A living hall of story and craft
For the Essays & Works that don’t fit neatly into categories.
The Look That Says “Oh, You’re Doing That?” There’s a particular look that crosses a face when someone sees a tip jar on an artist’s page. It isn’t disgust, not exactly. It’s etiquette’s little wince: oh, you’re doing that? As if a line has been crossed—some invisible threshold between “serious creative” and “person who needs … Read more
How influencer culture turned honest labor into performance — and why I refuse to play along. I make things and I sell them. That’s it. This isn’t content; it’s work. Bookmark it if you want to find it again. Subscribe if your bookmarks look as chaotic as mine. The Uneasy Divide I make things. I … Read more
I do not want to turn suffering into an icon. I do not want to polish it, frame it, and pretend it ever did me favors. What happened to me was ugly—bloody, raw, body-level harm with the kind of psychic splatter that reaches years into the future. Still, I keep circling the same threshold: my … Read more
The first thing anyone notices about a handmade rosary is never the price. It’s the weight.Glass, stone, metal—each bead has a small gravity, each knot holds a decision, each decade learns to sit in the palm like an animal that trusts you. I made one on the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart, and as … Read more
There’s a certain kind of moral cleanliness people want to feel these days.They want to be good consumers, conscious supporters, enlightened participants in a system they claim to despise but cannot live without. They buy from small businesses, repost infographics about mutual aid, share “support artists!” memes, and talk wistfully about community economies—the imagined utopias … Read more
Rethinking the transactional expectations we’ve built around creativity The Smile Policy I spent fourteen years behind counters, headsets, and glowing screens where the smile policy was as binding as the dress code. You learn the choreography early: the greeting that catches before it lands, the apology you deliver whether or not anything is your fault, … Read more
Every brochure swears there’s help if you need it. Every workplace poster smiles beside a hotline. Every government site has a dropdown labeled Emergency Supports. The language is clean, confidence-colored. Words like accessible, inclusive, no wrong door. If you believed the posters, you’d think the country was a long, soft net strung beneath the high wire of ordinary life. … Read more
He said it with the offhand confidence of someone who has never had to ask permission to take up space. “You’re where you belong — making my coffee.” The sentence slid across the counter like a coin: tossed without thought, bright enough to catch the light, already sticky with fingerprints. I smiled. I handed over the cup. … Read more
There’s a different kind of silence on the internet now. Not peace — vacancy. You can feel it in the empty timelines, the vanished conversations, the shop links that used to hum with life but now lead nowhere. It’s not just quiet; it’s abandonment. It’s the hollow ache of realizing that everyone you once built … Read more