Insomnia Farm

I’m shivering outside a Best Buy at 10am, masked up and waiting for it to open. It’s April 2020. I don’t know shit about anything anymore. Toilet paper is back in stock but onions are hard to come by. I bought a webcam before they sold out but I don’t want to turn it on anymore. I have an anxiety condition now but don’t yet realize it. I am shivering outside this Best Buy to get a Switch Lite. I have no idea if this act of wanton consumerism is flirting with viral disaster, but I’m here and ready to buy.

The Switch Lite was my first handheld and the first console I bought for myself. I got it for the express purpose of cozy gaming myself into a stupor. I planted fruit tree after fruit tree, then gifted Elliot the Beach Poet so many pomegranetes and duck feathers he couldn’t help but fall in love with me. I have always been a night owl and a fitful sleeper. The pandemic made this much worse, so I spent the small hours farming and landscaping, hitting rocks and fleeing wasps. Night after night I built my small empires, a few hours at a time.

It’s five years later and I’ve now played 705+ hours of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and 405+ hours of Stardew Valley. The Lite and the games have evaded the pandemic PTSD some people I know associate with playing ACNH so much during the pandemic. I’m happy I have no such negative associations. Of course, the combined play time of those two games could have been spent learning another language or improving my guitar playing. Instead I have the impeccably landscaped island of Camillia and the bountiful produce of Insomnia Farm to show for my efforts. Ineffable. Incomparable.

The empires still stand.