How to "find your voice" in your blog or zine

When it comes to "finding your voice" in your writing, there isn't a much better metaphor than the voice of Morgan James.  And she's in her underwear, as an angel, pretty good visual, too.

If you've been writing for any length of time, you've probably heard someone telling you to "find your voice."  What does that mean?  Also, in blogging and social media marketing, people are told to "be authentic," which is a similar idea.  Simply put, both of these mean to be yourself.  But how do you become yourself in writing?  

Write a bunch of shit.  That's a good way to start.  Don't publish the shit, just write it.  In her epic book The Artist's Way, which is a 12 step program for creative people, Julia Cameron tells every creative person to write three pages, of whatever, every morning, first thing.  She calls these "morning pages."  That's a great idea, I did it for five years straight after reading and working through The Artist's Way in 1996.  Every freakin' morning.  I would be bouncing along in a moving truck to go move furntiure, writing in my notebook.  But you can also write in a journal.  You can write on your tablet or phone into a document, or Google Docs or Word on your laptop.  But Julia recommends, and I agree, writing by hand, with pencil or pen, on paper, is better.  There's something about physically writing which seems to help the process.

Don't try to write your story idea.  Don't try to write that blog post.  Don't try to write that novel.  Just write about whatever is on your mind at the moment.  "Man, my girlfriend freaked when I left the toilet seat up yesterday, and then she fell in it when she went to pee.  Why the hell don't women look to see if the seat's down?"   Obviously a guy's point of view. "My mom called up yesterday to see if I found a boyfriend yet, went into the whole spiel about needing grandchildren ASAP to make her feel better since she fucked up by having me.  Still not sure how to tell her I'm a lesbian..."  You get the idea.  

Write about the shit that bugs you and pisses you off.  Write about that really cool thing that happened yesterday.  Write about how good potato chips are in mac and cheese.  Write about that mole with the one hair sticking out that really bugs you.  Write about whatever pops in your head, whatever you're dealing with. Just start writing it.  Get it out. It's like mental diarrhea.  Clean the shit out of your system.

Something weird begins to happen.  Every once in a while, you'll go off on a tangent, and a little piece of that story you have had in your mind comes out..  Or that problem with the character in your novel finds a solution.  More than anything, you begin to learn to flow with your writing.  Thoughts (wherever they come from) to pen to paper.  No filter.  Nothing is right (write) or wrong.  Just left the garbage drain out through your pen.  You can edit it later.  Or throw it away.  Or burn  the paper.

Then put it away for a day or two, and read over it.  You'll be like, "Damn, this is shit... Hey, I like that line, wait, that whole paragraph is good, I could make a blog post out of that."  Things like that begin to happen.  

Most people sit down to write a masterpiece.  And then stare at a blank piece of paper.  Yeah, like that's gonna happen.  

Here's a big secret to writing, are you ready?  You can write complete shit for days... weeks even, AND NOT PUBLISH IT.  

No one has to see this crap.  But most people need to write it, just write for a while, to break down the filters of "This needs to be brilliant!"  No it doesn't.  Brilliant usually comes in little bits and pieces.  So just start writing the shit.  Don't edit in your head.  Write down whatever comes.  Good, bad, silly, funny, mean, devious, sexy, fucked up, whatever.  Write A LOT of whatever.  Get your mind used to just writing.  Then pick through it, and find the cool thoughts, and work on those.  Don't publish all the crap.  

In time, you begin to write better off the top of your head, your writing gets better overall, and you truly begin to write what's important to you, what YOU have to say to the world.  That's your voice.  

"She... she's figured out, all her doubts were someone else's point of view."  

-"She", Green Day

Blogging as a tool to build an audience for artists and writers

My Sharpie Scribble Style drawing of David Bowie with a Bowie knife.  He was on the cutting edge of music for decades. I drew this for Facebook a friend while living in Richmond, Virginia, and then left at a bus stop by accident because I'm an idiot.  I started trying to sell my Sharpie art in late 2015, and I wasn't known as an artist at all then.  I've sold around 90 originals and 150 prints over the five years since, using my blog and Facebook as my main promotion.  

If you make some kind of art or write, and want to sell or promote it, I think you should have a blog.  Now I'm a longtime, hardcore blogger (12 years, 40+ blog ideas tried, about 6 serious ones, 380,000+ total page views), so of course I think you should have a blog.  It's kind of like asking an insurance salesman if you need insurance, the answer's always, "Absolutely."  But do you think you need a blog?  That's the real question.  Here's why I think blogs are good for artists and writers. 

As most all of you know, a blog is a kind of website that you post on time after time, on a regular basis.  It's on the internet, as opposed to on a social media platform, like Snapchat, Facebook, etc., which means people can do a Google/Bing search for your blog.  When you blog your thoughts, ideas, frustrations, photos, videos, or whatever, it's available for most of the world to read.  If you actually want to sell your art or writing, getting your name out there is how you begin to do that.  

Another good reason for a blog is that, because blogs are constantly being updated (2 or 3 times a week is a good goal for most people), search engines love blogs.  Blogs rank high in search results more so than a website that was built once, say in 2014, and has been sitting there untouched ever since.  New content on your blog tells search engines "Hey, there fresh stuff here, check it out."  

Another good thing about blogs, unless we hit the Mad Max days or something, the internet's going to be around for quite a while.  Social media platforms, as big as they are these days, come and go.  When's the last time you checked your MySpace page?  How 'bout Friendster or Squidoo?  Sure, everyone's on Instagram... right now.  But it will fade in popularity at some point, and all your content will fade in popularity as well, or maybe diasappear.  Blogs tend to be around a long time, and they actually gain readership over time, as people find and share different posts.  

Another good thing about blogs is that you can write primarily, like I do, or you can embed videos of yourself or others, you can add links to podcasts, you can link every post to your social media, your Etsy or Shopify site, or anywhere else.  That makes a lot more places in the online/social media world where people can find your photos, art, songs, writing, or whatever creative work you do.  Blogs aren't a substitute for social media, but a good addition to social and other forms of promotion.  

You can also use you blog to promote your fav hashtag.  Take a second and search mine:  #sharpiescribblestyle .  Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram.  I'm not on Snapchat, so you can skip that one.  I don't rock on all of those, but when I meet someone who wants to check out my artwork, I tell them to search my hashtag... anywhere.   Social media usually leads them to one of my blogs at some point.  I'm a fucking homeless guy (no booze, no drugs, just for the record), but I have a better online/social media presence than most small to mid-sized businesses. 

The internet and social media platforms are sort of like free land where you can build a big billboard that says, "Check my stuff out!"  When someone does see your stuff, and thinks it's cool, they can easily share it with other people. That word of mouth (and word of mouse,text, and share) promotion gets your name, and what you do, out where lots of people can see it.   If you blog steadily, and spend some time promoting your stuff, you begin to build a following, or build a bigger, and more important, more solid, devoted following.  

I was able to start selling mediocre art quickly in 2015 because I already had a solid following for my Old School BMX freestyle blogs.  As I got more orders, my art game improved a lot, since I was drawing every day.  I also got more orders, and became known as a Sharpie artist with a totally unique style.  I don't make real living off my artwork, but I've been able to scrape by as a working artist, for five years, and now I'm pivoting to do more writing, and a bit less artwork.  What I've learned from promoting my blogs and artwork can help a lot of other people, like yourself, promote whatever it is that you do, whether it's art, writing, music, small business, whatever.

So that's my basic thoughts on why artists and writers in particular should have blogs, in my opinion.  Hit me up with any thoughts or questions on Facebook (Steve Emig- North Hollywood) or Twitter (@steveemig43).  Now get back to creating something worth promoting.

 

 

I've been blogging since blogs were called zines... 35 years of self-publishing

Tens of thousands zines have been published in the last 45 years or so, since early punkers discovered self-publishing.  But this is one of the only, and the best, documentary on zines there is.  There should be more.  $100 and a T-shirt.

Since 2007, I've tried probably 50 different blog ideas.  Most sucked.  But some didn't.  My most successful blogs, in terms of readership, have been about Old School BMX freestyle.  Guys (and a couple women), now in our late 40's and 50's, who got really into BMX trick riding in the 1980's, when it was a new sport.  It doesn't get much more niche than that.  

Yet, somehow, my best blogs together have clocked over 380,000 page views in 12 years.  For real.  My last main personal blog, Steve Emig; The White Bear (it's a BMX nickname, not anything racial), I retired about a year ago, when it hit 100,000 page views.  Without really touching it, that blog has attracted about 24,000 more page views in the last year... just sitting there.  It's about Old School BMX freestyle, a little Sharpie art, and my thoughts on economics and the future.  

That's the power of blogs.  If you put halfway decent thoughts in a blog, consistently, over a period of time, some people will check it out.  Sometimes, A LOT of people will check it out.  That blog is also the main one that's helped sell my Sharpie Scribble Style artwork across 12 or so states, maybe 10 countries, and on 6 of the 7 continents (still working on getting art to Antarctica and the International Space Station).  And I was homeless nearly the whole 3 1/2 years that blog was being written.  

Blogs (and zines) are a place to vent.  They are a place to throw a new, or reasonably revamped, idea out into the world and see what people think.  Blogs are a place to talk or write about those things that you are really into, and to find other people out there in the world who are also into those things.  Blogs are a place to build a solid following as a writer, artist, performer, comic, or other type of creative person.  Blogs are a place to write things off the top of your head, and ramble on about really niche topics.  Blogs are a way to show the world things you think are cool, interesting, and need a little more attention.  Blogs are a lot of things.  

Best of all, blogs are one form of Constitutionally protected free speech (with a few minor limits), which I found out the hard way isn't popular in all parts of the United States.  I've literally had a group of guys threaten me with baseball bats and clubs, because they didn't like my blog.  It wasn't a particular thing I said they didn't like.  They were mad (in a conservative Southern State that will remain nameless) because I was talking about a big recession I saw coming in the future, back in 2018.  Obviously, everyone knew back in 2018 that we would never, ever  have another recession, much less a major one.  They were also mad because when people Googled that city (of about 250,000 people), a blog written by a homeless Sharpie artist came up in the top of the rankings.  I told them, "It's not my fault you guys suck at blogging and social media, you have to EARN rankings on Google.  Get on You Tube, learn how to do it, and get to work."  That didn't go over well.  But they decided not to beat me to a bloody pulp that night (about May 16th, 2018).  Why?  Because if I lived, they knew I would blog about the beating.  Isn't it ironic, don'tcha think?  

Anyhow, I love blogging.  And blogging IS writing.  It's not all writing, it's a particular type of writing, if you choose to write posts.  You could shoot videos, talk at a camera, put them on YouTube, and also upload them to a blog, which is a good idea if you have a YouTube channel, BTW.  Blogs are kinda like zines, but e-zines that the whole world can see.  That's good in some ways, and bad in some ways.  I like both blogs and zines, each in their own way.  I began self-publishing as a zine guy in 1985, and blogging was pretty much inevitable, once I had time on my hands and a computer to use.  For me, that happened in late 2008, when I was forced out of California and to North Carolina, very much to my dismay.

I first heard of zines in a FREESTYLIN' magazine article in late 1984, I think.  I was a dorky high school senior in Boise, Idaho, and one of three serious BMX freestylers in that region.  Our goofy little sport was brand new, and for some reason, the idea of publishing a zine about it appealed to me after reading that article.  So I drew up some designs of what my zine would look like.  Then, in my typical fashion at the time, I did nothing else, except talk about maybe doing a zine.  

In late August of 1985, I finished my summer job at a little amusement park, called the Boise Fun Spot, and drove my 1971 Pontiac Bonneville land yacht to San Jose, California, where my family had moved in June.  I promptly got a job at a local Pizza Hut, and tried to think of a way to find and meet all the good freestylers in the San Francisco Bay area (in the pre-internet days, meeting people you didn't know was much harder).  I decided to publish a zine about BMX freestyle, and hand it out at local bike shops.  It worked, and a month later, I was riding at a jam session with the Skyway factory team, the Curb Dogs, and the other local riders of the Bay Area.  

Eleven issues of the zine landed me a job at FREESTYLIN' magazine (and BMX Action).  At 20 years old, I was an editorial assistant, and the proofreader of, two national magazines... because I self-published a zine for a year.  For real.  That happened.  

More than anything, my first zine, San Jose Stylin', taught me the power of following through on a creative idea, and finishing it.  I've been self-publishing, on a regular basis, ever since.  Much more on blogs, zines, and self-publishing coming in this blog.  Oh, and if I die at the hands of someone in authority in the near future, it will probably be because of something I wrote in a blog.  There are still a lot of people in this country to don't like the idea of free speech.  I do.  It's worth fighting for.  If we lose free speech, we lose all other rights soon after.  So go make a zine or write a blog.  Publish something.

 BMX freestyler, manager of the Boise Fun Spot, and a dork a couple months from becoming a zine publisher.  Me, summer of 1985, at the Fun Spot.  Photo by co-worker Vaughn Kidwell.

Planting flowers in Hell: poetry, other arts, and the gift and dedication of creativity

My favorite bands are mostly punk bands, the music I listen to most often, are bands like Social Distortion, The Descendents, and Face to Face, and several others.  But when I'm in a creative mood, actually working on creative projects, I listen to this entire concert of the Lilith Fair in 1997.  I've watched and listened to this dozens and dozens of times.  This is one of the best documentaries on creativity I know.  

"Writing's so bizarre.  I think that's why it's so fulfilling.  It's like you're... you're making something out of nothing."

-Shawn Colvin, Lillith Fair, 1997 documentary (above)

To be able to reach into the void, to literally stretch your soul out into that other dimension, and bring out something new, something you think the world needs, to breathe life into it, and set that creative piece on its journey into the physical world, that is the work of an artist.  And that work requires every bit as much dedication as that of a doctor, or a soldier, to do it well, and do it consistently.  An artist, a poet of life, may not fight battles with guns, but we are always fighting battles. 

While in North Carolina, three years ago, living in a tent in the woods, and drawing my Sharpie art day after day, fighting the darkness of the deep shadows of the worst aspects of Old Southern Culture, it seemed like I was planting flowers in Hell.  I wondered if it was all worthwhile many times, like when I was hunkered down, under a tarp, inside my tent, as a Carolina thunderstorm raged around me, thinking about drawing at the library the next day.  One day I realized, if you plant enough flowers in Hell, it doesn't feel like Hell anymore.  That is our work as artists. 

To keep trying, keep creating, to build our technical skills, and learn our own creative process, to bring new things, new creative works, new ideas, into the world.  That is our job.  If you dedicate yourself to that over the long term, you eventually build up the drive to keep going no matter what forces of the evil parts of the everyday human world throw at you, or our own fears and personal demons we may be wrestling with. 

 That is our job.  We light matches in the darkness and create new lights to share and pass around and light new paths.  To do that, we must be sensitive to the creative sparks and the nuances, but also build a toughness to break past the doubters and haters.  At this point, if you put me in front of a firing squad, condemned to die a moment later by the executioners' guns, I'd write a haiku on the spot and recite it, as my last work in this world.  

You pull the trigger

Sending lead death to end me

A poem comes, I win

Sometimes it takes that level of dogged dedication to be an artist.  History would forget the names of the firing squad members, and the leader who told them to shoot.  But that poem, that haiku would be written down and remembered, I guarantee it.  

Yes, sometimes it takes that level of dedication to your creative work to be an artist.  Most of the time it does not, thankfully.  But there is a dedication to being a poet, a painter, a sculptor, a songwriter, a musician, a dancer, a content creator, a director, a producer, an inventor, a graphic designer, whatever.  You may not face the firing squad for your creative work, but you face days of creating crap, you face your insecurities, your personal bad habits, your doubts, your mom's doubts, your dad's doubts, everybody's doubts.  You face moments, even days, where it doesn't seem to be working.  

And then... that spark comes, from somewhere.  That next right idea that you need to create.  But the spark is the just that, the spark, it is not the poem, the song, the play, the finished work.  Then comes the dedication that you've built over time, the work to take that creative spark and form it with your technical skills, into the piece of art to share with others.  

Some pieces of art may be instant hits, going viral in your genre' to be admired and to inspire many people in a short amount of time.  Other pieces may not receive much initial excitement at all.  They may sit out there in the world, seemingly unnoticed, for months or years.  But in that time, in their place, those pieces inspire one person here, and another there.  And years later someone thanks you for creating that piece or work you'd long forgotten about.  It did have a purpose, it was needed in the world at the time you created it.  Maybe that "failure" ultimately inspired entire new people and new ideas while you went on, busy elsewhere.  You never know.  

There is a reason we are driven to create something.  Sometimes it's just for our own survival.  Sometimes we just need to get out of our everyday mindset and goof around, and make something to keep our own spirits up.  Sometimes we create a gift for someone dear to us, to help them through a dark time.  Sometimes we create a piece of art that speaks to many, many people.  Sometimes we may create something that seems like no big deal at the time, but it sparks a whole new genre' of creativity in other people.  Sometimes we may create a work that speaks to our times, and helps drive a major, needed,  a change in society itself.  

We never know, as artists what effect a certain piece will have.  Our job is to actually live life, and to learn and grow as artists, to dedicate ourselves to doing the best work we can, as we journey through life.  Our job is to learn our own creative process, to follow our our weird path, to build our technical skills, and to drop everything and create that next piece of work when the spark hits us.  

The world of humans needs our work, even if it may not seem like it at the time.  The world needs us, as artists, no many how many mean and seemingly evil people (most of whom are blocked artists themselves) may try to destroy us.  The world needs new creative pieces of work, new ideas, of all kinds, constantly.  The world needs you to create.  Do your best to hold up your end of the bargain.  Keep creating.

Become

You must risk

If you're to succeed

From when we grow

Sometimes we bleed

Each must climb

Over the fence

For the only cage

Is ignorance

Each Jedi Knight

And Shaolin monk

Evolved from

A lowly punk

Don't get caught

In the world's throws

We must become

Our own heroes

 

-The White Bear 

(aka me, Steve Emig)

A couple of memes I made a while back, on the idea of creativity...

 

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.