Here's Val Kilmer as Thomas Van Allen, who is living as Danny Parker, in the Pooh Bear breakfast scene in the little known movie, The Salton Sea. Danny is trying to get Pooh Bear on tape agreeing to a big drug deal for some crank. But this isn't Pooh Bear's first rodeo. This is an incredibly well made movie, chock full of really memorable characters. You should watch this movie. If you're in recovery form meth, crank, or coke, this movie will probably knock you off the wagon. But it will be worth it. Luckily, I'm a pizza addict, drugs aren't my thing, so I can watch this movie with reckless abandon. After you watch The Salton Sea movie, look up the actual place, the Salton Sea, it's story is just as crazy as the movie.
"The greatest words on written page
Only come to life when you're on stage"
excerpt from "Actress," a poem I wrote fin about 1990. I wrote the poem for my sister Cheri's best friend, Alisa, who's been a diehard actress since a young age. I lost, and have forgotten the rest of the poem.
I'm really sorry to hear about the death of actor Val Kilmer. He just died at age 65. I'm generally not huge a fan of specific actors, male or female, but some actors would just keep showing up in movies that became my personal favorites. Val Kilmer was one of those.
Of course, the Hollywood press, like in this Entertainment Tonight tribute, reminds everyone of his best known roles, Iceman in Top Gun, Bruce Wayne and Batman in Batman Forever, Jim Morrison in The Doors, and Doc Holiday in Tombstone. All great roles. But none of those roles are why I've been a fan of Val Kilmer's work since the late 1980's.
It's easy to talk shit about actors in general. People say they're all shallow, self-absorbed, and narcissistic. People say actors just want to be movie or TV stars, and live as glamorous prima Donna's. People say that the top actors make way too much money. These things are true for some actors. But then there are the hardcore, devoted actors. They take a writer's characters, described only in words, or maybe simple drawings in some cases. The great actors flesh out and literally become those fictional characters, taking the rest of us on a believable journey, for an hour, two hours, maybe through a whole TV series. That's a pretty amazing thing to be able to do well. Val Kilmer was one of the greatest at this. Rest in Peace, Mr. Kilmer in whatever realm the greatest move into after an inspiring journey here on planet Earth.
Here are the main roles that made me a big fan of Val Kilmer's work.
This is definitely not my taste in interior design, but I love her creativity and way of making this place uniquely her own. DIY content creator Mariane Plaisance and her boyfriend live in an old bank building in Montreal, Canada, which she has completely redecorated inside. We have a growing number of commercial buildings now losing money, and many standing vacant or fully abandoned. In addition, there's a major affordability crisis in housing across the U.S., Canada, and some other countries. Is living in a remodeled commercial building an answer to these problems? Maybe.
What would your dream house look like? Think about it for a moment. Where would it be? What color would it be? How many bedrooms and bathrooms would it have? If money was no object, would you have a gigantic mansion on a hilltop? Would it be way out in the country? In the mountains? In the middle of a city where the urban action is? Would you have a home theater?A huge swimming pool? Would you have droids to wait on you? The ultimate open kitchen? A slide? A fire pole between floors? Would your master bedroom be underwater? When it comes to customizing a living space, there have been all kinds of amazing and ridiculous homes built throughout history, particularly for people with more money than they knew what to do with.
Today, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, we are decades into a long transition period in society. The late futurist Alvin Toffler called it The Third Wave, in his 1980 book with that title. He and his wife believed we were leaving the industrial-based society of the last 350 or so years, and moving into an information-based society. He wrote several books explaining how this massive transition in society might play out, as he explains in this interview from 2007.
Forty-five years after Toffler published The Third Wave, I believe we are now reaching the point of peak change in the transition the Tofflers wrote about. In 2025 we have a major housing affordability crisis in the U.S., Canada, and several other countries. Here in the U.S., we also have a major homeless problem that has grown exponentially in the last 20 or 25 years. At the same time, because of the Industrial Age to Information Age transition Toffler wrote about, we have tens of thousands of commercial buildings that are no longer viable for their original purposes. Thousands of these structures, ranging from small houses to entire sports stadiums, have been abandoned. First there were abandoned factories and some warehouses, then came houses in those cities, then retail storefronts in small towns, larger abandoned stores, dead malls, and now a growing number of abandoned older office buildings, in nearly every city in the U.S..
I've been writing about this issue of empty buildings on my Substack site, in a series of pieces called Simulpocalypse. One of my main reasons for writing this series is to dive into this topic is to try and figure out how we could actually put many of these buildings to new, cool, viable uses for today's world.
That's where Mariane, in the video up top, and her renovated bank turned into a work and living space, comes in. This is a great example of how someone turned a vacant commercial building into a cool, funky, whimsical, and YouTube studio and unique home. I think this type of thing can be done in many, many more instances, if we can get through the issues of evaluating a building's current true value, local red tape, outdated zoning laws, and the other things keeping thousands of other under used and vacant buildings from finding new uses for today's world.
Mariane and her boyfriend bought the old bank for about $500,000 U.S. dollars, in Montreal, where the median home price is about $600,000. So they held out, as the price dropped, and made an offer, so they got the property for less than the median price of a home there. The bank has about 3,500 square feet, which I bet is much larger than the average house size. At half a million U.S. dollars, this isn't a super cheap place to live. But it is less than an average house there. Now imagine if you had a somewhat larger building, and had several people sharing it, two or three couples or several single people, each creating their own living space (and work space) in the building. You could bring everyone's living expenses down quite a bit.
I've been writing about "the coming recession" for several years now, since some long term trends suggested this next recession would bring a huge level of change throughout society. Here in the U.S., we have a major housing affordability problem, particularly for Millennials and young Generation Z, just entering their working life. At the same time, we have what I'm now calling the "Simulpocalypse," a growing number of vacant commercial buildings across the U.S..
There are a handful of people living in commercial buildings who have videos here on YouTube. Not many. As this recession deepens, and as commercial real estate continues to tank in retail and office particularly, some people will figure out how to live in some of these spaces. I'm not talking about the large adaptive reuse projects that cost tens of millions of dollars, but average people realizing that if they have a small business of some kind, they can rent an old store front or industrial unit for half as much money as a decent apartment.
Yes, zoning is an issue, but vacant properties getting tagged, vandalized, invaded by drug addicts or other homeless people, and possibly catching fire are other, often bigger issues. There will inevitably be property owners willing to lease to people who run a small business and live in their vacant stores, warehouses, or office buildings, just to get some income. Other people will be desperately trying to get out of buildings, and will take some weird offers to sell these properties. While I don't see this as the biggest answer to housing affordability, I think this is likely to be a quiet trend over the next several years. Time will tell if I'm right about that or not.
Did you check out the video embedded at the top? Mariane is French Canadian, if you haven't figured that out yet by her accent, and her DIY YouTube channel is in French, and it's called 2e peau.Her work as a DIY content creator led both to how the couple could afford to buy this building, and to the nature of her amazing renovations and redecorating of this building. As millions of people struggle to afford decent places to live, will more people start renting or buying commercial building to live in, or create live/work places tapped into today's internet-based business world? I think it's definitely a possibility.
If you read my blog or Substack, you know that I've been living homeless for many years now. So why am I so interested in abandoned commercial buildings? Well, for one, let's just say I've become much more sensitized to today's housing issues, because of my own struggles to make a decent living and find housing, starting with my taxi driving days, about 25 years ago. But there's more to it than that. I've had this weird dream of living in a converted industrial building since I was a kid. It started with a womanizing TV detective when I was about 12-years-old.
At 20:46 in this episode of the 1978 TV show Vegas, we see private eye Dan Tanna drive his classic Ford Thunderbird into his apartment, with a flat tire. This clip leads into a long scene in his "apartment." In the show, Tanna lived in an industrial building out near the Las Vegas airport, and he would drive his car right into the living room. Like pretty much every 1970's private detective on TV, Dan Tanna was a hero every week, and a consummate ladies man, in the James Bond tradition. But it was that cool apartment in the old industrial building that I always thought was the coolest part of the show.
In the 1986 bicycle messenger movie Quicksliver, starring Kevin Bacon, Jack and his ballet dancer girlfriend live in a spacious loft, the quintessential artist's loft. In this corny road bike freestyle/dance scene, he's riding around their apartment, trying to distract his girlfriend from her ballet practice. Yes, it's a stereotypical, 1980's, corny, romantic, movie montage. But this is one really cool loft apartment. By the time Quicksilver came out, I was a hardcore BMX freestyler, and this cool loft built on the dream I had, started by Dan Tanna's industrial building apartment Vegas. The dream of living in a funky, cool, industrial building someday, where I could ride my bike or park my car in my "living room," kept growing in my head. I'll be honest, that dream still exists. I'm probably not the only one who has imagined living in some old industrial building transformed into my own cool, personal live/work space.
My dream actually happened, sort of, back in 2005. I was working as a taxi driver, scraping by week to week, paying about $600 every week to lease my cab, and putting another $300 or more in the gas tank, every week. After paying my expenses, I didn't have enough money to rent a decent room or apartment. So I lived in my taxi, 6 1/2 years total, and took showers at the gym. I got a cheap motel room once a week, usually on Sunday nights, because business was slow. I'd watch a little TV, eat a cheap pizza, and get 10 or 11 hours of good sleep. After working 70-80 hours a week, all seven days, one night of good sleep did wonders.
Another taxi driver, a guy named Richard, had an indie art gallery in an industrial unit in Anaheim, the AAA Electra 99 Art Gallery and Co-op. He made me an offer one day. The deal was that he would let me live in the art gallery during the week, and I would drive his taxi all weekend, from Friday afternoon until early Monday morning. I took the deal. I moved into the gallery, and suddenly had 4 days off. I worked long hours on the weekend, and lived with a mama cat and her six kittens in the gallery Monday through Friday afternoon. It was in that place that I invented my Sharpie Scribble Style of drawing and shading with markers. That drawing technique now provides most of what little income I earn now. I lived in the gallery for 8 or 9 months, then went back to full time driving in the cab, hoping to rent an apartment at some point.
Living in an indie art gallery was pretty damn cool, and jump started my creativity, which was non-existent, for about three years, when I moved in. I became a visual artist in that crazy little gallery. I've now sold over 100 large drawings, in the last ten years. I didn't see that coming when I moved into the gallery, in the late summer of 2005. I didn't have a BMX bike, and I was really out of shape then. So I didn't do any freestyling in my "living room." I didn't have a car then, either. Electra did have a big roll-up door in the back, but the stage was right there, where garage bands played on the weekends. So I couldn't pull my car into the living room.
So in my weird head, the dream of a really cool live/work art studio/gallery/apartment housed in a commercial building still lives on. Personally, I need to sell my drawings for a lot more money to make that happen. But who knows? Maybe someday the dream will come true... again. As for the millions of people looking for a reasonable place to live, I think we will see more people figuring out ways to live in vacant commercial buildings since there are thousands of them sitting vacant or underused across North America. If this idea appeals to you, check out some of the links in this post for further ideas.
I'm doing most of my writing on Substack these days, though I still do a post here on the blog once in a while. Check out the whole Simulpocalypse series on Substack, all about the growing number of struggling and abandoned homes and buildings in the U.S..
I just stumbled across this talk, and Mr. Brooks gives one of the most brutally honest explanations of Western society I have ever heard.
For over 23 years now, I've had a tremendous amount of outside pressure put on my life. I've been unable to make a decent living since the beginning of this century. I had no idea where this pressure was coming from. There were a lot of conservative people coming into my life early on, and a fair amount of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians back in 2002-2006. The "Christian Right" seemed the best name to put on those invisible power brokers who were putting great pressure on my life.
Ultimately, I was pushed out of California, and to North Carolina, where my family had wound up living. I was pushed away from BMX freestyle, the weird little action sport that gave my life meaning. It became apparent that somebody, somewhere wanted me to live my life in a completely different way. Once I got to North Carolina, some people around me were told I had some incredibly high IQ score that no one had ever told me about. That may or may not be true. I still don't know, and I hate the entire idea of IQ scores at this point. It's a test score people, one test on one day, nothing more.
These past 23+ years have pushed me in ways I could have never imagined, and I figured out who I am, and who I am not. While it's still not totally clear, it appears some small group, part of the "educated elite" that Mr. Brooks talks about in the speech above, are the people who have been pushing me in directions I had absolutely no interest in for more than 23 years. I think I was supposed to "realize" in North Carolina that I had wasted my whole life by doing tricks on a "little kid's bike," and that I should go to college, grow up, and become a part of the East Coast establishment. I did not enroll in college in North Carolina. In fact, the exact opposite happened.
After more than 23 years of this bullshit, I have no intention of ever going to college. Not going to college was one of the best decisions I've ever made. I do not want to EVER set foot in the entire state of North Carolina for the rest of my life. I refuse to live in ANY conservative state. I would much rather die in my late 50's or early 60's as a homeless man in California, than to have ANY association with the "educated elite" that Mr. Brooks speaks of in the talk above. I want nothing to do with any of those people, any of their institutions, their religions, or anything else they are a part of.
I would rather die as a penniless homeless man in California that to be a part of their "elite." I want to earn a living here in Southern California as a writer, artist, and hopefully a video producer again, someday. I want to pay rent for my own apartment. I want to work smart and hard, doing projects I'm interested in. I want to go goof around on a BMX bike for an hour or two every evening, after a good day's work. That is success to me. NOTHING else is success to me. The educated elite of the world have nothing to offer me, they have nothing I want. They can't seem to understand this. So I will probably die in the next two or three years as a homeless man. That's fine with me.
Here's one of the many videos on YouTube looking at a handful of the abandoned places across the U.S.. There are literally MILLIONS of vacant houses in this country, and tens of thousands of abandoned commercial buildings, dilapidated factories, vacant stores, dead malls, recently vacant office buildings, and post-apocalyptic looking places in the United States. There are many more around the world.
Simulpocalypse-(SIGH-mole-pock-a-lips) is a word I coined to describe how the United States has a growing number of vacant and abandoned buildings, and post-apocalyptic looking locations, while normal, everyday society goes on simultaneously, as if it isn't happening.
Kids from the 1960's and 1970's, late Baby Boomers and Gen X kids like myself, grew up being told that a worldwide nuclear apocalypse could wipe out civilization at any time. That's a thought that can put a damper on your vision of the future. We saw a growing number of post-apocalyptic TV shows and movies as we grew up, ranging from the original Planet of the Apes movie from 1968, to the early Mad Max movies, and films like Damnation Alley, which featured the coolest RV ever. As kids then, we regularly had drills where we had to get under our school desks, which is what we were supposed to do if a nuclear missile was about to destroy our town. Really. Yes, we realized the school desk wouldn't really help, we would all be blown to smithereens, but no one seemed to care.
Now it's the year 2025, us Gen Xers are middle aged, about 50 years into "the future" of our childhood selves. Guess what, we have never had a full scale, worldwide nuclear apocalypse. That's a good thing. Yet... somehow... we have thousands of places in the U.S. alone that are abandoned, or now look post-apocalyptic. Places like this, and this, and even this. How the hell did that happen?
Why do we have so many post-apocalyptic looking places if we've never had a nuclear apocalypse? Or any apocalypse? Most of these individual locations are now abandoned for financial reasons, and some are abandoned because of environmental events, or a combination of both. Most people don't realize just how many of these places there are. There are over 12 million vacant houses in the U.S. at any given time. That number includes vacation homes, second homes, and houses that are for sale or are short term rentals currently empty. But there are lots of completely abandoned houses as well.
Detroit has over 70,000 abandoned buildings according to Google search results. Flint, Michigan has 24,000 according to Google. Gary, Indiana has over 10,000 abandoned buildings, and Youngstown, Ohio has 740. Gary only has a population of 69,000 people these days, and Youngstown has 60,000 people. These are four cities, all in the Midwest, that were hit exceptionally hard by the factory closings of the late 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's. But not all the abandoned places in the United States are in old, rundown industrial towns and cities in the Midwest and The South. I live in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles. This is high priced real estate in Southern California. There's a recently closed Guitar Center store a couple of blocks from me right now, and an abandoned small office building next to it. That office building has been vacant for a couple of years, or more. There's a dead mall, almost entirely abandoned, a few miles from here. This is really expensive commercial real estate. Even here, in dramatically high priced SoCal, there are plenty of vacant and abandoned buildings. Obviously, the huge areas devastated by the recent Pacific Palisades and Alta Dena fires in this region have added 12,000 more burned buildings to the list.
When I write about the Simulpocalypse, I'm not talking about these recent tragedies, most of which will ultimately be rebuilt. I'm talking about the thousands of other vacant and abandoned factories, dead malls, empty houses, vacant office buildings, and other dilapidated buildings all over our country. There are so many of these places, that Millennials and Gen Z people started exploring and documenting them, a hobby and movement called Urban Exploring or UrbEx.
On my Substack site, where I write in more depth about a variety of subjects, I've started a series of posts about the Simulpocalypse. I'm looking into the different aspects of this phenomenon, coming at the subject from many different angles. Why are these places abandoned? Why is this happening now? What kinds of places have been abandoned? What forces led to all these empty spaces? Are any of these places being re-imagined and rebuilt? If this sounds interesting to you, take a look. The first three posts are up now, and you can check them out at the links below.
This is a pre-pandemic Volcom surf video from about 2019, featuring surfer Noa Deane. This past Sunday, Liberated Brands, the company the owns most of Quicksilver, Billabong, Roxy, Volcom and other brands, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
I'm going to dig into this overall issue in more detail. But for now, most of you know that GT Bikes "paused" operations, dropped sponsored riders, and laid off people last month. Now Liberated Brands, the holding company for Quicksilver, Roxy, Billabong, Volcom, RVCA, Element (skateboards), DC Shoes, VonZipper, Honolua, and Board riders filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this past Sunday and Monday. Check out this article, and this article for more details.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers singing "Under the Bridge," a very personal song written by Anthony Keidis, about his home, the City of Angels, Los Angeles, California. Fire Aid benefit concert, January 30, 2025. The concert was a benefit for all the thousands of people affected by the terrible Pacific Palisades and Alta Dena fires of January 2025.
Thank you firefighters!
I watched them save the area I live in now, on the ground and in the air. Thank you for your hard work.
Here are some of the ROCK highlights from the Fire Aid L.A. concert (These song/set videos are getting taken down or seriously shadow banned, but I'll link the best ones I can find now)
Nirvana Reunion- 4 songs- Surviving Nirvana members plus singers St. Vincent, Kim Gordon, Joan Jett, and Violet Grohl
A poet for most of my life, I wrote this poem while the fires were still burning. This is a rewrite of a poem I wrote while working with the Red Cross on the huge Rodeo Chedeski fires in Arizona in 2002. I lost that original poem.
After the fire
I thought it was a nightmare
When I awoke
It couldn’t be real
Some kind of tragic joke
But there I stood
Amid the char
The house, my life
Even my car
The grass crunched black
Beneath my shoes
I had my family
But no idea what to do
Lost… the house, furniture
Our pictures and things
We had each other, the kids
And our wedding rings
Everything got blurry
I could still smell the smoke
With a charred 9 iron
I began to poke
I hoped for something
Some item dear
To have survived the inferno
A small reason to cheer
Soot, ashes, charred pieces of wood
Shattered picture frames
I wanted not to cry, I wanted hope
I wanted someone to blame
Our home, now ruins
It just couldn’t be real
I found nothing to pick up
I didn’t know how to feel
The skeletons of trees
In our backyard
Black, crisp, and silent
Everything was charred
I rubbed my eyes
I screamed loud at God
Why did this happen?
It was all just too hard
That’s when I saw it
A single green blade of grass
A shoot of life among the black
The future surging from the past
I walked closer
By the sliver of green, I froze
Against the forces of hell
That blade of grass rose
It couldn’t shout or scream
That shoot simply grew
If that blade of grass could start over
I realized we could come back, too
It was tough, the weeks after
We began anew, step by step
The memory of that blade of grass
I clung to and kept
Each day a bit of progress
To replace the life we had lost
Little things meant much more now
We struggled, but it was worth the cost
Each new day we woke up
Then we figured out what to do
If that single, green blade of grass could grow back
We knew that we could, too
-The White Bear
(aka Steve Emig)
I'm doing most of my writing these days on Substack, you can check out more of my work there:
This post is a paper trading (pretend) experiment, and should not be taken as financial advice. Read the disclaimer above.
On December 11, 2023, I tried to open a crypto account, so I could get at least a little money into the market to take advantage of the current crypto cycle. Because of my lame Obama phone, I wasn't able to transfer money into the account. So I decided to do a paper trading experiment instead. Here was the idea, " If I had $10,000 right now (12/11/2023), where would I invest it?" Not just crypto, but any investment vehicle. I began the paper trading experiment, a pretend account, then. You can see the original post at this link. I bought and sold a bit, and by March 11, 2024, this was my portfolio of cryptos:
.011995 BTC (Bitcoin)
.2259 Eth (Ethereum)
7.647 SOL (Solana)
56.931 AVAX (Avalanche)
74.962 DOT (Polkadot)
595.298 Matic (Polygon)
2,685.31 APE (Apecoin)
490.196 SAND(Sandbox)
510.204 MANA (Decentraland)
After March 2024, the portfolio was up about 40%, and I cashed out some of the positions, and bought other cryptos. I saw no reason to "invest" in stocks, gold, or anything else. From the very beginning, my timeline was what I believed would happen in crypto by late 2025 or early 2026. That's still the timeline I'm following. I just let everything ride, after March 2024.
Yesterday, January 21, 2025, I decided to "sell" everything in this porfolio, except Apecoin, at the prices available about 12:45 pm Pacific time. Again, this is just a pretend account, a "paper trading" experiment, to see how my ideas would perform. Here are the prices I "sold" each crypto at yesterday (1/21/2025):
Bitcoin (BTC) - $105,950.64
Ethereum (ETH)- $3,308.78
Solana (SOL) - $253.79
Polygon (Matic) - $ .45
Sandbox (SAND)- $ .59
Decentraland (MANA) - $ .50
Polkadot (DOT) - $6.70
Avalanche (AVAX) - $37.03
That pretend (again, this is a paper trading experiment) sale yielded $7,244.01, less 5% estimated gas fees, for a total of $6,881.81
That left my portfolio with just 2,685 Apecoin (APE)
and $6,881.81 in cash
I took the proceeds and bought 6,000 more Apecoin (APE) at $1.03 each, which cost $6,180, plus a 5% gas fee, for a total of $6,489
So now, just over 13 months into my "$10,000 Investment Challenge" my portfolio consists of:
8,685.31 Apecoin (APE)
and $392.81 cash in the account
Total value after 13+ months, Apecoin and cash, equals $9338.63
So the account is down about $660 from the original $10,000 at this point, but I'm 100% OK with that, since Apecoin is out of favor right now, and sitting at $1.03 per coin. APE peaked at around $27, and hovered between $3 and $7 for much of its lifetime. I have faith in Yuga Labs, creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT's, Mutant Ape NFT's, the Otherside NFT/gaming metaverse, and, of course, Apecoin, the unit of trade in all those realms. So I'm going all in on Apecoin at this point for my $10,000 investment challenge. Again, this is a paper trade, a pretend experiment, and should not be taken as financial advice.
Here are links to all the posts for my $10,000 Investment Challenge:
