This is the fifth installment of my new newsletter: “The Valley.” To subscribe, click here. You’ll receive a weekly newsletter from me in your email inbox.

When it became clear, back in March, that a California coronavirus lockdown was underway, I sensed this could be an opportunity for me. I had several projects that I wanted to work on, and I realized that the interior isolation imposed by the exterior threat of the virus could create a bubble that would generate productivity.

And generate it did.

Among other things, I revised a podcast series pitch (which is currently being considered…

This is the fourth installment of my new newsletter: “The Valley.” To subscribe, click here. You’ll receive a weekly newsletter from me in your email inbox.

This week, I returned to posting on my Forbes blog, where I’ve narrowed my beat to the business of sex. With the COVID-19 pandemic dominating the headlines, I decided to find out how sex workers are being impacted by the crisis.

The Stripper

First, I reached out to Chase Kelly, a New Orleans-based stripper who works on Bourbon Street and who I’ve interviewed before. A veteran dancer, Chase is also a coach to other strippers…

This is the third installment of my new newsletter: “The Valley.” To subscribe, click here. You’ll receive a weekly newsletter from me in your email inbox.

About 23 years ago, when I set foot on an adult movie set for the first time, it occurred to me that someone should write a novel set in Porn Valley. Since, a few have tried it, mostly men, and mostly to poor effect. Take, for example, Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff, a terrible novel in which terrible things happen and nobody wins. Or, there’s Irvine Welsh’s Porno, which is also a novel and bad. …

This is the second installment of my new newsletter: “The Valley.” To subscribe, click here. You’ll receive a weekly newsletter from me in your email inbox.

At a certain point a few weeks into my self-isolation, I saw that photographer Nikola Tamindzic was creating “coronavirus portraits.” For his ongoing series, “I Am Here, and You Are Where You Are,” he’s photographing people in isolation around the world from his New York City apartment, using the miracle that is technology. I’ve internet-known Nikola for years, but we’ve never met. In any case, I jumped at the chance. …

This is the first installment of my new newsletter: “The Valley.” To subscribe, click here. You’ll receive a weekly newsletter from me in your email inbox.

When people ask me what part of Los Angeles I live in and I tell them Burbank, they give me a confused stare. You work there? they want to know. Well, yes, but I’m a writer, so I can work from anywhere. I live in Burbank because I like it. Heck, I love it. It is a small town inside of a big town, a city in the San Fernando Valley that’s right on…

I.

It’s years ago, but in your mind it may as well be now, and you turn your back to the nurse, and your spread your ass cheeks apart to show her the rash that circles your asshole. In a series of humiliations, this is the one you will remember years later. At the time, it almost seems normal — one more tie in a railroad track of horrors that’s your life. Months earlier, you were diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer, but now you’re in the thick of it. At first, the chemo wasn’t really that bad — your hair clogging…

You realize there is a problem when you cannot sort the laundry.

Picture it:

There you are, in the laundry room.

The laundry basket is full of dirty laundry.

You look out the window.

It’s:

1. overcast
2. the sky is a pale blue with cloud streaking across it
3. it’s raining and you’re wondering if the roof is going to start leaking again

You bend to sort the laundry.

Typically, you sort the laundry unthinkingly.

Black here.

Gray there.

Whites over there.

Only, today you can’t do that.

Why not?

Your brain is broken.

This is because every week you go to…