I’ve always been cool with New Agers. I can’t vibe with most New Age ideas. My science brain always kicks in and I go “nah.” The channeling thing… Please. But I can’t judge. I’m freak adjacent. People think I’m nuts half the time.

The only time I had a real problem with a New Ager was with this one lady who ran an ad with us every week and in exchange, she got to write a column. She wrote about ear candling. Weird kinds of food that cures anything. A different wacky treatment each week.

I was like, is this woman crossing some kind of ethical line here? But the ad… Without ads, no us.

I had to find a picture to go with each article and some of them looked really weird in the edited space of a newspaper. Ear candling! It was annoying, but I put up with it.

I just hoped people wouldn’t believe all her columns and would know to go to the doctor if they got sick. The last straw happened during the Anthrax scare.

Everyone was scared of getting a letter full of anthrax in the mail and she runs a column about an herbal cure for anthrax. Anthrax! Are you kidding me?

“If you think you caught anthrax,” she said, “don’t take Cipro!” Because the pharmaceutical industry. An herbal treatment for anthrax. Which kills people. Like always.

“That’s it,” I said. “I can’t put my name on a newspaper that has advice like that. My editor agreed and he got the ads and the column nixed.

I think he was afraid she was gonna get us sued if somebody got anthrax. We were both editors, by the way. It’s complicated.

Anyway, I’m mostly cool with New Agers. Or pagans or mystics, or whatever they want to be called. I don’t know if New Age music is them or if it’s just a coincidence.

I tend to experience both whenever I go for a back massage. It mostly sucks — except Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre and a Robert Rich and a couple of other guys.

On the other hand, people who I at least lump in with New Agers, maybe unfairly, make some bitchin’ dark ambient which I’m obsessed with. As well as weird interesting stuff I don’t even have a name for yet.

I’m just a lone weirdo I guess.