A mostly pointless ZERO CRED mid-year check in

Here's some crap I did this year.

Jul 20, 2025

Here’s a photo I took which looks like the Greek version of the American Football album. Greek Football, if you will.

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Last summer I was in Athens and stumbled upon a bookstore called Hyper Hypo that looked extremely up my alley. Art books and zines and photo books about butts and what not. But when I tried the door, I realized they’d closed one minute earlier. I pressed my nose against the glass real pathetic like, hoping they would take pity on the dumb American and let me in for a bit. But no dice. So when I returned to Athens this month I made sure to get my ass there during business hours.

Hyper Hypo, Athens. Oh wow they got the latest issue of BUTT.

I wanted to pick up something that was distinctly Greek and while the refrigerator magnet set of Greek statue penises was mighty tempting, I went with this book, Greek everyday solutions to common problems, published by the store itself. If you know anything about the Greek people, you know that they embody the “good enough” approach to building or fixing anything. Which is sort of amazing because these are the same people who erected stadiums 6,000 years ago that are still standing today.

Greek everyday solutions to common problems has collected dozens of photos of Greek ingenuity. Honestly, I don’t think most of the photos really do justice to the oddity of the situation but there a good concept nonetheless.

Alright if any IRS auditors are reading, as you can see, this clearly fulfills my business-related obligations and justifies me writing off all expenses from the trip, including the €238 I spent on “misc magnets,” thank you.

Anyway, it was good to take a little vacation because this has simultaneously been the longest and quickest year of my life. Since we recently passed the halfway mark on ol’ 2025 I thought it’d be good to do a mid-year check-in on all the work I’ve miraculously managed to get done despite being distracted by the news every single minute of every single day. Consider this an ICYMI for you and an accountability check for me.

FAHRENHEIT-182

I guess the big one would be that FAHRENHEIT-182, the book I co-wrote with Mark Hoppus, was published in April and became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. As you can imagine I have been very normal about this and have not let it go to my head at all. I definitely do not wear an oversized button on my lapel that says “New York Times Special Boy” and absolutely never work it into conversation like for example, “Hi I’m #1 New York Times bestselling author Dan Ozzi and I was wondering if this Motel 6 offers complimentary breakfast.” I never say that.

Mark and I spent a month doing the coolest book tour of all time. I took a lot of photos and tried to post them here and there when I could. I think we might be doing something in the future with some of the photos. Anyway, here’s one that I included in my weekly column for paid subscribers:

Oh and Mark was recently a guest on How Long Gone. I mention this only because it was a good episode and definitely not because he said some very nice things about me and our writing process. I would never let that kind of public praise go to my head. Like I wouldn’t even be able to tell you where it is in the interview. If it started at the 59:12 minute mark I would have no idea. Too humble to say!

Dirty Work essay

As a notable resident of the intersection of Highbrow Street and Lowbrow Avenue, I was asked by Vinegar Syndrome to write an essay for the box set release of one of my all-time favorite comedies, the Norm Macdonald cult classic Dirty Work. This thing came out looking incredibly sick. The Blu-ray includes the lost deleted scenes that were cut to shave the movie down to a PG-13 rating. I’d love to watch such a thing but alas I no longer own anything that can play discs.

Murder by Death album cover

danozzi

A post shared by @danozzi

Taking photos is sort of a fun side quest in my life so when I actually get paid to take photos I count that as a win. Last year I was asked to meet up with Murder by Death in Detroit and photograph the cover of their new (final??) record Egg & Dart. Well the album is out now and I can’t I believe my photo is going to be on this cover forever. Hard to even wrap my brain around it.

Oh and last week I dropped two new interviews…

An interview with Laura Stevenson

I don’t do much freelancing anymore because I genuinely don’t know what publications are still around, if any. Sort of like saying I don’t rent a lot of movies from Blockbuster Video anymore. I think the last thing I wrote for a publication was this little feature The Guardian asked me to write on Jeff Rosenstock which was oh god TWO YEARS AGO somehow. But I had to dust off my freelancing gloves to interview Laura Stevenson about her new record for The Creative Independent. I really loved this answer she gave about taking inspiration from her daughter:

She does ask really beautiful questions and we have to talk about death and life and why death happens and if it hurts. It’s heavy. You want to make it developmentally appropriate, but she asks existential and beautiful questions and it kind of reminds you how special life is. You get so caught up in life and having to go to fucking Target, and then she’s like, “Why does a butterfly fly?” It gets you back to just thinking about how wonderful everything is or just having a sense of wonder.

An interview with Lawrence Burney

I also had to talk to my old coworker Lawrence Burney about his debut book, No Sense in Wishing. For any aspiring documentarians of any kind, Lawrence is a great person to take advice from and he dropped a lot of helpful truthbombs in this chat. This was his answer for what advice he has for people looking to document their lives through music:

I would say the thing that you would not want people to know that you listen to or engage with is probably the thing that you should write about the most, because that's the thing that's going to actually make you interesting. Like, everybody listened to Jay Z. I don't want to hear a person talk about how Jay Z changed their lives, no disrespect to Jay Z. If you can find the things that you experimented with in order to reach who you are, I think those are the things [to focus on].

Alphabetical Order

Speaking of writing about your life through music, I assigned myself a yearlong writing project to keep myself busy in case I found myself with too much free time. It’s called Alphabetical Order and I’m going through my record collection A to Z, writing about albums that impacted my life somehow. Am I on track to finish this in a year’s time? Absolutely not. But I’ve written seven of them so far and I think that’s not bad!