“What's with all the skeletons and darkness?” I get asked some variation of this question quite a bit. Why the skulls? Why the monsters? Why does everything look like something terrible either just happened or is about to happen? My answer is usually pretty simple. “Because I can.” And I don't mean that in some defiant, fuck-the-art-world, misunderstood-genius kind of way. I mean it quite literally. I can finally draw whatever the hell I want. Which is particularly liberating

On Main Character Syndrome, Identity Theft, and the introduction of Jimmy Con I've suffered from main character syndrome for most of my life. I suppose having an extraordinarily overdramatic mother helped establish that foundation pretty early. In our household, life wasn't simply lived. It was performed. Every inconvenience had the potential to become a crisis. Every disagreement could escalate into a three-act tragedy. Every emotional disturbance required an audience, prefe

I’m convinced that if Scary Bear had a voice, it would belong to none other than Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. Why, you might ask? Why the fuck not? Look at him. Doesn’t he just look like he’d have that lazy, slightly slurred Queens drawl that 50 acquired after taking a bullet through the cheek? That unmistakable combination of menace, amusement and complete disregard for anyone else’s feelings? And the laugh. 50 Cent has one of the greatest laughs in recorded human history. It’s

There are certain things that happen during childhood that, for reasons nobody can adequately explain, become permanent fixtures in your brain. Core memories. Not necessarily the important stuff. Not birthdays, graduations (I only had one, by the skin of my teeth, or because they just wanted me gone), or those carefully orchestrated moments your parents spent hundreds of dollars trying to make memorable. Sometimes it’s something completely fucking ridiculous. I have a few. On

I used to think I thrived in chaos. That was the story, anyway. The truth is, if chaos wasn’t around, I’d usually create it myself. Then I’d complain about it. Obsess over it. Tell everyone how fucking exhausting my life was while conveniently leaving out the part where I had personally poured gasoline all over the floor and was standing there holding the match. It gave me an identity. Sometimes I was the hero. Sometimes I was the arsonist. Most of the time I was the arsonist

In the last four years of sobriety, I have lived approximately fourteen years. I had a second child. A beautiful little girl named Aria. My heart. She’s two, so thankfully I have plenty of time before she starts dating—which is good, because as a Jew in America these days, I’m already well on my way to being sufficiently armed by the time some terrified sixteen-year-old shows up at my front door. For entirely unrelated reasons, of course. Becoming her father was one of the gr

Sometime around 2015, I found out I had synesthesia by accident. I was at my studio doing a photo shoot with a photographer friend who moonlighted in philosophy, psychology and dark arts. Cool guy. No idea what happened to him. We were waiting for the rest of the band to arrive, killing time, and I started playing him demos and unfinished beats. This was back when I could spend an unreasonable amount of time explaining exactly who should be on a record that didn’t yet have an

recently read something about Heath Ledger’s journal while he was preparing to play the Joker in The Dark Knight. There was a post on Instagram showing pages from it—images, scribbled thoughts, disturbing references, fragments of things he was apparently studying while trying to crawl inside the head of Gotham’s most maniacal villain. It was fascinating. It was also fucking dark. First off, I should establish that I’m partial to Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Picture five-year-old J

Saturday morning. Or afternoon. Who the fuck knows at this point. I’m in the front passenger seat of a Jaguar F-PACE hurtling toward a lightning storm somewhere in the mountains outside Sedona, perspiring cocaine from a bevy of glands, pores, fissures, and previously undiscovered openings in my vessel. In front of us is maybe the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Also possibly the most dangerous. Rust-colored stone. Rouge sand. Mountains stacked against the horizon like so

One time, during a roughly sixteen-hour bender, I listened to “WHY?” by Carly Simon probably a hundred times in a row. Not the radio version, either. The extended version. Eight-plus minutes of the same song, over and over and over, while I was higher than giraffe nuts and apparently conducting a private graduate seminar on Carly Simon and the emotional architecture of post-disco. There are two things you need to understand about this perhaps lost song from 1982. FIRST OFF,

I had a dream my mother hugged me. Not just hugged me. Held me. Tightly. With genuine care behind her intent. Like a new mother holding an infant, she embraced her adult son with the intention of somehow making everything okay again. There was no hesitation in it. No awkwardness. No history. She just grabbed me and held me. And I let her. That’s probably what fucked me up the most when I woke up. Because some part of me has wanted that hug for a very long time. My relationshi

There’s a strange emptiness that comes when you stop living a life built almost entirely around madness and chaos. Nobody really tells you about that part. They tell you about getting sober. Withdrawal. Meetings. Triggers. Gratitude. Making amends. They tell you how much better your life can become. Nobody tells you about Tuesday night. No football on TV. Your ex-wife has the kids. Nobody needs anything from you. Your phone isn’t blowing up. There’s no emergency. No crisis. N