Empig, Heevin' Steven, The White Bear, and other nicknames I've had...

I'm glad this 1986 news clip featuring Maurice Meyer is one of the videos still around 35 years later.  Maurice, aka, Drob, is one of the coolest people from the 80's BMX freestyle world.  He's the NorCal pro I actually talked to the most in my time up there, along with Robert Peterson.  This video was shot at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, in the summer of 1986, and it's the only video of me riding in the 80's.  To be clear, I was never a Curb Dog or part of the Ground Control team, but I hung out and rode with these guys on the weekends in 1985-1986.  Along with Maurice, you can see Chris and Karl Rothe, Mark McKee, Tim Traecy (doing a backyard a year before the trick got popular), and Darcy Langlois.  I'm the dork chasing my bike at 5:07, a trick I did in parades while living in Idaho.  As far as I know, I was nicknameless for that year.  It's about the only time I didn't have some nickname going.

When you're a dorky kid, you usually get tagged with a nickname, and not a very good one.  I was a chubby, unathletic kid growing up, moving from town to town around rural Ohio.  I changed schools nearly every year, and I never told the new kids the nicknames I got tagged with at the previous school.  But my last name is an unusual, short, German background name, Emig.  Teachers almost always mispronounced it EE-mig, with a long E sound.  Then I'd correct the teacher (never a great way to start in a new school), and say "No, it's Em-ig, like the letter "M," then "ig."  And the teacher would still call me EEE-mig, for the first couple of weeks.  

I was kind of fat, so at school after school, I got tagged with Empig, by the other kids.  I'm not sure why, but in Ohio in the 1970's, we rarely called each other by our first names, we called each other by our last names, and those often got turned into nicknames.  Empig was a pretty easy one to figure out, and school after school, that became my nickname, after the first few days.  At Willard Junior High, in Willard, Ohio (Go Flashes!), Emicrud was another variation someone came up with.  

I played football poorly in 8th grade at Willard.  I was always really short for my age, but chubby.  Since I wasn't really into team sports, but I wanted to not suck at one, I signed up for football.  I played right guard, though after practice I probably smelled more like a left sock.  One day while practicing blocking, the coaches split up the little guys and the big guys.  I was short like the little scrawny guys, so I practiced against them at first.  They were small and wiry, and bounced off me.  For some reason, one of the coaches, said something like, "Hey, Steve's kind of stocky, let's try him against the big guys."  So I got in the line to practice blocking the bigger, athletic guys, the ones who scared the shit out of me every day in the hallways. 

Being short, there was no way I could stop them with standard blocking techniques (forearms and elbows, no grabbing in those days).  So when I lined up against one of our team's good running backs, I reverted to my backyard football style.  When the whistle blew, I dove sideways at his knees and he fell over me onto the ground.  This amused the coaches, who had me pegged as the unathletic pussy that I really was.  But I knew it was easy to knock big guys down by just taking them out at the knees.  So I did it over and over that day.  By the end of the practice, the coaches were calling me The Mighty Midget.  That was the first cool nickname I ever had.  

In our next game, with my newfound nickname and unorthodox blocking style, I got more time playing.  I kept taking out a big linebacker, just long enough so our backs could get out of the pocket.  The coaches and guys loved it, and were rooting for me on the sidelines.  So the other team double teamed me.  Then I took both defenders out, put them on the ground the same way.  Although I was deathly afraid of physical pain as a kid, with all the football pads, it didn't really hurt to dive into guys knees, and have them fall over me onto the ground.  Eventually the other coach triple teamed me, and I took all three guys out with my sideways dive.  I got pulled out after that, and patted on the back on the sidelines, with guys yelling, "The Mighty Midget!"  For a kid who sucked at all sports, that moment was pretty cool.  

Then all the other small kids learned to dive and block big guys, and by the end of the season, everyone small got called the Mighty Midget at some point.  I gave up on football, and went back to just being Empig or Emicrud.

In Boise I got into BMX, jumping, then racing, then freestyle, which was just turning into its own sport in 1983-84.  To my high school friends, I was usually just Emig, no nickname.  My family moved to San Jose, California, in 1985, the year after I graduated high school.  I went from having a couple of good freestylers to ride with in Boise, to having about a dozen really good riders, they guys in the video above, plus the rest of the NorCal crew, from September 1985 through July 1986.  I improved a lot, and I made a zine about the NorCal freestyle scene.  As I'm written many times before, that zine, San Jose Stylin', landed me a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, beginning August 1986.  I moved into my new co-workers apartment, with Craig "Gork" Barrette, and Mark "Lew" Lewman.  Though we were all dorks by normal standards, I was the dorkiest dork of the bunch.  FREESTYLIN' editor Andy Jenkins started giving me little nicknames in the magazine by lines, like "written by E. Mig or M.Ig.  

Then one night, we had a party at our apartment.  In typical dork fashion, I drank too much beer, too early, in order to gain beer muscles and hopefully (finally) get laid.  I was still a virgin at 20, much to my dismay.  Instead, I got sick.  I jumped up off the couch, and ran to the bathroom door, trying not to puke.  The door was locked, someone was in there.  In desperation, I ran into my bedroom, slid open the window (there was no screen), and puked out my window, down the stucco wall.  Our neighbor's kitchen window was straight across from that wall, about five feet away, but lower, since beach apartment buildings take up as much land as possible, and are really close together in California.  So when they looked out their kitchen window the next morning, they saw an 8 foot long puke stain on the wall below my bedroom window.  

As I lay hungover in bed, they told Gork and Lew, "hey, looks like your roommate drank a bit too much last night."  I had to wash off the wall after my head cleared, and Gork promptly tagged me with the nickname Heevin' Steven.  It turned out there was a Garbage Pail kid card with that name, which someone found soon after, which was funny.  But Heevin' Steven has way too many syllables for daily use, so Gork just started calling me Heave.  I'm pretty sure there's a by line "by Heave Emig" somewhere in one or two of those BMX Action issues (November 1986- April 1987).  

I got laid off at the magazines, mostly because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy, and I was a dork in general.  I went to work writing and shooting photos for the AFA newsletter, and doing a bit of everything working for Bob Morales. Bob later hired a young woman to be our receptionist, and she and I hit it off.  She was 25, and she broke me in, got me past the 21-year-old virgin plague, and we dated for several months.  She was also a singer in a local rock band, and I started trying to write some hit song lyrics for her.  In December of 1987, I got a job at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboard video company, and she followed, becoming the receptionist there for a while.  She was a few years older than me, and liked to party way more than me, so I was doomed.  When she eventually slept with one of my good friends, and then later dumped me, I was crushed.  I wrote a poem that night called "Journey of The White Bear."  

Three different girlfriends had said I kind of reminded them of a bear, I had a bear-like nose or something.  So in the poem, I used the metaphor The White Bear for me, and she was The Black Leopard.  She wasn't black, it was never a racial thing.  I thought of being naive as like new fallen snow, pure and white, and then once you mix it up, and get involved with people, you dig into the dark side of life (partying, sex, drugs, whatever).  You lose that naivety, you're never "pure white" and ignorant again, you've been "stained" with the heartache and dark side of relationships, and we're all some mix of black and white from then on.  That was the idea in the poem.  "Nothing's right or wrong, in our world today, nothing's black or white, it's all shades of gray," was the refrain.  I've lost all copies of that poem, and almost all of the other 400 or 500 poems I've written.  Anyhow, it turned into a pretty good poem.  But only dork's wrote poetry, in my mind, so I wrote that poem in 1988, and it sat in notebooks in my closet, with about 200 other poems, for about 4 years.  

While at Unreel Productions, my main job was making dubs, making copies of one video or another, on all kinds of formats, for everyone in the Vision empire that needed a video for something.  One day, someone visiting asked what my job was, and I said, "I'm the Dub Guy."  That became my unofficial title around Unreel, from 1988 through 1990. 

During that time, Vision closed down Unreel Productions, and I moved into the main Vision office, and didn't have much to do.  I eventually quit, and blew a bunch of money, and ran up my credit cards self-producing my own freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990.  I worked a while for a surf video distributor, then got on the crew of the Supercross and Monster truck TV shows in early 1991.  I got that job because Laura, a woman I worked with at Unreel, got on the crew there, in the production office.  They needed someone to log footage for a day, and she knew I was a good worker, so she called me.  I drove up to a building on Cahuenga, right across the freeway from Universal Studios, and spent ten hours watching interviews and footage of monster truck and mud racer drivers, and taking notes.  We called that "logging footage" back in those days.  I'd write down which of the three mini-interview takes was the best, and any funny lines they might say.  They asked me to come back the next day, and the next.  After about a month, I was officially a "production assistant." mostly working in the office, 5 days a week.  But I did work on four supercross events in Anaheim, San Diego, and Las Vegas, that year. 

On the first one, I ran errands around Anaheim stadium all day, for several hours before the actual supercross event in the evening.  When it came time for the actual race, John, the producer told me I'd be working with the cameramen, "pulling cable."  Yes, that sounds dirty, but it really means just coiling up the long cable behind the camerman, as he moved around the side of the track.  Think Supercorss races are fun to watch live?  You should see one from the edge of the whoops, five feet from the riders, it's epic.  Anyhow, John said, "The camera crew is eating dinner, right now, so go eat, and then work with them during the race."  I headed to the meal room, where they were having lasagna.  I'd been working my ass off all day, and I was starving, so gorged myself two big plates of lasagna, salad, and garlic bread. 

Then I met the cameraman I was working with, and he showed me what I needed to do.  I was out on the field, and as he moved around, I coiled and uncoiled the cable, to keep other people from tripping over it, or whatever.  Unfortunately, I ate too much lasagna, it was a physical job, and I really needed to go take a dump.  But there was no time, so I had a seriously upset stomach, and a seriously bad look on my face all night.  John walked by me at one point, and asked why I was mad.  I didn't tell him the truth, since I had only worked there a couple of weeks.  After seeing me with a mean look on my face, he joked and called me "Smilin' Steve."  When the race was over 3 1/2 hours later, I told the cameraman, and he told me to run and hit the restroom.  

After a much needed dump, I felt 100 times better, and helped pick up all the cables and camera equipment.  The cameraman joked, after I told him how much lasagna I ate.  He said, "Yeah, if I wasn't running around with a camera all night, I would have had a second helping, too.  But when you work on our crew, you need to eat light."  Lesson learned.  I became, "Smilin' Steve" at the office from then on.  John actually felt bad,when I told him I was sick that whole first race, and that's why I looked so mean.  He was actually one of the coolest bosses I ever worked for.

 One of my other jobs at the monster truck/supercross production office became labeling every video tape that came in, and organizing them in our "tape library," a big closet.  I was in charge of keeping track of every single tape, as they went out to edit or get copies made.  Laura knew I did this to the 3,000 poorly labels tapes at Unreel, and totally organized the place, so I got the job.  My overly uptight attitude worked well for keeping track of the various tapes coming in and out.  For those who don't know, video tapes, VHS, betamax, 3/4", betacam, whatever, are big cassettes with reals of plastic "tape," and that tape is coated in iron oxide, which is a basically a cool form of rust.  That's what the electric signals on video tape are recorded on, in the oxide on the tape.  

One day, Craig, a very loud, borderline arrogant, and funny producer, came to me to get tapes for his next edit session.  He walked into the office I was in and said, "Oh Gatekeeper of All That Is Oxide, I need a tape."  For a couple of weeks, I was nicknamed "The Gatekeeper," because I was the gatekeeper to get tapes, and kept good track of them, so they didn't get lost.  When your office produces two TV shows a week, losing footage can be a real bad thing. 

I wound up living in a flop house in North Hollywood, in late 1991, working second shift at a video duplicator, and going street riding alone every day, around the San Fernando Valley.  At that time, about 50 miles away, back in Huntington Beach, BMX racer/jumper/entrepreneur, Chris Moeller bought out his original partner, Greg Scott (The "S" in S&M Bikes, Scott & Moeller), and was running the tiny bike company from his garage.  Chris decided it was time to make an official video for S&M Bikes.  The year before I had self-produced a bike video called The Ultimate Weekend, and Chris, and a few of the S&M riders and P.O.W. House guys were in it.  He found my phone number somewhere, and called me up in North Hollywood.  Chris had this crazy idea for the first S&M Bikes video, and it sounded fun.  He started coming up and hauling me down to H.B. on the weekends, to hang out at his apartment, and shoot video footage, since I didn't have a car.  The result was the video, Feel My Leg Muscles... I'm a Racer.  I shot the footage on my RCA S-VHS camera, and Chris bought a prosumer S-VHS VCR to edit it.  Not counting the VCR, the total budget to make Leg Muscles was about $250, mostly beer money.  

As things worked out, I got fired from my job as a result of making Leg Muscles, which is a long story of its own.  That story became a BMX industry urban legend for years, getting crazier with each retelling.   I'll save that for another day.  Anyhow, I wound up sleeping on the floor of Chris' tiny, "Winnebago" apartment in Huntington Beach.  He called it the Winnebago because the whole apartment was 8 feet wide, with almost no windows.  So it felt like we were living in a motorhome.  A guy named Shaggy had the small couch in the living room, I slept on the floor, Chris had the one bedroom, and S&M Bikes was run out of the garage.  It was a weird scene, with lots of punk rock on cassette, ramen noodles, slices of pizza at Papa Joe's, cheap beer, and riding in the afternoons and nights.  

One morning in 1992, Chris walked out of his room, talking about this cool book he just got of Henry Rollins' poetry.  One poem in particular, was about Rollins doing what single guys do when alone, while looking in the bathroom mirror.  I'd never polished the old rocket while standing at the bathroom sink, looking in the mirror, but Rollins said in the poem, "I look in the mirror, and see Superman... sort of."  When Chris finished the book, called Black Coffee Blues, I believe, he loaned it to me.  I read Rollins' poems.  Henry Rollins is a smart guy, and the poetry was real raw and cool.  Suddenly, being a "poet" seemed much less lame.  Knowing I had a couple hundred poems hidden away in notebooks, I said, "I could write a poem book like this.  Hell, I already have written more poems than this."  

I got my notebooks out of storage, along with my typewriter, and edited and typed up a huge zine of nearly 100 of my poems.  The zine was so thick, I had to bind it with duct tape, staples wouldn't go through it all, it had like 60 or 70 zine pages.  It took over a month to get it all together and published.  The zine of poetry was called "We're on the Same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing."  I drew a bad picture of a brain riding on top of a 747 airplane while it crashed for the cover.  

I gave the first copy to Chris Moeller, pretty sure he would find a lot to make fun of me with in it. Much to my surprise he came out his room the next morning and said it really surprised him, it was so honest and kind of raw.  Not as cool as Henry Rollins' poems, but better than he expected.  That was the first day.  I think it was the next day, he started giving me a hard time, saying "I am The White Bear and she is the tigress."  I said, "No she's the black leopard, it's a metaphor."  The word cougar to describe a woman dating younger guys hadn't become a thing yet, but that girlfriend definitely had that feline quality.  Anyhow, day after day, Chris kept calling me The White Bear.  Then people in our group of friends started calling me The White Bear.  It was always THE White Bear, not just White Bear.  

When Chris Moeller tags you with a nickname, he keeps pushing it until it sticks.  Ask Belt Buckle Barry, Porta John, or Child Molester Gary.  So I became The White Bear to the BMX world of the 1990's.  Chris' girlfriend at the time, Shelly, would come out in the mornings when she slept over, heading off to work, and have to step over me in my sleeping bag,since the living room walkway was so small.  Every morning she'd say, "Morning The White Bear," and I'd look up, "Morning Shelly." as she stepped over me.  

At some point in 1992, I can't remember why, I moved into the P.O.W. House, the Pros of Westminster.  The house then was Dave Clymer, Alan Foster, John Paul Rogers, Lawan Cunningham, Chris Sales, Jay Lonergan, Scotty, Bill Naggy, John Salamne, and probably someone I'm forgetting.  I think Todd Lyons had just moved out, but he hung out there almost every night.  Most of the time I lived there, I worked as furniture mover part time.  So while everyone else slept in hung over, I'd get up kind of early, go out to the nasty brown Lazy Boy recliner in the back yard, and read books in the morning sun.  When I was at the house, I'd just sit in one place reading a lot.  At some point, someone started calling me Sluggo.  apparently because I just sat there like a slug, I guess.  But nobody told me that they called me Sluggo behind my back.  

I moved out, and then back a few months later, after working the summer on the American Gladiators crew.  Alan's little brother, Brian Foster was living in the house then, as well.  Keith Treanor never lived there, but hung out most nights, and went riding with all of us daily.  One day we were heading out to ride somewhere, and Keith said, "Hey Sluggo, you coming?"  The other guys looked weird for a minute.  "Nobody knows we call him Sluggo," someone said.  "Keith was like, "Really?"  He looked at me and laughed, "Damn, we've been calling you Sluggo for almost a year now."  I laughed it off.  After all the other nicknames, it didn't phase me.  When I'd practice with my nunchucks at the house after that, I told them I was practicing Sluggitsu, the Way of the Slug, you look so pathetic no one wants to fuck with you.  That got a few laughs.

So in most of the BMX world, to this day, I get called The White Bear.  If I run into Todd Lyons, Alan Foster, or Brian Foster, they'll still call me Sluggo.  Since The White Bear actually sounded kind of cool, I took it as my pen name when I published poetry, and some zines.  As the old saying goes, I don't really care what people call me, just don't call me late for dinner.  

Why I'm focusing on small business and creativity these days: The 2013 Oxford "Future of Work" report

 

Here's a 1 1/2 hour talk on the 2013 Oxford University report, "The Future of Work."  Among other findings, the researchers estimated that 47% of U.S. jobs could be lost to new forms of technology from 2013 to 2038.  The U.S. "workforce" is about 165 million people, officially, and 47% of that would mean about 75 to 80 million Americans will lose their jobs to some form of new technology over this 25 year period.  That's a lot of people.  That's why I feel this issue, and small businesses, as one major solution, deserve a lot of attention.

When I was a kid in the 1970's, my dad would pull into a "service station," what gas stations were still often called back then, and a man would walk out to our car.  I'm not talking a high school kid, but it was usually a grown man, who had a family he supported.  That man would not only pump our gas, but he would clean the windows, and offer to check the oil, for free, while pumping the gas.  This was a normal thing every time we got gas, back when gas was about 50-55 cents a gallon.  That man usually would spend part of the day in the garage, repairing cars, as well.  Those men working at gas stations made a decent living back then, pumping gas and fixing cars.  In those days, gas stations weren't mini-marts, and people rarely went into the stations, usually my parents would pay while sitting in the car.  

Obviously now, we have self service gas pumps, and we pump our own gas, which is now $3 per gallon, and $4 a gallon here in California.  Those gas pump jobs are long gone.  The new technology (in the 1970's) of self-serve gas pumps, was a major factor in replacing those gas station attendant jobs.  In a similar fashion, ATM machines replaced hundreds of thousands of bank teller jobs in later years.  Industrial robots and computer technology replaced millions of high paying U.S. factory jobs in the 1980's through the 2000's.   Outsourcing jobs to foreign countries gets demonized for the loss of factory jobs, but just as many were lost to new technology.  Income tax software has replaced thousands of tax preparer and accountant jobs in more recent years.  These are just a few of the most obvious cases of new forms of technology replacing human jobs in the last 50 years.  

In 2013, researchers at Oxford University in England released this report on the future of work,, which predicted that 47% of U.S. jobs could be replaced by new technology between 2013 and 2038. I heard about this report, being a geek on economics and Big Picture social dynamics in 2017.  It blew my mind.  Yes, like everyone, I realized that new forms of technology had replaced millions of human jobs already, and would continue to replace human jobs.  But this report put an estimated number on that... a HUGE estimated number.  

The U.S. workforce is generally estimated at about 165 million of our 328 million total population.  Those are basically the people from ages 16-18, to age 65.  So the 2013 Oxford report predicted about  75-80 million Americans would use their jobs to new technology from over 25 years.  That's an enormous number of people.  Now you can argue the researchers' thinking and estimate.  But even if they're off by 20% to the downside, that's still well over 60 million people losing their jobs, through no real fault of their own, in a generation.  That's huge.  If the estimate is low, and the number goes higher, we get up near 100 million jobs losses in 25 years.  So I added this huge trend into my own Big Picture of where society is heading in my brain.   I even wrote about this is my blog (Steve Emig: The White Bear, June 28, 2017) in the summer of 2017.  This continuing loss of jobs to new forms of technology is a huge issue that almost no one seemed to be paying much attention to.  But it seemed to be an issue that would affect most people, in some way, at some point.  Plus, my career as a taxi driver went down the tubes when new technology (dispatch computers replacing the old CB radios), so I had experienced this first hand.  

As I blogged about the major recession or likely depression I saw coming (back in 2017-2019), I saw job loss from new tech as a major amplifying factor.  Since I geek out on these kinds of things, I tried to figure out possible solutions.  Yes, 75 million jobs will likely disappear over 25 years, but new tech will also create some new jobs.  But nowhere near enough.  Another option would be large new companies hiring massive numbers of people.  But most of our most valuable companies now employ relatively small numbers of people compared to the major industrial age companies of 50-70 years ago.  Amazon has 810,000 employees in the U.S., according to Wikipedia.  As we all know, Amazon is a behemoth in retail, and is coming up on its 27th birthday as a company.  Apple has 147,000 employees.  Google (aka Alphabet) has 135,000 employees.  Netflix has 9,400 employees.  Facebook has 58,000 employees.  Those are five of the most successful, valuable, major companies in the world today.  All of them grew exponentially in the last 20-45 years from nothing, due to the tech revolution.  Together they employ about 1,159,400 employees.  Even if they all double their workforce in the next 25 years, it would barely make a dent in the job losses.  The simple fact is, there will not be enough major businesses created to put 75-80 million people back to work.  

For about 2 1/2 years, early 2017 to 2020, I was trying to figure out what the best solution to this huge issue would be.  The only people who seemed to even think about this issue were smart people at the high tech companies themselves, and their answer was to push for a Universal Basic Income.  That's where the government gives every adult a check each month, say $1,000 a month.  But then, how does the government finance that?  Creating that much money would lead to massive inflation, and likely hyper-inflation, where those checks become almost worthless over a year or two.  

The best solution to this huge societal dilemma that I could come up with is to encourage tens of millions of Americans (and the same in other countries) to start small businesses.  In effect, people could create their own jobs.  This trend in micro and small businesses has been happening for many years now.  Think of eBay sellers, and all the freelance people doing work using the internet, and other new tech.  In fact, Amazon has 1.9 million resellers, who are small businesses, often 1 or 2 people in a garage, that work in conjunction with Amazon.  That's more than the big 5 companies have in actual employees.  

While no major corporation will come along to hire 40 million people, the idea of 40 million people starting a micro business (1 person business) is entirely possible.  Not easy, but possible.  If half of those businesses hire one person, that's 60 million people working.  The numbers become possible when new small businesses are considered.  After all, the U.S. began as a nation of farmers and shopkeepers, it's in our nation's DNA.  So that became what seemed like the best solution to me.  Then the economy began to tank in late 2019 (Repo Crisis, Sept. 2019).  Then Covid-19 hit the U.S. in February/March 2020, and withing 2 months, over 45 million people were out of work, although "temporarily."  About half have gone back to work, to some degree, since.  

Suddenly, this long term issue of job losses to new tech seemed very real.  But even now, few in business and politics are talking about this issue.  Everyone is betting on the false hope that the end of the pandemic will get everything going full bore again.  It will be better in in 6-8 months, but far too much damage has been done.  Far too many people, tens of millions, can barely make rent or mortgage payments right now.  And many major businesses are using the pandemic to find new tech to replace even more workers, and not hire them all back.  This is all on top of the fact that about 60% of U.S. jobs are fairly low paying service jobs, which no one can live well on, to start with.  

So for all these various reasons, I'm now focusing much of my personal writing and thought on getting my own business off the ground (I'm one of the tens of millions struggling), and helping small businesses  get more creative, use the internet and social media more effectively, and looking at how different people are creating small businesses in our ever changing, high tech enabled world.  So that's where I'm at.

As if this issue needed any more emphasis, I heard a presidential economic advisor say on TV that 400,000 small businesses have already closed down because of the Covid-19 pandemic.  So the U.S. has not only lost over 555,000 American lives to the pandemic, we've lost 400,000 small businesses, as well.  

We need MILLIONS of new small businesses  in this decade.  Got any ideas? 

Writing life: Weddington Park- the place where I found the flow in prose writing

 A jogger on the path in South Weddington Park, right below Universal Studios in Studio City, CA.  In 1991, nearly every morning for a few months, I would sit below the trees on the left and write whatever came to mind. That's when I really got going in the writing life.

When I got hired at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in 1986, I didn't think of myself as a writer, as weird as that sounds.  Many writers struggle for years, desperately wanting to "be a writer," usually meaning getting paid by a "real" publication to write something.  I got the magazine job, working at Wizard Publications, thanks to a BMX freestyle zine I self-published for a year in San Jose.  I started the zine as an excuse to meet the pro riders of the Bay Area in 1985, guys like Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer*, and Robert Peterson, and kept doing it because I liked shooting photos.  I didn't think of publishing a zine as "writing," and a writer wasn't a cool thing to be when I grew up.  I was more into being a "rider," trying to become a pro freestyler at the time.  

But shooting photos of the NorCal crew was fun, so I kept publishing my zine.  I started with a Kodak 110 Instamatic camera, and a 1940's era, Royal, manual typewriter.  I may have lived five miles from the then young Apple Computers HQ then, but I was light years away in publishing tech.  I did move up to a 35 mm camera during that year of zine publishing, though, getting a Pentax ME Super.  Just enough so I never had to learn to work a light meter.

Out of nowhere came an offer to write a freelance article for FREESTYLIN', and a month after that first article was published, I was on staff there.  I was an editorial assistant, running errands for everyone, putting together BMX bikes to be tested, driving Windy, the photographer, to photo shoots, and proofreading both magazines.  Yes, at 20 years old, with only a diploma from Boise High School, and no college experience whatsoever, I was responsible for checking every word in two national magazines.  I stepped up my game, and did a pretty good job.  I even wrote a few articles.  But I didn't totally click with the other guys, and got laid off a few months later.  A couple months later they hired some BMX/skater kid from the east coast to replace me, a 17 or 18-year-old named Spike Jonze.  Whatever happened to him? Hheh, heh, heh, we had no idea then he'd become a media superhero.

I went on to edit and shoot photos for the American Freestyle Association newsletter for a year, got into video work, and landed at Unreel Productions.  Unreel was the video company owned by Vision skateboards and Vision Street Wear in the late 1980's, one of the "Big 5" skateboard companies then.  But the skating and BMX boom dropped off in 1989, and I stumbled into TV production, and wound up in North Hollywood, working second shift at a video duplicator, in 1991.  

I worked alone, making dozens of copies of random videos, like promo videos for automatic bowling lane sweepers, 4-hour videos explaining the different strains of corn to farmers, and boating navigation videos.  After leaving work at 1:30 am, I'd ride my bike back to the flop house where I rented a bed (not a room, the lower bunk bed) for $40 a week.  The place was cheap, close to work, and had about 12 roommates at any given time, several with prison records.  It was a decent place to sleep, but not so great a place to hang out all day.  

By that time, I was thinking of myself as a writer.  I just wasn't sure what I wanted to write, or how to get back to making money writing again.  The trick, it seemed, was trying to find out a way to get paid to write what I wanted to write.  So five years after being a paid magazine writer, then a newsletter writer, I was working on trying to "be a writer."  I did things backwards.

I was also a hardcore BMX freestyler, not a great one, but decent.  So I woke up late, and took off on my bike every morning, and rode around North Hollywood, Burbank, Studio City, and Toluca Lake, looking for cool stuff to ride.  I'd throw my spiral pad in my backpack, and sit down and write a while at a McDonald's or Carl's Jr..  

Within a week or two of my bike exploring, I found this quiet little park, just off Lankershim, right below Universal Studios.  Officially called South Weddington Park, there was a small hill on one end, with several medium sized trees.  I began to sit under one of those trees, day after day, and just write whatever came to mind.  I was 25 years old, didn't have a girlfriend, had about $7,000 credit card debt from a BMX video I self-produced the year before, and didn't have any friends up in the valley, except one co-worker.  So I was often depressed about the debt, bummed at life in general, and wandered on my bike alone exploring and street riding. With those themes in my life, I began to write what I hoped would be a really cool novel... or something.  It turned into more of a journal.  

While working at the newsletter in 1987, I dated a woman working there who was a singer in a local rock band, and wrote her own songs.  She's the one that kept telling me I was a writer, and finally got me to sort of, kind of, believe it.  I started trying to write song lyrics for her, hoping to write her a hit song, so we could both blow up and be rich and famous.  Instead, she slept with my best friend, I eventually found out, and she dumped me.   Yeah, I was pathetic, didn't dump her.  Anyhow, I wrote a poem that night called "Journey of the White Bear," where I was the white bear, the naive young guy. She was the "black leopard," a metaphor, since she was older, much wilder, a rocker and party girl, and had been around the block more than a few times.  It was the best poem I'd written.  After she dumped me, I realized that since I wasn't a musician, my "song lyrics" were actually poems, and I'd written a couple hundred of them by then.  I didn't show then to anyone until years later, they were notebooks hidden in a box in my closet.

So after writing hundred of sappy love poems, depressed loser guy poems, and some "what is life all about?" poems, I started writing in the mornings in Weddington Park.  I wrote A TON of crap there.  But every once in a while, I'd hit some idea, and the words would just burst out of me, as fast as I could write them.  My poetry writing had already turned like that, where I'd think about an idea for a poem for a few days, maybe a few weeks, and suddenly, it just started coming.  I'd learned from my poetry that I had to sit down, right then, at that moment, and write the poem.  If I didn't, the idea was lost.  

But at Weddington Park, I was consciously trying to write some kind of story, fiction, prose.  And I'd wander off into writing about random stuff, just journaling, much of the time.  But I kept writing.  And more and more, some cool idea would pop up out of nowhere, and I'd get a page or two, maybe three, of good writing.  I didn't know it then, but I was beginning to learn my own personal creative process as a writer.  

My notebooks from Weddington Park were lost in a storage auction, or maybe in a move, at some point.  I moved around a lot in the recession years of the early 1990's.  All that writing was lost.  But a few of those cool ideas stuck with me, and made it into my zines during that era.  More than anything, at Weddington Park, I learned to just keep writing, grind it out, and roll with the good ideas, the good pieces, when they seemed to appear out of nowhere. That was where I first started putting time in as a writer.

In my first poetry zine, self-published in late 1992, I wrote a line on the inside cover that came from my Weddington writings.  "These are not my words or ideas, I'm just the faucet the water flows through."  The best ideas, the best pieces of writing, seemed to simply flow through me, from some other source.  No, not ancient fucking aliens, but either from my sub-conscience, or some deeper mystical source, the universal consciousness, or whatever.  I later learned many writers, probably most serious writers, have similar experiences.  But that was new to me in those mornings at Weddington Park, now almost 30 years ago.  

Although the Universal Red Line train and bus station is now right next to (and under) Weddington Park, the park is very much like it was in 1991.  It's a quiet neighborhood park.  A few homeless people (not me) camp by it now.  It's a bit more fixed up, and there's a walk/jog trail around it.  Although I gravitated to this same area when looking for a place to land in 2019,  I rarely go there now.  But it's still a cool place to chill a while, play fetch with your dog, or to sit under a tree and write.  

 * I'm in the Maurice Meyer clip, at 5:07.

Why you need to "drive traffic" to your website or blog

These metal dinosaurs (and other sculptures) are out in the California desert.  I've seen videos of these, but didn't know there were 130 different sculptures.  These are in the Anza-Borrego park area, look up "Borrego Springs metal sculptures," to find directions.  Basically, they're in the middle of nowhere, west of the Salton Sea, and straight east of Carlsbad, California.

Why am I showing you a video of metal dinosaur sculptures out in the Southern California desert?  Because they are a great metaphor for building a website or blog for your business, art, or other projects.  When you build a website of any kind on the internet, it's pretty much in the middle of nowhere, out there in "cyberland," just like these dinosaurs. A random person here or there might come across it, but very few will.  

For over 20 years now, forward looking marketing people have been telling businesses (mostly major corporations) to promote their products and services online.  In the early 2000's, after the Dotcom boom and bust, most traditional businesses had websites built, as did many smaller businesses.  But they didn't put in the time, money, and staff into really learning how the internet, and now smartphones and apps, have changed the game of business.  These forms of communication have dramatically changed people's shopping habits.  So that means your business needs to adapt, if it hasn't already. 

Now, 20-25 years into a practical world wide web, aka "the internet," many major businesses of the Industrial Age are gone, or bankrupt, and most major businesses have some team doing online and social media marketing for them.  But a huge number of small businesses don't use all these "new" tools and platforms to anywhere near their full capacity.  

Having become a serious blogger in 2008 (after writing zines, and for magazines and newsletters since 1985), I've been learning how to operate as a writer today's world.  One of the big lessons I learned is that when you build a blog or a website (or an app), it's pretty much invisible.  It's not like opening a bricks and mortar store next to a busy road, where a lot of people will just stop in and check it out.  For any kind of website (business site, online store, blog, etc), you have to "drive traffic" to the website to get people to check it out.  This is still an often missed concept by lots of small businesses.  

Driving traffic means that you create content of some kind in other places on the web, social media, or phone apps, and you link them to your website.  You also can hand out physical flyers, or post signs in your physical store for people to check out your website.  You go on social media, in all its forms, and write posts, or post photos and videos, and link them to your website.  You find communities of people interested in what you sell, like on Facebook groups, for example, and you let them know about your website.  There are dozens of ways to drive traffic to your website, for free.  These are just the main themes.  You can also pay influencers on social media to mention your website, and send people to it.  You can place ads all over the internet, social media platforms, and phone apps, to get people to start checking out your website.  This is absolutely critical, to get people to see your work, and to sell through your website, online store, blog, whatever.  In time, some people will start telling others about your site, or it may even go viral within a large group.  That's what you want.  You want people to be able to easily find your website, and have it be interesting enough that they tell other people. 

So, in review.  Your website is a lot like these metal dinosaur sculptures out in the desert, when you first build it.  It may be cool, but no one knows it's there.  So you start building paths and roads (links) in the online world, to your website.  Like building a bunch of roads to these dinosaurs, so more people will see them.  That's the idea of "driving traffic."  When you build any website, you have to spend time, daily, if possible, to drive traffic to your website, to be successful at getting views, and making money if it's a business site.  Got it? More thoughts on this, and specific techniques, in future posts on this blog.