ABOUT
I have spent most of my life trying to understand people.
I've done it from behind bars, inside fighting gyms, through art, in books, in relationships, in foreign countries, and occasionally by making spectacular mistakes.
I am an artist, writer, martial artist, bartender, restaurant owner, mezcal educator, and student of philosophy. None of those things has ever seemed particularly separate to me.
They are different ways of asking the same questions:
What are we? What are we afraid of? What is God? What is truth? And what the hell are we supposed to do while we're here?
THE BARMAN
I have spent nearly thirty years behind bars.
Not the kind with cells. The kind with whiskey.
I've worked in neighborhood dives, nightclubs, restaurants, luxury resorts, and strange little bars in strange little places. I've served people celebrating marriages, mourning deaths, falling in love, getting divorced, starting fights, ending friendships, and occasionally discovering something about themselves at the bottom of a glass.
Bartending taught me more about human beings than anything I've ever studied.
A bartender occupies a peculiar place in society. Part servant, part salesman, part psychologist, part priest, and occasionally part bouncer. People tell you things they wouldn't tell their families. And if you stand there long enough, patterns begin to emerge.
Much of what I write about fear, love, violence, addiction, loneliness, God, and human nature began on the other side of a bar.
THE BUILDER
Eventually, working in other people's bars wasn't enough.
I wanted to build the whole thing.
I've opened and designed four restaurants and bars, including two that I own today. I design the spaces, create much of the artwork on the walls, and build the bar programs from the bottles up.
To me, a restaurant isn't just a business.
It's an environment.
The lighting matters. The music matters. The art matters. The drinks matter. The strange little thing someone notices in the corner matters.
You're building a place where thousands of people are going to have first dates, last dates, celebrations, arguments, birthdays, bad decisions and occasionally very good ones.
Somewhere along the way, my obsession with agave became another business.
Through Rio Mezcal Education, I teach classes devoted to mezcal and other agave distillates—spirits I've spent years studying not just from behind a bar, but in Mexico, in agave fields, distilleries and mezcalerías.
That work has taken me on the road and led to magazine features and interviews, including NPR.
I don't think I've ever been particularly interested in owning businesses.
I've been interested in building things I wanted to exist.
THE FIGHTER
I have practiced martial arts for most of my life.
I started because I wanted to learn how to fight.
Eventually I learned that fighting was the least interesting part.
Martial arts taught me about fear. About violence. About pain. About what happens when the body wants to panic and the mind has to remain still.
I've been hit. I've hit people. I've won fights and lost them. And somewhere along the way I discovered that strength has very little to do with being dangerous.
Anyone can lose control.
The difficult thing is learning when not to.
That lesson followed me out of the gym and into almost everything else I've done.
THE ARTIST
I make art because sometimes words aren't strange enough.
My work has always been drawn toward the uncomfortable: death, violence, sex, religion, beauty, absurdity, and the places where those things collide.
I don't believe darkness and beauty are opposites.
Destruction can be beautiful. Chaos can have grace. Death can be funny.
Everything is beautiful if you look at it long enough.
The art is another way I've spent my life asking the same question:
What the hell is all of this?
THE PHILOSOPHER
I don't call myself a philosopher because I think I have answers.
I call myself one because I have spent most of my life questioning the answers we've already been given.
God. Death. Morality. Violence. Love. Fear. Meaning.
We inherit explanations for these things before we're old enough to question them. Then we spend much of our lives defending ideas we never chose in the first place.
I'm interested in what happens when you stop.
When you take God apart. When you take yourself apart. When you question even the things you're certain you're right about.
My whole life is asking the question, "Why do I do the things I do?"
I don't want to tell people what to believe.
I want to make belief uncomfortable.
Most of my writing begins there.
LOWDOWN
Long before I started writing books, I wrote jokes on matchbooks.
I was working behind bars, watching people drink, fight, flirt, lie, fall in love, fall apart, and occasionally say something brilliant.
Whenever something occurred to me, I wrote it down.
Eventually those scraps became Lowdown, a single-panel comic strip featuring a character named Joe — a badly disguised version of me with an equally questionable view of the world.
The jokes were deliberately lowbrow.
The ideas weren't always.
God, sex, death, relationships, alcohol, morality, stupidity and the strange things people do to one another all became fair game.
Sometimes the shortest route to the truth is a really inappropriate joke.
I drew hundreds of Lowdown cartoons, developed a following, and eventually self-published three collections of them.
Apparently I had been writing philosophy all along.
I just thought I was being an asshole.
THE WRITER
I started writing long before I thought of myself as a writer.
At first it was one-line jokes scribbled on matchbooks behind a bar.
Then comics. Stories. Essays. Half-finished ideas. Strange observations I couldn't quite get out of my head.
Eventually the ideas got too big for matchbooks.
So I started writing books.
My writing lives somewhere between philosophy, fiction, dark comedy, spirituality, and the occasional complete disregard for good taste.
I'm interested in the things we're usually told not to talk about.
God. Suicide. Violence. Sex. Death. Love. Fear. Madness. The possibility that everything we've been told about being a good human being might be slightly wrong.
I don't write because I know the answers.
I write because I don't trust them.
Some of my books are funny. Some are disturbing. Some are philosophical. Some look like children's books and absolutely are not.
They're all asking essentially the same question I've been asking my entire life:
What if we're looking at this whole thing wrong?