SNAG, S-N-A-G stands for Sensitive New
Age Guy. At Café Olimpico I always see this SNAG and he’s one of those people
who’s ultra-busy running his micro-nation the MacBook Pro. And so, he never has
any time to talk to me. But one day he decided he could spare a moment to grace
my life with his secret to success.
“Erica,” he said. “You have to Name Your
Wounds.”
As fate would have it, I am average to
mediocre at naming my wounds; however; I am just about phenomenal at naming the
dudes whose legs I hump and whose dicks end up inside of me.
For example, there was: the Vegan Life
Coach, the Tall Cute Cauliflower, Rob One, Rob Two, and one of my favourites,
the star of my life’s beautiful blogging fairy tale, The Boatman. As his name
suggests, I met the Boatman on a boat. We happened to be at a wedding. Lucky
for me, the full moon whispered in the Boatman’s ear and told him to kiss me. In
about twenty minutes, we fell in love, and in his beautiful delusion, the
Boatman invited me to leave Montreal and go live with him in Halifax in his Big
Blue House with his Big Black Dog, and in my beautiful delusion, and also because
I had seven and a half part-time jobs and maybe five dollars, I said yes.
As the blogging fairy tale goes, we
lived happily ever after for three and a half years, except I had no friends
and refused to go on Prozac.
I would highly recommend that everybody
move for love at least once, it’s just that sometimes you have to move back. So,
two Aprils ago, I had to move back and within a few months, I met the man who
would one day inspire, the Magical Rock Vagina Cleanse.
This man I named, the Generic Married
Man (GMM).
For me, the best is when dudes are ultra-unavailable,
and when they have deep and beautiful and impossible wounds. As fate would have
it, the Generic Married Man was all over this criteria. Like I imagine most
philandering husbands are, he was ultra-busy running his micro-nation with his
kids, a really important job, in theory his wife, as well as the highly
time-consuming task of mourning and wailing over all his dead and broken
dreams.
But Generic was clear and relatively considerate
right from the start.
“Erica,” he said. “I just want you to
know, I am never going to leave my family. Like never. That is not who I am.”
And I responded, “Yes! Definitely! Do not
leave your family for me. Of course not!”
The other thing he said was, “I’m also
not going to be all that available for the next 18 to 25 years.”
For me, this was no problem since I was not the kind of person who would move eighteen hours and give up my whole life for some silly love story.
"That's perfect," I said. "You are exactly what I am looking for!”
So we were off to this erotic, steamy
passionate affair, and we met on the monkey bars every three to seven to
seventeen and a half weeks.
On the monkey bars, Generic would tell
me about all his deep and beautiful and impossible wounds, and I’d sit there
shivering, and I’d wish that he did not have a wife. And then, we’d make out.
But not all of Generic’s wounds were
deep and beautiful and impossible. Some of them were pretty Generic, and
unsurprising.
For example,
“I haven’t had sex since 2010, or like
maybe once, but that was to make a kid.”
Or like,
“All my wife ever thinks about is the
kids and then I go to spoon her and she recoils onto the other side of the bed,
and I’m all lonely and tired and horny.”
Or,
“My life is so ridiculously crazy busy!
I don’t know who I am anymore.”
Now, I love parents and I love children
and I love babies. Some of my favourite friends are parents and I love their
kids. As one of my current seven and a half semi-retirement projects, I tie-dye
onesies for babies I will never have. But families, I love them. Having said
that, one of my favourite things to do is to complain about parents complaining
about having children. As though the inherently fulfilling biological task of
ejaculating inside of someone you kind of like (like that must be a little bit
fun), and then you combine your own special DNA to make this extra unique and exceptional
child that comes out of a vagina which is really interesting, and the child is
so tiny and adorable – and you find it extra adorable, because it reminds you
of you – and then it starts to talk, and everything it says is extra brilliant
and extraordinary because it reminds you of you, like as though this whole
process is so tragic and selfless and heroic – and also compulsory. Because
it’s not compulsory. You know, I always want to tell people, you could have
pulled out.
But poor Generic hadn’t pulled out and
now he had a couple of kids and a wife who ostensibly recoiled whenever he went
anywhere near her. Poor guy was stuck using condoms with me. Although it is not
charitable to publish details of one's sexual experience on the
Internet, I will say that Generic gave indisputably excellent and redemptive
head. Also, he let me hump his leg which, as fate would have it, happens to be my
favourite.
Unfortunately, since he was so
ridiculously crazy busy, I did not get the chance to hump the Generic Married
Man’s leg quite as often as would have been ideal. But that was okay, since
besides complaining about parents complaining about having children, and
besides leg humping, one of my other favourite things to do is to be a pen pal.
I am a remarkable pen pal. While I may be a little intense and self-obsessed
and one-sided about it, I would say that in general, I write delightful emails,
letters, haikus, postcards, and text messages, and I would say that for the
most part, it makes the world a better place.
For the most part, I made Generic’s
world a better place. I filled his days with heartfelt and extraordinary emails
and haikus and text messages, and every night I’d sign off, not just with the
regular and generic x-o. Oh no! I wrote out my x’s and o’s. It was like the
opposite of abbreviations. I spelled them out, “E-x, o-h, e-x, o-h,” and I
added the innovative and provocative emoticon, the eggplant.
 |
| E-x, o-h, eggplant |
Generic absolutely relished my stunning
and enchanting creativity. He somehow believed that I was spectacular. This was
a dream come true, and the best part was, since we barely ever saw each other, he never had a chance to change his
mind.
So the whole thing was mostly magnificent
apart from the fact that one of my main objectives in life is to be relatively
to thoroughly well fucked. This is hard to pull off every three to seven to
seventeen and a half weeks. The other issue was that I experienced a degree of
conflict in my heart about the fact that Generic had a wife and children. As
penance, I would force myself to stalk his beautiful wife on Facebook. Like most
people, she had horrendous privacy settings which allowed me to peruse her
happy mom photos. I would scroll through all the birthdays and milestones and
the millions of ways her precious little children filled her heart with more love and joy and surprise than she ever
could have imagined before the little creatures had come out of her vagina.
This made me feel very gross.
But otherwise, I was relatively happy
with how things were going. Having said that, I had accumulated a few other
problems in my life. My heart was sort of broken from my last ex-boyfriend and
I kept refusing to go on Prozaac. I decided my best option was to fuck off and pull
a geographic, and I decided the best place to do this was in India.
Thus, in November, off I flew to Delhi,
and I proceeded to bop around India for four and a half months. I spent a great
deal of these four and a half months squatting over small holes and shitting
buckets of liquid diarrhea. Then, when I got out of the bathroom, slews of
horny and sex-deprived men would come up to me and ask, “Oh, Madam, you are
very big awesome. Have you made the sex? Would you like to make the sex with me?”
To which I would reply, “No.” So India was super interesting, a little hard,
but lucky for me, I had my loyal and supportive pen pal Generic to get me
through it.
Generic especially nailed his pen pal
duties this one time when I was in Bangalore. I had gone to the latest movie
Star Wars with some friends from the youth hostel. After about eleven minutes,
I had to leave and projectile vomit into a garbage can. Twice.
I remember nauseously Ubering back to
the hostel all by myself. By some miracle, Generic was available. I messaged
him on Facebook chat, mourning and wailing that I might be dying and wanted to go home except I didn't really have one. .
Generic’s response was so perfect and
comforting.
“Oh Erica,” he said. “Take heart. I’m
waving my virtual Erica Flag for you.”
And you would think that this would not
be so helpful. Generic’s in Montreal, waving not-a-flag for me, as I puke
across the world in a garbage can in Bangalore. But astonishingly, it was a
little bit helpful.
Even so, I decided that when I came back
to Montreal, the whole thing needed to end. I mean, we hadn’t had sex in four
and half months, he had a wife and kids, most of the love was probably in my
imagination and I was convinced that once I saw him in person, it would be over.
So we arranged to meet on the monkey bars, and I was all ready to can it.
And then, we made out.
And despite thirteen and half more
attempts to can it, the ex’s and oh’s, and the emails and the haikus and even
the occasional leg hump went on and on and on. Until suddenly it’s the end of
the summer and I really don’t like myself that much.
I came to the decision that I needed to
resort to drastic measures. The drastic measures were, The Magical Rock Vagina
Cleanse.
Pretty much nobody knows what that is,
so let me explain.
The Magical Rock is black, it’s called
an Onyx, and you can buy it for about three bucks. I bought mine at the
Mont-Royal sidewalk sale. What you do is while you are menstruating, you put
the rock in your underwear – not your vagina, that’s where the diva cup goes.
And as you menstruate, the magical rock is supposed to absorb and dispel all of
your vagina’s trauma and disappointment and wounds (and/or ingrown hair issues
and yeast infections, etc…). I was hoping the rock would also
absolve and relieve my tendency to make pretty inappropriate and inconvenient
sexual choices. And then there was one other thing I wanted, which the SNAGS
are always going on and on about. It’s called Radical Self-Reliance. Immensely
inspiring, Radically Self-Reliant people wake up in the morning, they have a
shower, perhaps they even go to work or something like this, and somehow, they
don’t need a Vegan Life Coach or a Generic Married Man or a Boatman or whoever
to send them encouraging produce emoticons to affirm what they had for lunch.
I was thirty years old and I wanted
Radical Self-Reliance.
My first step was, I put the rock into a
jar of salt water. This was supposed to purify things.
Next, I composed my last brilliant
epistle to the Generic Married Man. The subject line read, “Attachment Wounds.”
Poor Generic wrote back mourning and
wailing about some terrifying dream he kept having where his wife and his
children are up in a skyscraper, and the skyscraper is burning down, and
Generic is stuck on the sidewalk and his legs are so tired and heavy and weak
because he has no time to work out since he’s so ridiculously crazy busy, and
he tries to climb and he can’t, but even if he could, the building is burning
down way too fast, and no matter what he does everything is going to
disintegrate and perish. And then Generic wakes up and he’s all alone sweating
and screaming silently on his own side of the bed.
With mild sympathy I offered Generic a
virtual flag, mentioned that he could maybe text me some eggplants on my
birthday, but right now I really needed to focus on me and my rock and my
vagina.
Very spiritually, as though my vagina
knew what needed to happen, I started to menstruate, right in sync with the New
Moon. And thus began Day One of the
Magical Rock Vagina Cleanse.
On Day Two, I got in the car with my
tiny mother and my darling grandparents who were both around ninety years old,
and the very best people of life. We drove to Algonquin Park where my beautiful
and perfect and exquisite cousin, a medical doctor, was getting married at a
summer camp.
I sat in the backseat next to my
grandmother. I shoved black licorice in my mouth, as the black rock sat beneath
my crotch absorbing trauma and disappointment. To enhance our minds, my
grandmother read us a National Geographic article called, “When Sex is
Shocking.” It was about a bug.
We got to the summer camp where my
cousin introduced me to her beautiful and perfect fiancé. They had about a
hundred perfect twenty-eight-year old friends who all had magnificent careers
and had been in beautiful and perfect relationships since kindergarten or at
least high school. I made some small talk about tie-dyed onesies, bug sex, and
cleaning out other people’s refrigerators.
The next day, to prepare everyone for
the wedding, I was scheduled to teach a yoga class to all these beautiful
people who were also rather athletic. And I realized that, I absolutely did not
want the magical black rock to fall out of my underwear. Like this just couldn’t
happen.
The other thing was that all the trauma
and disappointment was starting to make the rock smell crotchy.
So I came to the conclusion that you
know what, the hell with this. The hell with Radical Self Reliance. The hell
with Magical Rock Vagina Cleanses. I was canning it. For once, I was able to
can something relatively promptly. I took the rock out of my underwear, rinsed
off the trauma and disappointment and stuck the onyx in my purse.
The yoga class turned out to be
brilliant, the wedding was spectacular and before we knew it, we were all
sitting at the dinner table and suddenly I was little bit drunk.
There was one of those fun and exciting
happy wedding games where you have to do something to get the bride and groom
to make out. At this wedding, every table was supposed to write a limerick. In
my drunken charm, I decided that limericks were dumb and generic and that we
should write a haiku about the magical rock in my purse. To my great fortune,
no one at my table objected and I wrote my first haiku since canning my
“relationship” with the Generic Married Man. I presented the haiku to my stunning
cousin and her new husband. As a bonus, I handed over the magical black rock.
Whether or not they decided to keep it remains a mystery, but my best guess is
that the Magical Black Rock is now somewhere in Vancouver.
After the wedding I went to go hang out
in Toronto. And I thought, you know, yah I bailed on the Magical Black Rock
Cleanse, but maybe I have managed to acquire a little bit of Radical Self-
Reliance. You never know.
As fate would have it, Toronto is an
excellent place for resetting your vagina. You don’t need a magical black rock,
and you don’t need radical self-reliance. The hell with it. In twelve hours, I
got to hump two people’s legs. This was more action than I got from the Generic
Married Man in like six months. It was spectacular. Loved it.
The most persistent temporary source of
sexual gratification was this sad, successful and horny actor – he was a little
bit older than me, pretty cute, funny, also super depressed. The sad,
successful and horny actor was struggling with a whole slew of physical,
emotional and psychological problems. He definitely had the deep and beautiful
and impossible wounds going on, not to mention an extremely weird dog. Weirdest
dog I’ve ever seen. I called the sad, successful, horny actor, Dead Inside Man.
D-I-M. Dim.
 |
| DIM's weird dog |
Dim has been going to therapy twice a
week for twenty-seven and half years. He just discovered his inner child and so
he spends a great deal of time lying on the couch and soothing his inner child.
And every once in a while he lets me hump his leg which is very fun. After the
leg hump, I ask him how he’s doing
Mostly Dim says, “I feel so sad and
tired and broken.”
“There, there,” I reply, patting his
head. And I offer consolation with a special imaginary flag. Eventually, Dim
lets me hump his leg again, and it’s wonderful. One time after a nice leg hump,
Dim gives me a nice speech.
“You know, Erica,” he says. “You’re
lovely. You’re amazing. But… I just really don’t want to get too attached to
you. You know?”
“Oh you too? How interesting! But that’s
okay,” I say quickly. “That’s perfect. You are exactly what I'm looking for.”
Dead Inside Man is so neurotic that for
him to drive four and half hours to see me would be this massive ordeal, and
mostly unrealistic. Plus he has that really weird dog. So pretty much we’re
confined to being pen pals. But Dim does think I’m spectacular and this brings
me great comfort.
Every night, I’ve trained Dim to text
me, “E-x, o-h, e-x, o-h.”
For now, Dim is a little too dead inside
for eggplants, but maybe we can work on it.
The End.
