The Real Role of Ritual

February 16, 2026February 17, 2026 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

I spent a solid chunk of my life trying to figure out how I was going to save the world. Then I realized I couldn’t, so I decided to just do what I could.

I sometimes romanticize this in my mind as “I wanted to save the world, but I was only one person so I became an EMT so I could save people and make them happy. As an EMT I learned I couldn’t save everyone and even then I couldn’t make them happy. Then I decided to just give people more reasons to be happy and become a baker. That’s when it started working.”

That’s adorable and might make a good eulogy for me someday, but the truth is that’s what we all do. Everyone at some point fights with themselves over where they fit in the world, what they want to be, and what they want to leave behind. Some figure out, some resent the question and never do, and others just decide to let the world figure itself out and they’ll go where they fit.

I’m lucky as hell I found my way to baking and culinary. It’s not just a trade and career for me, it’s a calling and spiritual expression. I’d love if it paid more- who wouldn’t?- but it’s work that activates Heart, Mind, Body, and Soul for me and I can make something like a living doing it. That’s not nothing.

Continue reading →

The Impact Of Intent

February 7, 2026 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

I’m enjoying a local bar the way I like it- nearly empty, quiet but for the band in the next room that I’ll shortly go in to support, and just me and the bartender discussing books. They have to bus tables, I need to write and wait for my food order. It’s a genial end to the conversation.

Leikam Brewing is Jewish woman-owned brewery in Southeast Portland that embodies what I want to be myself- unapologetically and openly itself and also a hub of its community. It’s a Jewish space that’s not just for Jews. If you’re part of the community, you don’t need to be part of the Tribe.

I’ve knocked back two beers over the course of my conversation with the bartender about the virtues and flaws of various fantasy series. One was a French Toast-inspired ale called “Ain’t No Challah-Back Girl” and the other a stout called “Mob Barley.” If it’s not Jewish puns, it’s music- or both- and I’m not mad about it. Going here tonight felt needed, and not just because I knew a particularly good skewer truck was going to be selling their wares and I have an unhealthy need for their black sesame flatbread with roasted garlic toum spread.

The first month of 2026 in the US was not fantastic. An activist mother of three, Renee Good, was murdered- shot three times at point blank range- by an agent of the state who proceeded to brag about it, and the government unabashedly bullshit the public about how the woman was a “domestic terrorist” and “tried to run/ran the agent over” when their own camera shows otherwise. They did it again to a VA nurse- Alex Pretti- whose last words were “Are you okay?” to a woman these same agents had just pepper-sprayed and pushed to the pavement.

While still processing this, I got treated to reports of leftists- the guys meant to oppose this kind of fascist, Big Brother crap- lined up outside at New York synagogue chanting about how much they love Hamas. Later, I’d see tweets asking if the VA nurse was a Zionist, and I’ve grown too used to them showing up to every protest or event with their flags and keffiyehs yelling “collective liberation!” as they attempt to hijack someone else’s efforts to organize.

After over two years of feeling chased out of leftist spaces by these ignorant shmucks who are- at best- useful idiots parroting slogans, I think I’m well within my moral rights to wish a plague on both their houses, wait for both parties to beat the tar out of each other, and rebuild better once they’ve burned each other out.

It can never be that simple though. The fact that it goes against every bone in my body to look at people suffering and say “not my problem” is only part of it. It’s that I once again get to watch my identity be made convenient.

Continue reading →

Between the Mountain and the Sea

January 5, 2026 / The Black Hat Baker / 1 Comment

“A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“And Slid said: “I am the Lord of gliding waters and of foaming waters and of still. I am the Lord of all the waters in the world and all that long streams garner in the hills; but the soul of Slid is in the Sea. Thither goes all that glides upon Earth, and the end of all the rivers is the Sea.”
Excerpt From The Gods of Pegana,
Lord Dunsany

It’s a windy and cold morning on the shore. I’m out walking the beach down by the water, where the tide turns the sand from soft tan to slate gray and my boots leave footprints. It’s easier-going for older people who are out with their dogs. The dogs, for their part, don’t seem to mind the going or the feel of the cold sand; they’re high as kites on all the smells and feeling carried on salt air and the ability to run.

In a few hours, I’ll be on a plane back to Oregon. Back to my wife and cat, our basement apartment up a mountain, and eventually a kitchen that’s felt more like a psych ward the last few months than the serene kind of chaos I want to believe I work in.

Those LeGuin and Dunsany quotes slide through my mind along with “A Pirate Looks at 40.” It feels silly and dramatic and florid, but I don’t really care. Finding a bench on the pier where my grand-uncle once tried to teach me to fish, I could almost cry.

Continue reading →

The Uncanny Valley by the Sea

December 29, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

I still try to work out when I travel. It’s a reliable routine, and forces a little structure even on to my time off- a “whatever else goes on, I need to do this” task. In the case of my trip home, that means it joins a lot of food-centric tasks:

Hit up a Wawa
Hit up Dinos- get a Dino’s Special Italian, send pictures back west for instructional material to those who would put mayonnaise on such a sandwich.
Smuggle Yeungling beer and Tastykake pie back in a suitcase.

Priorities are important, all.

I’m staying near my old hometown, and the easiest gym to get into is the Jewish Community Center that my parents are still members of. It’s where I went to summer day camp as a kid, and where we went to enjoy the pool in summer. My dad handed me his access card and said, “When you get in there, report back and tell me where everything is. I haven’t been in there in a bit, and they’ve moved stuff around.”

“All things change and we change with them,” but that change is not always radical. It can be slow, in bits and pieces. When it’s a place that you remember being the whole world to you when you were young, what’s changed and what’s remained don’t always mesh in your brain.

Continue reading →

A New Project on the Craft of Living

November 16, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

After a rainy day and almost too much walking around in it, it seems the last wayward drops are making their way off the trees and onto the patio.

The week at the winery ended, for me at least, in one of those “what the fuck happened,” twelve-hour shifts that you can’t quite put your finger on where the day went or where it clearly all went wrong, but the only thing for it is embracing the suck, powering through, and getting to a point where you can leave the kitchen for a couple days without fear anything will irreparably explode.

I dragged my ass home, pausing to hit up one of my favorite beer stores along the way. The fact that I then dropped all three can of dark beer on the pavement- one rolling under the car, leading me to kneel down in the dark in a black hoodie, waiting for some impatient shmuck to flatten me before I realized it had rolled all the way under to the curb- confirmed that the day was Seriously and Entirely Fucked, and I needed to get myself home and out of work attire before something else happened.

Emily, absolute princess that she is, greeted me when I came home and told me to just get comfy. I stripped off my jeans and long sleeve undershirt, having already deposited my aprons and jacket for the laundry I’d do later. After a little downtime, some brainrot internet cartoons, and a little of my latest whiskey acquisition, I was feeling something like human again.

I’m in the middle of outlining a second manuscript (yes, while the mentorship book is still very overdue on my own schedule. It’ll get there, this is important too, trust me.) This one is the first book I’ve really tried to write with another person- and what’s more, it’s my father.