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Christopher

Noxon

Available Art

Not rarin’

“People are rarin’ to go,” someone said on a Zoom the other day, and she was right. You can feel it, the yearning to gather and hug and congregate and get past this godawful year of limitation and loss.

Creek sloshing in Matilija Canyon: where I want to be.

I get it, even as that cautious excitement lands in my heart with a resounding NO.

I am not rarin’. Not even a little.

I don’t want to get on a plane or ride on a subway or yell across a crowded table in a restaurant. I don’t want to wait in a line or push up against people in a nightclub for a better view of the band.

I’m OK here, thanks. I miss movies and restaurants and live music and theater, but I’m just fine in the weird state of suspended animation, highlights of my weeks sloshes through nearby creeks and pots of white bean stew. “Dude be careful,” a friend told me this morning. “You’re gonna end up a crusty Ojai hermit, going off grid and growing your own kale.”

Sounds pretty fucking good.

Maybe I’m just old (is 52 old? It’s definitely not young). Maybe the lockdown put my burgeoning codgerdom on a high steady temperature, hardening a relatively active, flexible social animal into a dense block of immobility.

Or maybe it’s the grief. It’s always there, a weighted blanket covering every movement. Fourteen months have passed since Charlie died (432 AC to be exact) and I’m doing a lot better than I was. But even now the world feels wrong and dangerous and empty.

The pandemic is awful and disruptive and terrifying, yes. But it has also been weirdly accommodating of those of us in mourning, slowing everyone down and focusing energies on deeper and more difficult truths.

Anyway none of this is over, obviously. We may never return to “normal.” Perhaps I’ll feel differently when I get my own shot. For now, I’m staying put.