80,000 page views! Cool...

Can I get a Woo-Hoo!  Thanks Homer.  Two years and 1 1/2 months in, this blog just hit 80,000 page views.  So thank you for reading everyone, I'm stoked that all of you keep checking out my stories, Sharpie art, and random weird ideas.  This blog is a weird mix of my old school BMX freestyle stories, my futurist thinking, thoughts on the economy and where society is heading, and my Sharpie (#sharpiescribblestyle) artwork.  That's a weird mix, but it's the stuff I'm most into.  When I started this blog in late June 2017, I really didn't expect much of a readership at all.  You guys have blown my mind, and I appreciate that. 

The blog crept up the last 1,000 page views or so.  Shortly after my Facebook feed got all weird for a few days, about a month ago, this blog suddenly started getting about 2/3 less page views than normal.  I'm not sure what's going on there, probably some of the same monkey business happening in the rest of my life.  But 80,000 is a nice, big, round number, which is always a cool milepost as a blogger.  Of the 30+ blogs I started for one reason or another (they all seemed like good ideas at the time), four have gained good followings, only  my Freestyle BMX Tales blog got more page views, than this one, about 125,000 total, back in 2009-2012.  Make Money Panhandling, which started as a joke to learn SEO, and turned into a sometimes serious, sometimes humorous look at homelessness, f got about 63,000 page views during its lifespan, back in 2010-2012.  My original Old School BMX freestyle story blog, FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales, got about 25,000 page views back in 2008-2009.  I took all of those blogs down completely in 2012, during a really dark time after my dad's death.  I regret taking them down, but that's life.  I did a repop version of Freestyle BMX Tales in 2015-2017, but I wasn't consistent with it, you can check it out here.

As for my life now, I'm homeless, on the streets, still, and struggling to make some money to get back on track, as always.  As soon as I started making some money selling my drawings online back in June, my Paypal account got frozen for no apparent reason.  I'd never updated my phone number on it, so now it's a long process to unfreeze it.  That was a big gut punch as I tried to get myself going financially.  I've been struggling to make day to day living money, as well as money to make more copies of drawings to sell, to help me get back on track.  The behind the scenes pressure on my life has stepped up again.  After the police completely avoiding me (which is really strange when you're homeless) in Orange County for about 2 1/2 months, I've suddenly had three run-ins with the police in a week.  No tickets, no arrests, just warnings.  That's the kind of thing that happened to me on a regular basis from 2002 to 2008, when I was forced to leave California, and banished to the hell hole that is North Carolina, for ten years.  After ten years in a living hell, I draw cool pictures now, and I'm still just trying to build a small business, and make a living selling them, blogging, and doing that kind of thing.  In today's world, that's totally possible, but raising enough money to give this business a fighting chance has been impossible.  I honestly don't know if I'll ever be allowed to make a living again, but I'll keep trying.  That's what I do, keep trying to live my own life in this weird world of 2019.

Thanks again, I'll try to keep writing pretty interesting posts, and hope you all find a few worth the time to read.