Burnt Sage & Blunt Truths

  (And You Have to Explain It’s Just Your Cat Imitating a Harley) There are moments in life that prepare you for nothing. This is one of them. Picture this: you’re on the phone, minding your business, existing quietly in your own home. Suddenly the person on the other end pauses—long enough to be concerning—and says: “Uh… is there… something running?” No, sir. That is not a power tool. That is not a personal massager. That is my cat . She purrs at industrial strength. Not a polite rrr . Not a gentle mrrp . This is a full-throttle, chest-rattling, Harley-Davidson idling at a stoplight kind of purr. The kind that makes nearby electronics nervous and innocent bystanders deeply uncomfortable. And the worst part? She does it just for being near me. Same room? Purr. Eye contact? Purr. Existing within a ten-foot radius? VROOM VROOM. This all started with Bird TV. Flickers, finches, juncos, chickadees, bushtits—the whole feathered production. One cat (the Ottoman Kid) belly-crawled across...

COLONIZER! "You used SAGE in a spell!"  You hear someone lambast someone else on TikTok. You see a snapchat post "I'm a baby witch, and I can use XYZ Herb because my great great great great grandma was a full blooded Navajo princess. I'm only 19 but I'm a young elder and a shaman from my tribe and I KNOW THESE THINGS!  JFC. I. Just. Can't Here’s the blunt truth, no incense, no disclaimers: What you’re seeing isn’t thoughtful cultural literacy. It’s performative purity politics mixed with TikTok-level anthropology and zero historical grounding. A lot of folks yelling “cultural appropriation” at every herb, stone, symbol, or tool are doing at least one of these: Collapsing global trade history into “who used it first” Treating cultures like they existed in vacuum-sealed jars Confusing closed religious rites with widely traded materials Using outrage as social currency because it’s easier than study And worst of all: They’re flattening...

  There’s a specific flavor of injury no one talks about — the kind that doesn’t come with a cast, a brace, or a visible marker that says this is real . You look fine. You are not fine. I was in a car wreck. Not the cinematic kind. The practical kind. The kind that rearranges your insides just enough to make everyday movement a negotiation. Imaging looks “normal.” Vitals are “stable.” Which is system-speak for we acknowledge you exist, please wait indefinitely . So I wait. (8 hours at the ER on Tuesday night into Wednesday morning)  I wait for the insurance company to return calls. I wait for the lawyer to apply pressure. I wait for a rental car that has become a theoretical concept rather than an actual vehicle. (The following three all impacted by the holidays.) I wait for my body to decide whether today is a “functioning human” day or a “don’t cough, don’t twist, don’t breathe too deeply” day. I sleep upright in a recliner like a half-remembered ancestor in a family photo. ...

  At approximately 3:00 AM , while I lay injured, upright, and clinging to consciousness in my big old recliner like a Victorian invalid , Captain Thunderpaws and the Ottoman Kid launched what can only be described as NASCAR: Feral Edition . Captain Thunderpaws, AKA Fraser                                           The Ottoman Kid, AKA Elvira No warning. No warm-up laps. Just full send . They thundered through the house at speeds previously reserved for: dropped pills the sound of “what did you just swallow” and the moment before something expensive breaks And then — AND THEN — Captain Thunderpaws miscalculated physics . Friends. He CRASHED INTO THE BACK OF MY CHAIR . Not a gentle bump. Not a polite ricochet. A full-body, Looney-Tunes-ass impact , like a furry cannonball launched by spite and leftover ham. Did this stop them? ✨ Absolutely not. ✨ They...

Every few months, like clockwork, someone on Reddit “discovers” a real necromancer . Not a practitioner. Not a scholar. Not someone doing quiet, disciplined work in the dark where no one applauds. No—this one posts a photo . An open “grimoire.” Yellowed parchment vibes. A skull. Some fake Latin that looks like it was chewed up by a blender and spit back out by an AI with a Hot Topic addiction. And suddenly the comments are full of: “This feels powerful.” “My third eye is buzzing.” “I can tell this is real.” Congratulations. You’ve been spiritually catfished by a JPEG. Let me be very clear: That image is not a necromantic working. It’s a mood board. Real necromancy—folk, ceremonial, ancestral, psychopompic—does not look like Pinterest witchcore cosplay. It looks like structure . It looks like limits . It looks like names you don’t say out loud and offerings you don’t photograph . What it does not look like is: Unreadable text pretending to be ancient Ran...

 There is a moment—brief, holy, terrifying—when a cat finishes pooping and realizes the burden of mortality has been lifted. The Ottoman Kid has reached that moment. You can see it in her eyes first. Wide. Shining. A little haunted. Her body lifts off the floor by half an inch. And then— THE ZOOMIES BEGIN. This is not running. This is transcendence . She rockets out of the litter box like she’s been fired from a cannon, leaving behind nothing but dust, a faint echo, and the unmistakable energy of someone who just fixed a major internal problem and now believes she is immortal. She hits the hallway at full loaf velocity. The rug is no longer a rug. It is a launch ramp . She bounces off the couch. Careens off the wall. Rebounds off the ottoman like a sentient beanbag with unresolved feelings. Her back legs move faster than physics allows. Her front legs are mostly decorative at this point. Steering is theoretical. Somewhere upstairs, the Moose Brigade pau...

I live in the second-floor middle unit of a three-story apartment building. Which means I am not upstairs or downstairs. I am structurally compromised . Above me live two women. Heavyset A-Ganger types. When they move, the ceiling doesn’t creak — it registers seismic activity . They don’t walk. They advance . It sounds like two moose learning to Riverdance while wearing work boots and making eye contact with God. I have accepted this. Because acceptance is cheaper than therapy. Below me live people. Quiet people. Hopeful people. People who thought, “The second floor seems reasonable.” These people were wrong. Because between these layers of humanity exists me . And my cats. Enter Captain Thunderpaws — a lean, tactical menace with a thousand-yard stare and a deep mistrust of inanimate objects — and his sister, a plush, gravity-honoring loaf who runs like a beanbag chair with dreams. Together, they have unionized and designated the hours between 4 and 5 a.m. as prime time for the Kit...

 Hustle culture loves collapse. It thrives in it. Because collapse gives the grind evangelists something to stand on while they preach discipline like it’s a moral achievement instead of a survival reflex shaped by timing, insulation, and luck. “Work harder.” “Out-hustle the problem.” “Sleep when you’re dead.” That advice only sounds clever if you’ve never been buried by systems that don’t care how hard you try. Collapse doesn’t negotiate. It takes the strap. Then it takes the boots. Then it takes the ground out from under you. And hustle culture still shows up, clipboard in hand, asking why you aren’t pulling yourself up. The people being crushed are not careless. They paid the loans. Worked the hours. Took the extra shifts. Said yes when it cost them and no when it scared them. They survived layoffs, medical hits, pandemics, inflation spikes, housing whiplash, and an endless series of “once-in-a-lifetime” crises that keep renewing their subscription. There is no...

 There’s a specific kind of workplace tension that doesn’t get talked about enough: Working under a supervisor who is younger, undertrained, and positioned above you without the experience or institutional knowledge to back it up. Especially when you do have the training. Especially when you do understand the systems. And especially when they respond to that gap not with curiosity — but with control. ESPECIALLY when you are instructed to run all communication you have with internal partners and external stakeholders through them.  If you’re living this right now, let me say this plainly: you’re not imagining it, and you’re not being “difficult.” What’s Often Really Happening When someone is promoted without adequate training or onboarding, they’re forced to lead from a place of uncertainty. That uncertainty frequently shows up as: micromanagement emotional reactions unnecessary urgency hostility toward competence, they don’t fully understand Add an upco...

  Last night, coming off Alaskan Way toward Ballard, I saw a man on the sidewalk. I don’t know if he was alive or dead. I don’t know if he was sleeping, overdosing, or already gone. What I do know is that traffic was moving way too fast for me to stop, and by the time the thought Should I pull over? fully formed, the moment had already passed. That’s the part that sticks with me — not just what I saw, but what I  couldn’t do . We talk a lot in spiritual circles about being helpers, healers, lightworkers. About always stopping, always stepping in, always being available when suffering crosses our path. It sounds noble. It looks good on social media. But it’s also a lie — or at least a half-truth that leaves no room for reality. Real life does not slow down so you can be spiritually correct. Roads don’t pause. Traffic doesn’t part. And sometimes the choice to stop isn’t yours to make at all. What lingers isn’t guilt so much as uncertainty. The not knowing. The unanswered que...

 Most of you who have spent any time around me know that I love thrift stores. In fact, my THT (more on that later) has a name for me. Sister Shops With a Fist.  I've found age-appropriate true leather pants, Tiffany-inspired lamps, and shirts that could only be labeled as "hot damn."  When my weight was yo-yo-ing from a size 10 to a size 18 and back again, thrift stores saved my budget. Because face it, I'm a clothes horse.  There's one other thing I'm worse about collecting, though. Books. Especially Earth Centered Religions, Paganism, Rootwork, Hoodoo, Conjure, New Age, Metaphysical volumes of all sorts. Mainly, I find them at yard sales, Facebook Marketplace, and Craigslist. But something happened yesterday that surprised even me.  I was standing in a thrift store, a sister store to Savers back in the Midwest called Value Village, minding my business, when the shelves started talking. Not whispering. Not hinting. Talking. I left my perusal of yet anot...

You all who know me, know that a part of my heart lives in the Florida Keys, mainly, in Key West. But what do you know of her ghosts? Oh we all know about Hemingway,  Truman's Little White House, that one haunted thing in that one museum. ( I will NOT say the name). But did you know about the Lantern Girl?  A Key West ghost forgotten on purpose. Matthew Street wasn’t always the harmless little cut-through tourists wander at night. Back in the late 1800s, when cigar rollers and wreckers filled the island, it was a narrow stretch of dirt where the streetlamps never quite stayed lit. Sailors said the shadows there moved wrong. Locals said wind shouldn’t sound like that. Everyone agreed it wasn’t a place you lingered. But the ghost? She came later. They called her Lantern Girl , though nobody remembers her real name. She was a young Cuban woman who worked rolling cigars by day and nursing sick neighbors by night. Fever season hit hard that year—yellow fever, brutal and fa...