He quit his full-time writing gig about ten years back, for more than a few reasons (way too many to list them all here), but mostly because he got real sick of the following:
- Being desperately, almost freakishly dirt-poor. $8.50 an hour can't buy you love, friend, certainly not now, and not even in central Rhode Island in the late 90's. It could barely buy Fat dinner, even then.
- Staying up every night until 2 or 3 am, being pressured to make morning edition deadlines for a newspaper that nobody (except his mom) was reading anyway.
IMPORTANT NOTE - It turns out that nobody was reading any newspaper at the time, really... it's pretty well documented that the whole industry went completely in the tank over the last 5-10 years. This is no way implies that Fat's writing was the cause of that failure, because that's simply untrue - he was reasonably good at what he did, editorial conspiracies aside - but Newspapers were losing their luster fast, and failing miserably in competition with websites, blogs, etc... that could provide 24-hour-a-day, around-the-clock coverage. Ink-on-paper was quickly going the way of the dinosaur.
These days Fat day-times as a “marketing professional” (much more lucrative), and has spent the last ten years in the direct marketing industry as a business analyst, project manager, and product manager. He also dabbles in trash talk, reads Scott Adams and Steve Johnson every day, and knows a bitchin’ cool trick that can make it “rain” paper clips.
His wife and kids love him, but they think he's a nerd.
If you'd like to contact Fat, you can email/tweet him at the following:
- fatbaltimore@gmail.com
- @FatBaltimore
