Archive | Essays

Be Here Next: Mercury’s Mixed-Up Parade

I never permit my Ruby Intuition clients to tape our sessions.

My reasoning is simple. When people know they can watch or listen to something later, they tune out of the moment. And when they’re not present, they’re almost impossible to access so the sessions become useless.

It’s not like I don’t let my clients take notes. Some take a ton. But writing, like reading, is active. Even the act of transcription requires engagement. And when we really engage in a moment–any moment–it transforms us, transformation being the foundation of any practical magic. Continue Reading →

Cities of Lost Children

I’ve been thinking a lot about Nathan, my father’s father. I often do when pretty weather makes me regret my solitude.

Nathan was a survivor and he never let you forget it. He also didn’t like to think of himself that way.

He was born in Poland to a determined woman with a schnorrer of a husband. That Yiddish word isn’t in the kind of rotation that other ones are–schmuck, for one. But it should be because schnorrers are everywhere. They’re hustlers who aren’t good at hustling, people (men mostly) who drain your resources without profiting from them. They’re what my grandmother Basha, my grandfather’s wife, called losahs without their mezuzahs.

She was a pissah, that one. Mean, judgmental, super clever.

When my grandfather was alive we didn’t exactly get on because he was funny about women, especially big blondes. When his mother arrived in America with him and his little sister, his father already had found a better-off wife, and here was my great-grandmother not speaking English with nowhere to live, nothing in her pocket. But with two small children in tow she wasn’t about to fall on her face, not while she was young and had spring in her step. So she started going by Mary Banks and turning tricks and well–

My grandfather didn’t understand shall-we-say normal sexual boundaries.

Any sexual boundaries. Continue Reading →

Teach Me Tonight (NSFW, O My)

I’ve been trying to figure out who to sleep with next–really, who to be attracted to. As if we have control in that department.

I always tell my Ruby Intuition clients the best you can hope for is a version 2.0 of what’s erotically imprinted on you. I’ve seen those relationships borne out of someone stubbornly trying Not to Date Mom or Dad and, boy o boy, the no-sex vibe is stronger than Prince’s pheromones are even now.

Strong.

As usual, my shrink has useful advice. She says, “The minute you get that Child feeling, get out.” She means that when I get that desperate, pay-attention-to-me-daddy! feeling around a paramour, I should cut it off. Because once again I have fallen for a charismatic narcissist who would rather drown me in their black hole than make our dynamics about anything other than their ego. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy