The Alternator Was Already Dying
You have to build your own fucking world.
The Alternator Was Already Dying
You Have to Build Your Own Fucking World
So many people distribute interpretations from inside worlds they have made and call those interpretations collective messages.
Their astrology may function within the world they have built. Somebody may choose to visit that world. Play inside it. Even find something useful there. But that does not make the message automatically true for my body, my ecosystem or my life. Consuming somebody else’s interpretation does not necessarily manifest anything for me. Sometimes it simply produces more attention, authority and money for the personality delivering it.
This is also why tarot readings are not part of my services.
Tarot is not my craft.
That does not mean I do not have a deep understanding of the practice. It means I use that understanding within my own ecosystem. I do not turn it into another ting I believe I deserve to profit from by distributing other people’s lives back to them as stories.
I cannot build somebody else’s world for them.
I can serve as a Creative Director within that process. I can help somebody recognize the architecture of their world. I can teach them how to find the language, patterns and skills required to build it for themselves.
But they belong to that world.
Not me.
The world has to meet their body. Their history. Their ecosystem. Their present state.
The sky may be shared, but astrology cannot be collectively distributed as though every body is living inside the same system under the same conditions. It has to meet the needs of the system and the state in which it resides. Otherwise, somebody is simply placing their world over yours and calling that interpretation.
You have to build your own fucking world.
I needed to learn the baseline for myself.
The planets.
The cards.
The elements.
The patterns.
And their actual manifestations across my life.
Not astrology separated from my body. Not tarot reduced to somebody else passing out messages. A practice grounded in recognizing when the symbols are already programmed into my life—and remaining curious enough to understand how they move.
Yesterday the alternator died on the side of the road.
Then the sky, the cards, the music, the money and my mother began speaking through the same circuit.
I HATE CARS
The car stopped. 
The field kept moving.
The alternator died on the side of the road.
An alternator has one job: turn motion into usable energy. While the car moves, it powers the system and restores what the battery spent getting everything started. When the alternator begins to die, the car can keep moving for a while. The lights still light. The radio may still play. From inside the vehicle, it can feel like you are making progress.
But the whole time, the battery is being drained.
It is not still.
What is obscured keeps moving. Beneath the hood. Inside the body. Within relationships whose failures become visible only after the stored charge is gone.
Not because I wanted relationship. Not because I had mistaken distance for longing. The car stopped. We needed financial help. Siir’s folx have already been helping us, and I have been doing everything within my own labor to keep our life moving. I reached toward the person called mother.
She answered as we.
“We are one.”
She and that man.
And suddenly the alternator explained the entire relationship.
A direct request for help. Help came with terms. No to the terms.
There is no independent mother available to me. There is no wire I can follow toward her that does not lead back to him. She has fused care with obedience, assistance with access and motherhood with her allegiance to a man who is not my father. Even a request made from the side of the road must pass through their shared mythology before it can reach her.
But I am not their child.
This website is evidence.
I built an entire living system beyond their current: language, pedagogy, art, archive, cosmos. I generated life where they expected continued attachment. I became a source after surviving people who believed their proximity made them my owners.
Fire asks expression.
Air asks for new infrastructure.
And perhaps that is the shift arriving now. Not another attempt to extract a current from a dead circuit. Not another jump mistaken for repair. A different architecture for how support reaches us, how energy circulates and how what we spend living is returned.
The car did not stop because the battery failed to try hard enough. It stopped because stored energy cannot sustain a system that is no longer replenishing it.
Neither can I.
The alternator was already dying before the car stopped. The relationship had already failed before my mother named its circuitry.
We are one.
Fine.
Then neither of you is where I go to be restored.
The September sky is quiet.
But my life is changing its power source beneath it.
The alternator gave me the material diagnosis. The sky located that diagnosis inside a larger transition. Then the cards showed me how I was already moving through it.
Brief Astro Arc Map — Tuesday, September 8, 2026
Sun in Virgo → Waning Crescent Moon in Leo, meeting Jupiter in Leo
Virgo Sun: The material diagnosis. What part of the infrastructure is failing? What must actually be repaired—not temporarily restarted?
Waning Leo Moon: The emotional reserve is nearly spent. Leo illuminates what has been carrying the system through sheer life-force, authorship and will.
Moon meeting Jupiter in Leo: The failure becomes too large to remain hidden. The moment enlarges the truth: Kiing’s light has been treated as though it were an endlessly renewable resource.
Libra current: The relational contract becomes visible. “We are one” exposes enmeshment—not reciprocity.
Scorpio current: Material help reveals its concealed cost. Scorpio asks what access, authority or debt is attached to a supposedly shared resource.
The arc: Virgo locates the broken infrastructure → Leo reveals whose life-force has been powering it → Libra names the false relationship → Scorpio exposes the price of remaining connected.
September 8 sits just before the September 10 Virgo New Moon. The alternator dying is therefore not only an ending. It is the final diagnostic before a different system of replenishment must be built. The Moon remains in Leo throughout Tuesday and enters Virgo on Wednesday evening.
The sky named the pressure surrounding the event. The reading entered through another route. Not to predict what would happen next, but to help me recognize the pattern already moving through the car, the money, my mother, my body and the world I have built.
The Transport Mechanism Is Severed
the transmission:
if I ruled the world (release, the world) every nigga (would be) is a star (a clear road, the star) because everytime I hear you hello all I see is yellow (the sun at mid day central zenith to all) and i’ll ride the wave (love initiation) to simple tings (transport, mirror, intercession) let everyting that have breath (respect, last judgement) breathe cause my life my love and my lady is the see (emotions, venus, cancer, granny “stand upon the deck as it moves into the deep clouds of the moon”)hollywood it ain’t for everybody (balance, justice, adjustment)
◉)) I Hear Tings — Nine Aural Worlds
“If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)” — Nas featuring Lauryn Hill
“Every Nigger Is a Star” — Boris Gardiner
“Yellow” — India.Arie featuring Terrell Carter
“Ride the Wave” — Moonchild featuring Astyn Turr
“Simple Things” — Minnie Riperton
“Let Everything That Hath Breath (Psalm 150)” — Florida A&M University Gospel Choir
Breathe Again — Toni Braxton
“Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” — Looking Glass
“Hollywood” — Jay-Z featuring Beyoncé
the breakdown:
I asked for help. The cards asked me to look at how I move.
Yesterday I asked my mother for money.
That sentence is simple enough.
The car stopped. We needed help. Siir’s folx have been helping us. Strangers have been helping me for years. I did not want to ask my mother. I told her that. I also told her exactly what the request was and exactly what it was not.
It was not an invitation back into relationship.
It was not an opening for reconciliation.
It was not a request for spiritual instruction.
It was money.
Her response came with terms.
Repent. Ask Yahovah for forgiveness. Change my mindset. Change my ways. Call my parents. Apologize with humility. Honor your mother and father. Remember that I am their child.
And suddenly the car was not the only transport mechanism that had stopped working.
Later, I pulled cards.
Release. A clear road. Daylight. Initiation. Transport interrupted. Judgment. Emotion meets adjustment.
Or maybe more accurately, I heard them.
Because the reading came to me in songs.
Not songs I went searching for to make the cards make sense. The songs arrived as part of the telling, each one finding its card, opening another route through what I had just lived.
And this is important because I have been reading tarot for years, but I am only now understanding more clearly how I read.
Granny showed up about a year ago.
It took finally severing with my mama for me to see what Granny had been teaching me to do.
Look in the mirror.
Get curious.
Not obedient.
Curious.
There is a difference.
If I Ruled the World
The first card was Carnival. XXI. The World.
Release.
The book says Carnival is a farewell to flesh. It speaks of liberation through a more complete awareness of our ways and states of being, including what we control and what acts through us.
And immediately:
If I ruled the world, I’d free all my sons.
Nas. Lauryn Hill.
Except the part that opened for me wasn’t fantasy.
This is my world.
I have spent enough time inside worlds somebody else constructed and then handed to me as reality.
Family.
Religion.
Normalcy.
Respectability.
Success.
Gender.
Work.
The good child.
The grateful child.
The child who can be forty-two fucking years old and still be summoned back into childhood because somebody needs that position to remain occupied.
No.
Carnival is release.
And release does not require the other person to agree that I have been released.
That is the trick.
I do not need permission to govern the world I have built.
Every Nigga Is a Star
Then Z’Étoile. XVII. The Star.
A body curled inside something that looks like an egg, surrounded by stars and long pathways running through the dark.
The divination says the road is clear.
Dedication to lifework.
And Boris Gardiner starts singing:
Every nigga is a star.
There is reclamation in that sentence.
But sitting with this reading, I heard time.
Everybody gets to be a star.
Everybody gets their turn in the sky.
My parents seem to believe they are timeless.
They aren’t.
Neither am I.
That does not diminish what came before me. It locates it.
Their lives happened.
Their decisions mattered.
Their choices entered the soil.
Some of what they made became material I could use. Some became material I had to survive. Some of it I have had to study long enough to decide whether it is nutrient, debris, or poison.
That is Mycelial Sankofa.
I do not return because everything behind me is sacred.
I return because there may be something there I can use.
And retrieval does not mean reinstatement.
Their time does not have to disappear for mine to begin.
But their time cannot require mine to wait.
My time is now.
And the card doesn’t say career.
It says lifework.
I know exactly what that means.
All I See Is Yellow
The Star gives way to the Sun.
Shi-Li-Bo Nouvavou / Dan-I.
The sun at midday.
At its zenith.
Central to all.
India Arie comes in sideways:
Every time I hear you say hello, all I see is yellow.
Yellow.
Not revelation by lightning.
Not interrogation under a lamp.
Daylight.
Enough illumination to see what is already there.
And the body on this card refuses elemental simplicity.
They are standing in water holding fire.
That image has stayed with me.
Because I am fire.
I know that.
Aries Sun. Leo Rising. Sagittarius Moon.
There is no shortage of ignition over here.
But I have spent years learning that fire is not the only tech(know)logy available to me.
There is water.
There are currents.
There is listening.
There is intuition.
There is what the body knows before language arrives to bully it into legibility.
I do not have to burn through the water to prove that I can survive it.
That would just be another form of forgetting.
I’ll Ride the Wave
Then Ayizan. III.
Initiation.
And Moonchild:
I’ll ride the wave.
This is where Granny starts getting louder.
Because initiation, for me, is not somebody granting me entry into a secret room.
It is learning my flow.
Learning where I am.
Learning what my body does with information.
Learning what those before me knew.
Learning what they reused.
Learning what they couldn’t use.
Learning what they refused to know.
And naming it out loud.
That last part matters.
Because silence can make repetition look like destiny.
Mycelial Sankofa has never meant that I walk backward until I can reproduce whatever came before me correctly.
A mycelial network doesn’t do that.
It moves information.
It decomposes.
It redistributes.
It establishes relationships between living systems.
It makes dead material available differently.
So I can honor what came before me without pretending it arrived complete.
I can retrieve a method and refuse its conclusion.
I can carry a question farther than somebody else was willing to carry it.
I can ride the wave without pretending I invented water.
Simple Tings
Then the reading turned the card upside down.
Masa. Nine of Rada. 9 of swords.
Transport.
Mirror.
Intercession.
Except Masa came reversed.
And I knew immediately:
pouring out.
Minnie Riperton started singing Simple Tings.
A song connected to my mother.
And this is where the whole reading got almost annoyingly precise.
Because I am not asking for extravagance.
I want simple tings.
Food.
A working car.
A home.
Plants.
Good meals.
My work.
My spouse.
Enough money that an alternator does not become an existential event.
Enough room to make.
Enough safety to remain curious.
I was groomed toward normalcy and assimilation with the promise that these simple tings would be waiting on the other side.
Do this.
Become this.
Work this way.
Behave this way.
Fit here.
And you will be okay.
That was a lie.
Maybe they knew it was a lie.
Maybe they didn’t.
Maybe their imaginations were simply too small to recognize the limits of what they were handing me.
That is part of this card too.
Curiosity.
Because the transport mechanism between my mother and me did not sever because I stopped being curious.
I got more curious.
About myself.
About my mother.
About Granny.
About what happened between them.
About what was inherited.
About what got interrupted.
About what each of us knew and what each of us could not bear to know.
Granny told me to look in the mirror.
So I did.
And I kept looking.
My mother stopped.
Granny stopped somewhere too.
I don’t say that to condemn either of them.
I say it because curiosity is a transport mechanism.
It allows one generation to encounter another without requiring replication.
It allows a person to meet the person in front of them rather than the role they assigned them thirty years ago.
Without curiosity, the vessel stops moving.
Masa reversed.
Transport interrupted.
And then yesterday my mother offered me another version of that old bargain:
You may receive material support if you return to our reality.
I could have accepted.
I didn’t.
Because the money would not simply have entered my ecosystem as money.
It had terms attached to it.
And those terms would have disrupted a flow I have worked very hard to establish.
Then yesterday somebody donated.
It wasn’t massive.
It was enough.
Enough to help.
Enough to let me see a little farther down the road.
Enough to keep moving on my terms.
Masa reversed is pouring out.
But pouring out is not necessarily depletion.
Turn a vessel upside down and what was contained becomes available to the ecosystem.
The route changed.
The resource still arrived.
Well, look at that.
Let Everyting That Have Breath
Then Ancestors. XX.
Last judgment.
Understanding the worth and meaning of one’s actions within the procession of life.
And suddenly I am back singing gospel.
Let everyting that have breath…
Youth choir.
LPMBC (trash but there were memories to be had)
Florida A&M University choir.
Music stored in the body long after the belief architecture around it has changed.
This is another place where Mycelial Sankofa becomes useful to me.
I don’t have to throw away every song because I no longer live inside the theology that carried it to me.
The song entered my body.
Breath entered the song.
I can examine what remains.
I can ask what still feeds me.
I can decide what gets composted.
Ancestors does not tell me that everybody who came before me was right.
Judgment would be meaningless if inheritance were beyond examination.
The card asks for an understanding of actions within the procession of life.
That includes mine.
That includes theirs.
Nobody escapes time because they became somebody’s elder.
Nobody escapes consequence because they became somebody’s parent.
And nobody becomes disposable merely because I can see where they stopped.
That is a much more difficult relationship to ancestry.
Good.
I am interested in difficult tings.
Breathe Again
Let everyting that have breath—
Breathe Again.
The songs finish each other’s sentence.
And here comes Erzulie Freda Dahomey. Seven of Rada.
Emotions.
Venus.
Love.
Water.
Cancer.
My mother is a Cancer.
And Granny:
"Stand upon the deck as it moves into the deep clouds of the moon."
I have been thinking about that instruction for a year.
Stand upon the deck.
Not swim after somebody.
Not jump overboard.
Not set the ocean on fire because somebody in the water refuses to follow.
Stand.
Upon.
The deck.
The vessel is already moving.
This is where I understand what severing with my mother has actually revealed.
I am not going to burn through those waters because my mother forgot to remain curious.
I am not going to burn through Granny’s waters because Granny reached the edge of their own curiosity too.
I can go farther.
That is not betrayal.
That is the point of transmission.
If every generation must stop exactly where the previous generation stopped, then nothing was transmitted.
It was merely repeated.
Granny told me to look in the mirror.
I looked.
Then I asked another question.
And another.
And another.
Eventually the mirror became water.
Eventually the water became a route.
Eventually I realized I was already on the boat.
Hollywood, It Ain’t for Everybody
Bottom of the Deck
The last card:
Secret Societies. XI.
Balance.
Justice.
Adjustment.
And because my cards apparently have jokes:
Hollywood, it ain’t for everybody.
Jay-Z and Beyoncé.
Illuminati.
Secret societies.
Cults.
Hebrew cult bullshit.
Of course.
Of course this is how the reading closes.
The book describes a restoration of equilibrium that can happen on both enormous and tiny scales. Most of the necessary flux goes unnoticed. We notice the aberration.
That is useful.
Because yesterday looked like the aberration.
The car stopped.
I asked for help.
My mother answered a financial request with a demand for repentance.
I refused the terms.
Today somebody else sent money.
From the outside, those are separate events.
Inside the ecosphere, I can see the adjustment.
Not divine reward.
Not proof that I made the morally correct choice.
Flow.
One channel closed because the conditions required to use it were incompatible with the ecosystem.
Another opened.
Not enough to solve everyting.
Enough to continue.
Balance is not always getting back what left.
Sometimes balance is discovering that the system has another route.
And Justice sitting beside Secret Societies after everything my parents have submerged themselves inside is almost too on the nose for me to bother explaining.
Hollywood ain’t for everybody.
Neither is every belief system.
Neither is every family system.
Neither is every world.
Which takes me back to where the cards began.
Because This Is My World
Carnival.
The World.
Release.
The reading folds back into itself.
Of course it does.
There was never a straight road here.
The circuitous nature of my mind is not keeping me from moving forward.
It is how I move forward.
I can remain inside deep emotion and sensitivity without surrendering my faith because I can see the routes between what happened, what my body remembers, what the symbols reveal and what is still becoming possible.
This is what I mean by glitching into yourself.
Allowing your world to become real enough that you can live inside it.
Building it from the inside out.
Then going back and reconstructing parts of it over and over again until your world becomes second skin.
Not another world assimilated onto your body.
A world your body recognizes as its own.
That is the deepest work of Black embodiment.
Returning the body to itself.
And allowing that to stand.
There is mycelium.
There are roots touching roots underneath tings that appear separate aboveground.
A broken car touches transport.
Transport touches money.
Money touches my mother.
My mother touches Minnie Riperton.
Minnie touches the simple tings I was promised.
Simple tings touch normalcy.
Normalcy touches the world I was trained to inhabit.
The World touches release.
Release touches the Star.
The Star touches time.
Time touches lifework.
Lifework touches initiation.
Initiation touches Granny.
Granny touches the mirror.
The mirror touches curiosity.
Curiosity touches water.
Water touches Cancer.
Cancer touches my mother again.
My mother touches breath.
Breath touches choir.
Choir touches ancestry.
Ancestry touches judgment.
Judgment touches balance.
Balance touches the decision I made when the text came through:
No.
Not no to help.
No to the terms.
And then help came anyway.
That means I have one more field note about how my ecosystem actually works.
This is also why I needed to learn astrology, tarot, earth and the elements for myself.
A message cannot become collective simply because somebody distributes it to a crowd.
Without a baseline—without knowing how a symbol actually lives inside your own body, history and ecosystem—it is easy to become attached to a personality. Their delivery. The way they make you feel. The way they say something. All while remaining disconnected from what the message is actually asking you to know.
The cards are storytelling.
Astrology is storytelling.
But folding your own story back onto yourself is easier said than done.
Especially when other people are continually constructing a storyline for you rooted in dishonesty and delusion.
The practice is not making every symbol mean whatever I want it to mean.
It is remaining curious enough to recognize when a pattern has actually entered my life.
To see the symbols, the trauma and beyond.
To allow the pattern to transform.
And, in turn, transform me.
For years I thought tarot was something I was supposed to learn how to read.
Granny showed up a year ago and started teaching me something else.
How I read.
Through music.
Through memory.
Through water.
Through language.
Through the body.
Through what happened yesterday touching what happened thirty years ago without either one becoming the other.
Through cards that turn upside down and become pouring vessels.
Through songs that finish one another’s sentences.
Through a mother who taught me music and could still lose curiosity about the person listening.
Through a Granny whose direction can carry me farther than Granny went.
That may be the deepest root here.
I do not have to discard what carried me simply because I have reached the place where it can carry me no farther.
I can thank the vessel.
Study its construction.
Take what remains useful.
Pour out what has been sitting stagnant.
And build another transport mechanism.
Because every nigga is a star.
And their time was real.
And my time is now.
So I am standing on the deck.
Looking in the mirror.
Getting curious.
Letting everyting that has breath breathe again.
And riding the wave through my own fucking world.
The Alternator Was Already Dying
Cosmos Watershed
This essay enters through Turbulent Water, where a material failure makes a relational failure visible, and moves through Deep Water, where coercion, family mythology and inherited belief sit beneath a request for help. Tidal Water carries the alternator, astrology, tarot, music, memory and ancestry into the same circuit. Flowing Water returns the essay to its central inquiry: What becomes possible when the body stops drawing energy from a dead power source and allows another route of replenishment to become real?
Watershed | Tributaries |
Watershed | Turbulent Water → Deep Water → Tidal Water → Flowing Water |
Relationship | Energy, support and transmission as relational circuitry |
Hom(e)ie | The alternator |
Origin | The car stopping on September 8, 2026, and the financial request that followed |
Expansion | The failed alternator reveals another system that has continued appearing functional while draining Kiing’s stored life-force. |
Application | Recognizing which routes replenish the body, which routes require self-abandonment and when support must be allowed to arrive through another channel |
Lineage | Granny, mother, choir, music, tarot, astrology and the knowledge carried through the body |
Counter Currents | Enmeshment, religious coercion, conditional support, assimilation and interpretations distributed from somebody else’s world as collective truth |
≋ The Six Waters
Water | Movement Through the Essay |
Still Water | The moment after the car stops, when motion ends and the failed system can finally be observed |
Flowing Water | Support reaches Kiing through another channel after the conditional route is refused. |
Deep Water | The request exposes the submerged conditions attached to maternal care. |
Turbulent Water | Financial precarity forces an unwanted request for help. |
Tidal Water | Astrology, tarot, music and memory fold the immediate event into generational time. |
Sacred Water | Kiing remains aboard their own vessel and continues through the world they built. |
Cosmos Coordinates
Coordinate | Connection |
Alternator | Converts motion into usable energy |
Battery | Stored life-force being spent without replenishment |
Mother | A route of support fused with obedience and access |
Astrology | Locates the material rupture within the surrounding sky |
Tarot | Reveals how Kiing reads patterns already active within their life |
Music | Carries memory, ancestry and interpretation through the body |
Mycelial Sankofa | Retrieves usable material without reinstating the former system |
World-building | Creates infrastructure the body recognizes as its own |
Transport | The mechanism through which energy, knowledge and resources circulate |
Curiosity | Keeps transmission moving beyond inherited stopping points |
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