The Lost Poems...

Beer, wine, cigarettes, cigars, pain killers, excessive prescription meds, red meat, French fries, potato chips, ice cream, any other fatty foods, soda, vaping (smoking "kool-aid" with nicotine), and in my personal case, cheap pepperoni pizza.  Yep, pizza grease is my essential oil.  Every one of us has some vice that we take a little time for most everyday, that helps us get through each day, but that is detrimental over the course of our life.  That is the idea of this meme.  Yes, many people pretend these vices are not that harmful, and some people are self-aware enough to say, "Yep, this pizza is going to help kill me over the course of my life, but I need it to get through the week."  Or whatever the vice is.  This meme above is one of four I made from this single line, which was a line in one of my Lost Poems.

If you ask most people, "Are you into poetry?"  The general answer will probably be, "Not really."  But if you ask the same person what their favorite song is, or who their favorite rapper is, nearly everyone has an answer.  Song lyrics are a form of poetry, set to music.  Rappers make a living "writin' rhymes."  Raps are poetry.  Sparked by the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" in 1979, and a few others in big afros and tight pants, rapping began to spread into the tough neighborhoods of New York City, and throughout the U.S. Black community soon after.  

A year later, the New York City group Blondie, led by Debbie Harry, introduced white kids across the U.S. to rap music with the song "Rapture."  I remember where I was when I heard an airplane flew into the first of the Twin Towers on 9/11.  I remember where I was when I first met BMX freestyle pros Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, and Josh White, in an airport in 1986.  I remember where I was when president Ronald Reagan got shot in 1981.  And I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the song "Rapture" in 1980.  I'm not a big rap fan,  I was 13 then.  It would be a few more years before we really heard of rap as a thing, in rural America, but "Rapture" in 1980 gave us a taste of things to come.

Kids on street corners in the hoods of America, in the early 1980's, did what decades of English teachers couldn't do, they made poetry cool... first in New York and L.A., and later worldwide.  

So while I think most rap sucks today, there is definitely some great rap out there, old and new, and poetry is a lot cooler than it was when I was a kid.  I was hanging out at my friend, Tom Conway, at his house, in the country, outside of the small town of Willard, Ohio.  We were in his family room, listening to radio station G-98 out of Cleveland.  As soon as the song "Rapture" was over, Tom and I looked at each other, "What was THAT?" we asked.  Hearing the song for the first time made that much of an impression.  It was something different than any music we'd heard before.  

When poetry does have an effect on someone, it is often a really profound effect.  If you're still not sure that songs can be great poetry, even without the music, listen closely, or read the words to one of these songs: "Because the Night" - Patti Smith/Bruce Springsteen.  "Madman across the Water"- Bernie Taupin/Elton John.  "American Pie" - Don McClean.  "Bat Out of Hell" - Jim Steinman/Meatloaf.  "Jungleland" - Bruce Springsteen/The E Street Band.  "Gimme the Sweet and Lowdown" - Mike Ness/Social Distortion.  "Hi Ren" - Ren.  That's poetry motherfuckers.  Damn good poetry.  It may not be your taste in poetry, but these are good stuff.  By the way, that last song got me starting to write poetry again, after not writing hardly any poetry, for over 15 years.  Thanks Ren.

Creation emanates, light from the sun

In every group that beholds there's one

-excerpt from one of my Lost Poems

In the big Substack post linked at the end of this blog post, you can read about how I started writing poetry in 1987-1988, sparked by my girlfriend at the time.  I kept writing "song lyrics" after we broke up.  Eventually I had 5 or 6 notebooks full of "lyrics," and knew I didn't intend to start a band.  That's when I realized I had become a poet.  That was in 1990 or 1991.  In 1992, inspired by a book of Henry Rollins' poetry a roommate showed me, I published my first poetry zine.  It had 80 or 100 of my poems in it, and the zine was so thick I had to bind each one with duct tape.  For real.  The zine was called, We're on the Same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing.  The first poem was called, "Journey of The White Bear," written the night that girlfriend who inspired me to try and write songs dumped me.  When I published that poetry zine, I got tagged with the nickname, "The White Bear."  I eventually took that as my penname for my poetry.  I published two more, smaller, zines of poetry, Mush in 1996, and The Poet in 1997.  Both of those had 30 or 35 poems each in them.  Between the three zines, I self-published about 130-160 of the poems I wrote between 1988 and 1997.  

The Key

I met a man with a golden key

He said, "Coincidence isn't

As you will see"

He plunged the key into a stream

And I realized all things flow from dreams

He held the key up to the sky

And I realized energy doesn't die...

Excerpt, all I can remember, from "The Key," one of my Lost Poems

I didn't stop writing poetry in 1997.  I kept writing it through the years until late 2008.  I wrote fewer poems, but they were better quality, overall.  Most of them had something to do with trying to make sense with the trials and tribulations of life, and what we're all doing here on this crazy planet.  My poems got longer, averaging 20 to 40 lines, I'd say, instead of maybe 10 to 20 lines, like many of the earlier poems.  

In 2005, while working as a taxi driver, I got an offer to move into an actual indie art gallery, and live there during the week.  The gallery, AAA Electra 99, was in an industrial unit in Anaheim at the time, and the owner was another taxi driver, who owned his cab.  I lived in the gallery with a mama cat and six kittens, Monday morning through Friday afternoon, and drove his taxi on the weekends.  After a couple of years of working seven days a week, 12-18 hours a day, in the taxi, it was a welcome break.  I was totally burned out when I moved into the gallery.  I hadn't done anything creative in two or three years.  At all.  I was completely focused on making money, as the taxi industry went into a downward spiral.  Suddenly, in the gallery all week, I had a lot of time on my hands.  I started drawing pictures with Sharpies after a few days, and my Sharpie Scribble Style drawing technique was born there in the gallery.  

But I did something else as well.  I had a Mac Powerbook laptop, and I started trying to teach myself Final Cut video editing software, so I could get up-to-date, and start making videos again.  That didn't pan out.  What I also did in the gallery was to go through all my notebooks, my personal journals, and to look through all the poems I had written from late 1997 through 2005.  Out of over 200 poems, I had about 165 that I thought were solid poems.  I typed them all into the hard drive of my computer, not sure what I was going to do with them.  So I had the original, handwritten poems in all my journals, and digital copies in my Powerbook.  

Mirror, Mirror

Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Why do you show the worst of all

Why can't you show who I could be

I look at you, but I see me

-The White Bear, excerpt from on of the Lost Poems

Since I was 19, I've published a lot of zines, written or had photos in 8 BMX magazines, wrote a newsletter for the AFA, worked on several TV show crews, made a bunch of BMX, skate and snowboard videos, and written over 2,800 blog posts.  The highest quality creative work I've ever done was in the poems I wrote between 1997 and 2008.  In 2007, because of health issues and lack of business, I walked away from taxi driving, and became fully homeless, in Orange County, California.  I spent a year homeless in SoCal, and eventually took my family's offer to fly me to North Carolina.  They thought I might be able to get going again there.  My parents moved to NC 3 or 4 years after I moved out of their house, in San Jose, in 1986.  My sister followed them east a couple of years later, and finished college there.  She ended up meeting her future husband, and they married and settled down there.  We're all from Ohio originally, so I had absolutely no connection to North Carolina, other than family members living there, and I didn't want to move there.  

But the pressure that gets put on homeless people at times forced me out of California, much to my dismay.  My family flew me to NC in the middle of November of 2008.  Remember 2008?  Yeah, not a good time to find a job, particularly in a place where you have no connections.  The Great Recession (aka GFC or Global Financial Crisis) was in full collapse mode then.  

I was promised a loan of about $150 to catch up my storage unit payments in Cali, and get my laptop out of the pawn shop, and have someone ship my stuff to me.  when I went to NC.  I flew there with a bookbag sized backpack, and that's it.  All my BMX stuff, a Dyno race bike I'd been riding, all the raw footage and master tapes of videos I'd produced, all my BMX magazines (including a full set of FREESTYLIN' magazines), my videos and DVD's, and all the notebooks with originals of my poems, were in my 5' X 5' storage unit.  That loan I'd been promised was quickly dismissed after getting to NC, and I had no way to come up with money there.  I lost everything I owned, my entire BMX history, except for my Haro brake lever key chain.  I went instantly into a deep depression.  

What surprised me was that, of everything I lost, the poems were what bothered me the most.  I stopped writing poetry.  I couldn't find a job, and I lived with my parents at age 42, in a small two bedroom apartment, for a year or two.  I couldn't get away from North Carolina for nearly ten years.  I never did find a "real job" there.  It was the spring of 2019 when I finally made it back home to California.  I've lived in a couple dozen cities and towns in six states, but Southern California is the only place that ever felt like home to me.  In 2008, in North Carolina, I stopped writing poetry.  The poems just didn't seem to come anymore.  

My sister had copies of two of my poem books, and she gave me those.  Those got lost in another move in NC.  That was totally my fault.  So I've managed to lose all copies of the 150 or so poems I've published in zines, and the 165, much better quality poems, I wrote between late 1997 and 2008.  I also lost well over 100 not-so-great poems that I wrote as well.  So these few poems in the previous posts, and the handful I linked in the last post, are the few remaining poems I have, out of 400 to 500 I've written.  So that's the story of my "Lost Poems."  

The lesson here, if you do any kind of creative work of any decent quality, GET IT OUT IN PEOPLE'S HANDS, even if you have to give it away.  It is possible to lose all your creative work.  It happened to me.  

Back in 2008, bored and severely depressed, and living in my parents' spare bedroom, in a tiny town in North Carolina, I had 24/7 access to a computer, and decent internet, for the first time in my life.  For a couple weeks, I "surfed the web" and watched a ton of porn.  Then I started blogging.  Somewhere around 1,500 to 1,700 of the blog posts I've written since are in this blog, and spread across more that 25 other blogs, sitting out there, on the web.  I've got over 200 original drawings and copies of drawings in many U.S. states, and over a dozen foreign countries.  I haven't made a living doing all this work.  I did it because I love doing, and this is what I do.  This is who I am.  I'll keep putting out the best work I can, for as long as I can, and hopefully make a living at it some day.  Either way, I'll keep doing the best creative work I can in whatever situation I'm in.  

I started spending my Pizza Hut pay to self-publish zines in 1985.  It took until 2008, but I finally got over my Luddite-ism, and figured out how fucking cool the internet is.  I've been using it the best I can to create pretty cool content ever since.  I've made some money selling drawings, selling over 100 original drawings in the last 8 years.  But what I've made is nowhere close to making a living.  I'll keep plugging along at this as long as I'm able to.  And I'll put out work for free, if that's the only way to get it out so some audience that may appreciate it.  I'll make money at this work when I'm able to.  That's what I learned by losing over 300 of the Lost Poems.  When you do decent creative work, get it out to people, whether you get paid or not.  

I recently wrote a big post on my Substack about poetry, and how I became a poet.  If that sounds interesting, check it out.  

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

 

"Love Lies Bleeding" and a the few other surviving poems of mine

 Poet and donut connoisseur.  Me with a light snack from Randy's Donut's in Hollywood, 2019.  

After writing the big Substack post about how I became a poet (linked below), I got a nasty leg infection, and couldn't get online for a while.  I've been getting to the library to get online for a while the last few days, from the recuperative place I'm in for the time being.  As I said in the Substack post, I've written somewhere around 400 to 500 poems in my life.  I published about 150 of them, total, in three zines, which came out in 1992, 1996, and 1997.  But I lost all of my copies of those zines, and all the handwritten originals, and other copies.  I lost ten years worth of my unpublished poetry in a move to North Carolina in 2008.  More on that in the next post.  

I've written some really stupid poems, some funny poems, some sarcastic poems, a bunch of mushy love poems (in the late 80's, and early 90's), and a lot of pretty decent, philosophical, "what's life all about?" type poems.  I don't memorize my poems, in most cases.  So most of those 400 to 500 are lost, unless one or more of my poetry zines show up somewhere.  There's a few still out there, in a box in a closet or attic, somewhere.  

In addition to the few poems in the last several posts, here are links to a few more of the better poems I've written since 2008, when I pretty much stopped writing poetry.  These 10 or 15 poems, here and in the previous posts, are all I have left, at this point.  

"Love Lies Bleeding" - 2018

"Life: What will you do?" - 2018

"The Douchebag's War Cry"- 2023

"Freaks, Geeks, Dorks, and Weirdos" - 2023

"Ode to the word FUCK" - 2007  

(This one is a comedy bit/poem, and I do have it memorized, but have only performed it for a handful of people)

I recently wrote a big post about writing poetry and how I became a poet on my Substack.  If that sounds interesting, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

"Is there a need for art?" - New poem in 2024

 Photo of one of my favorite graffiti pieces I saw in Hollywood, in 2021, I think.  Is it art?  Everyone has their opinion, but I dig this piece.  #steveemigphotos.

Is there a need for art?

The truth out there is plain to see

Yet humans continue to disagree

Sitting on a rock on a hill, enjoying the view

Of the city below, where humans do what they do

The good, the heroic, the evil and mean, 

The city is the place of human fears and dreams

Though we still can't place where cities got their start

I asked out loud, "Is there a need for art?"

Take away Roman columns, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Greek plays, 

Would it matter how humans spend their days?

Take away cave paintings, ivory etchings, and architecture grand

Would humans still see the guidance of a Creator's hand?

What if the music of a million years had never been heard?

No books, no movies, no poems spoken, only everyday words

What if every spark of inspiration had just fizzled dead?

Would civilization have happened, if all the great ideas had been left unsaid?

The answer is obvious, a definite, "No!"

Without arts of all kinds, there would be nowhere to go

So despite all the pain, all the hate, all the war

Perhaps there's a reason that we're all here for

Perhaps there's a reason actors act and singers sing

There's a reason novelists and poets are seeking something

It's why designers design and movies get made

Why directors direct, and put on their plays

Perhaps it's all part, of a story grand and strong

Playing out over the eons, a span longer than long

Is there a purpose to Art?  An enthusiastic "Yes!" I declare

Music, dance, and stories are always found there

This truth came to me, on a rock on a hill

The grand story of humankind... creativity, drama, and free will

-The White Bear

I just wrote this one, in January 2024, while laid up in a sketchy-ass homeless recuperative center, where I couldn't access social media, write on my blog, and was listening to other people's music and chatter for over a week.  There's such a strong surge of censorship being pushed onto social media and online platforms these days, by certain groups who hate books, art, and most of makes life interesting, that's it's like this continuous under current of hate and negativity.  I've written very few poems in the last 16 years, and this one came out pretty messy, when it came time to write it down.  But it captures a lot of what I feel these days, being creative in my own unique ways, in a world where there's so many forces coming down on arts of many different kinds, because they don't conform to certain ideologies.  

I recently wrote a big post on my Substack about poetry, writing poems, and becoming a poets decades ago.  If that sounds interesting, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

"AirFireEarthWater" and "Quotes"- Two of my poems from the early 1990's

 This is me as a cameraman for Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company, back in 1989.  This photo was taken 3-5 years before this poem was written, but I don't have any photos handy of myself in the early or mid 1990's.

AirFireEarthWater

A FEW there that find the path

A FEW there be that hear the call

A FEW there be that wake up to

The mystery and wonder of it all

-The White Bear

This poem above was written somewhere between 1993-1997, when I was reading and digging into religion, spirituality, mysticism, the Rosicrucians, Pythagoras, the mystical meaning of the 3-4-5 right triangle, and other weird shit like that.  This poem was in either my 2nd or 3rd poetry zine, Mush (1996) or The Poet (1997), I'm not sure which.  Around the same time I also came up with this little poem/saying.

Quotes

I read the businessmen's quotes

And they quoted the philosophers

 I read the philosophers' quotes

And they quoted the mystics

I read  the mystics' quotes

And they quoted Nature

So I walked out into the woods

And found that everything quotes God

-The White Bear

I recently wrote a big post on my Substack about poems, writing poetry, and how I became a poet.  If that sounds interesting, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

"Play" - poem from the early 1990's-

 

If the world's a stage, show it what you got.  Street performing dance team, The Damn Team, who used to perform right next to where I would sell artwork on Hollywood Boulevard.  2019.  #steveemigphotos

Play

The world's a stage

Just grand in scale

Drama erupts

From our travails

It's one Great Play

Go find your part

Some day you'll realize

The world is Art

-The White Bear

written somewhere between 1992-1996

I just wrote a bunch of my ideas on poetry and becoming a poet on my Substack.  If that sounds interesting, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

"Become"- short poem from the early 1990's...

 

Wall ride over my sister Cheri's head, Blues Brothers Wall in Huntington Beach, 1990.  These two poems were written in the early 90's, the height of my BMX riding days.

Become

You must risk

If you're to succeed

For when you grow

Sometimes you bleed

Each much climb

Over the fence, 

For the only cage

Is Ignorance

Each Jedi knight 

And Shaolin monk

evolved from 

A lowly punk

Don't get caught

In the world's throws

We must become

Our own heroes

-The White Bear

I just wrote a big Substack post about writing poetry (before my recent stay in the hospital), if that interests you, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

Jezebel- a poem about a weird punker chick I dated in 1989

 This is me carving a line in the Nude Bowl, in the spring of 1990, a few months after writing this poem.  The Nude Bowl is an abandoned swimming pool out in the middle of the desert, legendary in the BMX and skateboard worlds, in the Palm Springs area.  It's a relic from a 1970's era nudist colony.  I have very few pics of myself from that era, so this will have to do.  Video still from The Ultimate Weekend, my 1990 BMX video.

In late 1989, I dated this weird punker chick who used to hang out at the Huntington Beach Pier on the weekends, where a handful of us BMX freestylers would hang out and session.  It wasn't a serious relationship, I think she dated me mostly for the food, I took her out to Denny's almost every night.  

She was really weird, and told us a different name nearly every time we saw her, for the first several weeks she started hanging out.  We took to calling her Jezebel, I'm not sure why.  We listened to The Cure a lot while hanging out, and she liked to watch horror flicks.  The one thing I will say about her, this weird punker chick had an amazing rapport with animals.  She had a rat that would drink off of her (or my) tongue.  The thing that really freaked me out, though, is that she would cuddle with my roommate's 25 pound, mean as hell cat.  I never even petted the cat, in two years of living in that apartment.  I still managed to get bit by it once.  But, within five minutes of walking in the living room, Silus the furry, mean, basketball of a cat was on his back, in her lap, and she was rubbing its belly.  My roommate, who owned the cat, could rub its belly maybe once a month, without getting bit.  So she was a really weird, kind of interesting, very crazy punker chick.  But she had an incredible way with animals.  Near the end of of our short relationship, I wrote this poem.  I was probably kind of drunk, I can't remember.  I wanted to break it up, but was kind of worried since she was kind of suicidal at times.  I wrote this poem when I was thinking about how to break up with her.

Looking back, I think this is the oldest poem of mine that has survived, unless someone finds a copy of my first poetry zine, We're on the same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing.  This poem was in that zine, which I published in 1992.  But there were poems in it going back to 1988, when I really started writing a lot of poetry.  Obviously, it's not a great poem, but since I memorized this one, I still had it, when I lost nearly all of the 400-500 poems I've written, in a move in 2008.  In my head, the way I would read it, the rhythm of this poem goes to the tune of the song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."  Yeah, not the best relationship when that's the song that comes to mind while thinking about it.  

Jezebel

The words that I want, well they just aren't around

And I can't look into your eyes

What we once felt, I don't see anymore

Like a ship when the fog fills the skies

The moments they come, and the moments they go

But the right moment just won't come 'round

I can't go on feeling just how I do, and I can't risk leaving you down

You're all that I wanted, before I knew what I had

And without you I'd never have known it

You captured what little love I had inside, even though I may not have shown it

But here we are now, in the dark and the gray, two rowboats adrift in the mist

And maybe our paths, they will cross once again, if not this world than in the next

-The White Bear

I just wrote a big post with thoughts about poems, and writing poetry, on my Substack.  Check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

Mystery Machine- a poem about that van we all watched as a kid

 Scooby-Doo was my  favorite cartoon as a kid, and I come from Generation X.  We were the kids who spent every Saturday morning in the 1970's as a kid, lying on our stomachs, four feet from the TV, eating our cereal, watching 3 or 4 hours of cartoons, and weird live action kids' shows (like this one).  

Many years ago I was talking to some friends, as adults now, we were trying to figure out just what was going on in that van back then, for the whole week between shows.  They had to be smoking some weed.  It was the 1960's and 1970's, and Shaggy and Scooby were always hungry.  That conversation led to me writing this poem, speculating on what happened back then, in the back of this van.  Here's what I came up with.  

Mystery Machine

Here's a ghost, there's a witch, Scooby's looking for a bitch, 

Shaggy's hiding in the kitchen with a big sandwich

Spooky green, it's a crazy scene

In the back of the Mystery Machine

The van's slower than molasses, Velma lost her glasses

Shaggy's in the back seat, checking out their asses

Spooky green , it's a crazy scene

In the back of the Mystery Machine

It's a van dogpile doing Daphne doggy-style

Velma's got a mouthful of Fred, all the while

Spooky green, it's a crazy scene

In the back of, the Mystery Machine

-The White Bear

I just wrote a big post on my Substack about poems, and my thoughts on writing poetry.  Check it out:

Steve Emig the White Bear's Substack

"California Bitch" and the other "punk songs" I wrote lyrics for in the late 1980's

The Ultimate Weekend, my first self-produced BMX video.  In 1990, after working for 2 1/2 years at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, I wanted to make a  BMX freestyle video that showed "real riding."  Only a handful of BMX freestyle videos had come out, up until that point.  But the wave of early prosumer video equipment made producing my own BMX video possible.  For the first time, average people could produce their own videos.  Armed with my $1,100 S-VHS video camera, I spent about 8 months shooting footage on weekends, and $5,000 of my own money to produce The Ultimate Weekend.  At the time, it was a pretty good rider-made video, the best edited of the bunch at the time.  In the process, I hada punk band called The Stain, from Ohio, produce and record two "punk songs" of lyrics I had written.  Thanks to Jon Stainbrook, Mark Mickel, and Jeff Kollman, John from Government Issue, and friends, for humoring me, and making these highly questionable songs happen.

"Cottage Cheese Disease" - 10:39 (in video above)- In 1988, 1989 and beyond, I wrote lyrics to a bunch of "punk songs."  My friend Mike, a Huntington Beach Pier local, Mike, started taking me to punk rock shows, and properly introducing me to punk music.  I was already writing poems at the time, after dating a woman who was the lead singer in a local band. I didn't tell anyone about the poetry slowly filling notebooks in my closet.  

The punk songs were just other ideas that I'd get, and write down, funny, sarcastic little ideas.  I never really wanted to start a band, I just liked making up fucked up, funny songs.  At one point, I started writing a series of short stories that included a fictional punk band called U.I., Unpardonably Ignorant, a line from the book Think and Grow Rich. In those stories, the characters would reference the band, and my songs were the band's songs.  But those stories never got finished.  

"Cottage Cheese Disease" was what a former roommate of mine called women's cellulite.  We were riding at the the H.B. Pier one weekend, and some large woman walked by in a smaller than necessary swimsuit, and I made a joke "Whoa, she got the cottage cheese disease."  Over the next hour or so it turned into a song.  I thought of it as a song, not a rap.  But when The Stain took it, they turned it into a rap.  Now, 35 years later, I'm fat from my years working as a taxi driver, and have my own cottage cheese disease.  Karma got the last laugh.  

"Mom's Imagination" -  44:07 (in the video above)- For this song, I was thinking back to high school in Boise, when I was just getting into freestyle.  My mom had a pretty good imagination when it came to what I was up to.  I was a shy dork getting shot down by pretty much every girl I talked to at parties, yet my mom always seemed to think that when I came home on the weekends, I'd been to a full blown drunken orgy or something.  My best friend in high school, Darrin, and I used to joke about this.  One day I laughed, "Man, I wish my life was half as great as my mom's imagination."  He laughed, "Yeah, no shit."  The line stuck in my head, and I turned it into these song lyrics.  The Stain, again, turned it into an actual song.  What I like about this song is that "Mom's Imagination" actually sounds like a song you might here in a show by a young punk band.  

"California Bitch" lyrics

Refrain

She's a... California bitch 

in her bleach blond hair

California bitch  

but I don't care

California bitch

in her Cabriolet

California bitch... No way!

Daddy pays the rent

She has a good time

Party with her friends

Maybe do a few lines

Find a new guy 

'cause she's got an itch

She's a California...

She's a California... BITCH!

Refrain 

There was another verse or two, I can't remember them now.  "California Bitch" was written about the hot, stuck-up, blond girls that we'd try to talk to at the beach, and who would either ignore us, or make fun of us.  A lot of them drove convertible Volkswagen Cabriolets then, that was the trendy, stuck-up, blond, rich girl car then.  Being a BMX freestyler was definitely not cool in the 1980's, and most of the hot girls walking by would totally blow us off.  So "California Bitch" was my "Fuck you bitch" song to all of the hot girls who waned nothing to do with me.

I've been doing a lot of writing lately about creativity, art, writing, Creative Scenes, and stuff like that on a platform designed for writers, called Substack.  Check it out.  You can even subscribe for free, and get each post sent to your email.  

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

Triple Challenge dirt jumping contest in Anaheim

For any of you who didn't catch it, here's the Our BMX Finals Highlights edit of the Triple Challenge BMX dirt jumping contest in Anaheim, California last weekend (January 6, 2024) 

Supercross racing in Anaheim in January is a big tradition in Orange County, California.  Just over 30 years ago, my first "real" TV crew guy job was working on the 1991 Supercross season.  While I heard about people going to check out Supercross races before that, I'd never actually gone to see a race live.  It's a freakin' insane thing to witness, and I tried to catch the Anaheim races in the years after that whenever possible.  

Years ago, they added a BMX jumping contest out in the pits area, in the parking lot, to each Anaheim race.  Now called the BMX Triple Challenge.  The jumps, as you can see above, look like a small mountain range, with the mega roll-in heading into the three ginormous sets of doubles.  I haven't made it to check out this event since I've been back in CA, the last few years, but that's what the video is for.  

I captured this still off the Our BMX footage from the video above.  This is not R Willy, it's Jaie Toohey, front bike flip that almost got away from him, but he actually landed this.  Video game stuff in real life.  

BMX Triple Challenge- Best Trick Jam- Our BMX edit

A Supercross story from the P.O.W. BMX House days... 1992 or 1993...

Back in the early 1990's, the first real BMX house formed.  In a house on Iroquois street in Westminster, California, a bunch of pro BMX racers moved in, and out over a 4 or 5 year period.  The early guys called it the P.O.W. House, for Pros Of Westminster.  Rent ranged from about $95 to $120 a month, with guys sharing bedrooms in the 4 bedroom house.  The backyard was turned into a little jumping line, and later filled with mini ramps.  Alan Foster, Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, John Salamne, Lawan Cunningham, Jai Lonergan, and Brian Foster were some of the 22 official residents of the house.  Pretty much every BMX traveler from around the world crashed on the couches of the floor during those years, at some point.  I lived there twice, for several months each time, in 1992-93,  

In January, either 1992 or 1993, our crew from the P.O.W. House headed out to watch the Anaheim Supercross, and we got there late.  The only tickets were way up high, and kind of expensive to our meager wallets, $14 each or something like that.  The other guys took off, I told them to leave me there.  Since I had worked on TV crews the year before, I had an idea.  

I walked around the stadium, found the TV camera crew, told them I was a good P.A., a production assistant, and offered to work for free.  I was believable enough, and the producer hired me on the spot, saying he'd pay me $50 for the night's work.  Deal.  He pointed me to a cameraman I'd be helping, and I was soon helping unroll cables for the cameras.  

I wound up getting a free spaghetti dinner, and then working all evening with the starting line cameraman.  Instead of watching the motos from the nosebleed seats, I was literally standing in front of that motorcycles, on the track, as they revved up, right before the start of every moto.  My cameraman was right in the middle of the first straight, getting the head on shot of all the racers.  I was about a third of the way across the starting straight, holding the camera cable, there were no wireless cameras in TV back then.  When the model turned the starting card sideways, we had something like 30 seconds to run off the racetrack, and I had to pull all the camera cable out of the way before the riders raced by, so they wouldn't get tangled up in it.  

It's a hell of the way to see the Supercross.  After each start, we'd run through the infield to the third turn, dodging all the assorted people down there, and I'd unwind the cable along the way.  The camerman took position on the backside of the berm, on the third turn, and the racers would be coming at us each lap, through the whoop-de-doo section.  Then they would charge through the berm, right in front of us.  It was hard work, but man, that was the coolest way to watch a Supercross race ever.  

The celebrity guest that night was David Faustino, Bud Bundy from the TV show Married with Children, so I saw him walk by, surrounded by security (he's a really small guy), at close range.  He waved to the crowd, and said a few words on the mic, I think.  Then it was back to racing.  Standing on the berm, watching all the top MX racers bouncing through the whoops right at me, was a sight I'll never forget.  Amazing night.  

After the race, it took maybe 45 minutes to coil all the cables, and pack up the camera gear, and I learned the over/under technique for coiling the coax cable used for video cameras.  It was a solid 6 or 7 hours of work, but fun work.  I wound up getting either $75 or $100, I think.  A check came in the mail a few days later.  They asked if I wanted to help them at the next Anaheim race, a year later.  I caught a bunch of buses back to the P.O.W. House, getting home like 3am, with a hell of a story to tell the next morning.  My crazy idea to not only watch it for free, but get paid to watch the Anaheim Supercross, paid off.  If you've never seen a supercross race live, go see one when you get the chance.  It's about the most insane sport ever. 

OK, not the biggest, gnarliest thing in the best trick jam, but definitely innovative.  Tucker Smith with a nac-nac seat spinner.  He loosened his seat, and spun it around mid air.  I'm 57 years old, never seen this one before.  Video still from the Our BMX edit.

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