Who Am I?

“Um….who are you?” Surprisingly, this is the most frequently asked question I get on Twitter (I blame the blue check). The simple answer is: I’m nobody, just like you. Just like everyone. I’m a bag of bones and flesh made of cool stuff like carbon and stardust (so I’ve been told). My existence is pretty meaningless in that I’ll swing through in the blink of an eye (from the perspective of eternity) and be another one of many hundreds of millions of humans who came and tried and died. This fact terrifies many people, I find it immensely comforting when I remember there’s really no pressure because ultimately, none of this matters all that much. More on that later.

The short answer is: I’m a writer. By necessity and at long last, after decades of waitressing, by trade. My former title was the “Playboy Advisor.” That meant I answered questions about sex and relationships in the iconic column in the magazine. This was a crazy moment for me because I grew up reading Playboy and swore someday, I’d be featured in print. My cousin videotaped me having that moment if you feel like watching it, click here, it’s not really that interesting but it’s a chance for you to hear my voice and see me so maybe when you read my words, you’ll have a better sense of who the fuck I am. (If you really want a great sense of who I am, check out my podcast, Walk-Ins Welcome.

I wrote a column called “Just the Tips” on Playboy.com for two years now and cool stuff for other websites such as Tablet Magazine, NY Daily News, NY Post, Spectator, Mel Magazine, The Federalist, The Huffington Post, Tonic and DAME Magazine. If you offer me money to write for your site, I will probably take you up on it.

The longer answer is: I have so much in my brain and it’s been such a long journey, I don’t even know where to start. So we’ll start with who I am today.

Right now, I’m currently sitting in my dining room. My place is a mess (messier than I’m comfortable with) thanks to a combination of post-holiday inertia and mild depression. Actually, I don’t even think it’s depression. I think it’s laziness. Usually I start the year like a bat out of hell. I write down all my goals and start January ready to take over the world.

This year…not so much. I feel like a hurricane that’s slowly developing over hot water, but it will more than likely be enormously disappointing and end up drifting out to sea. My dog, Hope, is gnawing on a bully stick, which is really a dried bull’s dick. They smell disgusting and why are so many bull’s dicks just lying around? I’m pretty sure my ignorance on this matter is important to maintain.

I digress…I’m also a wannabe comic. I say wannabe because I don’t grind as much as my comedian friends do and feel a perpetual sense of guilt and failure for this fact but comedy doesn’t pay the bills currently. Writing does. So it makes more sense to stay in and write than it does to spend 90 minutes driving to hopefully do 3 minutes of comedy. I have a lot of ideas for content and since it’s peak TV, maybe I’ll get to make them someday. I’ve been told this is like winning the lottery and since I’m delusional and refuse to give up, I’ve been here in LA for over a decade with millions of other people exactly like me, trying to win that fucking lotto. Oh, that reminds me, before I started writing here on Patreon, I wrote on Medium. I write about the grind of LA a lot. 

So why Patreon? Well, I started Patreon. I mean, not exactly. But back in 2006 I launched a site called Phetasy.com to sell my greeting cards and t-shirts. It was subscriber-based with different rewards for different levels of support. I didn’t give a shit about other people being able to set up their own subscriber sites and I see now the error of my ways because little Phetasy dot com the website that couldn’t, caused me to go personally bankrupt. What can I say? I was in my 20’s and full of ideas but not terribly great at the whole “how is this going to make money?” end of things. Phetasy existed as an enormous blog for the next decade, a place where I told all my tales as I traveled around the world and worked on “goat” farms in Northern California and heartbreak and tragedy and comedy. 

You’d be able to look at it but as of November of 2017 the server disbanded and moved to France. I didn’t know servers could just up and pull a Sabrina, but apparently mine did. If I know Phetasy, she’s taking a long drag off a cigarette, drinking her 4th latte, staring at the Mediterranean in a little café in Villefranche-sur-Mer. I don’t really understand what happened but Phetasy is officially deadasy. 

Which brings me to you, dear reader, if you’ve hung in this long. You probably found me being feisty on Twitter and you’re not quite sure what to make of me and quite frankly, I’m not sure what to make of me either. Or you met me selling t-shirts up and down a beach in Florida, or running around backstage at Coachella or dancing on a beach in Sri Lanka or at an open mic or you’re an old friend from one of the 11 schools I went to or you’re one of my enormous Irish-Catholic family members. 

However we are connected, however you ended up reading this, thank you for reading my stuff and sending me emails and sharing my articles and believing in me. Or better yet, thank you for secretly hating me and wanting me to fail. Thank you for supporting me on Twitter-- that den of wolves that it’s become. Thank you for being a bit of carbon and stardust passing through with me because I know I said none of this matters but YOU matter. And I matter. And collectively we matter to each other and the people we love and who love us. And we matter to the generations that come after us, if there are any, which there will be because humans are resilient fucks despite our best efforts to self-destruct.

So this is where you’ll be able to find me, until I can afford to reconstitute Phetasy. I’ll occasionally be writing stuff for the general public and other outlets but for most of 2018, I’ll be hiding out behind my Patreon pay-wall because I learn from my mistakes and if writing is how I’m going to make money, I need to charge.

My therapist told me I’m worth it, I don’t believe her yet, maybe someday I will but maybe someday I’ll be a millionaire and still be filled with self-doubt and self-loathing. There’s only one way to find out. You need to subscribe to my Patreon. 

Did I mention I’m a jackass? But I'm sure you already knew that...