1. I played Frank N. Furter in a Rocky Horror Picture Show troupe at the movie theater I managed during high school. I’m not particularly proud of it now, but at the time, that was like being King of the Freaks.
2. I also auditioned for the role of Frank N. Furter in a live performance of Rocky Horror that was being organized for the 20th or 25th anniversary celebration, but I get really self-conscious about my voice when it is unaccompanied, so I didn’t sing strongly enough to get the part.
3. I asked a girl I dated for a while after high school why when we hung out once during high school she wouldn’t kiss me. She told me it was because my breath was bad. I’m not sure to this day if she was being brutally honest or dryly sarcastic. Sadly, I think it was the former.
4. In the middle part of high school, my bedroom walls comprised posters of Guns N’ Roses and The Black Crowes and strings of Christmas lights … and my bed featured Disney-themed sheets. WTF?
5. I’ve worn corrective lenses since about fifth grade for nearsightedness. I wore big, ugly glasses for the first five years or so, but got contacts right before my sophomore year of high school and have worn them ever since (for the most part). But I kinda think I look better in glasses. Or at least, smarter.
6. In 2004, I wrote, directed and played a small part in a one-performance play called “With the Band.” It was about domestic violence and created for UNLV’s Men Rebelling Against Violence expo.
7. I do not have a MySpace account. My band does have a MySpace that I help moderate. I used to be on MySpace but very abruptly and publicly deleted it in early 2006, in a disconnect I wrote about in the Las Vegas Weekly.
8. I’ve had a one-night stand only once, when I was 18. My car was broken down at the time, so one of my friends actually drove this girl and me to my house that night. I found out later that he had slept with her the night before. Not surprisingly, she later became a stripper.
9. In elementary school, I would rub out those big pink erasers, collect the shavings, and try to sell them to kids. And sometimes, they would buy them. Kids are stupid.
10. One time during elementary school, I brought a mixture of baking soda and sugar wrapped in tin foil to school, intending to sell it as cocaine. I think I got $5 for it. Wow, I was a f*cked up kid.
11. When I worked at the Torrey Pines Discount Cinema in high school, we showed a lot of gang culture movies and cult midnight movies, which means there was a lot of marijuana smoking going on just about all the time. On more than one occasion, I would find dime bags dropped on the floor of the theaters. Even though I didn’t usually smoke out, I did stash a collection in my bedroom, and I think I sold one bag for … $5. Things didn’t change much since elementary school.
12. At Torrey Pines we hosted a screening of one of the “House Party” movies. When Kid (of Kid ‘n’ Play) came to the theater, I got him a Coke while he hung out in my office.
13. Leaving the studios of a local rock station after picking up a contest prize one day, I walked past Brett Michaels of Poison.
14. Once when I was 5, a family friend was staying with my family at our duplex in Philadelphia. I went down to the basement one morning and saw him dicing up a white substance. He told me it was aspirin. It took me quite a few years before I realized it was cocaine. Hey, it was the ’80s.
15. Something odd happened to me when I was 6 that has pervasively bothered me for 25-plus years. My recollection is vague, but I think I was hanging out at this girl’s house, and I wanted to leave for some reason, so much that I bolted out of there and onto my Big Wheel. A couple of other kids were holding onto it so I couldn’t get away, but eventually I did and sped home. To this day, I have no idea what or why. Even at 6 I was having paranoid delusions. Great.
16. I adopted the “Pj” name (born Paul Joseph) when I was 14, but it took my family moving across the country for me to be able to start over with a clean slate to get buy-in from people on that. My extended family (whom I’ve seen once in 20 years) still calls me “Paul,” but my parents have settled for “Peej.”
17. I’m a huge Billy Joel fan, in a totally un-ironic way. I could pretty much listen to his music ad nauseum, and own much of his late-70s and early-80s output on vinyl.
18. Toward the tail end of high school, I was so obsessed with Jim Morrison, people pretty much started calling me “Jim.” I had approximated as many of his mannerisms as I could, in addition to adopting the hairstyle and clothing (down to the custom-fit leather pants and a beaded necklace I modeled after the “Young Lion” photos).
19. In an 8th grade art class, I painted a visual representation of the Led Zeppelin song “Battle of Evermore.” It was pretty terrible, and is probably the reason I never again attempted to paint anything.
20. Also in 8th grade, I decided to start publishing a school paper because there was none at my middle school. I did the layouts with a school computer — I think — and had either my parents or one of my teachers photocopy it. I published maybe two or three issues only, mostly focusing on school gossip and sports results. The vice principal caught wind of it and actually thanked me in the hall one day. I guess my destiny to work in journalism was fixed at a young age.
21. A few years later, when I was a sophomore in high school, I started a neighborhood publication along similar lines. It was a weekly, photocopied newsletter, basically a gossip rag for my friends and the kids in my neighborhood, like who was dating whom and other dirty laundry. That lasted maybe a month.
22. My first professionally published article was in Scope Magazine, a local alternative newspaper that eventually became the Las Vegas Weekly, in 1993. I was 16. According to its publisher (and now friend) James Reza, I got paid for it, though I never received the check. To this day, I still bug him about it, to either his amusement or annoyance.
23. In fourth or fifth grade, I fell backward off a block wall after some kids fighting accidentally pushed into me. It was about a 6-to-8-foot drop, and I landed right on my head. It knocked me unconscious, and when I woke up, I was in a wheelchair in the nurse’s office. I never got checked for anything serious, but I’m pretty sure you can thank any of my nonsense today on that incident. My brains are scrambled.
24. I’ve only had one cavity my entire life, and that was in a baby tooth on its way out anyway.
25. Though I’ve had a lot of break-ups in my life, almost all of them have been amicable, and I’m still friends with almost everyone I’ve ever dated. For better or worse.

If you’re STILL hungering for more access to the annals of Pj, you could ask me an anonymous question on Formspring for all the world to see.

1. People I’ve been told I look like: Ron Livingston (Office Space), Gil Bellows (Ally McBeal), David Cook (American Idol) and in a particularly weird moment, Jimmy Kimmel. I will refrain from comment.
2. When I was 7 or 8, my best friend (who was about 5 years older than me) and I tried to start a landscaping business in Philadelphia. We were dead serious. We went to our nearby gardening supply store, talked to the owner about equipment rental and purchase pricing, printed up fliers with full service menus from my pal’s computer and distributed them door-to-door throughout the neighborhood. Within one day, my mother fielded about six phone calls for services, and she told every inquirer that we were already booked, then she put the kibosh on our entrepreneurship.
3. My first real job was selling newspaper subscriptions door-to-door in Simi Valley, Calif. A van would come and pick up kids from all over the greater L.A. area and then drop us off at particular neighborhoods in Simi. We were paid only on commission, so if I didn’t sell any subscriptions, I went home penniless. Sometimes, I’d just ditch my route and go read magazines at a nearby grocery store.
4. I always sleep with a comforter, even in the summer.
5. 

   Real musicians never take off their sunglasses. And wear leather. Rarrgh!

   For about a year or so in the mid-1990s, I went by the alias August Rahne. I used it as my name at poetry readings as well as to create a separate identity in the ‘zine I published at the time. About the same time, I started a band named Rahne.

6. One of my biggest heroes is Henry Rollins. When I finally met him at, of all places, San Diego Comic-Con International in 2007, I’m pretty sure I sounded like an idiot as I told him how much of an influence his entrepreneurial spirit, work ethic and writing had on shaping my life. A month later when we featured Rollins on the cover of my magazine, I assigned the interview to someone else, afraid of sounding like an idiot again.
7. In my late teens, when I’d go to parties, I’d usually just curl up in a corner and write poetry.
8. I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Sorry.
9. I did not go to the polls in 2004. Sorry again.
10. I have never personally owned a TV, DVD player, stereo, microwave or iPod, but at one time in my life I had three Macintosh computers.
11. In high school, I almost signed a contract to act in movies for an independent producer. I’m pretty sure had I gone through with it, I would have ended up in some sort of pornographic film. Just a hunch.
12. I currently play drums in a Las Vegas rock band called As Yet Unbroken. I play a five-piece Ludwig set.
13. In addition to drums, I also play guitar, bass and a bit of keyboards, all of which (in addition to singing) I have done with moderate success in bands since high school. The only formal training I’ve ever had is two guitar lessons when I was 9 and one semester of intro piano in college.
14. I learned to play drums by showing up to band practice a few hours before the rest of the band in which I played guitar and goofing around on the drummer’s kit. Eventually, that band — Morgana Athena — let me play drums on one song at one of our last shows.
15. I’ve only been taken to a hospital for my own needs once: I had a panic attack in 1996 resulting from a combination of stresses including someone wanting to kill me. I mean that literally. I thought I was having a heart attack. The doctors just said it was really bad anxiety and that my potassium was low. They told me to avoid stress for a while. Ha!
16. 

    Alex Kidd pwns Mario anyday in my world.

    I have not owned a video game system since the Sega Master System came out in the mid-1980s.

17. When my family moved back to California in 1985, we had a little mini-celebration in the hotel room we were staying in. My parents had a bottle of champagne that I kept sneaking sips of. I must have snuck about half the bottle, because I got stupidly drunk and violently ill, and spent the rest of the night in the bathroom, thereby getting out of the way at the tender age of 9 both my first bout of drunkenness and alcohol-induced vomiting.
18. I’m 5′9-1/2″. That half-inch is important.
19. Perhaps as a preemptive defensive measure, in kindergarten I was kind-of a bully. I have distinct memories of blockading kids from the coat closet and throwing wood blocks at them.
20. When I was in fifth grade, I had this evil math teacher named Mr. Praglin. One day I had to pee pretty badly, and when I asked him if I could be excused, he told me to “tie a string around it.” Seriously.
21. Perhaps out of retribution — though obviously this didn’t directly affect him — during recess, I’d sneak back into Mr. Praglin’s class and steal money out of all the kids’ bags and lunch boxes. I kept that up for a week or so until they realized it was a recurring problem and started to lock the classroom. OK, fine, I was no angel.
22. I revisited my bully days my sophomore or junior year of high school, when my pal Brian and I would torment the poor kid that worked at the Carl’s Jr. in our neighborhood where we hung out. The kid was actually afraid to go outside to take out the trash if we were hanging outside. It really makes no sense, we never hurt him or anything. So it must have been a big step for that kid during our senior year when he asked me to design the decor for some event in the school cafeteria. And I did it.
23. I was abnormally mature for my age when I was a child, and my parents essentially did away with babysitters by the time I was 9. They’d leave me in charge of my four-years-younger brother as well, all the better for me to torment him.
24. I barely graduated high school. My senior year GPA was a 1.8. My cumulative for all of HS was 2.6.
25. I graduated from college cum laude with a dual bachelor’s degree and a 3.86 GPA.

1. I smoked cigarettes regularly from age 15 to 22.
2. I stopped consuming caffeine in January, 2005. I’ve only had a caffeinated beverage purposely a few times since then, for “emergency” situations such as ridiculous deadlines.
3. For a long while, I suffered from sleep apnea, which is only mildly odd, because it’s usually tied into obesity, and I’m of medium build and exercise regularly. I had a few violent episodes waking in the middle of the night gasping for air, but mostly, my symptoms included falling asleep during the day, everywhere: in meetings, at my desk, driving, on the toilet, etc. Perhaps not coincidentally, it went away after two things changed in my life: I stopped drinking caffeine, and I got divorced.
4. I have been a vegetarian in some capacity for more than a decade. At the end of high school, I stopped eating red meat and pork. On my 21st birthday, I gave up poultry and fish. I went back to eating small amounts of chicken, turkey and fish at 22, but by 24 or 25, I was completely vegetarian. I tried going vegan (no eggs or dairy) for about six months, but damn it, I love pizza. Early in 2008, I started eating fish again.
5. My biological father died when I was 18. My only regret is that he did not live to see me perform music, because I think he would have liked that.
6. 

   I had a Sharpie and wasn't afraid to use it.

   When I was about 9, I began to write and draw my own comic books (at first, just one-page strips). I continued to write and draw comics in that self-created “universe” until I was 15, and the one-page format evolved into six-to-10 monthly titles ranging from about 12-to-20-pages each. I still have them all, somewhere.

7. Ninety-nine percent of my wardrobe comes in blue, gray, black or white. I actually copped that approach to clothing from a friend of mine about a dozen years ago, and to this day, I rarely buy anything outside of those parameters.
8. I do not own, nor will I wear, polo shirts.
9. I’ve had a one-night stand only once, when I was 18. My car was broken down at the time, so one of my friends actually drove this girl and me to my house that night. I found out later that he had slept with her the night before. Not surprisingly, she later became a stripper.
10. For a short period during high school, I started off each morning with vodka in my coffee.
11. I don’t understand why people have to choose hard, fast opinions on things such as abortion. Is it not possible to be against abortion personally but for choice? I am.
12. When I was 10, I sliced the bottom of my left foot open wading in a lake in Southern California. I needed five stitches. To this day, if I even think about it (like right now!) or if I view anything particularly gory, I get a twinge in that same foot.
13. I have a 3- or 4-inch black, three-ring binder that contains hundreds of notes written between a high school girlfriend and myself. I haven’t looked at them in years (I don’t really know where they are), but I’d imagine it would be a good snapshot of my life from the period between January 1992 and April 1993.
14. Though I was born in Southern California and spent the last 18 years in Las Vegas, I was raised in Philadelphia for nine years total. I don’t have a prominent accent, except when I say the words “orange” or “hilarious.”
15. If I talk to someone with a Southern accent too long, I start speaking in one as well. Which makes no sense, as I’m as Yankee as they come.
16. I somewhat regret cutting off my hair the last time it was long, because it’s unlikely I can ever grow it back to that length.
17. My birth name is the same as my grandfather’s. I remember my step-grandmother calling him “Pj” sometimes when I was a kid, which might have subconsciously informed my decision to scrap my full name at 14.
18. It’s “Pj” — capital “P,” lowercase “j.” No dots, no spaces.
19. I don’t know my blood type, and until about six months ago, I cannot think of the last time I went to a doctor.
20. I’ve only taken antibiotics once in my life (that I can recall), when I had my wisdom teeth removed at 26 or 27.
21. When I was 7 or 8, I thought my bike got stolen from the mall during one of my many summer day visits with my friend Michael. I freaked out for about half an hour and called my parents from a pay phone before I realized I was just looking at the bike rack on the WRONG SIDE of the department store.
22. 

    Dude, where's my Honda Accord?

    When I was 17, I thought my car was stolen from a street-side parking spot while I was at a Stone Temple Pilots concert at the Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts. My friend Ryan and I walked back from the venue to the street where I thought I left my car. Turns out it WAS on that street, but the road followed in a circle, and I was parked on the parallel, same-named street around the curve.

23. This is fully going to ruin my street cred, but I’ve never been in a real fight. Closest: I got into a pushing contest with this fat kid Joe in elementary school that was quickly broken up (and we became friends thereafter); I backhanded this kid Dave on the school bus in high school (and we became friends later); I got sucker punched outside my girlfriend’s apartment during high school by her drunken ex-boyfriend (we DEFINITELY did not become friends ever).
24. When I was 16, I worked as the shopping cart wrangler at a mega-sized drug store called Phar-Mor. I spent most of my shifts hanging outside the store, talking to the security guard and hitting on girls. For some reason, when I started working there, a rumor started that I was an ex-con. I did not start it.
25. I got stopped more than once in high school by school police to make sure I belonged on campus. Not sure why.

1. I sleep with the light on when I sleep alone, unless, of course, the sun is up. Thankfully, I almost never sleep alone now.
2. I have five tattoos and my ever-changing master-plan is to have two half-sleeves by the end of ‘08‘09.
3. When I am in a comfortable situation with friends, it is impossible to shut me up and I speak with authority. But when I am put on the spot in a professional speaking situation — meetings, radio appearances, guest speaking — I fumble and sound like an idiot. Goes with my feeling that I am just a punk kid in a (sorta) grown-up body.
   

   On the wagon.

4. I didn’t drink alcohol from about 2002 or 2003 until 2007, and even since, only for short periods during abnormally festive seasons. My drink of choice is vodka with ruby red grapefruit juice.
5. I failed my driver’s exam on the first try. It wasn’t bad enough I turned right into the far left lane, but then I couldn’t parallel park for shit. Bear in mind, this was in Las Vegas, where there are giant, free parking lots EVERYWHERE.
6. I was always very fast and limber as a kid, but I was never encouraged to engage in sports. I played soccer in elementary school for one season. A friend and I went to a recruiting day for a track team in high school, but my endurance had been deadened by smoking. I would have made a decent wide receiver if only I could catch a ball.
7. I wrote an awesome speech about John F. Kennedy for a speech contest in fourth or fifth grade and probably would have won an awesome award but I got nervous and rushed through it, falling short of the required three-minute minimum, thereby disqualifying me and leaving with only an “honorable mention.”
8. I lost my virginity at 16. Well, not so much “lost” as “threw the hell out.”
9. I did not go to my senior prom because a week prior, I caught chickenpox from my younger brother and was bedridden for two weeks.
10. In my younger years, I was obsessive about analyzing my love life in my personal journals, to the point that I made lists of not only all the people I had dated (updated on a semi-regular basis) but also made lists of people I wanted to date but never did. Those journals have since been destroyed.
11. The first concert I ever went to was Salt & Pepa, Keith Sweat and DJ E-Z Rock & Rob Base at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas when I was 12. I’m pretty sure I was the only white kid, even in the nosebleeds. I won the tickets from a local Top 40 radio station.
12. I love to give people gifts but I am terrible at figuring out what to get them.
13. I feel guilty when I receive gifts.
14. I was voted “Best Sense of Humor” in sixth grade.
15. I can’t drive a manual transmission vehicle. Well, maybe I could, but I never have.
16. When I was in sixth grade, I was inadvertently knocked backward off a 6-or-7-foot-high wall onto the asphalt below. The only thing I remember is waking up in a wheelchair in the nurse’s office. I think it’s the only concussion I’ve ever had. Thankfully.
17. My weight stayed between 135 and 169 lbs. for about 15 years. In the last year, it went up to 185 lbs., a weight I’m not comfortable with, and have pared down to under 180.
18. I chose my first name and was adopted into my last name.
19. Though I was not really raised with any religious influence, and do not believe in, follow or practice any religion, three-fifths of my tattoos are religious symbols, and more will likely be as well.
    

    Buckwheat says "A-Otay!"

20. In high school, my friend Brian and I became fairly obsessed with Buckwheat from Our Gang, as translated through Eddie Murphy’s take on him in the infamous Saturday Night Live sketches. We created a Buckwheat Sandwich (shaved turkey, swiss cheese, dijon mustard and horseradish on a French roll, slightly heated) and left tags around our neighborhood walls, doors and signs proclaiming “Buckwheat says ‘A-Otay’.”
21. Said friend Brian and I had a weekly ritual when he would crash at my family’s apartment — we’d go to the grocery store, get flavored seltzer water, Italian cookies and then go hang out at my apartment complex’s pool, hoping to come across girls. Which occasionally did happen. We developed a pretty decent two-man seltzer bottle juggling act.
22. In high school, some of my schoolmates called me “Hair,” presumably because I had long hair.
23. Major pet peeve: People who jaywalk when there is a crosswalk 20 feet away. It’s beyond laziness: It’s dangerous and stupid, especially in Las Vegas where our thoroughfares are typically 6-to-8 lanes wide.
24. I’m rather hirsute and can grow a beard in a week, but I have two small areas on either side of my mouth where hair just will not grow. I thought this was weird until I saw an actor on Days of Our Lives with a beard who had a similar hairline.
25. I eat mustard on pretzels, never cheese. And hot dogs — or in my case, the veggie equivalents — always get mustard as well, never ketchup.