The Kizer Journal

Do you ever wake up at a decent hour, but choose to go back to sleep? Not because you need the rest, but because you are afraid to wake up to your life? I practically invented this phenomenon. I set and reset my alarm, and then forget about it all together, eventually crawling out of bed sometime in the early afternoon and feeling just as paralyzed by my life’s problems only with less time to solve them.

The perfect juicy pimple can be the ultimate social kill-shot. The small pockets of bacteria come in various shapes and sizes. Sometimes they come with henchmen, other times they can drift alone. But every time a pimple forms, a siren goes off in your head to eradicate the enemy.

Many of us have thought of ourselves as invincible, as if we could not be easily defeated by the same weaknesses or flaws of other people. But the truth is, that is just a mask we put on when we face the world. It might be to impress the popular girl in school or get that raise at work.

My daily skincare rituals are by far my favorite time of any day. It’s where I perform Beyoncé deep cuts and clear my head. It’s where I wash away the crust of slumber in the morning and the grime of the long day of work. It’s that therapeutic ‘me’ time that we all need in our lives, and my beloved holy grail products are the objects of my affection.

Now based in Brooklyn, New York, Morton’s obsession speaks for itself. Black Boy Plants is a growing collective of Black men and boys who have chosen to enter the conversation surrounding indoor plant care, gardening, and wellness.

It could be that caring for plants implies that one has an ability to nurture, a characteristic often attributed exclusively to women. Tenderness is a trait not typically attributed to the Black male body. Far too often, our men are solely depicted as aggressive, destructive, and distant. However, it is impossible to deny the quiet, generative properties of plants

There's an intimate level of craftsmanship that does into the production. The ingredients that go into their drinks are entirely real and exclusively natural. They pride themselves on their drinks being "farm-to-bottle." And with this membership program, the new process can be "farm-to-bottle-to-doorstep."

This underhanded appropriation led to slow proliferation of different strains of gin—Dutch genever, London Dry, and, eventually, American, a sub-group exemplified by craft distillers like Few. The Evanston-based distillery is no stranger to changing the formula- in addition to their classic American-style, Few also offers Breakfast Gin, distilled with earl grey botanicals in addition to juniper, and Barrel-Aged, a woody, spiced gin aged in whiskey barrels.