Old School NorCal represent. Maurice Meyer selfie with Chris Rothe, Chris' son Max, Marc McKee, and me (Steve Emig). These guys let me hang, despite being financially challenged at the moment. Thanks guys. The weekend was epic. I've been stuck Back East for a decade, as the Old School BMX events got going, so this was my first one.
It all kind of came together at the last minute, thanks to my NorCal roots. In 80's BMX freestyle, I moved around a lot, which had the effect of letting me be a local in several different scenes over the years. First Boise, Idaho, then the Golden Gate Park/NorCal scene, The Spot in Redondo, the Huntington Beach Pier scene, The P.O.W. House/Sheep Hills/S&M Bikes scene, and The Van's Skatepark locals when we could still ride the Combi Pool, along with some smaller scenes.
So it was Maurice Meyer, the pro I talked to the most back when I lived in San Jose, the Curb Dogs/Golden Gate Park scene BITD, that asked if I was going to the San Diego event over Memorial Day Weekend. The main Old School event was the second edition signing party for The Birth of the Freestyle Movement book by Dominic Phipps. There was also a Mat Hoffman held vert contest, a sort of last chance qualifier for the X-Games, as well, and an BMX and art event.
Rich Bartlett from Block Bikes, where I'm now working, gave me at ride down the 14 freeway form Lancaster to a Denny's right off the 5, making picking me up a quick stop for the guys. Thanks Rich, it was a farther drive than I thought, and I asked him at the last minute.
Chris Rothe did the driving in his 4 door pick-up. In a weird coincidence, there was a great paved bank right at the at Denny's. But we wanted to get South, no session there. We headed South through the Valley down the 405, and picked up Marc in Venice. Last time I was in Venice, many years ago, it was still the hood. Not like Compton level hood, but "I'm not walking here at night" hood. Now it all looks like Santa Monica, really nice and forever out of my price range.
Another 45 minutes, then with all five of us in the truck, Chris said, "I think that guy's sleeping." I didn't know what he was talking about. He pointed it out. There was the Tesla above, doing 68 mph in the carpool/E-car lane, with the driver asleep. Like fully, completely fucking ASLEEP. Chris pulled up next to him, Drob took this photo, and I kept waiting for the guy to look up. He wasn't resting his eyes, he was out. None of us had seen that before. This was in Irvine, my old taxi driver neck of the woods. I don't care how freakin' brilliant Elon Musk and the Tesla engineers are, I would not, EVER, sleep in the carpool lane of the 405. But it was working for this lazy, rich fucker. Technology is crazy these days.
We stayed at a motel in Chula Vista, I camped out on the floor, you know, to give the weekend that true, old school BMX days feel. And because I'm a broke guy who's three weeks out from sleeping homeless under a bridge. Somebody tell the river otters under the Manchester side of the I-95 bridge in Richmond that I moved for work reasons, it was nothing personal. The otter couple acutally made pretty good neighbors, unlike a lot of humans. Steve Crandall, can you pass that word on for me? Anyhow, I digress.
Saturday morning we headed to Mat Hoffman's vert contest, in the chilly, overcast, May Gray weather. After a decade on the Eastern Seaboard, most of that in a place that hates BMX and action sports, it was good to see old friends and just hang and watch some good riding. My old roommate, Big Island Mike Castillo (photo above) was the first I ran into and got a pic with. We were roommates in Chris Moeller's condo in H.B. in 1995, when we both we skinnier and had no visible tattoos. Mike has since covered a lot of himself in tats, and I covered myself in blubber while sitting my my taxi for years. Tattoos would have been a better choice. You know Mike's going to be in an upcoming episode of South Park, right? True deal. He took a photo of me sitting on his new S&M, and texted it to Moeller. The response took about 30 seconds, "WTF?"
After watching riders practice on the vert ramp for a bit, alternating with saying "Hi" to other old BMX friends as they walked up, we started getting groups of guys lined up for photos. I was about to take the photo above, and one of the guys asked me to get in the photo. Some guy walking by said he'd snap a pic, so I handed him the phone. While we were trying to get a couple other people nearby into the line-up, I looked again at the guy I gave the phone to. It was Mike Dominguez. I didn't recognize Mike-freakin' Dominguez! I know I've been gone a decade, but that was pretty bad. So I got in one photo, then took this one. L to R: Big Island Mike, Hugo Gonzales, Rick Coronado, Xavier Mendez, Mike Dominguez, and Pete Augustin.
The contest had some pretty good amateurs on the huge, 13 1/2 foot tall ramp, as us old guys wondered if we could roll into it these days, or even way back in our younger days. I could have managed a foot drop, probably, back then. But I wouldn't even think of that these days.
The pro vert contest had that old feel of a 2-Hip King of Vert, or one of Mat's early comps. None of the big time, X-Games stuff. Just a small crowd of 100 or so watching some of the best riders anywhere blast. In the photo above, one of the pros, whose name I don't remember, airs out a huge downside whip. Despite the continuous winds, the top few guys were blasting. That includes Dennis McCoy, who, at 52, looked the smoothest on vert I'd ever seen him. He pulled a flawless barspin 540 at about 6-7 feet, and a glassy smooth flair, in his second run. Then DMC went for a 900 with not a lot of speed. And knocked himself out cold. He lay there twitching a bit, and a fire truck, then an ambulance showed up. The EMT's pulled the stretcher out, and headed behind the ramp, when Dennis had moved after coming to. Old school announcer turned fireman, Kevin Martin, was on the scene as soon as he heard Dennis was K. O.'d.
After about 15 minutes, the EMT's rolled an empty stretcher back, and put it into the ambulance, then stopped to watch the contest, which had resumed. I went over to talk to them, "Let me guess Dennis said he's going to walk it off?" "Pretty much," the EMT replied. "It seems he's been down this road a few times." I chuckled, "You have no idea..." Dennis was back to normal, well, there's nothing normal about Dennis, but he was at the book signing party that night.
The guy in the red striped shirt, watching the contest in the photo above, is Koji Kraft. Remember in the early 2000's when double backflips were a "Merry Christmas" trick, even for Dave Mirra? Koji used to double flips in demos back then. He was the first guy to really dial them in. He's one of the most underrated riders ever. Cool guy. He was in the vert contest last Saturday. He didn't go the highest, but was still throwing some solid variations at height.
The park we were at, I think, was called the Mission Valley YMCA park, but there's some family name in it as well. Anyhow, it had a really cool park section, and a "boardercross" track that Andy Macdonald had made a few years earlier, as well as a big park section. Chris, Maurice, and Chris' son Max all put the helmets on and got a session in.
It was during that period when R.L. Osborn, unseen for nearly 30 years by most of us, wandered into the park, with his son Dylan. It was really cool to seen him. He was the guy I most wanted to model when I really got into freestyle. Initially, I wanted to be the clean cut, pro rider/entrepreneur guy. That didn't happen, but I did stumble into the industry, and got to work with and ride with R.L.. He'd been gone so long, that everyone was re-introducing themselves. I told him my name as I shook his hand, and said I worked at Wizard a little while. Much to my surprise, his eyes lit up in recognition. "I remember you," R.L. said, "You're a really good writer." My stoke meter broke at that point. My writing skill depends on who you ask, but I'll take it.
After the chat with R.L., I watched the guys session some more. Max, Chris Rothe's son, got his sights set on doing a 180 off the hubba. That's him in the photo above, stepping up his game and landing a solid 180. He also landed a couple of 360's off the hubba right after that. Progression.
Another old friend, long time riding buddy, and one time roommate I ran into was John Povah, in my selfie above. I'm not disappointed to see him, I just can't operate a phone well. Despite a decade of blogging, I'm still catching up on standard technology, like working a smart phone. I'll figure it out, eventually.
The contest was full of old school faces, most of whom I didn't get photos of. Among them were...
I've got a new blog going, it's about building an art of creative business, and small businesses in general. You can check it out here: WPOS Kreative Ideas
After commenting on their photos on a French Old School BMX Facebook group Monday, I got to FB chatting with Seb Ronjon and later Franck Belliot. They put on this amazing exhibit about BMX, skateboarding, and scooter culture in 2011-12 called Beton Hurlant, in France. Not only that, but they flew Bob Haro over to check it out and comment on the exhibit. You can watch that video here, it's 17 minutes.
In addition, they put on the "Bob Haro Master Class," the video above. Bob shows slides and talks about how BMX freestyle began, in his own words. It's an hour long, I watched it, and it's just epic. This is how all of our lives changed because Bob liked doing tricks on his BMX bike. So if you're an old school freestyler, make some popcorn, or get a pizza and a couple brews, and lock yourself in a room where you can watch this in peace. I've never heard this explained so in depth by Bob himself before.
Also, Tuesday marked three weeks that I've been back here in Southern California, and I finally got back to a little bit of my Sharpie drawing. I've been busy trying to adjust, settle in, and get the Block Bikes Blog and online store going. While I've done a couple Sharpie "doodle art" drawings recently, the black and white stuff, I didn't do and of my scribble style stuff in about a month.
That's the longest gap in drawing since I got serious trying to sell my Sharpie art in late 2015. I lost all my art supplies, some were stolen (most likely by "authority types with badges" in Richmond), and the rest were lost when Greyhound switched buses on us, on my trip here.
Armed with brand new Sharpies and a sketch pad, I did this 11" X 14" drawing. I'm calling it "Dizz-pocalypse." Just a new type of background idea, I wanted to try out. I just got the OK from John "Dizz" Hicks to sell 20 copies of these. So those of you reading this get first dibs. 20 high quality color copies, best I can manage, signed and numbered, for $20 each. California residents add 7.25% sales tax (Damn, that went up!) So that's $21.45 for CA people. Reply on Facebook or email to reserve your place in line. Paypal the $ to me at: stevenemig13@gmail.com (steven, with a "v", not steve). Poster tube and shipping is about $7.50-$8, so I'm not making a ton off these, but it will definitely help me get back on track. You guys know my story. Here's the drawing. The colors are brighter in person, I need to get photos on the new phone down, it washed out a bit.
#sharpiescribblestyle on Instagram, Google Images, Facebook, or Twitter to see the 100 drawings before this...
Time to break out the Homer Woo Hoo! beer coolie. OK, I can't, I sold it, and I stopped drinking years ago. But this blog just surged passed another big milestone, 70,000 total page views, with the help of yesterday's "Josh White tailwhip" post. This is my second most popular blog ever, trailing only the original Freestyle BMX Tales in views. I seriously didn't know if anyone would read this blog when I started it, just under two years ago, in late June of 2017. Thanks for reading everyone, I'll try to keep putting something worthwhile out here (and elsewhere) as time goes on. I've started about 50 blog ideas over ten years, most of which faded soon after. My top four blogs have raked in about 275,000 total page views in their lifetimes, which I'm pretty proud of. For obscure niche blogs, that's pretty good.
More thoughts on tailwhips
I answered a ton of comments about Josh White doing the first tailwhip on dirt yesterday. Like I said in the post, at the time I shot it, I truly believed it was the first tailwhip jump ever. I was reminded that back in 1984, Mike Dominguez was trying alley-oop tailwhip flyouts out of the Combi Pool at Pipeline skatepark, before a contest. That's true, there's one photo sequence, and I've talked to riders who were there that day about those. I don't think he ever landed one cleanly, that's what I heard. But he was super close. But that is the first recorded tailwhip jump attempts in freestyle. Then Joe Johnson invented the tailwhip air in 1988, I believe, and did his first double, which I did get on video, in Kitchener, Ontario Canada, in the spring of 1989, at the 2-Hip King of Vert. Here's a still from my video of Joe doing a single that day:
I also was reminded that Mike Krnaich (still can't pronounce his name) did tailwhip jumps in Bully's Slow Ride video, which DID come out in 1990. So Crazy Red, you get the boot, Mike K. had the first tailwhip jump in a BMX video. And he was the ruler of tailwhip jumps in that era. I think Bully Slow Ride came out that summer (1990), and I didn't see it for quite a while, a year or two later. To the best of my memory, I shot Josh landing the tailwhip (with my camera shutting off) in the Spring of 1990. I definitely hadn't seen video, or heard of, anyone landing a tailwhip jump. So at the time, I thought I missed the shot of not only Josh White's first tailwhip jump, but the first one ever.
The riding progression was jamming at that time, and it wasn't unusual for two different people to come up with the exact same trick, totally separate of each other, at nearly the same time. I wrote about this subject specifically in my 2-zine pack, "The Spot" earlier this year.
And for the guys who ordered those zines and never got your copies, THEY ARE COMING, as soon as I make enough money to print and ship the remaining orders. I'm just starting to stabilize my life and make a little money right now. I'll get them out as soon as I can, I swear.
I'm glad the blog passed another big round number in the page view count. The new Block Bikes Blog, which I'm doing for Rich Bartlett at Block, just passed the 2,000 page view threshold, about six weeks into its life, which is a great start. I'll keep the stories and content coming! Thanks again everyone! Now I gotta get back to work...
Here's GT pro rider Josh White working the first four quarterpipe set-up at an AFA Master's contest in the fall of 1987. Blasting out of obscurity (pun intended) in Oregon, to instant fame in the BMX freestyle world, Josh raised the bar considerably as he broke onto the scene in a big way. He was known for going incredibly high for the time period, hitting honest 10 to12 foot plus airs when that's where the ceiling of the best riders was, and doing variations a 7 or 8 feet up. Keep in mind the ramps then were 8 foot high by 8 foot wide, wobbly, wooden quarterpipes, that usually came just up to vert.
Josh also set himself apart with his super stretched variations. This was said to come from years of training in kickboxing (MMA didn't exist then, BTW), and daily stretching through all those years. But the thing that I never could figure out about Josh was that he would approach the ramps at what seemed like half the speed of any other vert rider, amateur or pro, and then blast 9 or 10 feet out. He could just pump more air out of his speed than anyone, and even he didn't seem to know quite how that happened, because I actually asked him about it once.
As fate would have it, I met Josh in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, on a layover to the Tulsa, Oklahoma, AFA Masters contest in April of 1986. I traveling on my own, but had been tapped to write the article about that contest for FREESTYLIN' magazine. So I knew it was going to be a pretty cool weekend for me. That amazing weekend started when I saw GT pro freestylers Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, and some blond kid in the DFW airport. I'd met Eddie in Whistler, British Columbia the year before, where he and Chris Lashua hung out for a week on a tour break. I knew he didn't remember me, but it gave me, a pretty shy guy by nature, a reason to go say "Hi." Eddie was really cool, remembering the week in Whistler, and introduced me to top flatlander Martin Aparijo, and the new guy, Josh White. Eddie added, "Josh just did his first photo shoot for FREESTYLIN' the other day." I said, "Oh, cool." We talked for about fifteen minutes, until the last possible minute to board our plane, and then took our separate seats.
The next day, I saw just how good of a vert rider Josh was, holding his own (and then some) with all the heavy pros like Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, and the rest. I wound up hanging out with the Haro team all weekend (since I was traveling on my Pizza Hut salary and had no room or rent-a-car), and spoke with Josh, Eddie, and the others here and there over the course of the weekend. Almost all the pros, and many top ams, were staying at the same Holiday Inn motel, playing pool, and doing flatland in the parking lot all weekend, and everyone was talking about the new GT vert guy, Josh White.
In another bit of coincidence, that photo shoot Josh did with FREESTYLIN' led to a small, and completely amazing, photo on the cover of the August 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'. In that same issue happened to be an article about zines, where my zine, San Jose Stylin', was listed at the top BMX freestyle zine in the country. And, my article about the Tulsa contest also was published in that same issue. Now I'm definitely biased, but I also think the cover design was the coolest cover FREESTYLIN' ever did, which says a lot. They had many amazing covers. This is it:
In those days, magazines took three months to come out, from writing and photos to finished copies, so this epic issue hit newsstands in late June. A one hand no-footed can-can was simply unheard of then. A seven foot high, super stretched one hand no-footed can-can, on the famous T.O.L. ramp, was simply un-fucking-believable. This cover, all by itself, raised the bar of BMX vert riding, and the article inside raised it even higher. The icing on the cake was Josh's quote, blown up in big letters, "I consider myself a ground rider." With this issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine, Josh White exploded onto the national BMX scene. Meanwhile, deep inside the magazine, I kind of oozed quietly into the background periphery of the national freestyle zine, as a writer/zine guy.
Within days of this magazine hitting the stands, I interviewed for, and was hired at, Wizard Publications. So this issue changed the course of Josh's life, and my own, and shed light on some other up-and-comers in the freestyle world, little Mathew Hoffman got his first editorial photo, Joe Johnson got his first magazine mention, and NorCal bros. Chris and Karl Rothe got a photo. For an obscure part of the country to have a freestyle contest at the time, the 1986 Tulsa AFA contest shined a light on a lot of new blood in the BMX freestyle world.
By the time the magazine hit, Josh was already touring the country for GT Bikes. I moved to Redondo Beach, California, and began a new life of my own, first as a magazine guy for a few months, and then as the guy you yelled at when the ramps moved at AFA contests, and as their newsletter editor. While I never knew Josh well, we knew each other, talked from time to time, mostly at mostly at contests. Josh became legendary as part of the mid-1980's quarterpipe riders, pushing the older skatepark riders in the rapidly progressing vert scene. Josh went on to join the high air posse of Todd Anderson, Dino Deluca, and the other Camarillo riders.
In my life, I spent the last half of 1986 working at Wizard Publications, then nearly all of 1987 working for Bob Morales at the American Freestyle Association down in Huntington Beach. Bob got me into video work, which all happened at Unreel Productions in nearby Costa Mesa. Unreel was the video unit of Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear, which were soaring in popularity at the time.
My life turned to one of either taking the bus or riding my freestyle bike the length of Huntington Beach every morning, then cleaning up at work. On the days I rode, my 11 mile ride home was a wandering cruise to a whole series of H.B. street and flatland spots. I spent most of my weekends sessioning under the H.B. Pier with inlander-but-local freestyler Mike Sarrail, and freestyle skaters Pierre Andre', Don Brown, Jeremy Ramey, and the random locals who came by, like Mark Gonzales and Ed Templeton.
On one of those many weekends at the Huntington Beach Pier, in later 1988, I think, Josh White rolled up. We got to talking, and busted some flatland for the beach crowd. Then Josh told me a friend of his said there were some walls right by the beach that would be good to ride on. Wall rides were a brand new thing then, and everyone was looking for good walls to ride. Josh told me where these walls were supposed to be, right on the beach, from Goldenwest south. I rode the bike trail day after day for over a year, right by there, and was always looking for new places to ride. I told Josh would have seen them if they were there. But it sounded like something worth looking for, so he and I headed off to find these mysterious walls.
We rode north from the pier, and where the bike path headed up the hill, kind of across PCH from Taco Bell, (about 11th street), he asked about the lower, dirt path. For some reason, I'd never ridden it. It was dirt, and when I was heading to the pier to flatland all day, I didn't want to get my brakes all dirty, I guess.
So Josh White and me ride up this wide dirt area, below the bike path and above the beach itself. It's actually where the railroad into H.B. was built in the early 1900's, just before the big oil boom of 1920, as I found out later. Much to my surprise, there were all these old, crumbling, slightly under vert, concrete retaining walls, about 11 feet high, with murals on them. Most of them had thick sand in front of them, preventing a ride up to hit them for wall rides. We finally found one that didn't have much loose sand, the wall with the Blues Brother mural, and the Three Stooges painted on it. On the very left corner of the wall, there was a built up mound of dirt, maybe 18 inches high, a lip to get your bike up on the wall. Obviously, someone had ridden it before.
Best of all, the wall was just a bit under vert, maybe 80-85 degrees steep, which made it easy to get much higher up than any normal wall ride. Josh was doing 4 or 5 foot high wall rides right off the bat, and nearly 7 feet up before we left. I wall ride the other way, and found a tiny lip, a few inches high, farther down the wall, and got maybe three feet up the wall. I was stoked. Being able to actually grip on the wall, rather than the wall slides we had been doing, made us feel like a hero on the Blues Brothers Wall.
Then we got into a fakie wall ride session. While I'd done fakies on small walls with launch ramps before, I could never get the back wheel bounce to do a true fakie wall ride and land it. But I could roll up the Blues Brothers Wall, like a ramp fakie, and I was having a blast. Josh was getting a couple feet higher up the wall. Hey, he was Josh White, vert superhero. No surprise there. Right before we gave up on that session, he was doing fakies, pulling off the wall, and tweaking a nearly clicked turndown on the way down, and landing them. I'd never seen anything like that before. While Josh rarely came by the H.B. Pier after that, I started riding those walls on a regular basis. I did have a couple of more sessions with Josh, and others, over the next year or so. So that day, I got to know Josh a bit better, just as a rider. The Blues Brothers Wall, and several others, are in my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend (below), from 10:57 to 12:20, and around 13:26.
At that time, I had moved jobs from the AFA to work at Unreel Productions, which was on edge of the Costa Mesa mesa, looking north over the oil fields near what is now Sheep Hills. The Sheep Hills trails we know now didn't exist then, but there were some jumps above Sheep's current location, where the condos above Sheep Hills are now, by the bottom end of 19th street. There was a good sized hip jump, and a roll-in then flyout ditch jump, and also a four foot deep, concrete ditch, with banked walls, at the bottom of the hill. As a freestyler who was never good at jumping doubles, I was all about the ditch jump.
This jump was 5 minute ride from the Unreel office, and I realized I could hit it on my lunch break. This was probably the spring of 1989, I think. I started riding over there and getting a quick, half-hour jumping session in at lunch, then hitting the deli near our office on the way back for a sandwich, and eating in my dub room as I got back to work. Life was good.
One day, I was hitting the ditch jump on my lunch break, and Josh White rolled up. I was trying to learn tailwhip jumps, something I'd been struggling with for two years at that time. Joe Johnson did tailwhips on vert then, and even doubles, and I think Mat Hoffman was doing single tailwhips at that time and learning doubles. But no one had done a tailwhip off a jump yet, even off a flyout jump. I had worked out the basic move, leveling the bike off and getting the back end around, but I couldn't land them. I was always beside the bike, not up over it so I could land it. I'd also been trying bunnyhop tailwhips for a year and a half at that point, which everyone knew was impossible. That was just my stupid idea that would never, EVER happen. That's how different the thinking was at the time. Saying you wanted to land a bunnyhop tailwhip in 1989 would be like telling people you want to land a bunnyhop double backflip today. Never gonna happen. (Watch, someone will do a bunnyhop double back off a drop in or something now, give it a year).
At the ditch jump, Josh said he'd thought about learning tailwhips off jumps, but just never tried it. So we took turns hitting the flyout jump, getting maybe 18 inches off the ground, and trying to land a tailwhip. I got close, but couldn't land it. Josh worked out the basic movement pretty quick, and then was getting about to the same point. Neither of us could land it. I headed back to work, leaving Josh riding alone, and that was the last time I saw him at that ditch jump.
A couple of days later, back out at that jump, I snapped my chain heading into the ditch, went over the bars while just rolling in, and dove, Superman-style, into the sandy dirt. The whole side of my face and body was covered in dirt, those painful, stinging scrapes, and then some blood. I scootered my bike painfully back to Unreel, washed up in the bathroom, and went back to work. All afternoon, one person after another walked into my room and asked, "What the hell happened to you?" I only went for a couple more lunchtime jump sessions after that, and started hitting the jump, and other local spots, after work, on my long, sessioning, ride home.
This is my 1990 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend. The footage was shot over the spring, summer, and early fall of 1990. If you go to 23:16, you'll see me do three quick double peg grinds on a ledge with screw-on, knurled pegs, and then it leads into a section at a flyout jump. That jump was called Oceanview, and was an epic spot for a few years, in Huntington Beach. It was located at Oceanview High school, on the corner of Warner and Gothard in H.B., and was a big skate spot, as well, in the 1990's. A big addition was built onto the school years later, and this spot is under roof now.
This video section is from a collection of about 6 or 7 different sessions over a few months. Keith Treanor is the standout rider, in the black T-shirt obviously, and John Povah, Woody Itson, Josh White, and Andy Mulcahy are also in it. Josh has the white T-shirt, gray shorts, and light hair. All the footage with Josh was shot in half an hour, one evening when I ran into him there. It was just us, and one local kid, who wandered off pretty quickly. After shooting him doing a bunch of his standard vert variations, some of which he'd never tried on dirt. Josh and I got talking about that time we were both trying tailwhips the year before, at the ditch jump in Costa Mesa. He told me he'd never tried them again. But Oceanview was the perfect jump to land one.
So... with my two-hour camera battery fading, and dusk approaching, Josh White started trying to land his first tailwhip off a jump. He got the feel back pretty quick, and was coming real close. Remember, NO ONE... EVER, had landed a tailwhip off a jump then, as far as I know. If you go to 25:19 in this video, you see Josh come close to landing one, and then, off balance, come running towards the camera. That was the second to last try Josh took that night. I know this because, on the next try, Josh White landed the first tailwhip off a jump I had ever seen, or heard about. Even today, 29 years later, I believe that was the first tailwhip jump ever landed. And my battery died as his bike left the jump. My camera shut off when bike was mid-air. I missed the shot. I missed the shot of the first tailwhip jump ever landed.
I screamed. That wasn't out of place, because Josh White screamed, too. He was super stoked. He didn't realize we were screaming for different reasons. Josh was about ready to strangle me when he asked to see the footage, and I told him my battery had died while he was mid-air. We watched it back, and I think it clicked off just as his bike was leaving the jump. Darkness set it, both in the Huntington Beach evening, and in our souls, knowing what I'd just missed documenting. Ultimately, we just shook our heads and rode off in our separate directions. Sorry about that one, Josh.
If you go to 35:48 in the video, you'll see Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson do what I believe is the first dirt jumping tailwhip to ever appear in a BMX video. This one happened at Edison Jumps, behind Edison High School, on the other end of Huntington Beach. That's located at 21400 Magnolia in H.B. It's a toe dragger, but it's a tailwhip, and it happened on double jumps, not a flyout jump, about three months after the one I saw Josh do. Josh White is also all over this section, but that was shot on a different day than the session with Crazy Red, Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer and the rest. I never met Crazy Red until that day. By the way, this section is the first time the S&M Bikes/P.O.W. House crew appeared in a video as well.
Old school freestyler, Pipeline local who never rode vert, and punk rock encyclopedia (look that word up on Wikipedia kids), Mike Sarrail just shared this one on Facebook. Yeah, I blog about old school BMX freestyle from the 80's and 90's, and do a bunch of social media stuff these days, but I don't catch many episodes of Scotty Cranmer's YouTube channel. Mostly cause I'm lazy, but also because I'm jealous. The guy's got 1.4 million subscribers. He could be president. Wait.. there's an idea. The White House could use some trails...
Anyhow, I just watched this one, and it's pretty damn funny. I lived and rode through the 1980's, and I there's only two of these tricks I could have done in my prime. But those of us geezers from the old days remember that there were hundreds of tricks, variations, and moves that got lost along the wayside as time rolled on. Today's riders are more about a taking a smaller, standard set of moves to bigger, badder, and crazier proportions and new terrain. And a lot of us old farts make fun of these young guys... because we can't do that big ass shit. Sure, our bikes back then were made of chrome-moly potato chips welded together, and a four foot loading dock drop could snap a frame, but few of us could hang today. (List exceptions in the Facebook comments).
The reality is, the young guys rip. But the drive for originality and inventing completely new stuff can only happen once, and we got that time period. While it's easy to make fun of full leathers and helmets in flatland contests, neon bikes, and old school goofiness, there were a lot of 80's tricks that were pretty dang hard. So props to Scotty for getting Trey and Big Boy to give this a shot. It was really fun to watch and entertaining... especially because the book won.
If you're into BMX, young or old, this one's worth at watch, particularly if you see this on a Monday and you're at work.
I've got a new blog going on, it's about building an art or creative business, and small businesses in general. You can check it out here: WPOS Kreative Ideas
I don't have my own photos available at the moment, so here's a clip that gives a good overview of the riding and skating spots up at Woodward West.
Wednesday I went with Rich Bartlett (from Block Bikes, who I'm doing blogging and stuff for now) to Woodward West, for the first time ever. At a little over 300 pounds, and having not ridden hardly at all for years, it was a trip seeing such and amazing bike and skate park. The dirt pump track up on the hill is now concrete, and I was jonesin' from the beginning to roll around a little. But I didn't have a bike, and would have most likely wrecked myself in a dumb crash. My job was to hang and get some still and video footage. My stills are not on my computer yet, and we haven't gone through the video, was had some of the big concrete flow pool, the pump track, but mostly the foam pit session. There will be some of that on the Block Bikes Blog soon.
After being stuck on the East Coast, away from serious riding spots, for a decade, it was insane to see how much good stuff there is at Woodward West. It was seriously like walking into an actual location with most of the stuff we used to dream about as riders in the 80's and 90's. Amazing stuff to ride in every direction. I can't wait until I get a bike and can at least begin to carve around there some day.
The night ended back here in Lancaster, with a trip to In-N-Out, California's most loved burger place. A post session meal with a a handful of really good riders talking bike stuff. Good times.
Then, about 2 am or so, I woke up with really bad stomach pain. I thought it was just indigestion at first, but it was a really intense, deep gut pain, something I'd never felt before. A few hours later, that led to a trip to the emergency room, blood tests, and a CT scan. Still in tons of pain (but having no insurance), I was released, with a minor hernia I've had for years being named the culprit. In any case, I've been in bed, barely able to move, for the last two days. This morning I'm feeling better, though still pretty week since I didn't eat, and barely drank water, for two days. I also managed to lose about 11 pounds in those two days. That sucked on every level, but I'm now under 300 pounds for the first time in like 4 years, I think. After doing a little research this morning, what I was feeling in my gut sounds a lot more like a gall stone getting stuck than my hernia, which is in a different place than the pain was. So I'm not sure exactly what happened, but it sucked, and I'm now on the mend.
Since the most to California, I've been trying to acclimate, and working long hours on the Block Bikes blog and social media, to pump up the new online store. I haven't bee doing any of my scribble style Sharpie drawing for about a month now, the longest stretch of not drawing since 2015. I have been doing a little doodle art, black and white Sharpie drawing, in the evenings. I've also been ignoring this blog to some extent, so I should get back to more regular blogging here over the next several days.
That's it for now. Now I've got Block Bikes work to do.
One year ago tonight, in the woods between Bolton Park and Hanes Mall, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I was homeless and sleeping in a large tent at night. I spent my days drawing my Sharpie drawings, about one a week, which I was selling consistently, in an attempt to get back on my feet financially. But on May 14th, 2018, a bunch of men, at least 6 or 8, came out to my tent, well hidden in the woods, and started stomping around. I was laying down, under my covers, getting ready to call it a night, and eventually go to sleep. The guys, at least 6, I'd say were right by the tent, several more were off in the distance, and they repeatedly threatened to beat me if I didn't stop blogging. Yeah, blogging. THIS blog. I wrote about my artwork, I told stories of my days in BMX freestyle in the 80's and 90's, and I wrote about my thoughts on the economy, and the big picture of where I think our society is heading with high technology and changing social ideas, and that I saw a serious financial recession coming before too long.
I don't know who they were, although a couple had been out near my tent in the couple of weeks before that, at times, talking mostly about Google rankings and the fact my blog got something like half of the organic traffic looking up "Winston-Salem." Something like that. They were pissed about me, a guy with no college education, but who's read dozens of books on the subjects, and watched the financial markets for 30 years, writing about the economy. They said that a homeless person had no business writing about anything. One guy said he had a baseball bat, and he wanted to use it. They threatened to kick in my tent and beat me. After all the weird stuff I've been through in the last 18 years or so, I just wasn't in the mood to be intimidated anymore. I told them to go ahead and kick in the tent and beat me. That seemed to puzzle them, and they talked, within earshot, saying if they beat the crap out of me, I might be in the hospital for 2 or 3 weeks, but when I got out, I'd just tell the story in my blog. I said, "Yeah, that's pretty much what will happen." One guy stepped up and offered to break all my fingers. I actually laughed at that point, a little.
There was a thunderstorm coming in, I knew that from the weather report. They were outside my tent for 20, maybe 30 minutes, I'd say. I just waited. I just didn't really give a fuck, I'd already be harrassed for a month or so in various ways. One guy said, "Everyone knows that every homeless person is a worthless piece of shit." I thought, "Fuck you, mother fucker. If I survive this, I'll make "Worthless piece of shit" my business name, for the business I want to start some day." That was a bit wordy, but "WPOS" has a nice ring to it. So the WPOS blog is being built, the first post will be finished tomorrow. Actually, it's morphed into "WPOS Kreative" over the last few months. I'll share a lot of my thoughts on using today's media for small businesses, and stuff like that. More on that later.
So much crazy shit has happened since the "lynch mob" night, as I think of it, that it seriously feels like 10 years have passed. I have hundreds of stories from this past year, and few will ever be told. I'm trying to move on.
Now, a year later, I'm back in California, for a week now, and I'm doing blogging and social media to build up my friend's online bike store. I have a roof over my head now, and things are in the early stages of recovering from my couple years on the streets of Winston-Salem and Richmond, Virginia. It's been a weird ride. I nearly died from an allergic reaction to medicine in Richmond, and spent 7 days in the hospital. For a couple months, I woke up every couple of nights, sleeping on a porch of an abandoned building, hearing people say, "That homeless man there has the highest I.Q. in the country, it's 198. We're trying to figure out what to do with him." I still don't know what that crap was about. I later slept on the banks of the huge James River, where I met a pair of otters and saw a nutria one morning. It's been a weird ride.
Now, hopefully, I can finally work towards making an actual living at some point, and actually start seriously rebuilding my life. We'll see what happens. But things are a lot better now. What a difference a week, or a year, can make.
If you read this blog much, you know I landed back in Southern California last week, and my official job now is blogging and social media promotion for the new Block Bikes Online Store. I'll still be blogging on other interests and doing Sharpie art, my unofficial "jobs." Part of what I'm doing for Block is building a huge image bank of BMX, MTB, and other bike stuff on Pinterest. So last night, I got an idea for a new board there, Bike tattoos. I've collected 130 different photos so far, and you can check them out here: Block Bikes Bike tattoos on Pinterest. You have to sign up on Pinterest to scroll through the whole thing, which takes a couple minutes. It's worth it. Pinterest is set up as an image search engine, so you can look up pretty much anything, and get tons of photos, like good bike tattoo ideas. Or bad bike tattoo ideas... Happy Monday everyone.
Oh yeah, that's my leg in the photo. I had to get your attention. Not a real tattoo, I actually don't have any tats. Really, none. But I do have a self-done brand made of about 35 burns. Oh, and NO, I'm not going to get that white bear doing a tabletop tat. OK, now you can make fun of me...
I've got a new blog going on, it's about building an art or creative business, and small businesses in general You can check it out here: WPOS Kreative Ideas
Here's an intense moment of Harrison Ford talking about what it really means to be an actor. In another interview I just watched, he said that he took a drama course in college mostly because he was lazy. His grades were slipping, he didn't have any real direction in life, and drama seemed like it would be an easy class, and maybe a way to meet women. But in that course, and those that followed, he found he really liked the actual work of acting, of being part of this group of people collaborating on a movie set, working to tell a good story.
I was a big fan of the show Inside the Actor's Studio. While I've never had any interest in being an actor, I am, at heart, a writer. By the time that show was on, I had already worked on several TV show crews. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life after burning out on the TV world. I loved hearing the various actors get deep into what it was like to actually be good at their craft, and their thoughts on acting, which is, basically, telling the stories that writers write. I learned an incredible amount about storytelling from that show.
When Harrison Ford was on the show, where this clip comes from, he told people he was working mostly as a carpenter, repairing houses or building projects for people around the Hollywood area, and taking acting jobs he could get, when the role of Han Solo in Star Wars came his way. He didn't know it would be a hit, and thought it may likely flop when they shot it. But the movie took off, and made him a movie star, one who would then get offered good roles on a fairly regular basis.
James Lipton, the host of Inside the Actor's Studio, asked Harrison what he felt when the first Star Wars movie took off. Harrison rubbed his hands together and said, "OK, NOW we can get to work." He knew that he could stop being a self-employed carpenter, and he could finally be a serious working actor. Harrison Ford wasn't in it for the fame and to be a movie star. He really likes the day to day work of actually being an actor. He was happy, not that Star Wars made him famous, but that it gave him the chance to get to work at acting full time, from then on.
I'm not Harrison Ford, by any means. But over the course of my life, I've come to grips with the fact that I'm a highly creative guy, and I like actually doing the work of coming up with new things. Zines. Blog posts. Sharpie drawings. Videos. A funny new T-shirt design. Hopefully a real book one of these days. But for that last 18-20 years, I've struggled. I managed to sink to various levels of homelessness for around ten years, on and off, without drinking alcohol or doing drugs. A whole lot of really crazy shit has happened. When it comes right down to it, the Universe put me through the wringer to see if I was serious about doing creative work. I was financially trapped in a part of the country where there just isn't the culture to do highly creative work for a decade. And that frustrated the fuck out of me.
This past week, with a kind of vague description of a job, no set agreement on pay, and only a little backpack to my name, I made the 72 hour bus ride across the United States. The trip sucked, Greyhound is a horrible way to travel, but it was the viable option, and it got me here. I did make dozens of "50 Shades of Greyhound" torture jokes along the way, though.
Rich Bartlett, a guy I knew from BMX 30-some years ago, made the trip possible. We started talking, and I know there are a million things I need to learn technically to make this work. I need to help jump start an online store using the social media skills I've learned selling my artwork and blogging successfully. Tired from the bus ride, beaten down after nine, really intense, and nearly deadly, months on the streets of Richmond, Virginia, and hearing all of Rich's different ideas, I was overwhelmed.
But I was still excited. The reason why is the same reason Harrison Ford was excited when Star Wars took off. Now, I sense, I can really get to work. Now I'm at a point where I can dig into the actual day to day work of helping to build up a friend's BMX online store. I can blog about bicycles, the multi-faceted little vehicles that changed the entire course of my life as a young man. And I'll spend my spare time still doing some art, and sharing a whole bunch of ideas I have about building small businesses in today's rapidly changing, media saturated world. I think small businesses, ones that use today's tech and communications well, and are well run, by decent human beings, are our only real hope of building a solid future. If you read this blog much, you know futurist thinking is a big part what I do.
So now, as I officially have a day off, I can catch my breath, and do some planning. Because creativity doesn't take days off, it's always going. And that's how I like it.
Happy Mother's Day to the moms out there. Have a good one. Now I'm going to walk to McDonald's and get busy on the next set of ideas to make happen. That's what I do.
Just to prove that Pinterest is not just a women's site for crafts, snacks and D.I.Y. home projects, here's a collection of weird vehicles the site popularized. One man helicopter? Hell yeah.
Pinterest, very simply, is an online version of a bulletin board, cork board, or the walls of your cubicle. It's a place to collect and look at photos of really cool stuff.
We all have dreams. We have goals. We may have a Bucket List of things we want to do, or places we want to go before we kick the bucket. We also have an internet chock full of billions of photos. When you sign up for Pinterest, you get a dashboard, like any other online social media platform. You build "boards," which is a section where you can look at photos from Pinterest itself, and pull others from all over the internet, and collect them. You can also create your own pins to share with others. Then you collect photos, or "pins."
Every time you open the site up, Pinterest shows you a whole bunch of new photos it thinks you might like. You scroll though, click on the icon on the ones you like, decide which "board" you want to pin it to, and click again. Though I got into Pinterest to promote and help sell my Sharpie drawings (which it did help, search #sharpiescribblestyle" on Google images, Instagram or Pinterest), I wound up just liking the site. In the evening, when my brain's usually tired from the stuff I did all day, I love to listen to something online, a podcast or show, and add pins to my Pinterest boards. For me, it's pleasurable and relaxing. So I've been doing this just for the hell of it. I really dig Pinterest. Here are a few of the boards on the new Block Bikes Pinterest page.
Evel Knievel
Mat Hoffman
Huge Bike Air
Bike memes
There are personal pages, and you can open a business page, which is why I'm writing this blog post today. Over the last month, as I've been blogging and doing other social media for Rich Bartlett's Block Bikes Online BMX store, I've also been building up a Pinterest page. I have well over 1,000 photos pinned to the various boards at this point. And I'm just getting started. You can check it out here: Block Bikes Pinterest page, but you need to sign up to see it all. You can get a good glance without signing up, but need ot sign up to dig into it all. It takes a few minutes. No biggie. Here are a few more of the boards I've made on it:
Dream BMX road trips
Crazy bike bails
Tweak: Leary's and lookbacks
Tabletops
So what is Pinterest good for? There are several things. For one, like your cubicle wall or a cork board, it's a cool place to put photos of places you want to visit, or cars, bikes, motorcycles, airplanes or other big purchases you want to get some day. It's a good place to put visual representations of your goals. It's a good place to collect photos on any theme or area of interest. Pinterest is a great place to get inspired, either by the thousands of quotes, or by the art, design, cooking, craft, or DIY projects. It's a great place to get ideas for most anything you want to do. You can collect photos of epic cars or motorcycles, hovercrafts, or ice cream sundaes. On my personal board, I have something like 800+ pins on a board called "Ridiculous desserts." Hey, that's me. I also have a board with about 75 pins of pizza, and one called "Cinnamon rolls and pancakes." I also have over 1,000 photos pinned of Bruce Lee, my first hero as a kid. A thousand. Meanwhile, here are a few more boards on the new Block Bikes Pinterest page.
DIY projects for old bike parts
Old school BMX skateparks
Bikes jumping cars
Banana seat bikes
Now, if you have a business, any kind of business, you should have a website, blog, and some social media. That's simply part of the game these days. With a business page on Pinterest, you can create your own pins with text and a link to your site tied to the pin. Pinterest is a good way to drive traffic to your website, blog, or social media, which is a part of what I'm doing right now, with this blog post. A small part. There are only about a dozen linked pins of the 1,000+ pins on the page. Plus the link is on the front on the page, under the title. If you want to buy a bike from us, you can find the site. I'm not worried about that.
As I mentioned up top, I got into Pinterest when I Googled Sharpie art online, an image search, and saw none of my drawings come up. One big thing I noticed was that about half of the art that did come up in my search was photos from Pinterest. So I built a Pinterest page, tagged my own art with tags, started using one main hashtag, #sharpiescribblestyle, and my stuff comes up big time now. If you ask about my art now, I say, search #sharpiescribblestyle. I don't care if you search on Google images, Instagram, Pinterest, or even Twitter, you WILL find my art. The problem was that I was starting from below zero financially, and my original drawings didn't sell for enough to make me a living. I couldn't come up with the capital to jump up to a profitable level. So now I'm telling you business people some tips on using Pinterest, which can drive a bunch (technically, a shitload) of traffic to your sites, and really build your web presence. All this while I'm doing the same type of promotion for Block on their Pinterest page. Here are a few more of the boards where I've collected photos on individual riders.
Brian Foster
Chris Doyle
Morgan Wade
Corey Martinez
Dakota Roche
There are a handful more. The guys I picked are kind of random so far. And I'm just getting started. Like I said, I just plain LIKE doing stuff on Pinterest. So I'm going to keep doing this. It would be cool if you check out the Block Bikes page. Some of you will, no matter what I say here. That's cool. More than that, I want you guys to check out Pinterest itself, because it does have a ton of stuff that's cool for men. And the more guys that get into it, the better the whole thing gets. In addition to collecting photos, you can message others, do joint boards, use it to relax, or use it to blast a ton of people to your own business sites and social media.
Here's my personal Pinterest page, and my biggest board is "Street Art/Urban Murals," which has 2,470 pins. My second biggest is actually "Action Sports Women." But there's a bunch of BMX freestyle, art, 1,010 pins of nearly every Bruce Lee photo online, some punk rock, 818 crazy desserts, and a bunch of Mark Twain quotes, among other things.
So that's it. I think Pinterest is cool for guys. It will get cooler if a bunch more of you get on it as well. If not, whatever. I'm not leaving it, and it will help us sell a ton of shit here at Block Bikes in the coming months and years. What you do is up to you. Have a good weekend.
Courtesy of Shannon Gillette, a Boise BMX local who now works for USABMX (BMX sanctioning body), this video is racing at the Fort Boise BMX track, in 1983, I think. I know it says 1984, but I won a contest to help redesign the track in late 1983, and we rebuilt it for 1984. This is the old jump set-up, before the re-build. In any case, this is the spot where the idea of a "scene" that catapults one group ahead of another, first hit me.
On a sunny, brisk, October day in 1982, all the BMX riders from Blue Valley, the unofficial name of our trailer park outside of Boise, packed into my dad's silver Ford van. With about 8-10 kids and bikes packed in, I drove us all to the Fort Boise BMX track, on the north end of downtown Boise, nestled into the edge of the foothills. It was the very first BMX bike race, ever, for most of us. The weekend before, after someone discovered there was a BMX track in Boise, four of us guys and three BMX bikes packed into Scott's mom's Ford Pinto, which was not a hatchback, and went to the race. Scott, James, and Rocky (I think) raced, while I coached and checked out the scene. They all came home with trophies, and we told the rest of our trailer park posse about the BMX scene at a real track. Sure, the track was built inside of an abandoned sewage pond, but we didn't know or care then. It was REAL BMX.
Here's the thing, most of our bikes were pieces of crap. I had a "Kmart special" bike frame, a Sentinal Exploder GX, with some decent parts on it. James, the fastest among us, had a Huffy frame, the "official" cheap, piece of crap bike of the 1980''s. But over the summer of 1982, BMX had become our thing in our isolated trailer park, in the desert (technically sagebrush steppe) a few miles outside of town. Every evening after dinner, as the blazing hot summer temperatures cooled, all of us high school and junior high kids came out and some kind of sport took place. When I moved there in early June, 1982, it was usually a football, basketball, or whiffle ball game. Sometimes we just argued and threw rocks at each other (it was a trailer park.) But often we wound up at these little jumps on the edge of the park, that some motorcycle rider had built a couple of years earlier.
We were White Trash kids, so we were from somewhat dysfunctional families, some more than others, and we joked, argued, talked smack, and continually tried to be better at something than the other guys. As June turned into July, we began to spend less time playing football, basketball or whiffle ball, and more time out at the BMX jumps. One kid bought a BMX magazine at the grocery store with hard-earned lawn mowing baby sitting money ($1 an hour and all the government cheese you could eat), and we all read it and got motivated. We pushed each other, we built our jumps bigger and better, though they were tiny by today's standards, and BMX became our thing. When we broke a stem, or our fork dropout, or our cranks, we bought higher quality ones at Bob's Bikes (and lawn mower repair). We all ended up with several gold anodized parts on our bikes, because other BMXers didn't like the gold color, and Bob would sell them to us a little cheaper. We all had stolen bike parts on our bikes as well, some of the time. We did what we could to keep riding, so we could jump higher than Scott, or do a cross-up better than Brian, or whatever.
By the time we made it to that first race, we were pretty good riders. We were poor kids, by and large. OK, my dad was an engineer, we were solid middle class, but my mom habitually over spent, and my parents moved to the trailer park to save money for a year or two so they could buy a house in town. That plan actually did work. But day to day, we were broke ass teenagers with no place close to get an after school job. So we scraped by and built up our bikes... and our riding skills, by riding every day, and continually pushing each other to improve.
A funny thing happened on that race day. Our Blue Valley trailer park posse, in jeans and T-shirts, with paper plates for number plates, kicked some racing ass. Sure we were all novices. But with the small number of riders, we all raced some intermediate racers, most of whom had $400 to $600, dialed in, name brand bikes, fancy leathers (uniforms), and lots of racing experience. Every one of us, in our first or second races, got first, second, or third. There were seven official local teams racing that day, and I figured out that, had we been an official BMX team, we would have placed second out of eight.
The Fort Boise locals were no slouches. Sure, we were in Idaho, but there was a solid BMX racing scene there, and some riders (with well off parents) raced four to six races a week in the area. They were serious. They were chasing points standings we knew nothing about. Yet our trailer park posse smoked many of them on the track... in our first race.
After the post-race jumping session, the best part of racing then, I drove our elated crew back out into the desert, my brainiac side wondering why we managed to place so well. That was my first inkling in the power of a "scene" of people could have. As I got into the emerging, brand new offshoot of BMX racing, BMX freestyle, or trick riding, I saw that it was small groups of kids, 3-4-5 or so, in random parts of the U.S., that started and promoted our sport, in different areas. Scenes. A couple kids would see a trick show, or buy a magazine, and go out and start learning tricks on their bikes. As years turned into decades, I realized that these small "creative scenes" were how art scenes, music scenes, high tech scenes, and other creative environments, started.
When I heard about the "Creative Class" concept in a local entertainment weekly in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 2009, the concept of scenes was well known to me. Richard Florida's research into high tech scenes, and why they clustered in certain regions, put a larger framework around what I'd seen happen over 20-some years in BMX freestyle, skateboarding, snowboarding, art, and music. I learned in his work how these small groups of people, sometimes, turn into major economic engines for their regions. While they don't have the absurd money making potential of high tech, the action sports I was involved in not only became obscure sports that have gone global, they became worldwide industries.
This morning, I read this article about "Brain Drain," put out by City Lab, who build on Rich Florida's ideas and research. I know some regions are going to extreme measures to get highly intelligent people into their areas. I found that out the hard way. But on my three day bus ride from Virginia to California this week, I saw signs of creative scenes springing up all over. I came to a city outside L.A. to join a BMX/bike business, but I saw signs of several really cool art scenes in several cities along the way. I wandered into El Paso's arts district while on a layover, looking for a mini mart to escape the ridiculous bus station food prices. Charlottesville, Virginia had signs of a cool art scene. So did a few other cities, which are kind of lost in the haze of the crazy, 72 hour bus experience.
I've come to believe these small "creative scenes," not just art and music, but action sports, gaming, crafts, street art/graffiti, food trucks/restaurants, custom cars and motorcycles, and, of course, high tech, are key to our economic future as a nation. So while I help my old BMX friend, Rich Bartlett, get his online BMX shop off ground and jamming, I'll be writing more on this idea of creative scenes, and how they are important in our weird, chaotic, rapidly changing world. Much, much more on this area of thinking to come... Now go create something cool, then make your own scene better.
One of the great songs of the 1990's, big favorite of mine long before homelessness was an issue in my life. We all walk around judging other people, all kinds of other people, by sight. But we don't know those people's stories. We don't know where they've been and what they've done in their lives, or what they've endured or not endured. We don't know what's it's like to be them.
Once again, I'm suddenly no longer homeless. After a three day bus ride across the country, Rich Bartlett of Block Bikes has brought me on to do work for his online store, looking beyond my homeless situation in Richmond, to the person he knew me as 30 years ago, and to what I've done online blogging and promoting my art while I was homeless. He saw enough to take a bet to help me get back going again.
So now I have a place to work, a room nearby to stay until I really get going again financially and can get an apartment, and a stable environment to heal and build on. It's a whole new situation, there are a bunch of skills I need to learn, and, obviously, I need to keep up my end of the bargain. But I'm out of homelessness. Hopefully for the last time. But I've learned how crazy life can get, and I know weird things happen sometimes.
How does it feel? I'm pretty pragmatic. I've had the rug pulled out form under me so many times, that I never get my hopes up. When something good happens, I'm stoked, and look towards the next step. Right now, it feels like moving into a new house a long ways from the old one. There are a million things to do, and I need to make some lists, organize it all, and just plug away at the things that need done, one by one. Sleeping without worrying about otters, rattlesnakes, and a wandering black bear, that's a good thing. My body has been beat to hell the last nine months, and I need to begin healing it. But mostly, there's just a huge list of things to do. Kinda overwhelming, but I've done it before. So that's how it feels. Like, "OK, Let's get to work."
So let's start with how people escape homelessness. The Three basic ways people leave homelessness:
1) People "plug back in" to a family or friend's household, sleep on the couch, in a spare room, and work to get back on their feet completely. This is the way MOST people leave homelessness, and it doesn't cost the government a dime, and it doesn't rely or need any non-profit organizations. This also happens over the course of a day or two when it happens. Quick and easy.
2) People go into a homeless shelter or program, they get a caseworker, a social worker to help them enter and go through various programs. They spend months in a shelter, living in their car or weekly motels, or on the streets, go to free meals mostly, sign up for every possible for of government assistance, and sign up for the local "rapid rehousing" program. From what I've seen, most of those programs take 6 to 18 months to get housing, paid for by some combination of government and non-profit groups. In the process, the homeless people have two basic tracks to follow, addiction and mental health. In most cases, people fake mental health issues, and some physical issues, and many also have legit addiction issues and go through set programs for those. The basic plan is to scam the Social Security Disability system, and qualify for a disability check for life. These people wind up not working officially (because they'll lose their check), but often work under the table. Meanwhile they're living in a cheap, ghetto apartment, all paid for mostly by your tax dollars. There are now AT LEAST 7 to 10 MILLION working age people, living on disability and other handouts, that your tax dollars pay for, EVERY MONTH. MOST of these people scammed the system. Some are legit, and I get that. But mot are scammers. I've lived in that world. In fact this system is propping up several states' economies. This is an enormous financial and social cost for this country, and is also a main root cause of the opioid "epidemic." 3) People find GOOD PAYING work, stay at a shelter or live homeless for some time, while building up the resources to rent an apartment or room, get the clothes and household goods needed, and slowly rebuild their lives. This is a tiny fraction of the total homeless population, because our society is heavily tilted against this type of recovery. It simply costs too much for a motivated person to pull themselves out of deep poverty. You can't do this on one or two part-time minimum wage jobs. It takes at least $12 to $15 a hour, full time, MINIMUM, to even have a chance at making this happen.
Think of things this way, for every homeless panhandler the average person sees each day in a city, holding a cardboard sign, there AT LEAST A MILLION people who are on Disability, and most of them, (at least 60% I'd estimate) have scammed the system to get a free check for life. And you're mad at the guy on the corner asking for a dollar. But you ignore the 7 to 10 million people you're paying the rent and food for, because they're not obvious to you.
About 3 million Americans a year are homeless, BUT NOT ALL AT ONCE. Most are temporarily homeless and you never see them, and they find a place to stay within 2 to 3 months. No one knows exact numbers, but these are the best I've found online. At any given time, there are an estimated 800,000 or so homeless people. These are old numbers, from a huge PDF I found from around 2004, I think. But that's the best numbers we have to go on now.
So most of the homeless people that you actually see have fallen so far down, that it takes a heroic effort to get back on their feet, or they are in the programs mentioned above, biding their time until they get free housing and a check, and you pay their rent and bills for the rest of their lives. That's they system in place now. It needs to change. We have millions more homeless people coming in this next big recession, which isn't too far off.
One last thought:
There are more spare bedrooms and empty buildings in America than there are homeless people.
The Nasty Jam. So... dirt jumper Cory Nastazio held this jam so long ago, even he doesn't remember what year it was. The location was Gorman, OK, outside of Gorman, which is the middle of nowhere, off The Grapevine. That's what the 5 freeway, north of Los Angeles, is called, as it rises up out of the central valley, and winds through the Santa Susana mountains, and then back down into the San Fernando Valley, just north of the L.A. basin itself.
Last night, I asked Athene, Freddie Chulo's girlfriend at the time this happened, what year this was. I knew their boy Armando was toddler size, and by gauging Armando's size, she used her mom memory, and she pegged this as the Spring of 2002. So I'm going with that, because I don't remember exactly. Thanks Athene.
I can't remember how I heard about this, I was sort of randomly running into the Sheep Hills locals at this point, now and then, and I rode up to the Nasty Jam with Barspinner Ryan Brennan (:23), Freddie Chulo, Athene, little Armando, and another rider. Marvin Lotterle, maybe? I'm not sure. I took my video camera to shoot footage, so my footage of this is another bit I lost in 2008, when I moved to North Carolina.
We were all pretty broke then, and we drove up from Orange County, through L.A. itself, through the Valley, up the Grapevine, and then down some desert road. We passed the Middle of Nowhere about two miles before we got there. Then we got up there, and it was in a federal park or state park or something, which meant there was like a $8 vehicle charge. There were like five of us, and we didn't really have the money (if we wanted to eat later, which we did). We called this lady who was helping Cory put on the event, and she said, "There's five of you and you can't afford $8?" She got the obvious answer back, "We're BMXers." Sure, Cory Nastazio was a BMX rock star then, rollin' fat and blingin', and Stephen Murray (:24) pretty much was as well, but not the rest of us. Anyhow we scraped it up, and bounced down the Jeep trail to the Nasty Jam.
Although it was way up in the mountains, it had that total backyard feel. One big, sketchy-ass jump, with a dirt mound roll in a ways away. Plywood on the ground to smooth things out a bit, and hot, hot Southern California desert sun. The riding, for that time, was off the chain, as you can see in the clip. Cory himself was blasting turndown flips, stretched Superman-seat grabs, and 360 tailwhips. I remember Reuel Erickson was doing his Superman decade jumps, which I'd never seen before. Then we had the flips, 360 tables (Butler was there), and other variations of the day.
At a time when the X-Games was turning action sports into big crowd, overly organized, stadium-like events, the Nasty Jam was low key, chill, half-assed (in organization) and loads of fun, just like we like it. There were a dozen pros maybe, and a bunch of young kids running around and watching. It was a fun afternoon in the mountains with bikes. Or a camera, in my case. Like they said, we bought raffle tickets, a little money was raised to help a fan of Cory's, a couple bikes were given away, and the band played as the afternoon faded.
The whole BMX posse headed down into Gorman, or one of those I-5 crossroads places, for a dinner that was paid for by Nasty, or someone. We took over some upscale type burger place, and had a great dinner and talked smack and joked around.
One thing I specifically remember was that the woman who helped Cory put on the Nasty Jam had a son, a skinny kid who was totally into BMX. That kid was going around, table to table, talking to all the pros, and telling them he planned to be a pro rider like them some day. I learned many years before, that those random kids actually might turn into amazing riders some day. Mat Hoffman and Steve Swope were two random kids I met in Tulsa in 1986, when they were unknown to the national scene, a couple months before Mat first got sponsored. So when some 14-year-old kid tells me he's gonna be a pro someday, I keep in mind that it just might happen.
Obviously, I'm talking about that kid for a reason, because he's this guy now:
Yep, that kid hanging out at the restaurant was a young Dakota Roche, then coming up on his 15th birthday.
I saw him around now and then after that, and remembered his name. So that's another tale of why you shouldn't blow off random kids you meet at a contest or out riding, you never know who they'll be. And last night, Armando Chulo, a toddler at the Nasty Jam, learned he spent a day chilling with Dakota Roche, before anyone knew who he was. Armando's a tall guy of about 19, heading out on his own now. How quickly they grow up. Well, except for Nasty, not sure if he's ever gonna grow up. What's he up to these days, anyway?
