Dear Vincent, How was your eclipse?

Dear Vincent,

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)


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Keira Knightley's High Vagina

My friend “Cassandra”was lying topless on a beach on one of those tropical, paradise kind of islands somewhere in the Caribbean.  Although Cassandra looks excellent topless, she was having horrible suicidal, I-hate-myself-and-want-to-die thoughts.  Million-dollar luxury sailing yachts were drifting past her.  On each yacht there was a 22-year-old topless woman whose boyfriend had bought her the yacht.  Each 22-year-old woman looked excellent topless.  They looked excellent, and they owned a yacht and they got to keep it.

Cassandra was thirty and she didn’t have a yacht that she got to keep.  She started to cry because she felt like a failure.   Big, sad, suicidal tears.

“I will never ever be a twenty-two year old with a yacht,” she wailed.  “Ever.”  It was true.  She was right.  It would never happen. There was nothing she could do.  

“I will never ever be a twenty-two year old with a yacht.”

At first glance, this seems like the sorriest excuse for a human tragedy in the whole world.  Probably it is, but I can relate.  I have been on that beach, topless and sad.  I have spent hours, if not days, staring at topless women on yachts.  I was staring at the women and the yachts last night at 11 P.M.

The Boatman and I had just finished watching a movie called “A Dangerous Method.”  It was about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in their early days.  One of Carl Jung’s first patients was a woman named Sabina, played by Keira Knightley.  Keira Knightley put on a brilliant performance.  When she had her shirt on, and when she didn’t. 

After the movie was finished the Boatman and I googled Kiera Knightley to see what other movies she had been in.  There were dozens.  Atonement, Pride and Prejudice, Bend it Like Beckham, Never Let Me Go.  All this was fine with me until I saw Kiera Knightley’s birthdate:  March 26, 1985.  1985.  Same year I was born.  Kiera Knightley was 27 years old and already she had been in more movies than I will ever be in in my whole life.  What a useful thing to think about. Then I did something even more useful.  I looked up Kiera Knightley’s height and weight.  Kiera Knightley is 5 foot 7 and 100-110 pounds.  I am five foot eight and I haven’t been 100 or 110 pounds since I was in grade five.

Alas. 

No being a movie star for me.

No 100 or 110 pounds for me. 

Plus Kiera Knightley does charity work and I do not.

Keira Knightley. So thin and so talented and so charitable.

I grumpily went on Facebook where I saw I’d received a message from a lovely friend of mine who I hadn’t heard from in a long time.  Like me and Keira Knightley, she was born in 1985.  At just 26 years old, my friend has a great job in an awesome city and she just bought a new condo by herself, and she’s practicing part of the third series of Ashtanga Yoga.  I looked up her last posture.  Urdhva Kukkutasana C.  It’s like the 11^th posture of third series. 
 

Urdhva Kukkutasana C, the 11th posture of Ashtanga Yoga's third impossible series. The Yoga Sutras recommend that we cultivate friendliness towards this man's success. This man's and my friend's and all the Third Series People's.

I have never been able to do more than four postures of third series for much more than four weeks.  After four weeks, my pelvis starts to disjoint and complain.  But my friend could do it.  She could rock it.  And her pelvis never complained.  I was jealous of her pelvis.  I am still jealous. My friend has had to deal with anorexia for over a decade, and still, I am jealous of her and her job and her pelvis and her yoga postures.

Last night with tears in my eyes, I announced to the Boatman that I felt upset and unworthy because Kiera Knightley had been in way more movies than me, and my anorexic friend had a better pelvis.

He turned off the television  for two seconds.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.  Then he turned the television back on.

I think that he felt about the same way Cassandra’s husband felt while she was mourning her twenty-two year old yachtless topless self.  Moderately to severely disgusted. 

Yoga Sutra 1.33 recommends that we cultivate friendliness towards success.  This is wonderful advice, but last night I was pouty and miserable instead.  I made the Boatman turn the TV off again.  I waited for him to feel sorry for me.   He didn’t. 

I sat on the couch and I pressed the flesh around my navel together.  The space between the flesh made a crease and the crease looked like a High Vagina.  Although I am not one of those gluten free people, and sometimes I even eat corn chips, I do not have a Big Fat Wheat Belly.  There is hardly any flesh around my navel. 

And yet, I am capable of making a High Vagina. 

As I stared at my High Vagina, I realized that my goals were strange and perverse and dumb.  Wanting to be Keira Knightley or my anorexic friend with the awesome pelvis or a topless twenty-two year old on a yacht was dumb.  As dumb as aspiring to eradicate your High Vagina.

The whole world has a High Vagina.  Even the gluten-free people.  Even Kiera Knightley.

Keira Knightley has a High Vagina, and it is almost as ugly as mine.

The End.
 

My High Vagina. Thanks to the Boatman for the photo.

The Keira Knightley Charitable Foundation encourages you to please cultivate Friendliness towards:
 

My High Vagina (see above), 

My Very first Self-help e-book, I Let Go,

My Twitter Account:  @mypelvicfloor.

And my Facebook Fan Page:  Ecstatic Adventures

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