Last month Lucy Beach came up with this idea for us to raise money for Headcount. She convinced me to agree to get a tattoo of Headcount Chairman of the Board Peter Shapiro and the winner of the We Bee Spelling Bee at Brooklyn Bowl. Thank goodness the winner was my amazing friend and Rocks Off General Manager Karina Rykman. Two of the best souls in the universe are now firmly ensconced in my epidermis. We raised $7,400 for this incredible voter registration cause. Still accepting donations!!! Headcount.org

This might have been the best single day of riding I’ve ever done. 9+ hours on the saddle on 90+ degree heat but the scenery was mind bending. Woke up in Monument Valley and rose that 17 mile loop. I sort of wish they had warned me about the deep sand on the “road” but then again, if they had, maybe I wouldn’t have done it. Sand and motorcycle don’t really mix. But I somehow managed to stay upright. Then I moved on to Forest Gump Point, Goosenecks State Park, and Valley of the Gods. Tons of great off road riding there, but the highlight was definitely the Moki Dugway. 3 miles of STEEP dirt switchbacks, narrow as hell, on the edge of a cliff, that climb 1,200 feet – QUICKLY. Then a 150 mile blast through the plains and into the fresh mints in air in the foothills of the Rockies in Durango. Hunter S Thompson, I’m coming for you! @ Monument Valley

Toby Morse is one of my best friends and that makes me feel like one of the luckiest people alive. It’s been almost exactly 25 years since he bounced into my life, a boundless ball of endless energy and positive vibrations.

Back then I was working at the Wetlands and would happily consign myself to the cashier cage for the Sunday punk and hardcore shows. Back then H2O was just another young band on the rise in the NYHC scene, but I always knew they were something special. Every successful band has a special frontman, and they were of course no exception. But the rest of the band are all top notch musicians and human beings as well, and they have a completely complementary energy. The whole is definitely greater than the sum of their parts. But Toby was and is the perfect pitchman for this punk rock posse.

I’d never met anyone quite like him at that time, or since, really. He seemed to be everywhere, all the time. And not only did everyone know him and love him. But he knew them, too. He knew everybody’s name, where they were from, what shows they had been at. He probably knew what they had for lunch, too, and even if it had been a hot dog he was still down with them.

Toby has been a vegan for 31 years and that says so much about him. About his commitment and dedication to compassion. About his love for all living things. If you’ve been kicking around the idea of being a vegan, and think to yourself, “It’s just too hard…” Imagine how hard it’s been for someone to have been Vegan since 1988, especially while touring all over the world. And still managing to keep his energy up onstage every night.

Toby has come up with and / or popularized so many phrases that transcend punk rock. One Life, One Chance. Don’t Forget Your Roots. Positive Mental Attitude. Napoleon Hill might have coined that last one, and HR & the Bad Brains might have brought it to punk rock, but Toby and H2O have transcended it and brought it into the public consciousness in the twenty first century. But as much as I admire his music and his message – it’s the man himself that I truly love.

Back when we met we were both just hustlers who were pretty sure we were on our way up in life. Him onstage and me on the business side. But we clicked early and then started a slow-burning bromance that’s caught on like a wildfire in his adopted home state of California.  And shows no signs of burning out OR fading away!

At first I was just the guy he would hand in his guest list to. And what a guest list it always was. And it was literally *never* handed in just once. I’d say he probably holds the record for most guest list additions in the history of the Wetlands hardcore matinee shows. And that’s saying something. But, well, if you’re not first, you’re last 😉

Then I was the guy asking him to be on a compilation album. Of punk bands covering TV theme songs. (They recorded a fantastic rendition of Bad Boys – the theme from Cops – and also sprinkled in a little humor as well as an homage to 7 Seconds). After that I went on the be the guy who booked some of their NYC shows. And now Im the guy who’s booked every headlining H2O show in NYC for the past 20 years. Through it all we’ve not only become better and better friends, but I’ve gotten to know the man behind the mic, and that’s a man who inspires me to be more alive, day in and day out, and does it by example.

I’ve never ever met anybody who so completely exemplifies the term “ride or die”. There is NOTHING he wouldn’t do for his friends. Which is why he has so many of them. And not just the famous ones you see on Instagram. (Author’s note – I’ve never met anyone who is more of a celebrity magnet. It’s amazing how famous people are drawn to him wherever he goes). But every one of his friends somehow gets his full attention on a day to day basis. Int he last 15 years there probably hasn’t been a week that’s gone by that I haven’t heard from him. Asking me how I’m doing, what’s going on, and when are we gonna hang out again? I don’t think I can say that about any of my other friends. And I think most of his friends would tell you the same thing. That’s magical quality in a friend. That’s when you know their love is real.

And the generosity. There’s no way to talk about Toby without mentioning that on several occasions in life he’s literally given me the shirt off of his back. He’s completely selfless with whatever he has. Be it time, energy, positivity, or kick-ass street wear. Anytime you see a picture of me looking fly… I’m probably wearing at least one piece of dope gear that he gifted to me. Like a G.

Even with all the touring, and the songwriting, and the merch-making, and the podcasting, and the speaking at schools about a life-long drug free lifestyle, and the globe-trotting concert schedule, he’s found the time to do the thing that I know is the MOST important thing in his life. And that’s to be an amazing family man, husband, and father. And what a father he is. Him and his marvelous matriarch Moon blessed this planet with a wonderful new creature . Maximus Henry Morse. Or as I call him, my nephew Maximum. Parenting is easy to fuck up, and almost impossible to do right. But they have done it. The patience, compassion and dedication that Toby shows to his family is also liberally applied to his friends. And his fans. He’s one of the most sensitive and caring men in the world. So much so that I can’t believe that he’s not in an emo band. Though some people might debate me on that 😉

So, even if he DOES love Coldplay, that’s more than OK with me. Because I love him for who he is. From the inside out. And I know I’ve committed a lot weirder sins than loving Coldplay. Yet he still loves and treats me like a brother. And encourages me to Live My Dash every damn day.

Toby Morse, thank you for being my friend. And an incredible human being.

I’ve been up here in Ventura all week continuing my mission to become and actual surfer. Im not sure what exact level Im art now, but it’s somewhere many many multiple rungs lower than professional. But slightly above novice. I think?  At what point can you even call yourself a surfer? Is there a hard and fast rule? Im not sure. Ive got a friend wee call Action Jackson. He calls himself AJ. He’s a surfer. Or so he says. Ac apple of decades ago, back in the 90s, he used to always sneak out of the bar early and tell us he had to beep early to go to Long Beach or to Rockaway to surf. We all thought that was bad ass, because surfing is bad ass. It’s not just anyone who can head out into the ocean and ride a wave. A fact I’m becoming intimately aware of every time I paddle out and give it a shot. But day in and day out, weeks and months and years on in, Action Jackson was always going out surfing and coming back and telling us about the crazy waves he caught. And it always fascinated me. How could he drink so late, but then get up so early? And then drive all the way out to the shore and have the energy to surf gnarly breaks and then make it back to Manhattan in time for his day job? I was always in this sort of awe about him when he would regale us with tales of his spring adventures.

Until social media became a thing. And then AJ started posting videos of himself “surfing”. Turned out he was a boogie boarder. WTF?!? I felt slightly less fucking furious than I did the day I finally found out that wrestling was fake. AJ wasn’t a SURFER. Was he? Certainly not… I mean, I used to boogie board as a kid. And by boogie board, I mean, I would body surf. Surely boogie boarding was the same thing, except with the broken off front end of a surf board to hang onto. I always wondered what the guys who were actually surfing thought of that. Of course I had to share that video around to all of our mutual friends. They were all as stunned as I was. How had we all been taken by this insane level of fuckery, we all wondered to ourselves?!!?

So I finally confronted him about it. And was upset as fuck. HE claimed that boogie boarding WAS surfing. Because surf was the term fort the wave, not the activity that you participated din on the actual wave.  I immediately called bullshit on him and said there’s no way in hell any surfer would consider him a surfer. I also conceded that, sure, what he was doing was cool as shit. And that it was admirable that he would haul his ass out to the far flung NYC beaches on a daily basis and get out there in the water and etc some waves. I never contended that what he did wasn’t cool as fuck, and pretty awesome to boot, just that he was misrepresenting himself as surfer.

Im still not sure if that’s true. Because I haven’t exactly been Chatty Cathy with all of the surfers at the breaks Ive been visiting in SoCal. I’ve got a few fervent supporters who have been supportive of me in my mission to become a n actual surfer. I just down want to come off as a jabroni.

I think what really matters is that you just get int hw after and paddle out, day after day, and keep on trying to catch waves. There’s no set parameters for what makes surfer. Except for the one major tenet of “Don’t Be An Asshole” But I think even that one is malleable. Real cool dudes wouldn’t try and steal a wave from a newbie who clearly paddled into it first, would they? Well, that’s the thing. They WOULD. If the newbie wasn’t acting respectfully enough. Thinking about it in these terms, it almost makes me feel as though Im trying to join a motorcycle club, where there’s a hierarchy. Which is sort of true. But there’s a pretty much unending amount of pavement out there. And only so ,any good waves. More than hierarchy, it seems to become a show of respect.

I’ve heard lots of stories about fistfights on the shores of Southern California beaches at the popular surf spots. Because newbies come in and act like jerk offs and mess up the order of things. And that’s pretty unacceptable. If Id been hitting the same break every day for months or years, Id be pretty bummed out if some newbie came and tried to take my wave.

Which I guess makes me proud that I’ve thus far been accepted into the community. I know my place. And I proudly accept it. That said, I still haven’t even stood up, really. Ive finally started actually catching waves. Being able to identify them on the horizon, and position myself properly, and paddle into them, and catch the waves… I just haven’t managed to stand up on the board for any actual discernible amount of time. And by discernible I mean, one full second. Like an actual One-Mississippi. But I keep on trying. I didn’t even know it was possible for a human to measure time in increments of split seconds. But since I’ve been trying to surf, Ive been doing it. I’ve been put there in the cold water in my wetsuit on my surfboard and Ive been catching waves. And I’ve been pushing my body up so the only part of it that’s touching the board is my feet. And I keep getting just a liiiiiittttle bit more time on my feet before I fall right off, and once again become one with the ocean. But I keep paddling. Back out, and getting back up.

Because I take great pride in the fact that, while I might not be an actual surfer, yet… I’m not a fucking boogie boarder.

I’ve always sort of been mesmerized by surfing, and surfers. But I never thought I’d become one. For starters, I never lived close to the ocean. And until recently I had never been particularly drawn TO the ocean. Growing up my family took exactly one vacation a year and it was always to Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. Sure, I enjoyed frolicking around in the surf. I especially loved getting tossed around by huge waves. Body surfing, people called it. But I just thought of it as seeing how big of waves I could withstand getting crushed by and still come up breathing. As it turned out, I could handle some pretty monster waves. I woiuld get tossed and tubmled around by the ferocious power of the cresting walls of whitewater until I feared I had already drawn my last breath, and then would be let up above the water line just before my brain shut off due to lack of oxygen. Not that there was ever anyone to bare witness to my pre-pubescent feats of courage and resolve. Because this was back in the days when parents would allow their kids to wander off past the ocean’s edge while they were perfectly content to be shopping for salt water taffy hundreds of yards away. The waves themselves were pretty dangerous, but really, weren’t the half of it. The real danger were the land-sharks that were always lurking about, yearning to catch glimpses of young boys losing not the life and death struggle with the waves, but just their swim trunks. If only for a few precious fleeting seconds. Total creepazoids.

Thankfully I never got abducted by any of those lecherous low lifes. Probably because I had developed a highly tuned pedo-meter from a young age. I’ve got my Mom to thank for that. For as long as I can remember, whenever we were out in public and I needed to visit that Hawaiian god – King Takealiki – she would drag me into the women’s room. I had long curly hair back then (not much has changed, except then it was naturally blonde, go figure!) so she would loudly call me “Joanne” for some reason, as if it was some sort of sin to bring your son into a women’s toilet. Whenever I protested, she would tell me that I couldn’t go into a men’s room by myself because there was a very high likelihood that there would be a strange man in there who would try and cut my penis off. What kind of a fucked up thing is that to tell a child? You know whats even weirder? A quick google search shows that if someone is gonna be cutting off Little Jimmy’s Willy, the overwhelming odds are that the offender is likely to be, wait for it, the mother!!! It’s horrifying to think now that my mother was a precursor of those people who don’t want transgender women using female restrooms. OR, as they should be more widely known, pieces of shit. I always thought that I grew up in a progressive household. My dad was a staunch democrat, borderline socialist, really, and my older sister was an avowed feminist. And we grew up being told that racism was flat out wrong. At least by my immediate family. Plenty of the extended family loved to espouse on the evils of Puerto Ricans and, for some strange reason, Laotians.

I wonder how many Loatians even surf? It’s a completely landlocked country. Just about a quarter of the counties on earth are landlocked. 49 our of 195 to be exact. Weird fact right? Only two of them happen to be in South America. The rest are in Asia and Europe and Africa. Laos is one of them. But I’m betting there’s at least a couple of surf shops there. That’s the thing about surfing. The whole world is starting to catch the wave. Probably has something to do with how mobile everyone is nowadays. Modern transport has shrunken the world. Seemingly everyone can go wherever they want at any time. Sure that’s an exaggeration, but surfing isn’t just for the coastal elite nowadays.

But back to my Summer vacations. I never considered being a surfer because I never even really learned how to swim. Sure, you could throw me into a pool, even into the deep end! And I would inevitably doggie paddle my way to safety. But you certainly weren’t gonna get me out into the deep waters of an ocean or even a lake. Mostly I preferred frolicking in the surf and building sand castles and playing frisbee, and, eventually, chasing babes around. Or at least staring at beautiful bouncy boobies in bathing suits or bikinis. I guess that’s another thing I learned from Momma.

It wasn’t until 2016 actually that I learned to swim. I signed up for a triathlon with about 6 weeks notice and the first thing I did was go and take swimming lessons. You know that old adage about how “You don’t know what you don’t know”? That was so true for me. I had no idea how bad of a swimmer I was until I went for those lessons. And then I worked very hard at becoming a better swimmer. And now I can honestly say that not only am I a pretty decent swimmer, but that I enjoy swimming as both a form of exercise AND recreation.

And nowadays I also enjoy the beach, because of the sunshine. That’s something that living in London taught me. Before I lived in Old Blighty I did almost everything I could to avoid direct sunlight. I *always* opted for shade. Except for when I golfed. But after I moved to thje Big Smoke I took any opportunity J could to just bake in the sun. I guess that’s what living in the gray-est country on earth will do to you.

And now I’m a beach rat. An unapologetic beach rat. I take every opportunity I can to pay out in the sun. Which means I find myself at beaches or pools or summertime rooftops in the city with shocking regularity. And this year I decided to skip out on the cold entirely and to Winter In  Los Angels. And take up surfing. And guess what? It’s so much fucking harder than it looks. But I’m getting there. One day, and one paddle at a time. And you wanna know the irony? The water here in the winter is fucking FREEZING.

But I won’t back down.

I watched a bunch of the royal Rumble last night. Well at least I watched the women’s Rumble, the Daniel Bryan vs AJ Styles match, Brock Lesnar vs Finn Balor and then the men’s Rumble.  I think he entire show, including the pre-show, was over 5 hours long. Why would they do that? By the time the main event was over the crowd was totally spent and listless. Most of these people have to work in the morning. And WWE didn’t even give them a spectacular finale for the night. I don’t wanna sound like a broken record, but why in the hell does the WWE keep mucking things up, seemingly on purpose. Sometimes being a wrestling fan is so tedious. You can’t even blame the unpredictability of “sport” because these events are scripted.

Anyways the best match that I saw was the WOMEN’S RUMBLE, and here’s my take on it!

Damn. This was only the 2nd women’s Royal Rumble and already its about 43.7 times better than the men’s rumble. I wonder if this is because Vince isn’t concerned with the booking of the women’s rumbles so he stays out of it and lets them actually make sense. Like what happens with NXT. But that can’t totally be the case, because there were some weird parts. Like why did Lacey Eans come out and just start whining about being a southern belle who as super important or whatever? That didn;didn’t make any sense, and just made me wonder if it tuning in for the women’s Rumble was a mistake. Thankfully, it wasn’t.Why why did they pre-announce who the 30th entrant to each Rumble was gonna be? That didn’t make any sense. One of the main points of the Rumble is never knowing who will be coming out when, and each entrant being a surprise.

But once they got into the gist of the match, the in ring action was fantastic. I didn’t recognize about two thirds of the women, but Im a fan of lotus of them now. Especially Kacy Katanzaro. Apparently she won the American ninja Warrior competition, that thing the Rock just ripped off for his new show. And now she’s like the Kofi Kingston of the women’s division. She did these crazy moves where she walked on her hands and then climbed the ring post like a monkey climbing a coconut tree to keep from getting. Eliminated and now I wanna see every match she ever wrestles in. There was another woman named Kairi Sane, and she was dressed as a pirate from the 15th century. I don’t remember anything she actually did int he ring, but she sprinted TO the ring int hat crazy pirate put it while looking though one of those single sense binocular spyglass contraptions. Im not sure how she even made it considering that entrance ramp was CURVED, due to the even t being in a baseball stadium, I guess, but she didn’t wipe out, which made me all that much more impressed.

The ending was cool too. Lana came out but had her ankle all taped because apparently her Romanian on again off again boyfriend beats her, or knocks her off the ring apron, or whatever who cares but her ankle was tapped and she was walking super slowly to the ring. So then Nia Jax came out and kicked her in the ankle a few times making her fall down and walk even more slowly. So then after a while Becky Lynch, who his like the hottest thing in the WWE right now, and wasn’t booked on the Rumble, came out and took her spot.  Which was weird, because she just argued with former wrestler / current road agent Fit Finlay and he kept telling her that she wasn’t a;;owed to do that. But then the crowd got all excited so her just said “OK and motioned towards the ring” That was super weird. Because he’s not in charge. The WWE makes a super big deal about who the GM of each show is, so you would think that they would have to be the one to OK a surprise entrant into the match, but, naw. It’s just a. Free for all. Why have a GM if there are NO RULES?!?! Continuity is too much to ask for in pro-wrestling, right?  It wasn’t back ion the days of the attitude era. The last time wrestling was a part of the national pop culture conversation . But then they went off track and started trying to be kid-friendly so Linda McMahon could run for office and they could sell more ads to fruit roll up companies or some shit abs since then everything’s been weird and fucked. But Is till pay attention, because if you’re like me, loving wrestling isn’t a choice it s a COMPUSLION.  But thankfully I get my fill of live events in crappy bingo halls and seedy nightclubs, but I still read about wrestling on the internet every single day, and I tune in for big events, almost always to be let down. But I keep going back. Like an abused spouse with no self esteem. But whatever, NO REGERTS.

So Becky ends up getting into the match and then her and Nia Jax and Charlotte Flair are the last three remaining contestants. But after they both combined to eliminate Nia, Nia fucked up Becky’s leg, because Nia is a monster and a sore loser that just wants to hurt people,people, and of course how could Becky beat the amazing and awesome Charlotte Flair with a bum knee, but then of course she did and she ended up winning and now Becky is going to get to face Ronda Rousey at Wrestlemania and everyone is saying that they are gonna let the women’s championship match be the main event, but I don’t believe that for a second because Vince is a total misogynist and chauvinist and I cannot believe he hasn’t been ME TOO’d yet, but maybe he’s about to be and he knows it so he’s gonna let women main event Wrestlemania so he can use that as part of his defense when the whip comes down.

Or maybe, just maybe, he know that women are usually better than men at doing everything except being total dipshits.

Tonight Im gonna watch the other two big women’s matches from the show. Becky Lynch vs Asuka, and Ronda Rousey vs Sasha Banks, which everybody is saying were by far the best thew matches on the card. Viva Los Ladies!