Here's some of the craziest BMX footage I shot, about 5 years after that gig at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines. The 2-Hip King of Vert at Mission Trails, in early 1992.
In late November of 2008, I found myself living in the spare bedroom of my parents' tiny apartment in Kernersville, North Carolina. I couldn't find any job, and I had just spent a year on the streets of southern California. I was massively depressed, and hated North Carolina from the minute I got there. BMX, skateboarding, and everything I was into, didn't seem to even exist in NC.
But, for the first time in my life, I had a computer in my room, hooked up to the internet. I started "surfing the web" each night, as we used to say. After a couple of weeks, I decided to write about 20 or 30 blog posts about my time working at FREESTYLIN' magazine in 1986. I found out online that main trio from the magazine, Andy Jenkins, Mark "Lew" Lewman, and Spike Jonze, had come out with a limited edition, collector's box set book about FREESTYLIN'. I wasn't mentioned in the book, and neither were a few other guys who worked there or contributed to it in the early years.
So I started a blog called FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales, and decided to write 20 or 30 blog posts about my time working there. It wasn't so much that I was pissed, it was more like, "Hey, I worked there, too, and I have a few cool stories." That short stint working at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' had changed the course of my life. So I started a really ugly blog. No photos, no videos linked, because I didn't know how to do that. It was just white type on a black background. I started telling weird little stories of my life working at the mags.
At that time, I didn't understand the internet and online world at all. I would go to the library in Huntington Beach, and rent a computer, to check my email or Google something once a week or so. Up until late 2007, I was mostly driving a taxi seven days a week, and never really got online. So in 2008, when I hit "publish" on each blog post, it seemed like I was sending that little story out into this big black hole of the "world wide web," and maybe, someday, someone would stumble across it.
After a couple of weeks I started getting emails from Old School BMX freestylers. Then one blog post went viral in the Old School BMX online community. I didn't even know there was an Old School BMX community online. A bunch more old friends, and a few new ones, connected with me online. Most of them told me to keep blogging. I've been blogging pretty regularly ever since, I've published over 2,400 blog posts, in fact. I recently figured that, at 600 words per post, that would be about 1.4 million words, comparable to 17 or 18 novels. Crazy.
My biggest blog, until recently, was the original Freestyle BMX Tales, which I did from late 2009 to 2012, I think. I wrote over 550 posts, and it managed to rake in over 125,000 page views. In 2012, after my dad died, I got depressed and deleted all my blogs. That's one of the dumbest things I ever did. I immediately regretted it. The current version of Freestyle BMX Tales is the third version of that blog, and much smaller than the original.
I've actually tried about 50 blog ideas over the last 13 years. But now this blog is my biggest ever, with 750 blog posts, and over 132,000 page views. Not bad since I've mostly written about BMX freestyle in the 1980's, which only had about 1,000 hardcore riders in those years.
So thanks again to everyone who has taken a bit of your time, and read something I've written. I'm going to keep plugging along in this blog, and other places, as long as I can.
Here's my "Addicted to Blogs" post from a while back, where I looked into the blogs I've tried, and added up the stats on them. Links to the surviving blogs are in this post.
No comments:
Post a Comment