star of my blog, fed the Big Black Dog
rainbow lucky charm dog food. This caused the Big Black Dog to puke and shit
all over our bed and couches. We ended up renting carpet cleaner contraptions
from Canadian Tire and I remember the endeavour being extremely soapy. Once the
dog died, the Boatman’s mother gave us a new couch. She always had an abundance
of couches.
Eliot the Big Black Dog, post Lucky Charms ordeal
I might start making my own homemade Enzymatic Cleaner. You need citrus
peels. My favourite kind of citrus is grapefruit. What about you?
When I move to my new apartment, I might also take up fermentation
compost, though I am not sure I am meticulous enough of a scientist for this to
be an enormous success.
In my neighbourhood, people have so many children they don’t have time
to do the dishes, so they eat with plastic cutlery off paper plates, and they
drink out of Styrofoam, or more plastic. All the alleys smell like piles of
garbage. Kind of like in India.
The day of the eclipse, I cleaned all the way through lunch. At
midnight, I woke up hungry and ate some cottage cheese. When I finally fell
back asleep, I dreamt I showed up topless to my cleaning shift at the Real
Estate Agent’s. This made me feel quite embarrassed because my tits are so
small and I really should have showed up to work with a shirt on. In my dream,
as I cleaned, I accidentally broke the head of the Real Estate Agent’s crystal
Santa Clause ornament. The Santa Claus ornament had red and green wings and the
Real Estate Agent’s boyfriend had programmed it to fly around in circles up the
Christmas tree. When I showed her the broken head, she just laughed and seemed
happy and in love.
After that I dreamt that the Dead Inside Man offered me a cheque for 50
grand, as well as his really weird dog.
Dim's weird dog. Weirdest dog I've ever seen.
Then I dreamt that my mother gave me a voucher of redeeming vitamins.
Then I dreamt that someone gave me a rim job, and this made me feel
quite self-conscious. Kim Anami, the well-fucked woman, who lifts chandeliers with her
vagina, says that anal sex is powerful because it opens the orifice that leads
to your deepest shit. I think I am going to apply to be her copywriter. Yesterday,
I hooked up with my meditation partner again. We do not exactly open the
orifices to one another’s deepest shit, but at least it took the edge off. And
I drank my meditation partner’s cum, which the well-fucked woman claims is a
natural anti-depressant. So far I have not taken any Abilify, or Celexa, and I
don’t exactly feel like dying. Today, I am translating minestrone, apple crisp,
spinach salad, and macaroni and cheese recipes. After that, it’s more cleaning
and grieving. Thanks for being there.
Love, Erica.
Vincent was my therapist from October of 2016, and May 2017. After we ran out of subsidized sessions, I began to write him daily imaginary emails.
I called the project, "Mondays without Vincent," and it turned out to be quite healing. You too can write imaginary emails to Vincent.
The secret address is: ericaschmidt85(at)gmail.com.
Vincent will be delighted to hear from you, and he will not judge. He'll write back as soon as he can. The correspondence can remain a secret, or else we can share it here with others and maybe it could be healing for everyone. Love, Erica.
Shiny and happy with Half an Inch of Nip (September 2016)
Kino MacGregor insists that you can’t hurt yourself
meditating.
Kino MacGregor can pull her leg all the way behind her
shoulder and then her foot hooks under her armpit and it doesn’t seem like this
hurts her very much.
Kino MacGregor and I are different
Kino MacGregor and I are different. Just like Margaret
Atwood and I are different. Going into Vipassana, I could sit cross-legged
relatively comfortably for half an hour. Still, I was positive that sitting for
ten hours a day was going to break my knees, and probably also my hips, and
maybe a few other parts while I was at it. When I am not meditating, I masturbate on the
internet, inhaling thousands of yoga blogs. I have been devouring Matthew
Reski’s series WAWADIA: What Are We Actually Doing In Asana. It’s a qualitative
study on injuries in yoga. Of course I have devoured the whole thing. In one of the articles, Matthew interviews a guy who went to Vipassana. Someone this guy
knew there had to do six months of physio for her knee afterwards. And I’d
heard of a friend of a friend who had herniated her disc, just trying to
meditate.
A phrase from the internet haunted my head, “Many meditators
injure themselves meditating on non-violence.”
I was determined that this violence would not happen to
me.I spent my first two and a half days
at vipassana frantically obsessing over the best and most sustainable position.
Three cushions under my butt, two under each knee. Vice versa. Two under my knee
with the bad I.T. band. Oh but then I’m imbalanced, what if I get compensatory
pain? Yes, definitely there was compensatory pain. My vacillations went on and
on. As for the pain, well, it wasn’t quite extreme, but I did feel some
irritation above my left knee on the outside. And often when I got up, my hip
felt sort of jammed, so I had to click it back into place. Although the sound
of my hip was disgusting, I'm pretty sure my issues were mostly due to my tight I.T. band and probably
not because of some surgery-requiring problem.Even so, I fretted relentlessly. After two and a half days, I thought,
the hell with this; I’m straightening my legs. I propped myself up on a
mountain of cushions, and extended both legs diagonally in a v-shape with loads
more cushions underneath. Smugly, I looked around the room as everyone else
creaked themselves into folded legs and anatomically questionable versions of
virasana. “Erica,” I thought to myself. “You have the best seat in the house.”
Surely, I’d be spared of both agony and surgery. Well,
you’ll see how that went. On Day Four of the course, Goenka introduced the
Vipassana technique. Up until then, we’d been luxuriating in Anapana, the
delightful task of observing the breath below our nostrils. During this time, I
alternated between being very bored, being very sleepy, being very hungry,
being very obsessed about how I would starve because there was no dinner, and
being very pissed off at a number of people, including Sri W Ham Wrap who once
said that my yoga practice was violent and harmful. (I just wrote Hamful by
mistake. How funny.) What a blast. Then
the Vipassana technique opened up a whole new exciting world. Instead of being
stuck on our nostrils, now we got to move our attention from head to feet. It was like going from no internet to suddenly
getting a U.S. Netflix subscription. I remember walking out of our first
session with immense relief. Thank God, I thought almost laughing. No more
nostrils. But it felt like my sit bones had punctured through my ass. And I
wondered if maybe my hamstrings were being overstretched.
On Day Five of Vipassana, Goenka wanted us to start cultivating
adhittana, which means “strong determination.” Apparently the best way of doing
this is to endure one-hour sits of extreme stillness three times a day. No
opening your eyes, no opening your hands, no changing your legs. Having taken
refuge in rules from a young age, I was all over this. Though my legs were
uncrossed, I sat like the stillest Buddha in the world. The stillest and the
stiffest. It usually took 25 or 30 minutes before my sit bones started to
pierce my ass flesh to such an extent that I thought my ass might start to
bleed. The rest of my ass wasn’t doing well either. I could feel intense
stretching on either side. One of Matthew Remski’s case studies was about an unfortunate Ashtanga yoga teacher who tore all her glute muscles off her hipbone. She had been doing a bunch of hip openers to deal with a knee injury.
Then one day after meditating, she did a tiny wide legged forward bend and pop,
pop, pop, went all the muscles on her ass. At the end of Day Six, I felt
certain that my injury would be even more serious. Both sides of my ass seethed
in horrendous agony. Lying in bed around 9:30 p.m., I decided that all my butt
muscles were pulling at my sacrum.It
was only a matter of time, likely just five minutes, before the muscles
dislocated from my sacrum, my spine went to hell and then Erica’s greatest
fear of being in a wheelchair would come true. I sobbed, alone, in my cubicle
of a room.
“It’s going to break.” I said out loud, breaking the noble
silence to announce my imminent spinal cord injury. My roommates in the other
cubicles weren’t allowed to say anything back. I kept sobbing. “Sorry,” I said.
I lay down on the floor, stunned by the torture. Finally the day of my Big
Catastrophe had come. Ever since I was really small, I’ve been waiting for the
day when something horrible and irreversible would happen to my body. Broken
spinal cords, esophageal cancer, the flesh-eating disease. I’ve been
anticipating my disaster since my parents took me to the Niagara Falls wax
museum and I saw the wax statue of Terry Fox who only had one leg. Now my
disaster was happening on Day 6 of jolly old Goenka’s vipassana retreat.
Within about twenty minutes the spasms or whatever was going
on in my ass finally stopped. Later, I learned that during that night, I’d
called out in my sleep. “I knew it!,” I’d yelled. I don’t remember saying this,
but I do remember dreaming about Katy Bowman. Katy Bowman is a biomechanist and
author who advocates as much natural movement as possible for the benefit of
your pelvis and all the cells in your body. And she thinks that almost everyone
in the Western World needs a stronger butt.
“Yah, I was at Vipassana,” I told Katy in my dream. “But it
was too much.” While I was dreaming, I also remember having the very clear
intention of doing a bunch of butt exercises. Sadly, the time and location
never worked out. The butt exercises kept getting postponed. (Kind of like Butt Club in Mysore).
The gong rang at 4 a.m. Although I was quite relieved that I
wasn’t yet in a wheelchair, I felt absolutely ready to trade in both yoga and
meditation for a lifetime of butt exercises and/or anything else. My ass didn’t hurt as much, but now I felt
certain that there was inflammation behind my right knee, the one without the
I.T. band problem. Upon careful examination, I realized that the bulge was
merely my hamstring tendon.
I dragged myself to the meditation hall late and left when I
had to shit. Instead of returning, I went for a walk in the little loop in the
forest. It was pitch black. For someone terrified of a spinal cord injury, this
wasn’t the most logical behaviour; however, I figured I’d already survived yesterday’s very
close call and I wanted to work on my night vision. After a couple of times
around the loop, I had to piss and so I pulled up my skirt and peed in the
woods. I thought that this was quite scandalous for a vipassana retreat. I did
not get any pee on my sandals.
In the afternoon, I went to see the meditation instructor.
It was nice of her to view my body hysteria, not as severe, neurotic
dysfunction, but rather as my sankaras coming to the surface. Sankaras are
deep-rooted mental or behavioral patterns that tend to lead you into the same
types situations over and over again. (The yogis often call them “samskaras.”) Some
of my sankaras that fall into similar categories include going to the emergency room to see if my ingrown pubic hair is Herpes, or imagining having to get my esophagus
replaced with a piece of my colon, or worrying about getting a foot infection
in India that will end with me losing my legs. When I told the instructor about
the spinal cord injury scare, she suggested that maybe I was a bit too strict
with myself. “Torturing yourself, this is not Vipassana," she said. “Vipassana
is not the posture.” She gave the option of a chair, or a back support, if it
got too painful. I considered becoming a chair person, but one of my life’s
biggest rants is about the dangers of sitting in chairs. It’s up there with potty training, and sun salutations, and maybe also pubic hair waxing. I
decided I would try one more day on the floor. If my sacrum seemed at risk and
I had to sit in a chair, well then, so be it. The rest of this story is about
how I ended up sitting cross-legged and sort of relaxed for about seventeen minutes. You are probably better off reading this excellent zine that the
Boatman bought called, “Why I Like to Pee Outside.” It is so great. I even
brought it to India with me and read it to some wonderful Canadians I met in
the line-up to register with Sharath.
Zine: “Why I Like to Pee Outside,” by Amanda Stevens, bent from its long trip to India
The Author Amanda Stevens made the zine at a 24-hour
Zinemaking Challenge in Halifax in 2008. “Why I Like to Pee Outside” describes
the Unnamed Protagonist’s journey of how she grew to love peeing outside. It
is full of informative and compelling diagrams, lists and essential techniques. The
unnamed protagonist used to be afraid of peeing on her pants or on her shoes. She
even considered getting “one of those spouts that make peeing outside easier
for people with vulvas.” But she practiced and practiced and now she can do it
the way it’s meant to be done.
Peeing Outside, the way it's meant to be done. Watch out for pee splattering off the ground
“It’s a bit of a thrill,” says the Unnamed Protagonist. “It feels slightly
transgressive and unladylike, especially when there’s a possibility of being
seen doing it. It also makes me feel like I’m getting back to my natural self.”
This is how I felt when I peed outside at vipassana. Thrilled, transgressive,
and unladylike, and more like my animal self.
Peeing outside: Thrilling, Transgressive and Unladylike
As fate would have it, peeing outside happens to be
excellent for your pelvis, butt muscles included. Katy Bowman recommends
peeing outside as often as possible. And I think that she would be happy with
Amanda’s squatting diagram.
At the end of “Why I like to pee outside,” the Unnamed
Protagonist dresses up as a Girl Guide for Halloween and her friend makes her a
badge for peeing outside. Overall, “Why I like to Pee Outside” is a thoroughly
satisfying read. I tried to contact Amanda about where people can find more
copies. If you’re in Mysore, you can borrow mine.
If you have interesting techniques for peeing
outside or a peeing outside story to share, you should email Amanda at redheadwalkingas@yahoo.ca. And/or
share them at the end of this blog.
In India, people pee outside all the time. In Mysore, for the most part, you only see dudes.
The End.
I’m not sure how I mentioned so many things in one blog. Perhaps to some of you, this is not all that surprising.
I don’t have time to edit because my father and his
girlfriend are visiting and they are way better tourists than I am.
Oh well, think of all the people I promoted:
Kino MacGregor
Margaret Atwood: Once I wrote a story called, Why I am Different From Margaret Atwood and What I Don't Gain From Humping Duvets. It used to be all over the internet. Now I can only find a version with very strange formatting. Well, if you're dying to read it, I can hook you up, perhaps for the price of three coconuts. Haggling welcome.
Amanda Stevens, author of “Why I Like to Pee Outside.” I messaged her on Facebook raving about her Zine. Unfortunately, I got the wrong Amanda Stevens. Better luck next time.
“2-9 it is today. Somebody’s birthday. I don’t know them.”
Jadwiga used to announce this every morning at breakfast as she stirred
milk into her coffee in the mug with the cat on it.
“B-b-b bir-day, shanana nana. Cococococa.” Cococococa was Marc's name for me. Whether or not it was my
birthday, Marc liked to chant B-b-b bir-day, shanana nana. Cococococa this all day long. On the toilet, while he was
shaving, and while he was slicing his breakfast banana. Birthdays were a big
deal at my L’Arche house where I lived with five adults with intellectual disabilities.
Weeks ahead of time, Nathalie, our head of house, would make sure the L’Arche
workshop was preparing a beautiful homemade card for you, along with a Happy
Birthday banner. You got to invite your favourite people, request your
favourite meal and pick the kind of cake you wanted. My favourite food is
Indian, and from her years living with Muslim families in Madagascar, Nathalie
knew how to make it from scratch. Homemade samosas, papads, chana masala.
Eight, nine years later, I can still remember how delicious it was.
Before cake, it was L’Arche tradition to have a birthday prayer. If you
weren’t into Christianity, then they wouldn’t read anything from the Bible. But
at the time, I was trying to get a thing going on with Jesus and I didn’t mind.
For my twentieth birthday, Nathalie picked a verse from the Beatitudes, in the
Gospel of Matthew. The line went, “Blessed be the pure in heart, for they shall
see God.”Since my twentieth birthday, I
have definitely drowned myself in cynicism, negativity and self-deprecation for
days, weeks or months on end. During such periods, it is nice to remember that
somebody once looked at me and decided I had a pure heart, and that I would see
God.
After the bible verse which was short and sweet, Madeleine read a poem
that Judith, one of our assistants had helped her write. Madeleine came to
L’Arche when she was in her early fifties. Coming to L’Arche, she had all these
big dreams. She wanted to learn to read and write, and maybe get a boyfriend
and learn to take the bus by herself. Whenever we went to church, she would
hold the hymn book open and concentrate so intently on the words, dying to be
able to understand. It took her a long time to accept that not all her dreams
would come true. Still, she wrote really wonderful poems.
Madeleine’s poem began with, “A twentieth birthday is a special day,
and you are a very special person.” I will keep it forever. Another L’Arche
tradition during birthday prayers was to pass a candle around the table. When
it was your turn with the candle, you gave thanks for the things you loved
about the person. Some people gave thanks to God, and some people just gave
thanks. It all sounds so cheesy and yet, it ended up being pretty perfect.
Madeleine always gave a big speech that was similar to her poems. And
thank you, Erica for taking us to the library. And thank you, Erica for that
time we walked all the way from… Usually we had to tap her on the shoulder to
get her to wrap it up.
Jimmy, a new L’Arche member liked to make speeches too. He was obsessed
with Power Rangers, and with me as well. At every birthday, he made fun of me
about the time I was having dinner at another L’Arche home and I stuck my hair
in my mouth. “Remember, I asked you if you wanted ketchup? I have to tell your
mother about that.”
“B-b-birday, cocococoCA, shanana-na-na,” Marc would say a few times.
Then he would take my hand and whisper, “Cococococa,” one more time.
Isabelle loved Jesus and prayers. She was the same age as me. Born with
cerebral palsy, Isabelle doesn’t move or talk that much, though she laughs and
smiles a great deal and says yes and no with her eyes. At my birthday, Nathalie
held the candle in front of her face and she broke into hysterics. Over and
over again, her eyes looked up.
No matter whose birthday it was, Jadwiga said just about the same thing. "Awe, what should I say? Same as Madeleine. Happy birthday. Keep up the good health. Keep up the good work in L'Arche."
These days, it seems like some of the cool people don’t like birthdays.
People are too cool for such frivolous celebration. Oh well. Too bad for them.
I’m still alive and I’m happy.
When it was a child’s birthday at Montessori school, we put a brass sun
in the middle of the Circle time floor. Polishing brass is one of the
Montessori activities. The children polished the sun with diluted all natural
licorice -flavoured toothpaste.Sometimes
this made the sun shiny and other times the sun became encaked with greenish
chunks. In any case, the child with the birthday took the painted globe and
carried it around the sun.
“Isaac is one year old,” we’d say when he completed the circle.
“Isaac is two years old.” The child would walk around the circle as many
times as the earth had rotated around the sun with him on it.
“Isaac is five years old." Then we would sing happy birthday in as many
languages as we knew. English French, and Spanish.
More than once, I teared up as I watched a child walk around the sun.
What a surprise.
In Halifax, I picked up on a tradition of doing the same number of sun
salutations as the age you are turning. Some people also do this many
backbends. I tried this tradition for a couple of years and it was fun. Here in Mysore, you can hardly expect the crowds to wait for you as you
whip off your age in sun salutations and backbends. But although there is no official
birthday tradition, Mysore is just one big birthday party anyways.In most cases, I would advise you that not
everyone is as happy as they appear on the Internet. And yet, here I am, and my
face and the insides match.
Fake Rebellious Yoga Selfie I
The joy is real.
Fake Rebellious Yoga Selfie II Some of the joy must be attributed to the Fanny Pack. Also to the Spiritual Pants.
And to my dear friends Got this from the Boatman this morning. It's our friend the
moon. The Boatman is going to be the moon for Halloween.
Wish you were here, Babe. Otherwise I am the luckiest girl on Earth.
One night while my friend Lizzie was sleeping, a bookshelf
fell on top of her, and she died. The bookshelf hung on top of her bed. When it
fell down, Lizzie couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t escape.
A few months after Lizzie died, her sister came over to my
last shitty apartment in Montreal. She brought a book and a lamp and a
photo. The lamp was blue and was given to Lizzie by the people with
intellectual disabilities that Lizzie once worked with in France. Lizzie
used to work for people with disabilities until arthritis attacked the joints
in her spine and she got a disability too. Sometimes I worry about this
happening to me. Like the lamp, the book Lizzie’s sister brought is also blue.
I’d lent it to Lizzie for some English course she had to take. Volume I of the
Norton Anthology of English Literature. From Beowulf to King Lear to
Gulliver’s Travels. It stopped before “A Vindication of Rights for
Women.” They started vindicating women’s rights in the next volume.
The book was pretty heavy. I hope it wasn’t one of the books that fell on
her. I wouldn’t be able to bear it.
In the photo, you can see that Lizzie is wearing a light
turquoise button-up shirt with a collar. She has pink cheeks and brown
eyes. Her eyes are just a little bit bigger than eyes you might call
bird-like. Lizzie used to complain about her nose being too big. I
guess it is a little big in proportion to the rest of her face. You can’t
see it in the picture, but at the back of her head, I know that her hair is
scuffed and falling out from the friction between her head and her
wheelchair. You can’t see her wheelchair either. Sometimes Lizzie could
stand up by holding onto her wheelchair or her walker. Or a table, or a bookshelf.
Maybe Lizzie is happy in the picture – I think they took it
on her fiftieth birthday party. But to me, she looks worried and kind of
uncomfortable. Sometimes that happens when people smile with their teeth
and the photographer takes too long to take the picture.
The professor that Lizzie and I had during our second year
at Concordia was adamant that we shouldn’t write about what we knew or else
we’d be in trouble. He made Lizzie cry once. She’d written a story
about a little girl who’d found her grandmother’s vibrator and her mother, the
grandma’s daughter-in-law, felt awkward. The story wasn’t terrible, but
it read as though it had been written by someone who didn’t own a
vibrator. A little inhibited. But Professor Fraser Richman attacked
Lizzie who sat in her wheelchair at the back of the class full of twenty year
olds, and Lizzie cried.
“Where do you want to go with your writing? Is it just
an outlet to express your feelings?” asked Professor Fraser Richman.
Lizzie’s eyes fluttered and she didn’t know what to say. She was a pretty
inhibited person. In class, Professor Fraser Richman used to make us play
games to help us to know our characters. One of them was called “If you
were a fruit, what would be?” We’d go around the table and make up
questions like “if you were a drink,” “if you were a car,” “if you were a
kitchen appliance... what wouldya be?” And everyone would have to answer
for their character. A martini, A coke, Earl Grey Tea. A Volvo, a
taxi, a Mercedes. A toaster, a microwave oven, a hand blender. The
Magic Bullet. Lizzie could never come up with anything.
“Gee,” she’d say, her eyes blinking rapidly, her cheeks and
forehead blotching red. She’d push her glasses up her nose. “A car?
Gee, I don’t know. You’ll have to come back to me. Sorry.” My knees
hurt whenever I watched her. Just say something, I thought, it doesn’t
matter. I always sat in class with my legs coerced around the arms of my chair,
frozen into an excruciating lotus position. If you were a tree, a
country, a dessert… What would you be? Lizzie never knew.
“Think too much and you’ll be in trouble,” Professor Fraser
Richman warned us. We were doomed before we even started. When
Professor Fraser Richman stacks up all his published novels, they stand taller
than he does. The summer after our class ended, I set out to read the
complete works of Fraser Richman. I got bored after the first chapter of
– I don’t remember what the book was called. The trouble with stacks of
books is that they can topple over and kill you. 3-2-1, and you’re
dead. The suckers and the fuckers. Professor Fraser Richman used to
warn us about swearing in our stories. We risked drawing too much
attention to ourselves. The writer is supposed to be silent, yet
brilliant. Like God. He also said that writing about dreams (you
know, the kind you have when you’re sleeping), though they may strike the right
chord, was somewhat of a copout since real writers succeeded at weaving the
subconscious into the narrative inexplicitly. Well, shit fuck Jesus
Christ, I think I’m in trouble.
I Cop Out
by E. J. Bodhisattva
A few nights ago, I had a dream that I was in a movie about
Lizzie. The woman cast as Lizzie was tall and thin with dark red nail
polish and shiny, perfectly smooth straightened black hair that went down to
the middle of her back. Together we rode up the elevator to where the
filming would take place. When the doors opened on the sixth floor,
Lizzie walked in.
“Lizzie,” I said. “You’re here.”
“I think I fit the part better.” She wasn’t wearing
her glasses. I told the shiny black haired actress that we wouldn’t be
needing her anymore. She got off the elevator on the ninth floor.
Lizzie and I rode to the top. Lizzie wore a pink blazer. Her face
was less blotchy than usual and her small brown eyes which normally darted back
and forth, remained still. “You’re here,” I said again. “Yes,” she replied, her voice unwavering and wise. On
the top floor, there was a beach of red sand like in Prince Edward
Island. A little girl was playing in the sand with a bright red
vibrator. I knew that it belonged to her grandmother. “My grandma’s dead,” the little girl said, pointing to the
ocean. Upon the waves, an old sinewy silver-haired woman lay on a lime
green surf board paddling with her arms. “That’s her. She’s dead.”
“Me too, I am dead,” Lizzie replied. Further up the
sand dunes, a man in a navy blue Speedo sold blueberries under a yellow
tent. In each corner of the tent there was a video camera. Beside
the tent stood an empty motorized wheelchair.
“I’m hungry,” said the little girl. “I’m dead,” said Lizzie.
I took the vibrator from the little girl and led her by the
hand to the blueberry stand. Lizzie followed us. As the little girl and I
examined the cartons of fruit, Lizzie sat down in the wheelchair. “It will be sandy,” the little girl exclaimed. I
tasted a blueberry. It tasted blue and juicy, but it was neither sweet
nor sour.
“I hate water,” the little girl declared. I bought a
pint of blueberries and turned around to walk back to the ocean. Lizzie
was already ten metres ahead of us. She drove the wheelchair over the
sand and all the way into the water, until she disappeared underneath the
surfing dead grandmother.
“I hate the water,” the little girl repeated. “I’m not
going swimming.” I slid through the sand without lifting my feet.
“I wanna go home,” the little girl whined. She grabbed the vibrator from
my hand, ran to the edge of the water and threw it out to sea. It landed
just beyond her surfing dead grandmother. By the time the little girl
came back, an elevator had risen from the sand. “I like elevators,” she said. We entered and descended.
The End.
This is the lamp. The other day when the sun came up, I yanked it out of the
wall and sparks flew. The Boatman said that we can probably repair it, although we are typically quite terrible of dealing with that sort of thing.
Follow the Boatman on TUMBLR: verysatisfied.tumblr.com, and feel free to share his drawings.
The Boatman came back from art camp where he helped the
worms draw deeper lines into the clay sand.
Actually, they are miniature shrimp.
I like to say that at art camp, the Boatman got an infection
from the worms. But the infection didn't come from the worms. It didn't
come from the miniature shrimp either. The infection is going away. The Boatman will be fine.
Every time your vagina bleeds, it means that you won’t
become a mother. My mother hated getting her period. I
remember the sobbing, the wailing, and the devastated voice. “I’m getting my
period,” she'd call out through tears.
At least once, I saw a toilet full of blood.
It looked a little bit like this.
What the Blood Looked Like
I was around four years old when I saw the toilet full of
blood for the first time. The people who wrote the Vagina Monologues
complained that they couldn’t find any positive images related to
menstruation. How is this possible? Look at the beautiful blood in
this toilet. It is hardly original.
Usually in life, your dreams don’t come true. When I
was a little girl, I dreamed of becoming an excellent brain surgeon, or
president of the United States, or a nun. None of these things have
happened. Maybe it is not too late, but probably it is.
That’s okay. Other dreams have come true.
Or at least one did.
A couple of months ago, I had the dream of pouring all of
the internal lining of my uterus and whatever else comes out of my vagina into
a jar throughout an entire menstrual cycle. Then I would have all of the
blood in one place. I could look at it, keep it in my fridge, maybe water
the plants with it, or use it for arts and crafts.
Friends, it wasn’t easy, but I persevered. Everywhere
I went, I toted along my peanut butter jar. If you aspire to do this
yourself, I recommend opening the jar before you pull out the diva cup.
Opening the jar with a full diva cup can be a little precarious. Good
thing I have such excellent dexterity. Be sure to firmly secure the jar’s lid
in place. One evening, I took the jar out of the fridge where I kept it
at night and showed it to the Boatman. “Look at all my blood so far,”I said,
holding out my right hand.
He was rightly mesmerized.
Then he said, “Babe. Is that blood on your hand?”
Oops.
After five to seven days, the blood stopped flowing and the
jar was as full as it ever would be. For one and a half weeks, it
sat on this refrigerator shelf next to the jam and the peanut butter and the
ketchup and the vegannaise. Beside the ketchup, there are jars of salsa
and pickled turnips. Somewhere around there, you will also see a banana. One
and a half bananas.
My jar of blood, amongst other jars of other things
I hate veganaise and regular mayonnaise. I also hate
cleaning my fridge. Now it is Mother’s Day and blood is flowing from my vagina
once again. The peanut butter menstrual blood jar has long ago been carried away by a recycling
truck.
These photos are the only proof it ever existed. Behold the
red, and see how it makes you feel.
Thank you to the Boatman for supporting me in my dreams and
taking such revolutionary pictures.
Thank you to my mother for supporting me in my dreams and
giving up menstruation at least nine months in my honour.
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