Wyatt_Lassiter

Wyatt Lassiter: Sex, Money, and the Shores of Owen Sound I’m Wyatt. I live in Owen Sound, Ontario, now. It’s a far cry from where I started. I study people—specifically, the messy, beautiful, often transactional nature of their relationships. Did a lot of living, made a lot of mistakes, and somehow ended up here, writing about it all for the CamoWallet project. It’s about how we handle money and intimacy, and honestly? The two are almost never separate. I was born in Las Vegas. September 17th, 1976. If you’re looking for a place that imprints on you, that’s it. The desert heat, the constant, low-grade hum of slot machines in every damn store, the way the light hits the mountains at dusk—it all gets in your blood. My mom dealt blackjack at the Stardust, before they imploded it. My dad… well, he was a guy who knew people. Vegas back then was still old-school. You’d see Frank Sinatra’s ghost around every corner, or at least some guy who claimed he once fixed his car. It was a city built on illusion and cash, and that shaped me more than I realized for a long time. The lesson was simple: everyone’s playing a game, and the house always has an edge. I just didn’t know I’d end up studying a whole different kind of house. Spent my twenties and thirties being… let’s call it an active participant in the field of human sexuality. Not just the fun parts, the complicated parts. I worked as a counselor, did some peer-reviewed research on the rise of dating apps back when they were just for hookups—God, remember when that was scandalous?—and generally tried to understand why we connect, or fail to. I’ve seen couples in my office who haven't touched in years, and I’ve counseled polyamorous triads who communicated better than any married couple I knew. I remember one guy, a tech millionaire, who was utterly convinced his money was why his wife loved him. And maybe it was part of the equation. But the real issue was he didn't think he was loveable without it. That’s the thing. The money, the apps, they're just magnifying glasses for what's already there. You strip away the cash, the status, the perfectly curated profile, and what's left? That's the question I've spent my life asking. It leaves you with a healthy skepticism for simple answers. So, Owen Sound. How does a guy from Vegas end up here? A woman, of course. That didn’t work out, but the city… the city stuck. It’s on the southern tip of the Bruce Peninsula, where the Sydenham River empties into Georgian Bay. My place is just off 2nd Avenue East, near the old Dominion building. I can walk to the farmer's market on Saturday mornings—the one on 2nd Avenue—and get the best apples you've ever tasted. It’s a harbor town. You smell the water before you see it. In the winter, the wind comes straight off the bay, and it cuts through you. It’s the kind of cold that demands respect. I’ll walk along the water by the Bayshore Community Centre, watching the ice form, and it’s a world away from the dry heat of my childhood. I’ve done some guest lectures at Georgian College, over by the 10th Street bridge. Talked to students about the psychology of online dating, the performative nature of it all. They get it. They’re living it. Harrison Park, with its little bridge and the Sydenham running through it, that’s where I go when my head gets too loud. It’s grounding. Coming of age in a place like this, after Vegas, was its own kind of education. My younger self, the one chasing validation through a thousand different relationships, would have been bored here. But my older self? He sees the layers. I remember this one brutal winter, must have been '08 or '09, the bay froze solid. You could walk out to the ice fishing huts. I met an old guy out there, must have been eighty, tending his lines. He’d been coming to that same spot for fifty years. We talked for an hour about nothing—the cold, the perch, the price of bait. No posturing. No agenda. Just two humans sharing a space. That was a bigger lesson about connection than any academic paper I ever read. Or the time I was down at the Mudtown Tavern on 2nd Avenue, a real dive bar in the best way, and overheard two farmers arguing about the price of a used tractor for an hour. The negotiation was intricate, personal, and full of history. It was a relationship. It was a dance. Just like any couple arguing about a budget. See what I mean? It’s all the same damn thing. That’s what I’m doing now. Writing. For the CamoWallet project on their website, camowallet.app. It’s about the intersection of money and relationships, but through a very specific lens: this city. I write articles about how the young families in the new developments near the west side are navigating finances and parenting, or how the dating scene has shifted since the big box stores moved in and the old hangouts changed. I write about the unspoken contract of a long-term marriage I see in the elderly couples having coffee at the Mudtown, or the financial tightrope walked by artists living in the lofts above the stores on 8th Street East. It’s all material. My past in sexology taught me to see the patterns, the hidden transactions, the emotional ledgers people keep. And Owen Sound—with its harbor, its history, its quiet resilience—gives me a million stories to tell. It’s my laboratory now. A beautiful, cold, honest laboratory.