Generally speaking, I don’t tell anyone I meet in person that I am an intuitive. I may talk about it more than I used to—I have an intuitive practice, after all—but I find that owning up to this skill means I have to contend with everyone’s feelings and theories about psychic phenomena, not to mention allow them to feel superior to me. Often people begin to testify about their own experiences that defy regular logic, as if they are throwing me a bone or sharing a dirty secret. Sometimes they actually ask, “If you’re so psychic, what am I thinking right now?” I try to be patient, I really do. But though these people may not mean any harm, what they are discussing in essence is whether I am full of shit and whether the very concept of psychic phenomena is also full of shit. Believe me or don’t, I want to say. It gives me more of an edge if you don’t. Continue Reading →
Archive | Past Matters
Hexed and Hacked
It started with a pair of heels clicking down the hallway of a dream.
I have a great grandmother I’ve never discussed here. She is a family legend and, like most family legends, a family shadow. She and I were never alive at the same time but she looks out for me like no one in my line but my mother’s mother Alice May, who died when I was 18.
This great-grandmother’s name was Rubenfire, which I learned long after I named my now-deceased kitty Ruby. Growing up I was only told that she was a very cruel woman who’d made a small fortune selling rags. Later I learned she was brave, charismatic, and resourceful, and that when she’d arrived here from Poland as a non-English-speaking teen, she’d done the only thing she could to support her children upon discovering her husband had started a new family in Brooklyn: She turned tricks, and eventually became a successful brothel owner in the Salem area of Massachusetts. Continue Reading →
So much 
I think about the Pilgrims, as I so often do when the modern world bogs me down. They didn’t have antibiotics but they also didn’t have computer viruses. What a strange world we now occupy: so isolated and so boundary-less, all at once. It’s enough to make this goody cry.