The Effluencer. Isn’t She Lovely?
Trawling Instagram again, feeling like one of those whales that beaches itself on Bora Bora with 115 plastic cups, 10 kg of plastic bags and a whole mess of flip-flops in its belly. It starts with diminished appetite. Then weight loss. Before you know it you haven’t poo’d for a month, you’re vomiting blood and begging for the end. Yet even in the darkest hour, there is hope. Just when it seems there is nothing in the Instagram ocean but banana bags and condoms, up swims a squid, all glistening mantle and spatulate tentacles. Perquina Lovely is The Effluencer.
We first stumbled upon her by accident, banging about in the comments section of Beth Kirby’s feed. It was as if she’d stumbled in out of the rain looking for surgical clamps or the right gauge of pipe to give her cat an enema, but had become distracted by the stuff on the walls and forgotten how she got there. And where she was supposed to be next. Or who. She seems to be a lady in her ambiguous sixties, living alone in Upstate New York, pursuing a dizzying array of projects woven on the many-bobbined loom of self-help, natural beauty, foraging and vaginal care. The first item that caught our eye was a series of curated Dinners for One whereby Ms Lovely prepares a bespoke meal for a single sitter in an unusual natural setting.
the_effluencer ‘When Harold left, I wasn’t sure I could go on. I had not moved to the forest to be alone. I pressed ahead, greeting each solicitous smile with a dying fall as the path ahead crumbled, slid backward beneath my feet like a carpet of pebbles. But the cure for pain is in the pain. I wandered woods and streams; foraging for Me. Now the Me I found can help the You you lost find You. Healing Autumnal Effluence Dinners for One. Curated solitude and sacrament, nursing at the breast of Mother Nature herself. TABLE IN THE STREAM. Let the the river be your larder; wildflowers be your guests. Thrill silently to the symphony of cattlecall and birdsong as crayfish wink from eddies and brown trout tickle toes. String a tranquil pearl of Joy onto the necklace of Yourself. Space limited, dm for dates.’
Upon further examination, The Effluencer emerges as a bastion of the Catskills farm-to-table scene, with an artisanal eye for the changing seasons and how they can be harnessed to augment a naturopathic larder.
the_effluencer ‘BEYOND. 7 am. We are Mountain People. And each year, seemingly from nowhere, are gripped anew by Father Winter’s hoary knuckles. Is the firewood stacked close? Does the root cellar burgeon? Is Aunt Nancy’s old grey goose dead? Mason jars of Lady Summer’s heirloom tomatoes, abstracted to scarlet nectar, stand shoulder-to-shoulder above the mangle like vigilant dragoons. The pantry bustles with jellies of quince and loganberry, elbowing aside greengage chutney and gooseberry fool like peasant women at market. Tonight I shall fashion a seasonal broth from pheasant’s neck and salted mutton. I reach for the cleaver. Is that Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker I hear winnowing down the dingle, shaking its harness bells like a Robert Frost pony? We check the tire pressure on the Subaru. The Chopper beckons.’
Ms. Lovely’s words become particularly trenchant on the issue feminine hygiene. She takes her role as spirit guide to the online Yoni Steaming community seriously. Indeed, feverish promotion of the holistic Vagatial dominates her writings to an almost eye-blistering degree.
the_effluencer ‘Gathering equipment for tomorrow’s Sacred Yoni Steam. Checking weather, barometric pressure, wind speed, traffic conditions. Backup generator is primed with diesel, all gaskets and jumper cables inspected for scale and embrittlement. Before turning in for the evening, I administer a mugwort mask to the entire area, relaxing folds and corrugations, mitigating fluting and entrenchment and softening obstinate follicles for the morning’s pluck-and-wax extirpation, undertaken with blacksmith’s pliers, a three-bar fire, small propane blowtorch and scented candles in fresh balsam and frosted cranberry by Bath & Body Works©️. I like the Forest of Perquina to be free of interstitial bramble before purgation commences. Wish me luck, Sisters of the Moon! I am Wombyn, hear me yelp!’
Perquina’s irrepressible appetite for life is shaded throughout by reminiscences of her marriage to irascible Harold, who left home having been found in flagrante in the shower with a lady from the food co-op.
the_effluencer ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Gifted a summer that lingered past its sell-by date, I must now be like a tree and let the dead leaves fall. We moved to Paradise this season, twenty years ago. Harold had just had his first show in a little shopfront in Chinatown. I think he thought the girl at the gallery had a crush on him. He has a terrible radar for such things. I was concerned he was going to make a fool of himself again. In conversation he had begun to refer to himself an artist. That was new. To call his paintings work. When I said to him ‘There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled. You feel it, don’t you?’ he just stared at me. The move seemed to sever him at the knees, allowing him to self-mythologize in a landscape where there was no eyebrow cocked in retort. He started to believe his own words. Had we waited a little longer, collective indifference would have blunted his conceit as it always had. But the wheels were in motion. When I asked him, twelve years later, what he saw, he just said ‘a vale of fucking tears’.
As The Effluencer continues to ruminate on social media, we will occasionally reproduce posts here; but to observe her peregrinations first hand and receive unadulterated, penetrating blasts from her bugle, follow her on Instagram.
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