Addicted to blogs

There isn't a really cool blog song that I know of, but Harvey's Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" is cool, and mentions zines, where I got my self-publishing start.  Close enough.  

"I want to publish zines, and rage against machines..."

-Harvey Danger, 1998, When zines were resurging, and when blogs were just being invented.

I started my first blog about taxi driving in 2007, while living in my taxi in Huntington Beach.  I would go to the H.B. library and rent a computer for $5 an hour, since I didn't own one, and write about funny license plate rings or bumper stickers I saw while driving my taxi.  I think I wrote about 30 posts, and had maybe 50 page views in a year, which seemed to mostly be from my mom and the cops.  Not the greatest start to blogging, but you have to start somewhere. 

In November of 2008 I landed at my parents' tiny apartment in Kernersville, NC, after a year living on the streets in Orange County, CA.  That homeless year followed about 4 1/2 years of 7 days a week taxi driving, living in my taxi for about 4 of those years.  I lived in an indie art gallery for 6-7 months, and drove a taxi on the weekends the other part of that time.  When I got to NC, I was 325 pounds, in horrible health, 42 years old, broke, and lost everything I owned in that move.  I lost everything from my 20+ years of BMX riding, except a key chain.  I went from depressed to really depressed.  

But I had my parents computer in my room. I had never really spent any time online up until that point, I was a total Luddite, thinking "Fuck that goofy internet shit."  I knew almost nothing about the virtual world.  Within two weeks, I started a blog called FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales, about my 5 month stint working at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in 1986.  I've been blogging pretty consistently ever since.  I've learned a few things about blogging in the 12 1/2 years since.  Here are the main blogs I've done...

FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales..... about 212 posts..... over 25,000 page views.... 2008-2009

Freestyle BMX Tales..... over 500 posts..... over 125,000 page views..... 2009-2012

Make Money Panhandling (picked stupidest title I could think of to practice search engine optimization (SEO)..... 100 posts?.....  about 65,000 page views, 2010-2012

A month or so after my dad died in August of 2012, I got seriously depressed, and deleted all my blogs (I had tried about 20 or 30 blog ideas, trying to figure out how to make money with a blog).  I immediately regretted deleting my blogs after I did it.  Lesson, DON'T delete your blogs.

Freestyle BMX Tales..... (version 2, on wordpress.com)..... can't remember how many posts..... 40-50 posts?  10-20,000 page views?  Not sure.  

Freestyle BMX Tales 43 (Version 3).....89 posts..... 40, 124 page views.... 2015-2017

Bum to Bankroll..... 51 posts..... 1,403 page views..... 2015-2016 

Become Your Own Hero (line from a poem I wrote)..... 49 posts..... 1,402 page views..... 2015-2016

Cash Poor Story Rich..... 6 posts..... 1,111 page views..... 2016

Check out downtown Kernersville (North Carolina)..... 6 posts..... 963 page views..... 2016

Create Your Own Dang Job..... 17 posts..... 1,041 page views..... 2017  (If you look up nothing else here, check out the first post on this one, my playlist for Trump's inauguration day)

Freaks, Geeks, Dorks, and Weirdos..... 42 posts..... 877 page views..... 2016

Get Weird Make Money..... 38 posts..... 839 page views..... 2017

 How to Make Your Lame City Better- Part 1..... 22 posts..... 1,808 page views..... 2016

How to Make Your Lame City Better- Part 2..... 57 posts..... 330 page views..... 2016

New Ideas for Old American Buildings..... 24 posts..... 538 page views..... 2017

Steve Emig Art..... 86 posts..... 12,364 page views.....  2017 

The White Bear's Stuff..... 35 posts..... 2,053 page views..... 2017-2018

Steve Emig: The White Bear.... 700 posts..... 124,513 page views.....2017-2020

Block Bikes Blog (for Block Bikes Shop/website)..... 96 posts..... 21,839 page views..... April-June 2019

The Phoenix Great Depression..... 47 posts..... 985 page views..... June 2020-October 2020

Small Business Blaster..... 17 posts..... 953 page views..... 2020

Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- Book 1.....this is a book published as a blog..... 20 chapters/posts, all built December 2019..... 1962 page views..... December 2019- April 2020

Steve Emig Adventuring..... 67 posts..... 2,462 page views..... 2020-2021

 WPOS Kreative Ideas..... 89 posts..... 5,541..... April 2019-May 2021

Current blogs (revised October 8, 2021):

The Big Freakin' Transition

Crazy California 43..... 35 posts..... 765 page views..... April-May 2021

Full Circle- My new blog about writing and the writing life.

And a new fiction blog...

Stench: Homeless Superhero

 So...  Over 12 1/2 years, 25 blogs,  2,405 blog posts, 438,932 page views.  

I just found dozens of blog posts, actually a few hundred, that I totally forgot I wrote.  I've tried at least 30 more blog ideas, and stopped after a few posts.  But a lot of my same themes, like creative scenes, re-building our world, starting a small business, Sharpie Scribble Style art, and of course, BMX freestyle.  Lesson for today?  Don't be afraid to try new ideas on a blog.  When you get one that feels right, roll with it.  If you burn out on that idea for a while (or forever), leave the blog up online, and go try something else for a while.  

So... who wants to go down my rabbit hole?  Click one of those links.  I just blew my own mind.

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.