My pandemic hobby was/still is maybe also a mid-life crisis though truth be told, I just turned fifty and I’m not lying to myself, or maybe that’s hope.

(seriously, do you?)

Things are good now, though. I’m trying to adjust to being my age, having just come out of three years living on a residential liberal arts college campus. It was such a mindfuck how coddled everyone was, how people had time to seriously consider poetry – but also, how cool is that?

There was a woman in my cohort who was, is, an unbelievable poet and also a clinical herbalist. We would take walks around campus sometimes, especially during 2020 when there was a small group of us, a set of mothers and children, living on an otherwise unoccupied college campus.

there was also a town, but that was closed, too, so it was somewhere between an oasis and an island but she showed me some of the local plants like the trout lilies and their edible, spring-filled leaves and the Japanese knotweed, “invasive” everywhere, and a wonderful support for Lyme Disease.

There were tons of ticks there. It was serious. There is a Lyme, Connecticut; a Lyme, New Hampshire; and a Lyme, New York. We were in western Massachusetts, surrounded on all sides.

But also, there was knotweed, taking over, shouting at people like ‘hey, oh my god just put down the test tubes and agree with me already. you act like it’s such a huge deal that this is what i do but this is what the land calls for right now to keep things in balance and so i am here in force.

You can drive yourself crazy — but in a good way — looking for these patterns. I live for it.

Anyway, that was a tangent. We are warlike in so much of our language, fearing these invasives, these foreign, non-native people that most of us once were and have probably been at least once in our lives, even if we’ve remained so exceptionally silent about it.

I had originally thought to talk about music, to talk about the thing that pumped my brain full of happy neurobiological happenings but things meander periodically, as they should.

my god, that’s really the panic of dying, isn’t it, that you do not do it satisfied?

i know for some that the panic of dying is something called “hell” and I am supposed to imagine the worst of all possible worlds, the most torturous, for eternity and you know what, that’s the problem, i can.

If it gets any worse than this, I can’t imagine.

But also, this is not to say that I don’t love my life, immensely, and or that I am not happy to have it. I do. I am.

I love my family, my dogs (who are also family), my old house, and this pandemic hobby of mine, because thanks to pandemic unemployment I actually became financially solvent for the first time in a long while and so i made an investment in my half-centurion self and bought an expensive toy, and a couple of intensely-researched and considered accessories and I started learning how to push buttons and twist knobs and god, it’s addicting.

it’s like, listening to the music, moving to the music, and also interacting with the music with my body and my hands in a give and take exchange of control, the whole thing is just very synergistic and multi-dimensional i guess maybe like ketamine therapy. i’ve never done sanctioned ketamine therapy so i’m not yet sure on what level that operates, but i do know it works and as with all of it, if you have a will to heal it helps things remain in balance a bit more easily, since these are always an edge.

i guess that’s it, really, I guess I just came here to say that it all requires such active listening.