In 1987, I started writing "song lyrics" for a girlfriend who was in a local rock band, hoping to write her a hit song. I was working officially as the editor of the AFA newsletter, then, and she was the person who began to convince me that I was a writer. So writing her a hit song is seemed ot make sense at the time. Of course, that never happened.
When she dumped me in the spring of 1988, I wrote a poem that night called "The Journey of The White Bear." In the poem, I was The White Bear, a young, naive dork from "The North" (Idaho), who moved to the "Big City" of Southern California, then hooked up with The Black Leopard (wild, experienced, somewhat older woman) who schooled me on the wilder side of life. The term "cougar" for an older woman dating a younger man didn't exist back then, that term popped up around 2003 or so. IN addition, she was just 5 years older than me, though there's a big difference between a dorky 20 year old guy, and 25-year-old former model who liked to party.
The white and black were metaphors for being naive, and being wild and experienced at life, they had nothing to do with race. Unfortunately, in today's world, I have to make that disclaimer. That was the first pretty good set of "lyrics" I wrote. After the break up, I was used to writing "song lyrics," and found they were the cheapest form of therapy to begin working through all my personal issues, like extreme shyness and low self esteem. So I kept writing "song lyrics." I wrote them on what ever scrap of paper I could find if I wasn't at home. If I was home, I wrote them in a spiral pad labeled, "Just some stuff I wrote." If not at home, I copied them into the notebook later on.
In time, I had several "Just some stuff I wrote" notebooks. They were all hidden in a box, under some other stuff, on the top shelf of my closet. I really didn't want my roommates, or anyone, finding those writings. I never meant for anyone to ever see them, unless I actually started a band and made songs out of some of them. At some point, I looked at the 4 or 5 notebooks of "song lyrics," and realized that I didn't have a band, I didn't play any instruments, and I wasn't going to start a band. "I have a whole bunch of poems... I'm a poet," I finally admitted to myself. In 1989, being a poet wasn't cool. So I just kept writing poetry, and hiding it from everyone.
Finally, in 1992, when I was sleeping on the living room floor of Chris Moeller's tiny Huntington Beach apartment, where he ran S&M Bikes out of the one car garage, I had my poetry notebooks in a box, in a storage unit. One day, someone gave Chris a copy of Henry Rollins' book of poetry, Black Coffee Blues. Chris thought it was great, and let me check it out. I read through his poetry, and while it was raw, I didn't really connect to much of it. Instead, my thought was, "I could write a book like this." Then I thought of my notebooks full of poetry. The next thought was, "Wait, I have written a book like this." I started reading through the 7 or 8 notebooks of "Just some stuff I wrote," and typing up the best poems.
Over the course of a couple of months, in 1992, I typed up and published a zine about 80 zine pages thick, which is 40 sheets of typing paper. It was so thick I had to bind it with duct tape. Seriously, duct tape. It was my first poetry zine, and I titled it We're on the Same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing. Yeah, I was pretty much always depressed in those days, except when riding my bike. It scared the hell out of me, to publish me really personal poems, but I made about 20 copies, and handed them out to friends, starting with Chris and a few BMX people. I also gave a few to family members, and to a couple of friends on the American Gladiators crew. That's where I worked that summer. Much to my surprise, people were pretty supportive. Chris started calling me The White Bear all the time, after the first poem in the zine. The nickname stuck, and I later took it as my poetry pen name.
I kept writing poetry, and journaling, and putting out more typical zines, once in a while, through the early 1990's. I put out two more zines of poetry, "Mush" in 1996, and "The Poet" in 1997. Each of those was smaller, with 35-40 poems each. By that time, I was writing some pretty solid poetry, and to this day, the best creative work I've done is my poetry. When I first started writing poetry in 1987, I filled up six or seven legal pads of crap, just horrible attempts at "song lyrics." I threw all that crap away. After that, between 1988 and 2008, I wrote at least 400 to 500 poems. I published somewhere around 100 poems of those poems in my the three poetry zines.
By 2008, I had another 165 really solid poems, written between 1997 and 2008. I had the hand written copies in my journals, in my storage unit. I had also typed all of them up in my laptop, a Mac Powerbook that I bought to learn digital video editing. I was not into the internet then, and never got online once with that computer. I planned to get back into editing BMX videos with it, and was slowly trying to teach myself Final Cut Express edit software, while driving a taxi 80 hours a week. Then taxi driving died, I kept getting a bad leg infection called cellulitis, and had to quit driving a cab in 2007.
I had been living in my taxi for most of the years 2003 to 2007. When I quit, I walked out onto the streets of Orange County, California, with $15 in my pocket. My health was so bad then, I actually expected to die within maybe six weeks. Obviously I didn't die, and I lived homeless, wandering around Orange County and L.A. County, for almost a year. I couldn't find a job, and I couldn't get any little business going to start making decent money again. By late 2008, as the Great Recession walloped the economy, my family offered to fly me to North Carolina.
We grew up in mostly in Ohio, until I finished 8th grade, and then wound our way west, through two states, then to San Jose, California, after I graduated high school. I had never lived in North Carolina, I didn't want to move there. But my parents and my sister's family wound up living there by the 2000's. They offered to fly me there "for a while." I figured I'd stay through the holidays, and then somehow head back to California. I went to NC with a little backpack and a few clothes, and that's it. My whole life, all my BMX magazines, videos, master tapes, and all my poetry, and a Dyno BMX bike, were in my storage unit. I arranged to pay a couple of guys to ship it to me once I got back east. My Mac Powerbook was in a pawn shop, I planned to have that shipped to me as well. I just needed to borrow about $150 from my family once I got to North Carolina, and they said that was cool.
So I flew to North Carolina in mid-November of 2008. After a couple of weeks, staying in my parents' tiny apartment, bored out of my skull, I asked my mom to borrow the money, and get my stuff shipped to me. She said, "Oh we don't have money for that." And that was that. In my family, that kind of thing happened over and over throughout my life. Again, it was November of 2008, the economy was in full collapse mode, and I couldn't find any job there. I had no way to make any money in the tiny town we were in. So I lost all my BMX stuff, most of my clothes, and 165 or so unpublished poems, the best ones I'd ever written. Most of my poems are pretty long, and I almost never memorized them. A few copies of my poem zines were around, but those have since been lost, by me. So I wound up left with about a dozen of my shorter, crappier poems, the few I did memorize for some reason.
After that, poetry just didn't come to me anymore. I think I wrote 3 poems between late 2008 and January 2023. The Poet in me left the building. I came to call all of the 400 to 500 poems I lost "The Lost Poems." I remembered a couple lines, here and there, of a few of them. But the best stuff I had ever written, anywhere, was all gone in 2008.
I went into a really deep, near suicidal depression in 2008, in North Carolina. But writing ended up saving me, in a completely unexpected way. I had pretty much ignored "that internet thing" from when I first heard of it in 1994, until late 2008. I didn't have my own computer, I was living in my taxi when I did have one, so I just never learned anything about the internet. I got a Google Gmail account, and would check it, and google a couple of things, every week or so at the library in Huntington Beach. I actually started a taxi driver blog in 2007, but it sucked, and no one read it. That was it.
When I wound up in my parents' apartment, in late 2008, in a tiny town in North Carolina, their computer was in my new, little bedroom. That was the first time I had free, open, access to the internet, ever. So I did what everyone else did a decade earlier, I started looking up web porn. After a couple of weeks of that, I started "surfing the web," as we called it back then. I just looked up whatever popped in my head, and one search led to another. We all know how that goes now.
I found a copy of the FREESTYLIN' magazine book that Andy Jenkins, Mark "Lew" Lewman, and Spike Jonze put out earlier that year. Along with a few other short term employees at Wizard Publications, I wasn't mentioned in it, at all. There wasn't even a "and this guy Steve worked here for a while, he made cool zines, but he was a dork." Nothing. They didn't mention Steve Giberson, Don Toshach, Mark Snavely, Jim Cassimus, and a few other freelancers, either.
I wasn't really seeking revenge, though being completely left out pissed me off. But I decided to write a blog about my time at FREESTYLIN', just to say, "Hey, I was there, too, for a little while. Here are a few little stories of my time at the legendary magazines." At that time, I didn't know about online communities, I didn't connect with anyone online. Social media was still really new then, and most adults weren't on it. So I created FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales blog, and started writing little stories of my time working at the magazine, back in 1986. In my mind then, I thought I was just sending these little stories out into a big black hole that was "the internet." I had no idea how posts and sites were found by search engines, and had no idea if anyone would ever read them. I was just completely depressed, bored out of my skull, living with my parents at age 42, and I needed something to do, night after night. So I began to blog.
After about a month, one of my blog posts went viral in the Old School BMX online community. I didn't even know there was an Old School BMX online community. A well known freestyler contacted me, one I didn't really know in the 1980's. Then a couple of old friends from the 80's contacted me, by email, I think, back then. They all told me, "Keep writing these stories, they're cool." So I kept blogging, struggling with the technology, which intimidated me, but loving the actual writing. I kept re-connecting with riders I hadn't heard from in many years, and they told me to keep blogging. My "blogging career" began, and it gave me a reason to keep going in life, in general.
Now it's 14 1/2 years later, I've written over 2,500 blog posts across more than 25 blog ideas I've tried, and they have raked in over 450,000 total page views. With out realizing it in 2008, I kind of pioneered, by accident, an Old School BMX Freestyle focused media. There were solid BMX websites then, like Ride BMX, Fat BMX, and others, that covered some Old School freestyle stuff. But I was the first guy completely focused on that era, so all the Old School freestylers online started reading my blog, and the later ones, like Freestyle BMX Tales, then they discussed it between themselves, and later on Facebook and other social media. Then the Old School BMX reunion began soon after, and later came all the cool podcasts, when lots of people began to share their own stories from the 1980's and 1990's BMX world.
My life has been a time of far more writing than I ever did back in the 80's, while struggling to find a real job, or any other way to make a decent living again. That's a whole different story. Fast forward until a couple of weeks ago. Old School U.K. freestyler, Alex Leech, shared a music video on Facebook by a young guy named Ren, called "Hi Ren." It's an amazing, raw, incredible song, performance, and video, in my opinion. That sent me down a rabbit hole, digging into Ren's other music online. There's a lot of it, and it's nearly all amazing. I'm already an incredibly prolific blogging and Sharpie artist. But this video got me rethinking all my creative work, and trying some new ideas.
But most inspiring, "Hi Ren" is some incredibly well written, raw, and deep rapping. It's great rhymes about a serious subject. That's rare. He took on a huge, serious, hard topic, and did a great job. His rhymes in "Hi Ren" reminded me, to some extent, of my own better poetry. I usually wrote about pretty deep themes, and my poems always had a rhythm to them, so they could be rapped. That's just the way I write. And as crazy as it sounds, I've written as many, if not more rhymes, than guys like Eminem, Jay-Z, Ice T, or whomever.
While I'm not a rapper, I've written a shitload of rhymes, about deep stuff, and "Hi Ren" got me motivated to try and write some good rhymes, some good poems, again. Two days later, I woke up with an idea, and wrote a 76 line poem, while sitting on the side of a building (since I'm homeless), when it was about 45 degrees outside. When poems come, to me, I have to write them, pretty much right then. In my experience, you don't write good poems, you catch good poems. I'll get thinking about an idea, and then I'll go on to other things, and my sub-conscious takes over. Usually, between 2 or 3 and several days later, I get an idea for the first couple of lines of a poem, somehting to do with that theme. I have to sit down, quick, and write it down. Or the idea just flies off somewhere else, and I lose it. Maybe it goes on to another poet, like Elizabeth Gilbert spoke about in her epic TED Talk. A couple of days ago, I wrote another big long poem.
So, after a 14 1/2 year hiatus of not writing poems, the thing that got me the nickname, The White Bear, I have begun to write poems again. That's cool. Poems are intense, and most poems don't connect to very many people. But when a person finds a poem they like, it usually really makes an impression on them.
So the point of this overly long post is that "The White Bear" rides again, as a poet, at least. I've begun to write poetry again, and I'll put those first two poems in this blog soon. They are both on my Patreon site already, and I've shared them with a handful of creative people on my social media lists. I have no idea where these will lead, but it's something new, or old, that's happening in my creative work. There's more to come.
I've got a new blog now, check it out:
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