London. Ah, what to say about London? I was going to do a day to day type of blog, but when you’re drinking 12-15 pints a day.. they all kind of blend together.. so i’m going to go with a list format. If only half of these make sense to you, that’s about right. Ryan, John and I made the best of not the best trip we could have taken. Here’s what I remember
• A hazy first day walk across the Thames.
• Giggling at every mention of “Cockfosters” or “St. John’s Wood”
• The worst fish & chips ever.
• 7 AM McDonalds Breakfast
• Lots of Museums
• Television (Tele) + Trashcan (Bin) = the Telebin
• Sad drunk after only night 2.
• Awkward night without a private room
• That’s what happens when people stop being polite and start to get frank. Frank World.
• Nowhere to watch the Arsenal game
• Q: When do places open around here? A: Breakfast Time
• Camden Town with Ryan where we saw bootleg photos of Banksy pieces printed on canvas with “no photos please” sign.
• POACHED!
• Gene = John’s new nickname
• “Here’s the Rosetta Stone. Here it is. Oh no, here’s the Rosetta Stone… Here it is”
• Touristy Abbey Road photos.
• Snowcones
• Female conversion rate for Europe +2 points
• Amstel. Not Amstel Light. Amstel
• Getting lost then finding the pub we were looking for.
• I snapped and beat up John for trying to ruin my vacation photo
• Great Hold Steady show at KoKo with Dexter.
• Ryan kissed the British girl i thought was cute so I went to the dark side.
• “That’s why you make out with chicks and I call my Grandma, drunk” - Ben Goetting
• The Tube runs every 2 min, which is awesome
• Vacation ads everywhere because nobody wants to be in London.
• Our second hostel was self proclaimed “England’s premier party hostel!” and the interior decorating looked like a low budget 90’s sci-fi shows vision of the future where nobody lives past 30. Lots of purple and sheet metal.
• Babe-rhood
• New terms for drunk - “Lashed” Sad - “Gutted” and puking - “Chundering”
• “It got messy” “I had a bit of a nap” - Dexter
• Realizing you spent 100 dollars on drinks.
• Making London kids jealous I’ve seen Jawbreaker
• Ryan and I freaking those same kids out by moshing to Andrew WK song.
• Gene gets action in Parliament = Gene Parliament
• Ryan taking a massive dump in the Floor 2 showers in revenge for an asshole hostel worker. (we were on floor 5)
• Slovenian girls surprising me by singing “Happy Birthday” Karaoke style on my birthday was absolutely amazing.
• Kissing a very cute Slovenian girl in the basement of the hostel was also amazing
• Terrible Indian food, Chinese food, burgers, etc. etc etc.
• Great burger from Haché, great breakfast from a gay restaurant that we didn’t realize was gay at first but weren’t about to leave.
• Realizing Europeans have the worst music taste, it’s all bad dance music and hits you haven’t heard in years. The whole bar freaked out for “Cotton Eye Joe” and that Chumbawumba song
• “I’m doing this for YOU. BEN. FOR YOU!”
• Ryan yelling at Brits at 4AM “Please to being quiet now” which angered them and escalated into “Suck Cromwell’s dick” which lead to threats and “Arsenal’s fags” pushing them over the edge. Hysterical laughter turned to fear pretty quick.
• Seeing how much we could pile on Gene’s face to stop him from snoring = more hysterical laughter. Thinking we might have smothered him = more fear.
• Cinemas = bagged popcorn, warm soda, and screens the size of a home entertainment center. for $30 dollars.
• Couldn’t play poker because of the dress code “No white sport trainers”
• “The One Burger” is not just a clever name
• RYMAN! The Stationer!
• Fun rooftop antics = amazing. Dropping new Arsenal scarf in someone’s puke = not amazing.
• Sick and totally over London on Ryan’s birthday.
• “I blew all over this mattress. Stick it up your Bumwaz!” written in sharpie on my mattress.
• Finding out my grandpa was in brain surgery =(
• A long long trip home.

That about sums it up.

And links to our photos:
Ryan’s Photo Set
My Photo Set

Final cover for The Night Marchers

If i said “Cometbus” and you didn’t know what I was talking about immediately, you probably wouldn’t fully understand the amazing night I had last night. I’m sitting there waiting in line for the bathroom at a somewhat secret, unannounced until yesterday Pinhead Gunpowder show in Long Beach, mere blocks away from the former site of the PCH club. In a venue about the size the PCH was. So, I’m standing in line for the bathroom talking to a girl and there’s a lightbulb in the wall and i put my hand near it and it starts flickering, she tries and nothing happens, I go again and it flickers. We laugh and I turn to Aaron Cometbus who is waiting behind me in line and I say “you gotta try.” He dismisses the invitation and says “I don’t want to ruin the magic.”

I’m pretty sure the only way he could have ruined the magic for me tonight was by announcing that he was not going to play drums and Pinhead Gunpowder wasn’t going to play a show I was right up front for in a room with no more than 200 people. But they played, and hearing Mahogany, Life During Wartime, Losers Of The Year, Train Station and so many others played live with Billie Joe Armstrong a mere 6 or 7 feet away could only be described as magical. I danced, I sang along until my voice was horse, I bruised a rib, and I had the best night at a show in … I can’t even remember since when. Tonight crushed my belief that I could no longer have fun at a show. It brought back every feeling of being 15 and seeing Supernova, or the Toy Dolls, or Jawbreaker. A good punk rock show makes you feel like you can do anything. All the bands were great, the people were awesome. I chatted with all kinds of random people, I hung out, I felt a good vibe. It was the complete opposite of almost everything I feel at your average show, or even night out in Hollywood. I think I’m going to go to the Troubadour show they are playing tomorrow but there’s no way it could live up to being eye level with Billie Joe Armstrong as he sang some of my favorite songs of my youth, right up front, screaming my heart out. At the end of the night I got home and washed of the smell of sweat, smoke, and beer; but there was no way you could wipe this smile of my face not even with a bat.

A lot of my favorite things are negative. I like books about outsiders and weirdos, comics about guys who never find love, standup comedians like Bill Hicks, and songs about broken hearts. I’ve been told I hate everything. I’ve been called a grouch, an old man, negative, pessimistic, mean, and everything in between for various things I’ve blogged, written, or talked about. I guess my problem is I enjoy talking about what I don’t like more than I enjoy talking about what I do. Wait. while i’m on the subject… You know what I hate? . . .

Halloween. I hate Halloween. Mostly I hate dressing up. Halloween is like a giant theme party with no theme and a lot of dumb assholes. The only thing more stupid than dressing up in a costume as an adult is dressing up in a stupid unimaginative costume. Also, fuck you for having parties on the few days leading up to Halloween and having mandatory costumes, your party sucks. Halloween falls on a Wednesday this year so I have to deal with 5 full days of assholes in costumes, kill me now. I’m 27 years old, no I’m not “going as” anything. I was so relieved when I was finally too old to Trick-or-Treat because it meant I could stop having to dress up to get free candy, and now you want me to dress up to pay for alcohol? Fuck you. The only thing that sucks about hating Halloween is how much I love candy, skulls, bats, vampires, monsters, zombies and all the cool decorations that go along with Halloween. I think Halloween for kids is AWESOME. If there’s anything I can say I’m looking forward to having a kid for, it’s carving pumpkins and coaching baseball. If you are an adult you get a pass - you’re totally allowed to dress up if you are escorting a young kid trick-or-treating. Any kid who dresses up on Halloween is going to be way more stoked if his dad is dressed up too. Another thing you ask? What else still annoys me? Well since you asked… Teenagers who trick-or-treat. Have you turned 13? Oh you have? Well then you are too old to ask me for free candy. Lets face it you’ve really only been trick or treating the last 3 years so you can cover peoples shit in shaving cream and toilet paper anyway. Give it up. from 13 on to when you graduate college you are allowed to party on Halloween night, dress up if you want. But no more Trick or Treating. After you graduate college, you are an adult. Knock it off. So there you have it - my extremely unpopular opinion on Halloween. I hope you didn’t enjoy it at all and possibly even think less of me.

I was raised without religion. I was never told not to believe in God or anything like that. Nobody ever came out and said “God isn’t real.” It was just sorta like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, they let me figure things out on my own. When I was bad my mom wouldn’t say anything about God and “Honor thy mother and father,” she would just tell me she was calling 1-800-GYPSIES to come and take me away. I was a smart kid though so I called that number to find out if it was real or not. Come to think of it - maybe I was trying to get the Gypsies to come and take my little sister away, because you know without God in my life I was pretty evil ::wink::. My mom was raised basically the same way, although they went to church occasionally, I think it was more in a fitting in to the community sort of way. I don’t think we could have ever been considered a religious family.

I was born in Healdsburg, CA in Sonoma County, Wine Country, but when i was a little one we moved to Salt Lake City, UT. We were practically the only people on the block with only 2 kids. Our next door neighbors, The Lefflers ,had something like 5 children. There were kids all over the place! Mom told me that it was because they were “Mormons” but I had no idea what that meant when I was 4 years old so I just enjoyed having tons of kids to play with. My parents were divorced and my mom split with my sister and I to Newport Beach, CA before I was old enough to be influenced at all by the Mormon kids. Now out of the hotbed city of Mormonism, we had moved right into quite a little churchgoing community. At this point I still hadn’t made up my mind about God. I was aware some of my friends believed in Him, but all I really knew was I had never seen any sort of proof. I remember one day in San Remo park sitting in a tree praying for various things as a test. I asked God for some really simple things that SURELY he could do if he wanted to prove to me that he was real. If I prayed to God that I would find a dollar on the way home to buy some candy from the Lido Island clubhouse snack bar, then that would prove he was real. If God answered my prayer for a rainy day the next day, I would believe. But God never answered my simple prayers, so I was starting to get suspicious. This guy created the heavens and earth BEFORE he even created light, yet he couldn’t make it so i could buy some Boston Baked Beans? Right.

Around 3rd or 4th grade I did a report on the Galapagos Islands and in turn stumbled up Darwin and his theory of evolution. And thank God (get it?) I went to a school that didn’t try to squash the idea of teaching children evolution. To this day I’m still obsessed with the beauty of those islands, and whenever the “where would you go if you could go anywhere in the world right now?” question comes up on those stupid ass Myspace surveys I can’t stop myself from doing, the first answer is always the Galapagos. My doubt firmly in place, this was the point where I could officially be considered Agnostic. I had one legit Christian friend in elementary school, Mark Manderson. One weekend i was staying over at this house, he had just gotten a trampoline and we spent all day jumping on it. I pulled a muscle in my side and was in a ridiculous amount of pain. As we were going to bed that night his dad came in and they prayed together that God would help me feel better and that we’d have a good nights rest. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I didn’t believe in God but I was really weirded out. God couldn’t even make it rain, how was he going to fix my side? The next day, or maybe it was another weekend I stayed over, he and his dad took me to church. I sat in on Mark’s Sunday school class while his dad went to the sermon. The teacher was a substitute or just didn’t care that he never had seen me before because when he was handing out chalk to have kids write the Commandments on the board he gave me a piece and set me to it. I stood there with a blank look on my face and he tried to coach me, “Thou…..” I wrote it down and looked back at him. “Shalt…..” I looked up and said “Yeah, I’ve never been to Church before.” He sat me down and called up another kid in my place. The whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth. It was soon after that I was confident that, until proven otherwise, there was no God.

Now I had always believed in respecting people’s religion, whatever people chose to believe was their business, then came punk rock. I’ve talked about how punk rock changed my life in terms of self confidence and open mindedness, but it also made me less passive in my atheism. It showed me that I didn’t have to politely listen to someone tell me about Jesus loving me if I didn’t want to. At the same time it made me not keep my mouth shut around people who were openly racist or homophobic, but that’s getting off track. Basically if someone came up to you and said “Hey I’m Superman!” or “There are magic faeries all around us controlling what we do”! you would call him insane or cross the street to get away from him. Why shouldn’t I be able to tell someone he’s crazy when he’s asking me if I’ve let a man who died 2000 years ago into my heart? I didn’t really like Crass but I really liked my “Jesus died for his own sins, not mine.” patch. Punk rock first showed me the actual EVILS religion can bring out. How often shitty agendas were hidden behind the guise of morality. My best friend Nick and our punk friends took it upon ourselves to start many religious arguments, and even though we were young and naive, we usually won. The most common response from the believers? “Just have faith.”

I’m an Atheist, I don’t consider that a belief in any other sense of the word that I believe things that are true. Outside of concrete proof (which in spite of how many people argue the opposite, does not exist) that there is a supernatural being, outside of God himself smacking me in the head and saying “hey… i’m right here.” I’m always going to be an Atheist. I don’t see how anyone with half a brain can approach religion in any other way. I don’t see how anyone can look at all the scientific evidence that completely contradicts the Bible and still believe. I can see maybe believing that there is some sort of higher being to make yourself feel comfortable, but that’s not for me. Like Richard Dawkins says “… modern theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

right on brother.

Two rejected print ideas (too many colors) for a Love themed print exchange I participated in a few years ago that I eventually used as headers on old LJ blog posts.

For those of you who knew me in high school, you knew I was the one kid at Newport Harbor High that did a zine. Starting in 1995 (perhaps late 1994) with “This Zine Sucks” and continuing in 1996-1997 with three issues of “Phazer Blast,” my zine making career was short lived. in 1996 I got AOL and in 1997 I figured out how to go to web pages and so my interest in making a print zine was overrun by new found fascination with the internet that continues to this day.

Well a few years ago I archived my zines for the web, but with re-design after re-design they eventually made their way off of the page. After going through all the old Thrasher issues in my last post I decided I should re-upload MY ZINES. Because, I think we all can agree that are of equal historical importantce. (ha!)

It’s pretty funny looking back at all this stuff again in all it’s lo-rez jpg compression glory. Sorry if it’s hard to read, but if you don’t read it that’s less embarassment for me. So enjoy Ben’s Zines 1995-1997