Look at things differently. My perspective of a Jimi Hendrix mural in North Hollywood, CA. 2020. #steveemigphotos, #SEstreetlife
Sometimes you can take life by the horns and force it where you want it to go for a while. Sometimes life decides to kick your ass for a while, just to see what you're made of. If you don't believe me, try to remember what you had planned on January 1st, 2020. Your life's been a bit different the last couple of years, than you imagined, hasn't it. For over 20 years now, life has been kicking my ass, with the help of a few douchebags here and there. Things didn't go as I planned. But then, things never go as we plan.
I first became homeless, for an extended time, in late 1999, right after I started working as a taxi driver, I got out of it a few months later. But I've been in and out of homelessness, on and off the streets, at various levels. since then. All together, I've lived about 15 years without an apartment. I've lived in my taxi for 5 1/2 years, I've lived in a tent in the woods for 9-10 months, through intense Carolina thunderstorms, suffocating heat, and even snow and temperatures down to 12 degrees F. I've slept outside in bushes, on loading docks, porches of abandoned buildings, at outdoor bus stations, and even an old slave cemetery.
Homeless man with couch, Studio City, 2021. #steveemigphotos, #SEstreetlife
Want some street cred? I'll sell you a kilo. I've got far more than I need. I've dealt with all kinds of people, weather, animals, bugs, and a small rat snake that found its way into my tent. Living on the streets, while Life itself pummeled me in one way and then another, molded me into someone different than I was 20, 30, or 40 years ago. I survived a few things that should have killed me, nearly missing a head-on car crash at 55 mph, a horrific bout of cellulitis, and a suicide attempt 7 years ago, in North Carolina, where I took enough lithium to kill an elephant. God, The Universe, or whatever you want to call it, gave me a bonus life. I've focused on being much more creative since, and unapologetic about being creative. Since then, I have sold over 100 original pieces of my Sharpie scribble style artwork. I've written half of the 2,400 blog posts I've published in my life, since then, drawing in another 200,000 page views, across my blogs.
As we began coming out of the Covid-19 period this spring, as we all struggle with inflation, and now head into a stock, crypto, and real estate collapse, and into a long recession, I pondered where to focus my creative efforts. I've been writing about "the coming economic downturn" for 4 years now. It's here.
Two days ago, sitting at my sleeping spot, watching the first light of dawn, on Friday the 13th, I realized that life on the streets, in all its facets, has been the main theme of my life for over two decades. At the same time, I saw this crazy period of economic crisis and massive change barreling down on all of us. Then 2020 came along. Then 2021. Life has been pimp slapping damn near everyone for a couple of years. But it's not over, there's a lot more change to come.
Coyote in the early morning, about 60 feet away from where I was sleeping. There are urban coyotes all over Southern California. As a general rule, they leave people alone. #steveemigphotos, #SEstreetlife.
I realized if was time to talk about what I've learned, dealing with the lessons of the streets, and coming into my own creative work. We're all going to have to get more creative to survive, and thrive, in the next several years ahead. So the idea for new personal blog popped into my head. Steve Emig's Street Life, hashtag #SEstreetlife. I'm leaving Steve Emig: The White Bear, with over 800 posts, and 135,000 page views, behind. I'm starting fresh, with a new vibe, and more creative content. #SEstreetlife is about building new lives in what I believe will be one of the most chaotic and crazy decades in history, The Tumultuous 2020's.
In September of 2018, shortly after I landed randomly in Richmond, Virginia, I learned old BMX friend, and founder of FBM Bikes, Steve Crandall, lived there. When we met up, he gave me some food, some coffee, and his old iPhone 5. I've been snapping photos of things I see on the streets with that phone ever since. These are a few of those photos. Huge thanks to Steve for that phone. It's been cool to document bits of the craziness of my life these last 3 1/2 years.
You up for a crazy ride? I hope so. Follow the link over to Steve Emig's Street Life, and let's figure out how to make this world a cooler place. Let's go create some shit.
Rich kids with a little spray paint, a little creativity, and a hidden parking deck. Is this real? Or just some bullshit? Time will tell. #steveemigphotos, #SEstreetlife
I've given up on Steve Emig's Street Life blog, and back to using this blog as my personal blog. But I have a new blog about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, and making a living in the recession. Check it out:
This is the full video of The Ultimate Weekend, my 1990, self-produced BMX freestyle video. This was the 8th BMX video I produced or edited, and cost about $5,000 of my own money to produce. It sold about 500 copies in the U.S., through a sketchy surf video distributor, and I sold him the foreign rights. I think he sold quite a few more overseas, but I have no idea how many.
This video idea actually started in 1986, when Andy Jenkins, my boss at FREESTYLIN' magazine, asked us other editorial guys if we had any ideas to produce a FREESTYLIN' magazine video. Bob Osborn, aka "Oz," forked out a reported $40,000 to produce a video of the BMX Action Trick Team in 1985, Rippin'. While it was well produced and had good riding, it didn't sell well, and lost a bunch of money. So in 1986, if we mentioned video to Oz, it brought back bad memories.
In that era, when you wanted to make a video, you hired a professional video production company, usually the kind that made TV commercials for local businesses, and industrial videos. A mid grade professional camera could run $10,000 to $20,000 then, and a mid level editing system could run $50,000 to $100,000 or more. "Broadcast quality equipment, like the local TV news and networks used, were much more expensive. VHS home video cameras were still relatively new, and VHS editing systems weren't available. To produce a decent quality video in 1985, you had to hire a pro team, and they were expensive. Those teams didn't have a clue about BMX, so when they made this video for the BMX Action Trick Team, they did it in the traditional documentary style, with lots of cool close-ups, visually interesting shots, and a lot less riding than videos today. While the video had great riding for its day, it just wasn't super exciting to BMXers. In addition, a 30 minute VHS video could easily sell for $30-$40, retail price A 1985 dollar is like $2.67 today, so paying $30 then for a 30 minute video back then is like paying about $80 today, for a video we could watch for free on YouTube, or stream for $9 a month from a service. So that's the other reason they didn't sell a ton of those videos, they were really expensive for that time.
So when Oz thought about videos in 1986, he thought of a big expense with little return. But times were changing in video technology, VHS cameras were falling in price, and the smaller Video 8 camcorders were just becoming available. It was the very beginning of the D.I.Y. video era. A friend loaned Gork, the BMX Action editor, and my roommate, a video 8 camcorder. Gork, assistant editor Lew, my other roommate, and me shot a bunch of BMX riding, and goofy little comedy ideas with it. Gork edited a compilation, by tying it to our VHS VCR, and made a pretty cool home video. It was entertaining enough that Andy got the idea to pitch Oz with the idea of producing a FREESTYLIN' magazine video, shot partly with Gork's camera, which would save a lot ton money in production costs. So Andy called us other three editorial guys into an after work meeting, and asked us to come up with ideas for the video.
My idea was simple, just follow our real life. We spent our weekends going to contests and BMX events, or riding with some of the best riders of the day. So in my concept, we would get off work one Friday night at 5 pm, and wander around riding with all top pros, on flatland, ramps, and maybe pools, all weekend. Then we crawled in, tired from a great weekend of riding, back to work Monday morning, the end of the video. Since we worked at the top freestyle magazine, and we all rode ourselves at some level, we did that anyhow. The video would be us magazine guys having the ultimate weekend of BMX freestyle fun. The other three guys promptly shot down my idea. Their ideas were more exciting, and a couple sounded like they could be a cool video. As things worked out, the idea never got pitched to Oz, and no FREESTYLIN' magazine video was ever made, except Gork's homemade video, which I'd love to see today, if it still exists.
I got laid off a few months later, I just wasn't the right fit at Wizard Publications, and a couple months later they hired 17-year-old Spike Jonze. He was the right guy for Wizard then, I went on to become editor at the tiny American Freestyle Association, or AFA. The AFA was three people in a small industrial unit, in Huntington Beach, and we put on the local and national BMX freestyle contests at the time. There were about 3,000 members of the AFA, and they all got the newsletter I edited every month.
A few months into that job, Bob Morales, my boss, had me produce a 30 second TV commercial to air on local MTV, for a national contest in Austin. Local commercial spots were cheap then, something like $25 each. The commercial we not great, but pulled some more people to come check out the contest. I later went on to produce six contest videos for the AFA that year, 1987, shepherded through the process by the people at Unreel Productions, the Vision Street Wear video company. Vison sponsored our contests, and sent a cameraman to all the nationals, and part of the deal was that both Vision and the AFA could use the footage. They did the editing for our videos, and I logged the footage, and picked the shots, and made sure the videos got made.
After working on several AFA videos at Unreel, they hired me, when they needed extra help. From December 1987 to early 1990, I was basically a production assistant at Unreel. WE made all the videos needed for the Vision empire, which included Vision, Sims, and Schmitt Stix skateboards, Sims snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothes. Unreel had about 8 people, four of them producers, and I was everyone's assistant. I spent most of my time making copies of video footage for people across the Vision group of companies, and running to pick up equipment or supplies.
Unreel was weird as production companies go. Most production companies then were centered around one TV series, or made super cheap home videos. Unreel was living off the crazy profits that Vision Skateboards were making during the 80's skateboard boom. We shot a lot of footage, and then tried to figure out what to do with it afterwards. We produced all the trade show videos, commercials, and random footage that promotions, the art department, or another department might need. The company put out several home videos of skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX freestyle, and body boarding, like these: Psycho Skate, Snow Shredders, Freestylin' Fanatics, Barge at Will, and Mondo Vision.
Unreel also put out a syndicated TV series of six, one hour shows, called Sports on the Edge. Action sports rarely got on TV in the 1980's, and usually only as a quick news segment. ESPN didn't want to touch that series, though they had aired a couple earlier skateboard shows. The quote from the suits at ESPN in 1989 was, "Nobody wants to watch skateboarding on TV, and what the hell is snowboarding?" Unreel Productions was ahead of the curve.
Unfortunately, in 1989 and 1990, skateboarding faded in popularity, the third big wave of popularity crashed, and Vision Street Wear went down in popularity, and BMX pretty much died. The corporate money pulled out of those sports, and the business dropped dramatically. While the Sports on the Edge series aired nationwide on local stations, thanks to our syndicator, and got good ratings, there wasn't money to do follow-up series the next year. Instead, Vision dissolved Unreel in early 1990, and one woman and me, the two cheapest people on the payroll, were moved to the main Vision building. She quickly found another job in Hollywood, leaving me sitting alone in a big office, with very little to do.
I didn't really like the videos Vision was putting out. There were pretty cool, but a little hokey, with older skating or riding, not the most current stuff. Even though BMX freestyle had collapsed as an industry, the riding was evolving as fast as ever, particularly street riding. The first well covered street contest was in the 2-Hip Meet the Street in the Spring of 1988, less than two years before. I bought an $1,100 S-VHS camera on credit, and started shooting my own footage on the weekends in early 1990, just going wherever sounded interesting. The idea of The Ultimate Weekend concept was still in my head, and that became the theme for this video.
Initially, GT rider Jess Dyrenforth, who lived in Huntington Beach then, was going to be the main rider that the video followed from spot to spot. But Jess was getting into inline skating then, which was still surging. So when I called Jess to go ride and shoot video, he was usually busy. A couple months into shooting, I met John Povah, an English vert rider living in H.B., and Keith Treanor, an unknown and super hungry rider, who had just moved to town from New Jersey. Keith didn't have a job at the time, and was always down to go ride, and he ripped wherever we went. So Keith became the standout rider of the video, with John close behind. My flatland riding buddy from the H.B. pier, Mike Sarrail, went most of the places on the weekend, usually driving. Mike was a really good flatlander, but didn't like being in the video.
Little by little, word got around, and we went all over southern California, from the P.O.W. House backyard in Westminster, where guys like Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, and John Paul Rogers lived, to the local jumps at Edison High school and Magnolia in Huntington Beach, to the Tijuana Skatepark, Mission Trails near San Diego, and the Nude Bowl, way out by Palm Springs. There were no skateparks in southern California then, and street spots and backyard ramps were the main riding areas.
I shot video from February or March of 1990 until the beginning of September. I quit Vision out of boredom in July, but was immediately hired to drive their dually and ramp cross country on a three week skateboard tour. As soon as I got back, I flew myself to Indiana for a 2-Hip halfpipe contest, and shot footage at Bob Kohl's halfpipe, in Chicago, on that trip. I also met my music guy, Jon Stainbrook, in Toledo. He was a guy in a punk band who could get music out pretty cheap, from several Ohio musicians, Jon's house was a waystation for touring punk rockers, and he knew everyone in that world. He and his guys even recorded two songs that I wrote the lyrics to, for the video. While I was visiting him, The Stain was the stage band for comedian Howie Mandell, back when he had hair. I was a roadie for that gig, and got to meet Howie. The guitar and bass playing at the end of the video, with Jeff and Mark, is from backstage at the Howie Mandell gig. The shot of Jon is out front of the theater, in Ann Arbor Michigan, as I recall.
I paid $1,000 out of my own pocket to rent a 3/4" editing system, in the back of a video store in Redondo Beach, and spent 5 long days editing this video. I actually paid for the music (OK, I still owe Jon $400but I paid for most of it), because I was afraid of bootlegging music and getting sued.
The thing to know about this time period is that regular people, BMX riders, didn't make videos then. BMX companies, like GT, BMX Plus! magazine, and Bully Bikes, made videos. Only a couple riders had made super cheap videos. Eddie Roman had put out the super low budget BMX movie on video, Aggroman in 1989, and Mark Eaton had put out Dorkin' in York, and Dorkin' 2, which I think were edited with two VHS machines, in that era. I hadn't seen either video. There were only a handful of BMX company made videos coming out at the time, like 2-Hip's Ride Like a Man (produced by Eddie Roman, with a bunch of contest footage I shot while at Unreel, at the end), and the Bully Slow Ride video were the main two. Crazy as it sounds today, magazines still ruled as the BMX media, and videos were just starting to be a serious thing. Everyone kept asking me why I was making a video, since it wasn't for a bike company. "I want to make a video that shows the real riding we do everyday," was my best answer. No helmets while riding flatland, no balance tricks on a miniature golf courses while wearing leathers (like BMX Plus! magazine videos), just what I thought of as "real" riding.
Because of that, every video in that era had a lot of firsts in it. The Bully Slow Ride video, for example, had Mike Krnaich pulling the first tailwhip jump. 2-Hip's Ride Like a Man had the first 900 air by Mat Hoffman, and the first street peg grind on a rail, along a walkway. I think Dennis McCoy pulled that. In The Ultimate Weekend, I had several BMX video firsts as well. Keith Treanor did the first handrail slide down steps. I had the first the mini ramps in a BMX video, the H-Ramp, skaters Primo and Diane Desiderio's backyard ramp, and Mouse's ramp near San Diego. Keith and Gary Laurent did the first riding over a spine ramp at Primo and Diane's , in a BMX video, followed later in the video by Jess Dyrenforth, Chris Day, and Mike Tokemoto riding the big spine at Mouse's ramp. Keith did the first 360 over a spine, followed minutes later by Gary Laurent. John Povah did the first ice pick grind down a street rail, the small rail at the Regional Pool. I was the first guy to have BMX footage of The Nude Bowl, an abandoned nudist colony out in the desert, with a pool that was already legendary in the skateboard world. Along with Keith, John, and myself riding, I got skatepark legend Brian Blyther to come out and ride there, along with former Pipeline local Xavier Mendez. I also had Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson doing the first tailwhip jump over a set of doubles in the video. He dragged a foot on the landing, but rode it out. There are a few more tricks that were firsts on video in BMX, most technical tricks.
I also managed to get several top 80's pros in the video, like Martin Aparijo, Josh White, Todd Anderson, Ron Wilkerson Woody Itson, Pete Augustin, Jess Dyrenforth, Bob Kohl, and my personal favorite, Eddie Roman. This was the first video to get footage of pro racers and top dirt jumpers, Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, and the P.O.W. House (Pro's of Westminster) backyard. Even the now iconic S&M Bikes shield logo was first seen in a video here, spray painted on the side of a VW bus as I walked into the P.O.W. House backyard.
BMX freestyle, the initial explosion of the 1980's, with helmets and motocross style leathers being standard attire in contests, was fading after its first wave of popularity. Street riding and dirt jumping were just turning into their own genre's, and riding was going underground, into what became the long, ramen-eating recession, of the early 1990's. "BMX is dead" we were told, but us hardcore riders wouldn't accept that, and kept riding anyway. We didn't know what the future held for BMX freestyle.
As it turned out, Chris Moller's tiny garage company, S&M Bikes grew during the recession, and Hoffman Bikes, Standard Bikes, Eastern Bikes, and FBM were all rider owned bike companies, started during that recession. Most of those, possible all, got their bikes built in the U.S., by the time the recession ended. Even ESPN came around, near the end of the recession, and started the Extreme Games in 1995, changing the name to the X-Games a year later. BMX, other action sports, and TV finally merged in a big way, and BMX freestyle exploded into its second big wave of popularity, with rider owned companies and rider-made videos now at its core.
Eddie Roman, Mark Eaton, myself, and the Alder Brothers, who produced our own rider-made videos in 1988-1991, had no idea what we were doing at first, and no idea we would spawn a movement. By 1993, every fledgling company was making their own videos, with Hi-8 video cameras and "prosumer" equipment making video production possible for everyone willing to do the work of shooting, logging, and editing videos.
The Ultimate Weekend was not a blockbuster video like Eddie Roman's later videos,Headfirstwith Mat Hoffman (1991) and Ride On (1992). But everyone who rode then saw this video, at some point, and it had the best production quality of the rider made videos when it came out, in October of 1990. Us early video producers in BMX freestyle, skateboarding, and snowboarding, made the kind of videos we wanted to watch, and the way we made our shot and edited our videos, crazy as it was, changed the TV and video production industry to some extent. More action shots, showing people land tricks fully, close-up shots with wide angle lenses, riding skateboards with the camera to follow riders for tracking shots, and fast editing, and raw, punk rock influenced, DIY editing, and crazy comedy bits, all rippled into other productions in the years since.
I started working on The Ultimate Weekend not sure I could actually produce a video on my own. Just getting a finished video that was "pretty cool," with fresh, innovative riding, was my goal. I did accomplish that. I sucked at sales, so I didn't sell a ton of them, but the distributor did pretty well with them. All in all, I lost about $2,500 making the video. While this was not a monumental video in the history of BMX freestyle, it was solid for its day, and I'm proud to have it on my reel, as they say in video production. In the years after, I went on to produce and edit the first two videos for S&M Bikes, Feel My Leg Muscles I'm a Racer (1991), and 44 Something (1993). I also stumbled into TV production work, and wound up as a crew guy on American Gladiators. Just over a decade later, I self-produced another video, Animals, to try and get back into the BMX world. It didn't really work, though I did a better job putting the video together. So that's the basic story of The Ultimate Weekend. in my Freestyle BMX Tales blog, I tell about some of the sessions for T.U.W. in more detail, starting with this post, and going back, earlier in the 2016 posts.
I totally wanted to do a 20 year anniversary follow-up to The Ultimate Weekend in 2010, but life was super sketchy then, and it didn't happen. Same thing goes for a 30 year anniversary video in 2020, I just couldn't make it happen. I'd still like to do The Ultimate Weekend II at some point. But it'll be a while longer. Maybe along while. We'll see. I need to get my personal situation stabilized first, and that's a whole different issue. Will it happen someday? I hope so.
The Godfather of BMX, Scot Breithaupt, haulin' ass and flying fast in the 1970's.
In late 2020, I compiled, wrote, and published a 263 ebook about how I got into BMX freestyle. While living in a motel room, in 10 weeks I could afford the room thanks to pandemic unemployment, I also built an online store, and used the ebook to launch it. I immediately ran into banking issues, couldn't get a "real" bank account, and had to shut the store down. That's a bummer. But here's the first chapter of that book. I was listening to Indian creation stories on YouTube, and wondered, what a BMX "creation story" would be like. So I wrote one, The seed was a story that The O.M., Scot Breithaupt himself, told me on the trip back from a race where I worked for him as a cameraman. That was in 1989. Here's my "creation story" for BMX.
A long time ago (the late 1960's), in a land far, far away from most of you (Long Beach, California), a young man was racing his Schwinn Stingray on the bumpy Jeep trails in an area of oil fields. The young guy also rode motorcycles, but it was really expensive to keep a dirt bike running, so he spent a lot of time on his bicycle, racing around on the bumpy trails. A few homeless guys lived in the bushes in that area, and no one cared much about him tearing down the trails on his bicycle.
One day at those trails, young Scot saw a scruffy looking guy with a full beard, on a dirt bike, watching him ride from a distance. One of the homeless guys, sitting up against an old shack said, "Hey kid, I'll give you a brand new bike if you can catch that guy." Young Scot didn't think the bum could buy him a bike, but maybe he could steal him one. Scot was competitive as could be, and liked a challenge, so he took off down the Jeep trail, heading straight for the bearded guy on the motorcycle. The motorcycle rider, not wearing a helmet, just shook his head, laughed, and let the kid get within about 50 feet, then hit the throttle.
Scot, pedaling for all he was worth on his Stingray, hauled ass after the motorcycle. He got close in the first turn, as the motocrosser stuck a leg out and carved the turn, sending up a big roost, showering Scot in dirt and rocks. The mysterious bearded motocrosser played with the bicyclist, slowing down a bit, letting the kid close in, then carving a turn and hauling down one of the other trails, and accelerating. In a few minutes, the bicyclist was completely winded. He coasted to a stop, huffing and puffing, next to the homeless guy by the shack who had bet him. The motorcyclist stopped 50 yards away, looking back at the kid. The bearded motocrosser shook his head, hit the throttle, and hauled ass the other direction, riding out of sight down the trails.
Young Scot fought to catch his breath. He was pissed off, he hated losing a bet. But chasing the guy on the motorcycle, hauling ass on the bumpy oil field trails was the most fun he'd ever had on his bike. The old homeless guy sitting by the shed laughed. "Kid, you'll never catch him. You know who that was? That cat on the dirt bike was Charlie Gnarly. He's the best motocross rider there ever was. He won every race there was to win. A few years ago, he up and quit, nobody knows why."
Young Scot was beginning to catch his breath. "Charlie Gnarly?" he asked.
"Yep," the old bum said, "Kid, I'll get you the best bike you ever saw if you ever get Gnarly. He's fast as the wind on a motorbike."
Scot shook his head in frustration. "I'll catch that motherfucker. I'll get Gnarly someday."
Scot kept going down to the oil field trails to ride his bike, and some of the younger local kids would show up, and race Scot, and jump off the bumps on the Jeep trails. Every now and then, maybe once or twice a month, they'd all hear a motorcycle, and Charlie Gnarly would ride up, and sit and watch them, from 50 yards away or so. The old bum, usually sitting by his shack with a bottle of wine, would yell at them, "Go get him! Catch Charlie Gnarly! C'mon kids, get Gnarly!" Scot and the whole little pack would take off, hauling ass towards the old motocross rider. Charlie Gnarly would let them get close, and then take off, winding back and forth, stopping and starting, carving turns, bouncing over bumps, and keeping the the kids pedaling until they were all out of breath. It was as if Charlie Gnarly had been born on his dirt bike, his skill amazed them, as the tried to catch him. Then he'd send up a big roost as he turned and headed off the other direction and disappeared.
No one knew where Charlie Gnarly lived, or when he would show up. Scot started riding at the trails every day, and the local kids did, too. They got faster and faster, pretending to be motocross riders, racing each other every day on their banana seat bikes. As the Spring of 1970 rolled around, Scot decided they needed to start having official races, just like the real motocrossers did. He organized races at the old oilfield trails, and called it the B.U.M.S. track. About the same time, up in Malibu, an hour's drive away, some other bike riders parents' started holding races as well. Weekly races of what they called Bicycle Motocross began to happen, and draw more and more riders on the weekends.
Still, once and a while, during the week, Charlie Gnarly would show up at the trails, and all the bicycle riders would take off after him. By that time, there were broken Schwinn Stingray frames and forks, and a few broken pedals and handlebars, littering the trails. The crazier the kids got trying to get Gnarly, the more they broke their bikes. The kids kept looking for better parts, and some of the motorcycle companies, Yamaha and Kawasaki, made bicycles that looked like motocross cycles, but they were heavy and slow, with their plastic fenders and fake gas tanks. The kids begged, borrowed, and stole bike parts wherever they could. The just wanted to ride, they wanted to get Gnarly.
One day, Charlie Gnarly showed up in the distance. Like so many times before, Scot and the other bicycle motocross kids took off after him, chasing him through the trails. Charlie took a quick left, showering most of the the pack with his roost. But this time, young Scot Breithaupt was ready for him, Scot anticipated the Charlie's turn, stuck his leg out, and turned off the trail, and cut cross country to the trail Charlie headed down next. As Charlie Gnarly looked over his shoulder at the pack of kids eating dust, Scot popped out of the brush and onto the trail right next to him. Scot wasted no time, and kicked the side of Charlie's motorcycle. Charlie fishtailed, his back tire hit a little mound, and he high-sided, and was thrown off the motorcycle. Scot skidded to a stop, not really believing he had finally caught Charlie Gnarly.
Charlie rolled and bounced along the ground, and the motorcycle careened off into the bushes. Charlie Gnarly smiled. "You finally got me kid... I had a feeling you'd do it someday. You got fire in you, like I used to." Scot watched as Charlie Gnarly got up, brushed some of the dust off of himself, and then went into the bushes, and picked up his motorcycle. He looked it over, and got back on it. Scot, very unlike himself, was kind of in shock, blown away he'd caught the champion motocrosser on his Stingray. He had finally got Gnarly. "Follow me, kid," Charlie said. Charlie rode slowly down the trails, to the edge of the oil fields. Charlie stopped, and got off his bike near an old maintenance building.
"What're you doing?" Scot asked.
"Just hang on a minute," Charlie Gnarly told Scot Breithaupt. Charlie pulled his keys out of his pocket, and unlocked a rusty padlock on the old building. He disappeared inside, and reappeared a minute later holding two bicycle frames, frames like Scot had never seen before. One was bright chrome, the other painted black, the tubes were all straight, not curved like Scot's Schwinn. Charlie held the chrome one up, "This one is made of Chrome-moly steel, it's lighter, and a lot stronger than your bike." He held the second bike up, it's down tube looked wider and flat. "This one is 6061 aluminum, it's not quite as strong, but it's lighter, and it's still a lot stronger than your bike. I call this design the double diamond hard tail. If you're going to race bicycles in the dirt, this is how they should be made. I knew you'd catch me some day, so I figured I'd design and build a couple bike frames actually made for racing. You'll be able to ride a lot harder, and a lot faster, on one of these."
Charlie Gnarly handed both frames to Scot Breitaupt. "Which one do you want?" Scot checked them both out, then replied, "I want the light one, the aluminum." Charlie Gnarly held his hand out, and Scot handed him back the chrome frame, and kept the black one.
Charlie went back into the building, and came out with a pair of chrome forks, with straight fat tubes, the legs weren't curved, they were much beefier than the forks Scot kept breaking. "These are tubular chrome-moly steel, they'll last you a lot longer than the ones you have. Take these home and build yourself a bicycle MX... a BMX bike."
"Really?" Scot asked.
"Yeah, really," Charlie Gnarly said, as he locked up the building, and got back on his motorcycle.
"Thanks." Scot said, one of the last times he was ever at a loss for words. Charlie Gnarly started up his motorcycle, nodded to Scot, and rode off. That was the last time Scot ever saw Charlie Gnarly.
Scot went on to become one of the top BMX racers, and soon started Scot Enterprises to promote BMX racing, and his riders. That soon turned into SE Racing, which invented the PK Ripper, the Quadangle, the Floval Flyer racing cruiser, and the OM Flyer for Scot himself. Scot grew a full beard, just like Charlie Gnarly, and came to be known as the Old Man of BMX, which is what the OM stood for. The fire that Charlie Gnarly saw in young Scot led to a lot of progression in BMX racing. Scot rode hard, promoted hard, and would get gnarly every time he did. That fire also led Scot to a lot of self-destruction at times, he liked to party hard as well. Scot made huge leaps forward, and sometimes reverted to self-destruction. But few people, if any, made as much of an impact on creating BMX racing and BMX bikes as Scot Breithupt. That growth of BMX racing in the 1970's set the stage for BMX freestyle to evolve from skatepark carving in the 1970's to a full fledged sport in the mid-1980's. SE racing sponsored Todd Anderson, Craig Grasso, Fred Blood, and Justin Bickel, and a few other freestylers along the way.
OK, maybe that's not exactly how it happened. That's not quite how BMX began. But it did begin in 1970, and Scot Breithaupt was a big part of it in the early years.
In January of 1989, Scot Breithaupt hired me to be a cameraman at the Reno Silver Dollar Nationals, for a TV show he was producing. Scot headed up early in the week, and paid for a rental car for me to head up to Reno that Friday, taking off a little early from my job at Unreel Productions. I wound up driving through the Sierra Nevada mountains in a blizzard, so the weekend got off to a sketchy start. I shot video of Scot, and other racers, all weekend. We made the long drive back down to Orange County Sunday night. On the trip, Scot told me the legend of Charlie Gnarly, a mythical guy who young BMX riders would chase when out riding. Every time they tried to "get Gnarly," they got a little better, a little crazier, and pushed themselves as bike riders. After a while, the guy disappeared, but every time the BMXers got crazy on their bikes, they called it "gettin' gnarly." I took a few liberties with the story Scot told me on that drive, but that's the nature of legends. Welcome to my story in the world of BMX...
OK, how many of you kind of feel like this guy, after 2020, 2021, and the first few months of 2022? This is Tom Hanks in the movieCastaway, where he lives out a Robinson Crusoe couple of years, on a desert island, after a plane crash. "Wilson" is the volleyball, made by Wilson, that he paints a face on, and becomes his best friend on the island. This is near the end of the movie where he builds a raft, trying to get out where a ship can find him and save him.
Give yourself a pat on the back. Or if you're not that limber, have someone else do it, then give them one. You're still here. In the last 2 1/2 years, you have survived a 100 year pandemic that killed over one million Americans, AND you've survived an economic Depression. Yeah, Depression with a "D." Really. That's not including all the personal stuff you've been through, like job loss, working at home, not working, sick and dying friends and relatives, stressed out relationships from all this chaos, and The Great Toilet Paper Scare of the Spring of 2020. Seriously, if you feel a bit like Tom Hank's character in the scene above, that's OK. I think we all kind of feel like that at this point.
Going back to the first few posts of this blog, June 28th, 2017, I've been thinking and writing about huge problems and issues I saw coming in the future. In late 2017 or early 2018, I started writing about a huge economic downturn I saw coming in the next 2-3 years. As usual, "the experts" said it could never happen. Then it happened.
As an amateur futurist my whole life, I've always looked years ahead, wondering, and trying to figure out, what would happen in 2-3-5-10-20 years. Along the way, I've come across a few theories talking about long and ultra-long term trends that play out in societies over decades and hundreds of years. I've been watching economic and social trends, to some degree, since the late 1980's. As we worked through the 2010's, I began to see all of these trends start to merge. For whatever universal reason, many long and mid term trends were coming together in this period of time.
What that told me was that we were heading into a really, REALLY crazy era. The decade of the 2020's made a good reference period. I began calling them the Tumultuous 2020's. With my background, observing, and reading lots of books most people don't find interesting, I realized that we were not just in for a big economic downturn, but there would also be social, business, education, communication, and daily life changes. In short, it appeared to me that this decade in particular, would be one of the biggest periods of change in modern history.
In late July and August of 2019, when the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates, I knew we were getting close to the economic collapse, and I wrote a couple of blog posts about it (this one and this one). A month later, the Repo Market crisis in banking happened. Most people barely noticed, but that was the real beginning of the Depression. About six months later, Covid-19 hit U.S. shores, bringing a 100 year pandemic to us, something none of us were truly prepared for. That was not just a widespread medical issue, but business shutdown to reduce the Covid spread sparked the major part of the economic collapse.
The "Spanish Flu" pandemic of 1918-1920 killed an estimated 17-25 million people, perhaps millions more. The current Covid-19 coronavirus crisis, in worldwide effects, was the worst pandemic since. It has killed over 6.2 million people worldwide, and more than a million here in the United States. You survived it, so did I, and so did the rest of us still around. That's a big deal. It's not something we were prepared for, and it changed everyone's lifestyle in some way, across the board. Remember March 2022, "Just wear a mask for two weeks and we'll get through this." Yeah, we had no idea what we were in for, which is a good thing in many ways. But we're still here.
That acute medical emergency led to massive work shutdowns, and millions of people losing their jobs, some temporarily and some permanently. Somewhere over 100,000 small businesses went out of business, and nearly all other businesses, small, medium, and large, struggled to get through it. That was another big blow to all of us. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the official measure of all things purchased in the U.S., dropped over 32% in the Spring of 2020. That was about the same as the huge drop during the Great Depression of the 1930's. A drop in GDP of more than 10% IS an economic Depression. There's an official definition, though they avoid it today, and that's one of the two criteria that separates a recession from a depression. So you, me, and all of us have survived an economic depression. And a 100 year pandemic, AND all the other personal stuff that's happened, in the last 2 1/2 years. If you feel like you've been through the ringer, you have. We all have. So give yourself a quick pat on the back, you have survived two really big, global catastrophes, since 2020 rolled in. And you've survived all the drama in your personal life, caused by those issues, and other issues, as well.
Is it over? No. This decade is still going to be crazy, all kinds of crazy. But you made it through some serious shit. We all did. We should be much adaptable now, and much more able to handle what else happens in the next several years. The good part is, as old ideas, old industries, and old institutions collapse around us, we get to build a new world, in a sense. There's a lot more change coming, but we can help create that change. This is one of the greatest times in modern history to try new ideas, build a new business, or create needed, or to work for meaningful social change.
In a sense, it's a Do It Yourself world now. What do you think needs to be built? Get to it.
This is M.C. Emig Skatepark #5, the first large drawing (18" X 21") I've done in this style. The "M.C." is a nod to M.C. Escher, whose work we are all familiar with, and inspired this general idea. But my name is Steve Emig, and this is a drawing of a possible (if not super rideable) skatepark. That's there the name came from. This post is how I came to this new direction in my Sharpie art.
I'm still writing this post... don't read it yet... not done!
I've been drawing as long as I can remember. I drew with crayons as a little kid, with pencils as a grade schooler, and basic black Bic pens and pencils while in high school. My dad was a draftsman that worked his way up to being a design engineer, so he drew big drawings of machine parts for a living. When I was a kid, he would occasionally bring drawings home to work on, and he taught me how to understand them, So drawing was natural to me, and I was always that kid doodling in his notebooks all through school. In second grade, drawing Speed Racer's Mach 5 race car was the cool thing. At another school in 3rd grade, Army jeeps, tanks, and halftracks were the hot thing. My dad taught me to draw jeeps while on a camping trip, which upped my game, making me one of the two best kids at drawing that year.
My mom did ceramics when I was little, and other crafts, so there were creative hobbies always happening in my house. But at the same time, working class people in 1970's Ohio had no love for people who called themselves "artists." When somebody like Andy Warhol would show up on TV, adults were quick to denigrate "those crazy, lazy people who didn't have real jobs, and just did art in New York City or Los Angeles." It was simply known in my childhood world that art was not something you could ever make a living at. Adults didn't have to tell us that, their attitudes about art said it all. People had to work "real jobs," often jobs they hated, but did because it was necessary to work and make a living. Decent working people could have hobbies, but not get arrogant and uppity, and think they could actually make a living with art of any kind. I only met one professional artist when I was a kid. A friend's dad made cool little sculptures, a group of seals laying on a rock, was the one I remember. I couldn't believe that he actually made a living sculpting. "But what does he do for a job?" I kept asking my friend. "Sculpting is his job," she replied.
One of the "M.C. Escher Skateparks" that I did earlier this year. Sketched freehand in pen, then shaded.
So I grew up in a world where I was often encouraged to draw, as a kid, but where doing any kind of "art" as an adult was simply not an option. Becoming a draftsman like my dad was the only way to draw for a living. Like a lot of people in Generation X and earlier generations, this led to an inner conflict when doing creative work. One part of me had a strong drive to draw or do creative work, and socially programmed side of me thought it was bad or evil to try and earn money doing creative work. I've spent decades working through those issues.
The M.C. Emig Skatepark idea, above, started when I was in high school, after I got into BMX the summer after my sophomore year of high school. I would sit in class sometimes and doodle little ramps, at a time when simple quarterpipes and halfpipes were the only actual ramps that existed. If a halfpipe had a channel or roll-in, that was as complex as they got in 1983 or 84. But I would sometimes scrawl little ramp set-ups on notebook paper while bored in one class or another.
I also took drafting for two years in high school, and pottery my senior year, and I was pretty good at both, getting all A's, I believe. While people think of pottery as a lazy person's, "easy A" class, it wasn't at Boise High School. My teacher, Mrs, Feuss, made it pretty easy to get a B, if you did the work, and tried your best. But even in pottery, we had to work to get an A. I not only got A's, I also made a bunch of whiskey jugs on the side, which I sold to mountain men, for $5 each. My best friend Darrin was doing that, and got me into both pottery, and selling the handmade whiskey jugs. So I got A's in pottery, and made a $5 profit, after paying the $40 materials fee for the year. I also aced drafting, which came pretty natural to me, thanks to my dad, and most people figured I'd be a design engineer, too. But there was a big difference. My dad could actually understand mechanical things, and fix them. I couldn't. He just got how machines worked, and I didn't. I could draw the pictures, but I didn't get how things actually operated. My interests lay elsewhere.
When I graduated high school in 1984, there was no money to go to college, So I "took a year off." I worked in a restaurant, and kept riding my bike, practicing freestyle tricks, and doing a few shows, part of the one trick team in Idaho, with Jay Bickel. A year later, my family moved to San Jose, when my dad got a new job. I worked my summer job in Boise, managing a tiny amusement park called the Boise Fun Spot. Then I packed up my land yacht, a 1971 brown, Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose, to join my parents and sister.
When I got there, I quickly found a job at a local Pizza Hut. I worked nights, rode during the day, and started a BMX freestyle zine to meet the other San Francisco Bay Area riders. The zine worked, and I soon met the legendary Curb Dogs team, the Skyway factory team guys, and a bunch of really good amateurs. Eleven issues of my zine, San Jose Stylin', landed me a job in Southern California. I flew to SoCal at the end of July in 1986. I had my bike, a suitcase, and $80 when I left. I started my new job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, the next day.
I was used to being busy every minute at Pizza Hut, and Wizard was just the opposite at first. My primary job was to proofread both magazines, which was about one week's work each month. I had a lot of free time in my little office the rest of the time, for the first couple of months. I started reading the MLA Stylebook, to learn proofreading on the fly. I read back issues of both magazines, learning about the history of BMX racing, jumping, and freestyle. I also started drawing little ramp drawings again, isometric, "3D" looking sketches. Ramps were real simple then, and I drew weird combinations of quarterpipes and halfpipes, linked together in cool combos and at weird angles. One day I drew one, a completely crazy one, with ramps at completely unrealistic angles and directions. I called it an M.C. Escher Skatepark. My co-workers thought it was funny. And that was it. I drew a few more, just goofing around.
As time went on, I got busier, and didn't really have time to draw at work anymore. Over the years I would get a sketchpad and draw with pens once in a while, usually for a couple of months at a time. Then I wouldn't draw for many months. I made zines, produced low budget BMX and skateboard videos, and worked a whole bunch of odd jobs, from video store clerk to TV show crew guy, and I didn't draw much.
Then in 2005, while working as a taxi driver, another driver made me an offer. I could live in his indie art gallery, in an industrial building, and drive his taxi on the weekends. I'd been working nearly every single day, 10-18 hours a day, seven days a week, for 2 1/2 years. I was burned out, and took the offer. Suddenly I was alone all day, in a big room full of art created by several young artists, with a mama cat and six tiny kittens for company. On day two, I drew a little drawing on a post-it note. A couple days later, I bought a pack of generic markers, and a roll of banner paper. I started making big drawings, adding art to some of the poems I'd written. I tried to find a way to shade colors well with markers. I upgraded to a 24 pack of colored, standard Sharpie markers, and soon after figured out a way to layer different colored scribbles, and get more nuanced colors and shading. That probably happened in September of 2005. I kept playing with that idea, day after day. I soon figured out that the smaller, ultra fine Sharpies worked better. My Sharpie Scribble Style was born. I spent 5 or 6 more months living at the gallery, figuring out which colors blended well with each other to produce different hues.
I went back to driving a taxi full time in June of 2006, but I took my Sharpies and got an 11" X 14" sketch pad, and drew while sitting in my taxi, waiting for fares. I lived in my taxi, making enough money to pay taxi lease, buy gas, and eat, but not enough to rent an apartment. I drew a few different styles, and kept improving with my scribble style. Eventually, taxi driving took a dive, due to computer dispatching, and I wound up homeless, living on the streets. After a year, I took my family's standing offer to move to North Carolina, where they all ended up living. I quickly went into a deep depression, I couldn't find any job, and I hated living there.
I struggled with depression, lived in homeless shelters a while, drove a taxi for a year, and my dad had a stroke and later died. I wound up living with my mom, who I never really got along with. Again, I couldn't find any job there, even after putting in 140 applications over a couple of years.
In late 2015, I didn't have a dime to my name. I had a room of my own, in my mom's tiny apartment, a refurbished laptop still running Windows XP, a sketchpad, my Sharpies, and a pretty solid following from years of writing my Old School BMX blogs. I decided to step up my art game, and see if I could sell drawings to make a little bit of money for myself. I found a stencil of Bruce Lee, a street art drawing, and drew it in my style. I put it Facebook, and sold it for $20. Then I sold another. By the Spring of 2016, I was drawing every day, and making a couple of hundred dollars a month from Sharpie drawings. Unfortunately, my mom had a way of falling into a crisis that just happened to need the exact amount of money I had, time after time. I couldn't even buy art supplies much of the time, let alone money to get my own life kickstarted again.
M.C. Emig Skatepark #1, sketched freehand in pen, inked with a Sharpie, then colored with Sharpie Scribble Style, 9" X 12".
I eventually moved out, and lived in a tent in the woods of Winston-Salem, about ten miles away. I got a chance to do an art show at a cool, old school record shop, called Earshot Music. I spent a couple of months doing 8 big drawings of musicians. One sold the day before the show, and six more sold at the show, or shortly after. I was suddenly pounding out a drawing a week, making $120 to $150 each. Each drawing took about 40-45 hours to draw. It wasn't much money per hour, but I survived, and became a part of Winston-Salem's cool little Trade Street Art scene.
Since I drew several musicians for the music shop art show, people kept asking me to draw musicians. I've been drawing big #sharpiescribblestyle drawings, and scraping by as a homeless, but working artist, ever since. I left North Carolina, ran out of bus fare in Richmond, Virginia, and lived on the streets there for 9-10 months, then an old friend bought me a bus ticket back to California. I was working to help promote his online BMX store when I first got here. That project didn't go as hoped, and I ghosted out of there, and have been on the streets of the L.A. area, ever since the summer of 2019. I was selling drawings on Hollywood Boulevard pre-Covid, planning to survive the winter rainy season, and then promote my artwork full bore in the Spring of 2020. Yeah, we all know what happened in the Spring of 2020.
I went back into survival mode, and did sell a few drawings, just not very many, all through the pandemic. Now as we're coming out of that funk, I'm back to figuring out how to best promote my work, and raise my income level until I can rent a place of my own, again, and get back to "regular" life.
Since I've been doing drawings based on photos of famous people, making lots of copies to sell was never really an option. Copyright law, and 21st century use of images and files, are miles apart at this point. While I can make an artistic representation of someone's photo, and it's fair use, making lots of prints or posters can lead to a copyright lawsuit, whether frivolous, or serious. At this point most of my portraits come out really well, but I needed to find better subject matter to draw, something where it was all my work, using my own photos, or all my ideas.
As this was rolling around my head, I heard about NFT's, Non Fungible Tokens, or blockchain linked art and collectibles. When I dug into that world to learn the basics, I saw most people were doing big series of art pieces. Most of those were computer generated "profile pics" or PFP's. But the photographers doing NFT's and others that took off, were usually a series of similar themed work. I thought about what I could do as a series of similar pieces, to make NFT's out of. My aliens smoking cigarettes, which I call Grey Trash, came to mind. I've been drawing them since 2009 or so. I drew a whole bunch of those in early 2022, to see how many different types I could come up with.
One of the Grey Trash aliens I drew earlier this year, playing with different ideas.
Those were fun, and I wound up doing about 35 little alien drawings, each with a different saying. But nobody was really bowled over by the aliens, though I love them. Then, one day I was sitting at a fast food place, and I didn't have my Sharpies with me, just a black Bic pen, and a small sketch pad. I started drawing some isometric shapes, going way back to my drafting days in high school. Then I drew a couple of my M.C. Escher skateparks, like I did back in 1986, and put them on Facebook for people to check out. Much to my surprise, quite a few people liked them, and one guy wanted to buy the sketches. Then another person messaged me, asking about doing a collaboration. I told him I'd draw a new "M.C. Escher skatepark" for him. I sat down at the library to draw the next day, and listened to a couple of M.C. Escher documentaries while I drew. I looked at my drawing and thought, "This sucks. What if I tried to seriously draw a weird skatepark, something that was comparable in quality to Escher's work?"
This is the piece of cardboard I scribbled on one night, playing with the idea of doing serious, M.C. Escher caliber drawings. It was on this piece of cardboard that I figured out the repeating pattern of little hip jump ramps.
I was so stoked on the idea, that I grabbed a Sharpie, and scribbled ideas on a piece of cardboard, while at the place where I slept homeless, that night. That's where I figured out I could make a repeating pattern of little hip jumps, like in the top center of the drawing at the top of this post. I couldn't wait to wake up, and get to work the next morning. While I didn't have real drafting tools, like a drafting board, T-square, and triangles, I did have a protractor and a ruler. That was enough to draw a big, more complex, symmetrical skatepark. I drew it in pencil, with proper angles, and then inked the main lines with a standard black Sharpie marker. Then I spent the next couple of days coloring it, not sure how the finished drawing would turn out. M.C. Emig Skatepark #5, at the top, is the result. As soon as I got it done, I knew I was on to something.
So these designs, inspired by, but not copying, some of M.C. Escher's work, are the new direction I'm going with my #sharpiescribblestyle. There are so many directions to go with this basic idea, I just want to keep exploring and playing around with it. I like the idea of making a 3D looking, symmetrical design, that looks cool hanging on a wall, but is also a weird skatepark.
So that's where I'm at right now, and as of this moment, M.C. Escher Skatepark #5 is for sale, message me on Facebook or Twitter, if interested. Thanks for reading this long post, if you made it this far, and stay tuned for more weird "skatepark" drawings, coming soon.
Last weekend, April 30th, 2022, Bored Ape Yacht Club creators, Yuga Labs, opened up their new, NFT-friendly metaverse, to sell plots. This happened on the one year anniversary of the day their BAYC NFT's took off, and sold out. It has been quite a year for Yuga Labs and the Bored Ape Yacht Club community.
Yuga Labs seemed to be on fire. The Ape NFT's, 10,000 of which were sold at .08 Eth, roughly $230 at the time they sold out, took off. Prices reached 5 figures in weeks, and coming into April 2022, the floor price (lowest priced Ape for sale) was well over $300,000. Not a bad return for such a crazy year. The BAYC community had galvanized in their first year, and the Apes approached, and then surged past the floor price of the O.G. NFT's, CryptoPunks.
Along the way, Yuga Labs did another big launch, Mutant Apes, they air dropped NFT dogs to Ape holders, and raised $450 million of good old fiat U.S. dollars in a major funding round. That valued the 10-11 month old business at $4 billion. Not bad considering they weren't even sure the Bored Ape NFT's would sell well at first.
On fire, and seemingly able to do no wrong, Yuga Labs promptly bought out the O.G.'s, Crypto Punks, along with Meebits and some other NFT series. Then they announced they were going to launch their own NFT friendly metaverse, and tossed out this epic trailer as a tease. The Yuga/Ape metaverse would be called The Otherside, and it looked cool, interesting, NFT friendly, gamified, and completely different than all the other metaverses being built, particularly Facebook/Meta's version.
Then they announced and air dropped their metaverse token, Apecoin, to Ape NFT holders. The hype pot was bubbling like the Jacuzzi at a rap star's stripper-filled party mansion party. The Dutch auction plan was dropped at the last minute, and the sale of the "Otherdeeds" to get your plot of Otherside virtual land, commenced.
It seemed Yuga could do no wrong. Until the gas prices took off like a Space X rocket, and the Ethereum blockchain slowed to a crawl. Somewhere between $160 and $181 million in Eth was burned up in the sale. Like poof! Gone. That's what everyone was hoping would not happen. Transactions didn't go through, some people had the special wallet and $6,005 in Apecoin to buy their deed, but couldn't swing the 2-3 Eth ($4,000-$6,000) in gas fees to make their transaction happen.
Basically, The Otherside launch was so massive and popular, it broke Ethereum, or at least ground it to a halt, for a while. A LOT of people were really pissed off, for several different reasons, including people doing non-related transactions on Ethereum at the time. But the sale proceeded, and the Otherside sold out, and Yuga raked in about $230 million in Apecoin, which had doubled in price in the previous couple of weeks. Apecoin started to drop back down just before the sale, and kept dropping, and Yuga's take wound up being around $170 million, or so,for the launch. Not a bad day's work. But they took a beating in reputation with all the issues, unfilled transactions, record gas fees. They came out of the day kind of like a prize fighter, a fist full of cash, but beaten and bruised up from the battle.
It's been five days now, and if you watch this pre-launch video by The Defiant, along with the one above, you get a good take on the whole crazy fiasco, before and after. Yuga is now licking its reputation wounds a bit, but it still sold out of plots in The Otherside metaverse, and there's no sign of demand going down any great amount.
If you are into crypto or NFT's, you know this was a HUGE event, forcing people to look at the limitations of a launch, NFT's, the Ethereum blockchain, gas fees, and blockchains in general. The hype is dying down, and people are trying to get a grasp on all the properties and features in The Otherside. A jar of Koda farts, anyone? What are all these things going to mean? Which features of the plots will be the most valuable? Will Yuga get this NFT filled universe up and running smoothly? Where is this crazy metaverse headed? All those questions remain to be answered.
I'm a broke MFer right now, so I don't own anything in Yuga world, not even a couple of Apecoins, at the moment. But I think they are definitely heading in a really interesting direction, and leading the huge pack of NFT PFP communities. I'm keeping my eye on this rapidly expanding cyber world, and all it entails. Yuga keeps surprising us by putting way more thought and effort into projects than expected. It's probably good that they took some lumps at this point, to show some of the weaknesses and needs in the NFT/metaverse world going forward.
If you are not into crypto and NFT's, you're wondering WTF I'm talking about. Just go watch Netflix, and jump on the bandwagon in 2023 or 24, when the other normies "suddenly discover" the NFT world.
I started a new personal blog in May 2022, check it out:
After a couple of years of telling people we were headed for a huge recession, or possible great depression, I woke one morning with an idea to put a lot of my big ideas into a framework. Between October 2019 and April 2020, I wrote a 20 chapter book/blog thing, here's the link:
In the 20 chapters, or essays, I explained why I thought things were going to get completely crazy for pretty much the whole 2020's decade. I call this ten year span the Tumultuous 2020's. It's a lot of big ideas, three big concepts from top thinkers, and my own thoughts on how their theories help explain why things seem so crazy. Covid hit in the middle of writing this, taking things to a level of crazy beyond what I was expecting. Now, nearly 2 1/2 years into this decade, we all know it's a crazy period of time. And we've got 7 1/2 years to go... So this is a reminder that this big book/blog thing is sitting out there on the web, and I think it can help give a context to this turbulent time of history we are are going through. Check it out, if you dare. Oh, we're being driven into another, bigger recessionary period right now. Hang on.
I started a new personal blog in May 2022, check it out:
This talk is by Nicolas Eberstadt, one of the thinkers in an actual think tank, who research and write about issues affecting our country and our society. In 2017, he published a book called Men Without Work,* about the 7 million or so working age men who have dropped out of the American workforce. This video, from 2021, is a more recent talk on this subject. For a variety of reasons, men, and a lesser number of women, have simply dropped out of the American workforce. They don't have jobs, and are not officially looking for jobs. There has been almost no research into this group of people, besides Mr. Eberstadt's book. Looking at what supporting research there is, he has found that most of these people seem to get some kind of government support to survive. In another talk, he mentioned that these men seem to spend a huge amount of time watching screens, either TV, videos on phones or computers. or video games. The working people of the U.S., through taxes and now inflation, support these people, somewhere between 7 and perhaps 10 million people or more. This is a group of men, comparable to the population of New York City or L.A., that are not working regular jobs, and no one is sure why.
Besides Nicolas Eberstadt, I seem to be one of the few other people interested in this societal issue. Here's how I became interested in this. For reasons I won't go into, I got forced out of California, and to North Carolina in 2008. I'm not from NC, my family's from Ohio originally, but my parents and my sister's family wound up living there. I was homeless when I left California, I'd been on the streets for nearly a year, unable to find work or start a viable small business, after the taxi driving industry collapsed here. I accepted an offer to stay with my parents for a while, and they flew me to NC.
I landed in the tiny town of Kernersville, NC, in the middle of November, 2008. We were a couple of months into the major collapse part of the Great Recession, roughly two months after the Lehman Brothers collapse. I moved into the spare room of my parents' tiny apartment. I could not find a job in Kernersville, and I wound up staying with my parents, not working, and living off their Social Security payments. Without realizing it, I became one of those people, one of those men, who were not working, and not looking for a traditional job. At the time, I was hoping to start a small business flipping merchandise, buying stuff at auctions, and reselling it on eBay, Craigslist, and the like. If you've ever seen the TV show "Storage Wars," or similar shows, that's what I wanted to do. I'd been buying things at storage unit auctions for 3-4 years part time, and made a little side money doing it, while I was driving a taxi in Orange County, California.
My mom and I never got along well when I was growing up, and that tradition continued in 2008-2009. So in the spring of 2009, I took off, and wound up staying in a homeless shelter in nearby Winston-Salem, NC. Initially, I was trying to find work there, thinking I had a better chance in a city of about 250,000 people then in Kernersville, a rural town of about 30,000.
Like most homeless shelters, we had to leave by 7:00 am each morning, and come back in about 6:00 pm. One evening, getting back to my bed, I noticed that 10 or 12 of the 60 guys in the shelter didn't come back in that evening. So I asked one of the other guys, "Where'd everybody go?" This black ma,n who had grown up in Winston-Salem, looked at me like I was an idiot, "It's the first of the month, they got their check. Don't you get a check?" He was serious. Not having any idea what he was talking about, I replied, "If I got a check, I wouldn't be in a homeless shelter." He just laughed.
Later, I asked a couple of other guys, and they explained that nearly every man in the shelter got a "check," Those checks, in most cases, were actually direct deposits, from either Social Security Disability, SSI, or sometimes veteran's benefits, and other government money. The guys explained to me that a bunch of the guys went out, bought drugs, picked up hookers, or maybe rented a motel room to do drugs and hookers, and didn't come back to the shelter on the first. That was simply a standard thing, that happened every month, in the "hood" of Winston-Salem, at the shelter, When I asked a bit more, they said the same thing happened in nearby Greensboro, Highpoint, the other two large cities in the "Piedmont Triad" area in central North Carolina. It happened there, and in every other large city they knew of. After the collapse of the factory jobs between the 1980's and 2000's, this had become "just the way things were."
I wound up spending about 18 months or so in two of the Winston-Salem shelters, between early 2009 and 2012. I met maybe 200 or 300 men in the shelters, and found that living off the government and "getting a check," was standard operating procedure in the poor side of Winston, and most other cities that those men had spent time in. As I met and talked to other homeless men, including some that had stayed in shelters or lived in other eastern cities, the same thing occurred everywhere. I met one man who had been moving from shelter to shelter, up and down the Eastern seaboard, for ten years. He lived for free in shelters, from New Hampshire to Georgia, as I recall, putting in the 3 to 6 months allowed at each one, then moving on. He said that, even without a check, a man could live indefinitely for free on the East Coast.
So I learned quite a bit about the "Men without work," by actually living with many of those men in homeless shelters, and being one myself, much to my dismay. I came to the conclusion that at least 2/3 of the people on Social Security Disability are scamming the system, to live free off the government. Guys often bragged about the crazy stories they told doctors, to "prove" mental illness, because mental issues were the easiest way to get Disability. At that time, 2009-2012, it usually took about 2 years to get Disability. A person would get a social worker or someone to fill out the paperwork, and pretty much always get denied at first. Then they would get a lawyer, and usually get their Disability approved on the second or third attempt. At that point, they would get a big chunk of back payments, several thousand dollars at once, $12,000 to $15,000 wasn't unusual. Then the person would get monthly checks, usually $700 to $1,100 a month, for several years, and likely for life. Then they watched TV on their 60 inch flat screen in their $600 apartment in the hood (sometimes Section 8), or played video games all day. The entire system is set up to punish people who try to go back to work. So people get "hood rich," buy the big screen, put rims on their '96 Chevy Impala, and live it up. The people who have the worst habits would eventually wind up with no place to live, often kicked out by family or roommates, and head to the homeless shelter. When the first of the month came around, 10 or 12 guys would go party, not come back to the shelter, and lose their bed. They had to stay out of the shelter for a month or two, usually, then could come back for 3 to 4 months, if they followed the rules.
One guy Winston-Salem was getting a combined payment of about $3,500 a month, at a time when $600 apartments were readily available. He would blow the money on booze, drugs, and prostitutes in 7 to 10 days, on average. Month after month. Another guy, living in a house near the shelter, got a $40,000 insurance settlement for an accident, and spent the money in a month. That was the talk of the shelter for a week, because everyone was pissed off that he managed to keep the payout quiet, and they weren't able to steal any of his money for themselves. Not everyone, of course, thought that way, but quite a few did.
The concept of going back to work somewhere simply didn't exist. There were not a lot of jobs, and the few there were paid poorly. What's crazy is that most of those men I met in Winston worked in the factories, tobacco, textile, or others, when they were still open. But the loss of those jobs, and the rise of Social Security Disability, in particular, has created a completely different lifestyle. None of the men I met thought about starting a small business, which is all that I wanted to do. But I found the culture so anti-entrepreneurial, that it seemed impossible.
On the bright side, these "Screenwatchers" have seen about every movie there is, and play a lot of video games, and are a good source of info about those subjects. I saw the same thing in Richmond, Virginia, while living homeless there for 9-10 months. This non-working lifestyle is not a North Carolina thing, or an Eastern Seaboard thing, it seems to be prevalent everywhere there was formerly a strong industrial sector that crashed decades ago.
Here in Southern California, getting on Disability is much less pervasive, in my experience among the homeless population, now having lived over 2 1/2 years on the streets since 2019. People usually have "food stamps" (EBT), and medical insurance, and often General Relief ($200+/- a month) or SSI, ($235 or so a month). But I have met very few people on Disability. I think this is one big reason, along with much milder weather, that there's a much larger visible homeless population on the West Coast. Obviously, really high rent prices are another big factor. But in the East, the "homeless' people are in apartments, trying to figure out the next big score, like getting accident settlements. Those are another major income source in the hood back East.
In my case, I did finally get a job driving a taxi in Winston in 2011-12, and lived in my taxi for the year I drove, averaging just under $200 a week in net income. I never even came close to making enough to rent an apartment. Since I was working 70-80+ hours a week, there wouldn't have been much of a point, anyhow. Like in California, I worked 7 days a week, and spent a chunk of money on a "cheap" motel room once a week. There I got a pizza, watched a few hours of TV, or movies from the library, and got one good night's sleep a week.
I quit driving a taxi shortly after my dad had a major stroke, and it was apparent he would die soon. I wound up back in Kernersville, living with my mom, after his funeral. In late 2012-2014, I applied for over 140 local jobs, and could not get hired anywhere in Kernersville. Jobs were scarce then, and you needed to know someone to get ANY job, even a Walmart job. In that culture, people hire their relatives, friends, people from church, or their friend's kids. I was unable to find ANY job from late 2012 until I left in 2018.
In 2015, I started trying to sell my Sharpie artwork, not because I had some dream to be "an artist," but rather because I could not find any way to earn money in NC. I became a working artist because I couldn't find a "real" job. I've now sold over 100 original pieces of art in six years, and I am still a "working artist," if a homeless one, as well as a prolific blogger.
In this clip Harry Potter and the students of Hogwarts meet a hippogryph, an animal that's sort of a horse, but with a huge raptor beak, and wings. This creature in this movie is based on the idea of the gryphon, a horse/raptor hyrbid animal. So where did the idea of gryphon's come from? That's an interesting story, and I recently read a book that just may explain it.
This is the later edition, from 2011, of The First Fossil Hunters, and it has a lot of added material from the original version published in 2000.
Over 20 years ago, I was driving my taxi around the Huntington Beach area one morning, and there was a really interesting interview with an author. Her name was Adrienne Mayor, and she had just published a book about the archeological finds made in the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans in the Mediterranean region. Her weird path to write that book, The First Fossil Hunters, started with the ancient legends of the gryphon (or griffon). Going back well over 2,000 years, the gryphons were said to be mythical creatures with a horse-like body, a huge, eagle-like beak, and often with wings. Gryphons were said to hoard and guard gold. Some people believed gryphons could fly, some didn't. The weird thing Adrienne noticed was that gryphons weren't part of the mythology or the Greek and Roman cultures. In those days, gryphons were believed to simply be a weird creature that actually existed, far to the East. She wondered if there were some real fossils that might have inspired the idea of the gryphons. This basic idea set her off, digging through hundreds of accounts of lesser known writers from the Greek and Roman eras, and for archeological evidence that would corroborate these legends.
It took years, but she was finally able to figure out that in the land of the ancient Scythians, parts of modern day Kazakhstan into Mongolia, on the trade routes in central Asia, there were ancient gold mines. There were also fossils on the surface of a creature called the protoceatops, a sheep sized dinosaur with a huge beaked head. It's a cousin to the triceratops that most of us are familiar with, and there are many fossils of them in and around Mongolia.
A protoceratops skeleton, with the huge, beaked head. The frilled part, and the back of the head, was often broken on fossils. It's possible that broken pieces of these bones were believe to be wing bones, giving rise to the idea that these creatures had wings.
With a lot of diligent research, Adrienne Mayor proved the possibility that ancient people had seen fossils of the huge beaked skulls of protoceratops, in the general area where a lot of gold was mined. The jumbled up up fossil bones could have been woven into legends of hybrid creatures, part horse, part huge bird, that guarded the gold rich areas. Those legends had the effect of scaring a lot of people away from the gold rich reasons, acting to protect the gold for the local miners of that era.
While she can't say absolutely that this is how the legend of gryphons came to be, she makes a strong case for the idea. The book goes on from there, based on her diligent research, to explore reports of giant, fossilized bones found in ancient times by the Greeks and Romans. It elaborates on the different interpretations made from those fossils, to people who had no concept of dinosaurs, mammoths, mastadons, ancient rhinos, and other extinct creatures.
The Mediterranean region is really geologically active, and it's relatively new land, geologically. So the fossils found 2,000 to 3,000 years ago are not dinosaurs, like farther east in Asia. Most of what they found were huge bones from later mega fauna, such as mammoths, mastadons, wooly rhinos and similar creatures. In the early era, roughly 2,700 years ago, these bones were often thought to be of mythical giants from their legends. Many collections were reburied in that era in huge stone graves for giants. Sometimes giant bones, like a mastadon femur, which looks like a huge human femur, would be put on display in a town, usually tied to a legend of a local giant that won a battle or something. Much like today, these became tourist attractions, drawing people to see the huge bones.
As time went on in the ancient era, some better thinkers realized that these giant, fossilized bones, were from ancient animals that no longer existed, not from 20 foot tall giants. Today, with hundreds of years of science behind us, we know that thousands of species that once existed are now extinct. But the idea of extinction didn't exist in the ancient era, like it does now. But some writers did come to the conclusion that many of these bones were from ancient animals, ones that no longer existed.
If you have an interest in history, mythology, archeology, or paleontology, this book is a really interesting read. Although it took me over 20 years to get around to reading it, after I first heard the original interview about the book. The 2011 rewrite has a bunch more info not in the original version. Once the book was out, a lot of scientists, across many disciplines, contacted Ms. Mayor, with bits and pieces of info on these ideas, that helped flesh out the stories of ancient bones found in ancient times. While we tend to think of archeology as something that started 150 or 200 years ago, it turns out that humans have been finding, reporting, and trying to figure out fossils for well over 2,000 years. So if any of this sounds interesting to you, check this book out. The First Fossil Hunters. (Not a paid link).
I started a new blog now, about side hustles and small businesses in these crazy times. Check it out.
