Zach Selwyn

Actor. Musician. Host. Writer. Dinner Guest.

  • Zach wrote and produced this piece for TBS Digital starring the Sklar Brothers.

    Sklar brothers
  • Missi Pyle and Zach Selwyn are back at it this week performing live from the legendary Hotel Cafe – 1623 Cahuenga Blvd. in Los Angeles – special guests from Missi’s new YouTube Red show! $10 at door

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    Anna Faris Comedy Hollywood hotel cafe Missi Pyle podcast unqalified
  • 59832510211__913EF14E-489B-4ACE-9F6C-AAE81F0EB896When I came down with the rebound and heard my right knee explode and pop, I knew something was horribly wrong… I looked up at the faces of my basketball teammates looking down at me lying on the court writhing in agonizing pain. I somehow managed to verbalize what was going through my mind…

    “That’s it, amputate my leg… just cut the fucker off.”

    Turns out my injury wasn’t bad enough to turn me into an amputee, but it was bad. Torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). Partially torn medical meniscus. Partially torn medial collateral ligament (MCL). If you’re not familiar with this medical terminology, in layman’s terms… I blew out my whole fucking knee.

    Before I was given the official medical report by my doctor, I had four days to figure out what the hell I had done to myself. Why? Well, in America, with health care as bad as it is, getting in to see an Orthopedic surgeon for an official diagnosis takes time… Like, a lot of time. Which means, after Googling “knee injuries” over 3000 times, I had to make my own medical diagnosis on myself until a doctor appointment could be set up.

    Based on my online research, I had concluded that one of three things had happened to me:

    1. I tore my ACL.
    2. I tore some other knee ligament.
    3. My bones were deteriorating from early onset kidney disease and I would be dead by August.

    My father and sister are both doctors, so their advice to use the RICE method, (Rest, Ice, Compress, Elevate), helped a lot. They recommended getting crutches to get around, so, I quickly called my friend Scott, another basketball friend who had suffered numerous leg injuries over the years. Sure he had a pair… he said. But they were for people 5’10” and under.

    After searching for cheap crutches online, I called the Hollywood Goodwill and was told by an employee that they had a set that they would hold for me. As I limped through the parking lot of the store, praying that they would fit my 6’2” frame, I went over certain decisions in my life that had lead me to this point… Why had I turned down the professional path to pursue this artist life? If I hadn’t, would I be staggering through a Goodwill parking lot in Hollywood on a Thursday afternoon in my pajamas trying to save $15 on crutches if I only had I taken that job at FOX SPORTS all those years ago? What had I done to my life? The last couple months had been tough… Air BNB disavowed my house from renting it out, so my income had been roughly slashed in half. My latest voiceover residual check I had received in the mail was for .08 cents… My only solace of late had been in playing basketball… and now that dream, like my right knee, was CRUSHED.

    I felt like I was on the verge of being homeless.

    Of course the girl at Goodwill had made a mistake. They had a WALKER, not crutches. It also happened to have a blood stain on it, which is why it was SLASHED to $2.00. I passed.

    7F3CE290-9069-411B-BDC2-218F8B063F3E
    Finding crutches in this town is nearly impossible.

    I went to Walgreens next, where the crutches were at the back of the store. I hobbled all the way in only to find that they were “on sale” for $59.99. Excuse me? 60 bucks? FUCK OFF. I was about to go fasten myself a crutch out of an old tree branch and a bicycle seat when I looked on my phone and noticed that Home Depot sold them… I called, but got no answer. When I showed up, I was told that their crutches were not available in-store. They were online deals only.

    “Go to Urgent Care,” my friend Alex told me. “They’ll be able to tell in five seconds if you tore something… and they’ll give you crutches for free.”

    Urgent Care it was. I found one with a five star rating on Yelp and went down. I paid my $25 co-pay and was treated by a 20-something female who claimed to be a doctor, although I noticed that her name tag did not say “M.D.” It had a bunch of other letters that I’m sure were placed there to confuse naive patients… Hers said A.P.R.N. C.N.M.

    I texted my sister – a doctor down in Newport Beach – to see if this lady was, in fact, a doctor.

    ZACH: Hey – What do these abbreviations mean and is she a legit doctor? A.P.R.N. C.N.M.

    She wrote back immediately.

    AMANDA: NO! That stands for Advanced Practice Registered Nurse – Certified Nursing Midwife – What are you, fucking pregnant? get the hell out of there and see a real doctor!!!

    Since I had already paid the $25.00, I stayed. The young “doctor” felt my knee. She moved it around. She stretched it. It actually felt pretty good… And then, she gave me her official diagnosis:

    “You did NOT tear anything,” she said. “This is a bad sprain at worst.”

    “Really!” I exclaimed. “A bad sprain? Thank you sooo much! If I ever need a midwife, I’m calling YOU!”

    She took some X-Rays of my knee, (which I later learned were completely unnecessary for a ligament injury and cost me $125) and I asked them to provide my free crutches. When they explained that they did have crutches – but that they cost $39.99, I bit the bullet and bought them. Finally, upon checkout, the manager told me that I could earn a $5.00 gift card to a Starbucks if I simply gave them a 5-Star Review on YELP.

    “Hell yeah!” I said. “You guys made my day.”

    I put in the 5-Star review, snagged my gift card and Uber-ed home to elevate my “bad sprain.” Wow, no tear, no surgery, no problem. I was elated and texted everybody I knew that I’d be back on the basketball court within weeks.

    Screen Shot 2019-12-20 at 10.03.35 AM
    Better days…

    And then I got an appointment with a real doctor.

    Dr. Weiss was recommended to me by my primary care physician. I had my leg up on his exam table the very next day, confident that he would walk in, slip me an ACE Bandage and wish me happy holidays… Instead, within 30 seconds of looking at my knee, he casually offered the following.

    “Wow, you tore the shit out of your ACL… Hopefully you didn’t do too much damage to the other ligamants,” he said.

    “Wait, what?!” I reacted. “Tore my ACL? But the Urgent Care said it was a bad sprain…?”

    “Well, if by ‘bad sprain’ they mean a ’completely annihilated anterior cruciate ligament,’ then… yes.”

    Oh fuck.

    Dr. Weiss scheduled an MRI for that afternoon and told me I had wasted my money on X-rays and my entire Urgent Care appointment.

    “Lemme guess,” he said. “They offered you a Starbucks gift card?”

    Following the MRI, which is when you go inside one of those huge claustrophobic X-Ray machines to examine all of your inner workings, I was back in Dr. Weiss’ office for my evaluation two days later.

    He broke down my injury and began planning out my recovery. Since I was set to travel with my family for the holidays, I was concerned I’d be missing out on my trip… He assured me that since my swelling was so immense, I would have to wait at least four weeks for surgery. He then explained how it would work.

    “Based on the fact that you’re 44-years-old, I’m gonna replace your ACL with a cadaver ligament.”

    “I’m sorry, what? A CADAVER LIGAMENT?”

    Doctor Weiss smiled. He went on to explain that younger “athletes” can replace their torn ACL’s with their own ligaments, but for older guys like me, the best option is to take an anterior cruciate ligament from a DEAD BODY and put it into my destroyed knee.

    “Can you make the ligament from like some Kenyan distance runner or something?” I joked.

    “Haha,” He said. “It’ll most likely be from a car crash victim.”

    Wonderful.

    Dr. Weiss also told me that 20 years ago, patients my age wouldn’t even be ELIGIBLE for ACL replacement. As if men over 40 were considered beyond repair or something… Luckily, the outlook on knees had changed since the late 90’s.

    IMG_0388
    My torn ACL

    Eager to get to my rehabilitation, I bought a $300 knee brace from the doctor (Of course, not covered by insurance) and got instructions on how to put it on. After it was affixed, I had the look of a hydraulic half-man/half-Cyborg. I felt like Darth Vader.

    “Will I be ever able to play basketball at the level I was playing again?” I asked.

    “Maybe,” he said. “But you might want to join an elderly league.”

    Limping out of Dr. Weiss’ office on my crutches, the first glimpse of my mortality had hit me. Knees crumble, ankles snap… ligaments are torn. Age is forever out there hunting us down. Luckily, with this type of injury, full recoveries are entirely expected and at worst, I would lose 4-6 months of my life to inactivity.

    On the way home, I stopped at Starbucks to spend my $5.00 gift card on a cup of coffee. When I presented it to the cashier, he told me news that at this point, I was not surprised to hear.

    “Sorry, sir,” she said. “This card only works at certain Starbucks… Not this one.”

    I logged onto Yelp and changed my review…

    *Ed Note: Zach is set for ACL replacement surgery in Mid January. Stay tuned!

    CHECK OUT/BUY ZACH’S DEBUT NOVEL NOW!

    Image 2-8-21 at 11.11 AM

    ACL injury basketball essay funny short story humor hunter s. thompson knee literature Sedaris short stories writing Zach Selwyn
  •  

    A new Zachariah song from the LP “Hungover at Disneyland”. Featuring RJ Robinson on fiddle.

    Download song here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/too-old-for-molly-too-young/id952764244?i=952764259

    420 hungover at disneyland LSD MDMA Molly Zachariah
  • Sadly, we had to postpone our summer shows – but we still have our merch! New T-shirts below! $25.00 – shipping included. DM z@zachariahmusic.com for info!

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    ALSO – our new EP CLOUD ROAD will be streaming everywhere in May 2020… HEADS UP! Early reviews have called it “Mac Miller meets Steve Earle.”We’ll take it!

    See you in the FALL!

    Z and LR!

    chris kro Cloud Road Mac Miller Outlaw Country psyedelic country springsteen steve earle tour tucson Zachariah ZAchariah Lobos Riders
  • Zachariah & the Lobos Riders

    “Ghosts in This Guitar”

    Skywriting (c) 2014 Papago Records

    https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/ghosts-in-this-guitar/id910266624?i=910266654

  • The Worst Cocktail in LA.

    By Zach Selwyn

    It was a hungover morning. Most of them are hungover mornings, but this one was particularly bad. It was actually quite unbearable. It was 91 degrees outside, but for some reason I was in a good mood based on the fact that it had finally stopped raining in Los Angeles. L.A. had been miserable lately. Not to mention depressing. My gas bill in January had skyrocketed to $1800 and wasn’t looking to get any better. A looming writer’s strike and a desolate media landscape had flattened any creative work available in the city. Shit. Even Disney had laid off 7,000 employees sine January 1st. Not only that, but the rain had destroyed nearly every road in the city and never-ending potholes greeted my car wherever I drove, resulting in more than one flat tire. 

    Anyway, it was a Friday morning and I had to drop my son in the deep valley for a haircut on his day off from school for “Teacher Organization Day.” I wasn’t sure when “Teacher Organization Day” became a national fucking holiday, but apparently, like four times a school year, teachers needed some time to get their shit together. I guess I understood… I need one of those days like, 25 times a month. I just didn’t particularly love when these days were thrust upon myself as a parent, because you suddenly had to do stuff like catch up on haircuts and Costco shopping and shit like going to the Grove to see films you would never pay for on your own, like Dungeons and Dragons. Meanwhile. My son prefers this one particular valley hairstylist to any scissor-slinging tattooed millennial who works at the Floyd’s Barber Shop 0.8 miles from our house, so I basically have to go 13 miles to Encino with him once every three months. And as you know Encino is a pretty miserable place. 

    It’s ten times worse it with a bad hangover. 

    After dropping him off, I had a roughly an hour to kill around the Encino corridor. Looking to curb the uneasiness of the body aches I was fighting from the night before, I Googled local bars and hotels to find any sort of affordable Bloody Mary that might help me open my eyes and face the day a little easier. Not finding much, I walked for a few minutes and quickly realized that I was surrounded by nothing but chain restaurants, weed stores and car dealerships. I was on Ventura Boulevard in Encino. I had nowhere to go. I felt like I had become the man I once swore I would never become: A 47-year-old dad, hungover in the Valley on a Friday morning looking for a drink. This wasn’t rock bottom, but Jesus, it sort of felt like the boat was sinking fast. 

    And then I spotted the Buca di Beppo. Yes. Buca di Beppo. Anyone who has been here knows this place is basically Olive Garden on HGH.  You order a plate of spaghetti and it feeds nine people and you take four pounds home to haunt your fridge for the next month and a half. The leftovers are enough to choke an entire village of starving Albanians. 

    I was certainly their first customer of the day. The general manager, a goateed gentleman named Rick, who was wearing a tie patterned with a bushel of tomatoes, looked shocked that someone had actually entered the restaurant before noon. He struggled to greet me at the door. When he finally did welcome me inside, I noticed that he his shirt was untucked and one shoelace was untied. He brought me a monstrous menu and informed me that the restaurant was featuring a wine special that day: A glass of Apothic Red Wine was going for only $14.00. I thanked him but chose to not alert him that Apothic Red is a bottle of garbage wine found at Trader Joe’s for roughly $7.99. 

    Sweet tie bro.

    Since the dining room was still being setup for the evening rush, I was seated in the empty bar, where half of the barstools were still turned upside down on the tables. They had sports on, so I knew I could easily kill an hour there… and I asked Rick how the Bloody Mary was. 

    “It’s amazing,” he said. 

    That was all I needed to hear. 

    I asked for a Bloody Mary with Tito’s and “all the fixings they could give me.” 

    Rick responded by asking me, “Tito’s? – OK – So Vodka or tequila?”

    “Uhm Tito’s”

    “Oh. So… What is that?”

    “It’s a vodka from Austin, Texas dude,” I said perhaps a little too aggressively. “It’s a Bloody Mary.”

    That was my first warning. I should’ve walked out then. This guy did not even know that Tito’s was a fucking vodka company? 

    I gave him a little side eye as he began working on the drink, making sure he was pouring in the right vodka, but unfortunately, he reached for a bottle of some brand called Helix. Helix Vodka?  I had never even heard of that shit. But I watched as he incredulously poured it into a glass and then poured in some bullshit pre-packaged Bloody Mary mix from a plastic bottle that looked like it dressed Greek salads on its off-days. He didn’t even MIX the drink. He just dumped it in, and served it to me raw-dog, meaning it was lacking any olives, pickles, celery, salt, Tajin, fucking pepper… and flavor. 

    “Dude, Yo – do you guys don’t have any garnish whatsoever?” I asked.

    “We have Tabasco,” he said. 

    “Olives?” I asked. “Maybe a peperoncini?”

    “Uhm well, we have those but it means I would have to open the salad bar, which isn’t quite open yet.”

    Jesus fucking Christ. 

    I took Rick’s bottle of Tabasco and tried to make this drink taste like… something. Anything but Clamato juice and ice. And it fell flat. This was by far the worst Bloody Mary ever served on American soil. Right there, in Encino, California precisely one week before my birthday in the good year of our lord 2023.  

    I sat there for a moment as Rick adjusted his tomato tie and folded napkins and I watched some NBA Playoffs highlights suffering through each and every sip of this bullshit drink. It basically tasted like water with hot sauce in it. The ice cubes were so prevalent that I surmounted that there was close to one to two ounces of liquid in the entirety of the glass. The straw was minuscule and sharp in my mouth. 

    And then I started looking around at the decor. 

    If you’ve ever been to a Buca di Beppo, you know that they fancy themselves as a classic “Family-Style Italian Restaurant.” That requires that they must decorate the walls with photos of great Italian American stalwarts of recent past, including 200 pictures of Frank Sinatra, at least 50 photos of Joe Dimaggio and a few stills from the movie Goodfellas. In fact, there was one large bar photo of Dimaggio that caught the Yankee Clipper smiling and youthful, at the peak of career, probably in the middle of a 200 hit season. He was grinning so widely, that there is no doubt he just flossed his teeth with Marilyn Monroe’s underwear. For some reason that photo made me happy. I pointed at the picture and then back to Rick, who mind you, was probably in his late 30’s to early 40’s and said, “What do you know about that guy?”

    “Oh, Sinatra?” He said. 

    I almost went Joe Pesci on him and slapped him with his tomato tie. 

    “That’s NOT fucking Frank Sinatra, that’s Joe fuckin’ Dimaggio,” I said. “Joltin’ Joe Dimaggio.”

    “Oh, the baseball player,” Rick responded. “Dodgers?”

    If you work at an Italian restaurant and think this guy is Sinatra, you deserve to be fired.

    Let me tell you something. If you work in a Buca di Beppo, or ANY Italian establishment that serves a version of a simple red sauce on pasta or a fucking meatball or a basket full of fucking breadsticks, you BETTER know who the fuck Joe Dimaggio is. In New York City, Rick would have been driven to the Hudson River, fitted for some cement shoes and dropped the fuck off the pier. And even the cops would have looked the other way and laughed about it at a bar later that night. But, this was Encino. And Rick was born in 1987 or so. And I was hungover. And unemployed. And bitter. So I leaned back and continued sipping the worst Bloody Mary of all time. A few sips later, I excused myself to the bathroom. 

    There was a photo of Kirk Gibson above the urinal. 

    I guess that made sense. Kirk Gibson is an LA hero and that 1988 World Series home run is one of baseball’s grandest moments, but I actually began wondering if Rick even knew who he was. When I returned to the bar, I asked him if he knew who the mustached man above the urinal was. He nodded yes. 

    “Joe Dimaggio?” 

    Look. I have nothing against Buca di Beppo. In fact, I have enjoyed many fun nights at this restaurant with family and friends over the years… I’ve murdered bottles of wine and meatballs and large pasta dishes here while singing along to That’s Amore with drunk friends two tables over. But this was ridiculous. My advice is forever avoid the Bloody Mary at all costs, and certainly do not enter any Buca di Beppo before 6:30 PM on any given day. You will leave depressed, disappointed and miserable – and when you face that blazing sunlight outside it will shine in your eyes like God’s high beams, informing you that you have made yet one more mistake in your short, miserable, pathetic life. 

    I paid Rick the $11.00 for the drink and walked outside, heading to pick up my son from his hair appointment. I was feeling a little better, happy that I at least informed Rick who Joe DiMaggio was, and happy that I was now aware of the catastrophic flavor of Helix Vodka. I walked back up towards the salon and texted my son to see if he was done. He wrote me back pretty quickly and seemed happy with his haircut. I squinted in the sun and read his text aloud:

    Dad, can we go see the Dungeons and Dragons movie?

    I went back to Buca di Beppo’s and ordered another round…  

    The Author. Encino, CA. 12;30 pm Friday.

    STREAM ZACH’S NEW SINGLE NOW!

    Bloody Mary Buca Di Beppo Cocktails Comedy Encino humor Joe Dimaggio Los Angeles Zach Selwyn
  • CREDITS…

    In the Presence of God *

    Firing Squad $

    New Suit for My Hangin *

    Honky Tonk Saloon @

    Bartenders in LA @

    You Built me a Ghost Town (Gia Ciambotti) #

    The River (With Bobby Joyner) $

    Gower Bridge #

    Dellmus Colvin @

    Last Country Road $

    City of Angels #

    Executive produced by The Pale Ryda

    All songs 2021 Desert Hobo Music (Ascap) written by Zach Selwyn

    Papago Records.

    MUSICIANS:

    (Acoustic, Steel, Lap Guitars) Dan Wistrom, Jesse Siebenberg, Leroy Miller, Zachariah

    (Drum Programming) Leroy Miller

    (Bass) Mark Antoleonos, Jeff LeGore

    (Keys) Brian Lapin

    (Fiddle) Lucy Clearwater

    (Harmonica) Bobby Joyner, Zachariah

    (BG Vocals) Lucy Clearwater, Leroy Miller, Bobby Joyner, Zachariah, Gia Ciambotti

    MIXED and PRODUCED BY:

    • – *Jesse Siebenberg
    • $ – Leroy Miller
    • # – Dan Wistrom
    • @ – Justin Jay
    country cowboy hip hop killers Lobos Riders Outlaw Country Rolling Stone steve earle todd snider true crime western Zach Selwyn Zachariah
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Zach & Mike Senese re-launch blog “Neighborhood-Cement.com”

  • January 17, 2014
  • by zachselwyn
  • · Neighborhood Cement

After a year off-line, Zach and Mike’s popular cement carving blog NEIGHBORHOOD-CEMENT.com has returned.

Featured on the site are funny, unique and outrageous cement carvings from around the world.

Please enjoy the latest – dedicated to the fabulous LEIF GARRETT.

leif_garrett
Sweet moose knuckle…

Leif

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