In April I visited a crystal store in Minneapolis. Soft synthesized chimes played, the kind of sounds you get when you search for “spa music” on Pandora. I flipped through “The Crystal Bible” looking for a stone with healing properties for my sacral chakra — a center of spiritual power in the body. Next to me, a woman in a purple velvet newsboy hat examined fragrant bundles of palo santo wood, Spanish for “holy wood,” a serious look on her face.

It had come to this.

“Is this the gayest moment of my life?” I wondered.

(No, it was not: I once slept with a woman who rubbed her hands with a squirt of organic lavender hand sanitizer from an enormous pump bottle before touching my shoulder while Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” played in the background.)

But the crystal store moment made it to my Top 5.

I was in a crystal store because I had injured my tailbone in February, and it wasn’t healing. It turns out you need your butt to do everything, and after seeing a doctor and two chiropractors, I was referred to a massage therapist/energy worker who worked out of a chiropractor’s office.

The masseuse grazed her hands over my body and informed me that my root chakra, at the base of my spine, was holding a lot of grief about my mother and could not heal until I addressed it and cleared the chakra.