How to live in Denver as a 20 something with low pay rates and high rents?
This is a tricky question because it takes diligence and sacrifice to live in a city where every business acts like it’s doing you a favor when they take your money. But there are a couple simple things you can do to make your dollar go further in 2023 and beyond. Grocery shopping used to be the surefire way to save some dollars compared to going out, but not anymore. Unless….. You ring up all your expensive groceries as bananas. Man, these vitamins sure look like bananas (PLU #4011) to me! Need to save on rent? Many Denver apartments do discounts on rent if you work for the building doing maintenance. Don’t know anything about maintenance? Neither do they!
How do you make solid connections in your industry?
This is an easy one. Kendama. “You mean that weird wooden ball and cup toy all the wooks play with?” Yup! The same kendamas the wooks use to distract them from their existential life crisis, bass artists also use to distract ourselves from everything else backstage and save us from cringy awkward social encounters. 95 percent of the meaningful connections I have made in the music industry have come from playing kendama backstage at a show. You just start jiggling that weird ball on the string and like a moth to flame other artists will come up to show you their best “trick” and then bam… just like that… You start talking about collabs.
How do you make every day a good day?
Tattoo something meaningful or uplifting on your thigh. Hear me out. Every morning when you wake up and start with your morning ritual, you will most likely end up taking a satisfying morning poop, and while you are pushing it out you end up staring at those milky blank thighs. But if you have something uplifting tattooed there, it will springboard you into the day like the boss bitch you are. That’s why on my thigh I have a tattoo of a surfing t-rex in sunglasses drinking a Capri Sun.
What’s your approach to handling a screw up when DJing live?
This is something that gets easier the more times you screw up, so at this point, I’m what you call “an expert.” The first step is to stop the music, look confused, then get on the mic and completely throw the venue under the bus. Tell the crowd the CDJs are broken, or “They were raging so hard the power went out!” For bonus points, call out the sound guy! Chances are he hates you already anyway so there’s no relationship lost. If the screw up was particularly catastrophic you may want to tweet about it the next day with something like “Even with all the technical difficulties, Denver (or whatever city you are in) is still the best city in the world to play in! ILY heart emojis etc.”
What advice would you give to a man who is about to turn 30?
This is a pivotal time period to be in and one that can be a huge turning point in your life if you play it right. The most important thing I would say is to stop giving chances to questionable people in your life. When you are 20 you have all the time in the world to follow that random bass witch in her dog hair-infested CR-V to Electric Forest and see what happens. But at 30, death is right around the corner and time is precious. This is even more important for girls. I see a lot of my female friends trying to be patient with their fuckboi boyfriends hoping they will find the motivation for a better life at the bottom of a bag of ketamine, and that’s fine in your 20s. But in your 30s that shit is cheeks. Be more selective with who you spend your time and energy on. The same goes for jobs. You don’t have enough time anymore to slave away a shitty job just to make your boss richer. Job sucks? Quit it.
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