Native Midwesterner who grew up in Hong Kong, travelled a lot, went to college on the East Coast, then adopted Los Angeles as home over 10 years ago. I live in Echo Park and absolutely love it.

Working a job for the money and constantly reminding myself not to complain about it. Screenwriting in the thriller genre (and yes, getting paid for that too). Incubating a wine-related business I don't want to talk about yet. Sleeping. Waking up.

Slacking off when I really should be writing, being honest, picking out a great bottle of wine, asking questions, brainstorming recipes, cooking and eating said recipes, being generally interested in people and their stories, intuition, drinking way too much coffee, city hikes, making friends, reading maps, Hack Peruvian Shamanism, texting on my Luddite LG phone, attempting to control reality but not being sure if its actually working...

I can be pretty funny too if I'm in the mood. Try me.

I don't know, I'm not other people...

Lately, I'm loving (or still loving):

Watchers (Koontz), The Red Book (Jung), Cat's Cradle (anything & everything Vonnegut), Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke), A Moveable Feast (Hemmingway), The Bell Jar (Plath), Fingerprints of the Gods (Graham Hancock), T.S. Eliot, John Berryman...

Annie Hall, Apocalypto, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Batman where Jack Nicholson plays The Joker, The Shining, Most films with Jack Nicholson, A scary movie I wrote that's coming out this year,
Groundhog Day, Mulholland Drive, The Silence of the Lambs, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Grey...

Louie, Top Chef, The Wire, Billy on the Street, Game of Thrones,
Kitchen Nightmares, Summer Heights High, Mr. Show, Major League Baseball -- KC Royals/LA Dodgers (guys like sports, okay? I'm more than down to logically explain why)...

BRMC, Jay-Z & Kanye rapping about being Masons and/or Satanists, Hot Snakes, The Lonesome Crowded West, Frank Ocean, The Lonely Wild, Kendrick Lamar, Xasthur, Other Lives, Fever Ray, Miranda Lambert, The Knife, Phosphorescent, Bob Dylan, everything Tom Waits, Fleetwood Mac, everything Lucinda Williams, Arctic Monkeys, everything Bonnie "Prince" Billy...

Dim Sum, Star Anise, Marco Pierre White, Heirloom Fruit from the farmer's markets of Los Angeles, Vanilla and Chocolate together as one, Pickling everything and genuinely acting like one of those asshole characters from "Portlandia," Giant Lebanese Mezze Platters, Priorat, Rioja, Gaillac, Cahors, German Pinots, Saison Dupont, Armagnac, Sherry Cask Scotch...

In the literal sense: Oxygen. Water. Food. Love. Numbers. Alphabets.

(Why six? Seven is waaaaaaay sexier...)

In the figurative sense: Proustian Memories. Coffee. Sex. Red Wine.
Final Draft. My records. My classical guitar.

Lately:
Echo Park, sentence structure, Carl Jung's art from the Red Book (check it out if you haven't seen it!), world maps, the view from my balcony, the Moon, fresh spices, Asian grocery stores, tension in screenplays, tension in songs, the Black Knight Satellite, songs and stories that make me understand something about someone's life or point-of-view that I previously didn't, the east side of Los Angeles, Egyptian interstellar religion, globes, other planets, other lives, a novel I've written that needs to be cut by at least 100 pages that stresses me out just thinking about it, metaphysics, dimensional aliens, planetary aliens, living on a giant rock the rotates around a much bigger fiery rock somewhere in a concept we call "the universe," how scientists apparently found a baguette in the coils of the large hadron collider, time travel, how to not think so much about things like baguettes and time travel, architecture, baseball statistics & sabermetrics, my nephew Henry, ancient monolithic architecture, wine, cocktails, wine cocktails, drinking these things, why I'll never master piano, or guitar, and especially drums, relationships, marriage, divorce, love, duty, honor, suffering, cats, dogs, a professional photo shoot of a dear friend's Maine Coon kitten where the kitten got paid $400.

Either working and not even realizing it's Friday or drinking something classy with friends, hopefully sharing some food, then eventually switching to something far less classy.

That or I'm attempting to sleep.

When I first moved to LA I performed at children's birthday parties for money... I've played Santa Claus. And Batman. And countless others. I've literally passed out in Compton wearing a Winnie the Pooh costume. Yes, gangsters laughed at me. A few cops too. This took me to every kind of abode in almost every neighborhood of LA. Rich. Poor. Every ethnicity. I often wonder if I can still make shitty balloon animals, then I desperately try to think about something else...

You're FUN, live in Los Angeles (preferably on the East Side), and write something that makes me want to write you back. (That or you want to get a drink in Echo Park and I happen to be around.)