My Sharpie Scribble Style Art 2005-2019 #8

Drawing for money begins in a serious way, November 2015...  BMX freestyle has been a huge part of my life.  For about 20 years, nearly every day, I was out somewhere doing tricks on my bike.  Working as a taxi driver, where I literally had no free time, finally ended that.  I started riding BMX in 1982, and started publishing a zine in 1985, as freestyle was really blossoming as a weird little sport, and I wound up working several jobs in the industry in SoCal.. 

When I moved to North Carolina in 2008, all my master tapes of BMX videos I'd made, all my magazines, and all the raw footage I never used, was in a storage unit in Huntington Beach, California. Before I flew to NC, my mom said she'd loan me the money to pay the back rent on my storage unit, and to have some friends ship the stuff to me.

A week after landing at my parents' small apartment in Kernersville, NC, I asked my mom to borrow that money and get my stuff shipped.  I had one of the four best collections of BMX freestyle footage, from 1990, on in the world.  My mom said, "No, we don't have money for that."  She does things like that.  I lost everything from my 26 years of being a BMXer, except a key chain.  I went into a deep depression, and soon started blogging about my adventures in the BMX freestyle world of the 1980's and 1990's.  All I had left at that point was memories.  So I planned to write 20 or 30 blog posts about my time in the freestyle scene and industry.  That way there would be a little record that I had existed.  After writing those 20 or 30 blog posts, I planned to flip a coin.  Heads- I'd hitchhike back out West to California.  Tails- I'd commit suicide.  That's how depressed I was after losing all of my creative work in late 2008, including my BMX stuff. 

What I didn't know then was that there had been an intentional push to get me away from the BMX world, away from "crazy Liberal California," and to get me to go to college in North Carolina, and focus on "intellectual pursuits."  That story is still unraveling, slowly.  This, it seems now, was because I tested as having an exceptionally high I.Q. back in 1985, though I've never been told the results of that test.  Some other people seem to have access to those results, and decided to push my life to serving their best interests.  that didn't work out too well.

The drawing above is BMXer Scotty Zabielski, from the Chicago area, riding ramps in a place known as the Skatherdral.  It's an old, abandoned church, in St. Louis, I believe, that was taken over by skateboarders and turned into a D.I.Y. skatepark.  Scotty was one of the first people to ask me to draw some of their photos when I started drawing for money in late 2015, and early 2016. 

Back to my tale.  In 2008, I had never spent any amount of time on the internet.  I went to the library, paid $5 an hour to rent a computer, and checked my email, and did the occasional Google search.  I'd been living in my taxi as other people, those who weren't computer geeks, signed up for AOL and Yahoo and began to "surf the internet," and to figure it out.  I didn't put much faith in that technology, and missed that whole era.  When I moved in with my parents in late 2008, in NC, I had their computer in my room.  So I started surfing the web every night, just looking up random stuff (and porn, of course). 

I had no idea that there even were online communities.  I'd lost touch with almost all of my old BMX friends in the late 90's and early 2000's, except the ones who called me up for taxi rides in H.B..  I started blogging about my days working at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, thinking I would kind of archive my memories.  Maybe, someday, a few random people would stumble upon my stories and read them.  But something weird happened.  One post, about my 25th, went viral in the Old School BMX online community.  I didn't even know that community existed.  People from the BMX world started emailing me and commenting on my blog.  I began to reconnect with all those old friends.

So I kept blogging.  From late 2008 to 2011, I wrote over 700 posts about my BMX days.  I've probably written 100-150 more since.  I built a following, completely by accident, at first..  I also started learning about blogging, how the writing world had changed with new technology, and started educating myself about how the world now works in the Information Age.  By the time I decided to start drawing for money in 2015, I already had a solid following from my various blogs.  Having a following is the game these days.  It was the old school BMXers, ones I knew from years before, and ones I'd never met back in the day, that started ordering drawings from me.  The footplant just above is another drawing I did for Scotty Z. in 2016.

Mid school BMX racer and my one time roommate, Mike Haupt, X-up at Sheep Hills, world renowned dirt jumps in Costa Mesa, CA.

Yeah, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  I think this is Michaelangelo, right?  Some BMXer's kid, named Luke,  was into the turtles, and he had me draw this for his Luke's birthday.  I actually forgot who I drew this for, but he sent me a pic, Luke was STOKED.  And that's the whole point.

Here's another of Scotty Z's riding photos he had me draw, a classic tabletop.  Scotty turned into my first serious art collector, going way out of his way to help me out over these last few years as I've struggled to get this art/writing business off the ground.  He has a beach house on Lake Michigan now with 10 or so of my drawings hanging on the walls.  I really need to get up there and visit one of these days.

This is a drawing I did of legendary freestyler, contest promoter, and bike company owner, Ron Wilkerson.  This was one of the "example drawings" I did to get people to order their own drawings.