“Lord of Yourself I Crown and Mitre You”

April 6, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

“It’s goddamned exhausting. I’m so tired all the time.”

I’m in one of my favorite coffeehouses in Southeast, having just had a light lunch after my workout. A woman sitting across from me is generously sharing her table and its electric plug ins until a friend of hers is meant to arrive. We’re not talking, but I gather she’s a teacher- she’s in a hoodie in a coffee shop on a Sunday afternoon, flipping through resumes, books on pedagogy, and Classroom Safety manuals. I can only imagine what’s going on in her world at this moment, but I recognize the beleaguered groan as she clicks through her laptop.

When school children learn about this moment in American history, I wonder what the textbooks will call it. I personally vote for The Great Exhaustion- a moment in history where the only things there were plenty of were arrogance and opinions.

Photo by Photo By: Kaboompics.com on Pexels.com

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The Bookworms

April 3, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

“Think not of the books you’ve bought as a ‘to be read’ pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.”
– Luc van Donkersgoed

Years ago, one of my relatives indicated the piles of books in his house and told me “Booksellers love Jews, because Jews buy books. Why? Because we’re always the ones that have to remember.” It could also be that we’re historically not that great at sports and needed something to do on the playground.

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Breaking The Habit

March 15, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Old habits die hard. I wake up in the morning, and my gut instinct is to scroll.

America is back to being weird and scary as fuck and the urge to preserve my mental health is in constant tension with my wish to stay “informed.” I thought that getting rid of the social media apps on my phone would mitigate this- you can’t obsess over what isn’t there. The muscle memory remains, though. The habit. The “wake and bake” of the 21rst Century where our first instinct on resuming consciousness is “Shit, better fix that” and roasting our minds to a blackened husk on information before we go about our day.

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The Sabbath Day

March 8, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

What smells do you associate with holiness?

If not “holiness,” then let’s call it “sanctity.” “Austerity” could also work, I think. Whatever word you want to use, it’s the idea of being in a very large place where a lot of people do a lot of generally serious things in the name of something arguably intangible, and it has a unique smell. The government buildings I have been in don’t have that kind of smell (“why” is something others can argue), but synagogues, the right kind of churches, and museums definitely do.

Somewhere a while back, I read that the reason people love the smell of “old books” is because lignen- the fibrous matter in plants and trees that paper is made of- has compounds that decompose over time into a yellowish color and is related to vanillin, the compound that (you may have guessed) gives vanilla its smell and flavor. Synagogues and churches inevitably have a LOT of old books in them unless they are brand new. Hymnals, prayer books, and holy texts to service a whole congregation don’t come cheap, and there aren’t “new editions” of ancient vows and praise that require refreshing the stock. The same prayer books (ideally) serve generations. The next time you walk into a place of worship, it might be interesting to wonder who held your hymnal before you. What were they going through? What were they thinking, if anything? What did they pray for if they could? Were they praying for you?

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Home Brew

February 11, 2025February 11, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

It’s perfectly understandable to me how haunted houses can exist. We have the idea of “ghosts in the machine,” “Artistic DNA,” and omnipresent-but-unspecific “vibes”- why not “ghosts in the interior design?” Ghosts that can follow a person or people from place to place, creating the sense of where they’ve been before, and writing an intangible living atlas in the frontal lobes of Those Who Know.

The house where I was raised is a minimum hour drive away and five-plus years back in time from being swiftly and silently bulldozed. My parents now live in an ivory tower of an apartment, nineteen floors above center city Philadelphia. They brought some of their favorite decor from their old house was well as my Bubba’s similarly-leveled house, and have moved into an apartment roughly a twentieth the size of where we used to all live together.

Ghosts in the decor, then, is the only way I can explain spending a few days in the cluttered but cozy guest room and walking out the door in the morning expecting a staircase to the right. It’s the only way I feel like the living room of the Philadelphia high-rise has a piano and fireplace in it that I can feel but not see in their decor of wood, white, cream, gray, and Judaica.

Everything about our old house is there, tucked under the carpet or back in a closet, felt but not seen until you cross the threshold out to the hall. Then I am most certainly in Philadelphia.