Out of 15 (yes, 15) ultra low budget action sports videos I produced and/or edited BITD, this is some of the best footage. Horrible editing, Play-Rec-Pause, machine to machine, while fairly drunk, but the footage is good. Scenes from Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip King of Dirt at Mission Trails, in the spring of 1991. This segment was my footage that I edited into the first S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles... I'm a Racer.
Thank you readers!
I started this blog in late June of 2017, when I couldn't find a job in North Carolina, and literally had just moved into a tent in the woods. That was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Really. My FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales Old School BMX blog (2008-2010, 100+ posts, 25,000+ page views), and my follow-up Freestyle BMX Tales blog (2010-2012, 500+ posts, 125,000+ page views) had both run their course. Both blogs were really popular in those early days of the Old School BMX Freestyle online community. I deleted both of those blogs completely off the internet during a dark moment in my life, in 2012, a couple of months after my dad died.
I played around with 50 or more other blog ideas, writing 20 or 30 posts, then giving up on each idea. I started two follow-up versions of Freestyle BMX Tales, Version #2 on Wordpress, and version #3 (still up today) back here on Blogger. In this "Addicted to Blogging" post on one of those blogs, there's a list of the most popular of my "unknown" blogs, though the page view stats are totally out of date. Those years, 2012-2018, were a really depressing time in my life.
I was living with my mom in North Carolina, couldn't find ANY job, at all, and blogged a lot to fill the time. I even attempted suicide, in the spring of 2015, with a serious overdose of my depression meds, including a whole bottle of lithium (let's see if this sentence gets me kicked off Blogger). That led to nearly two weeks in the local hospital. I came out the other side of that, with the help of a good therapist, and focused on creativity. Late in 2015 is when I started drawing people in my Sharpie Scribble Style, and selling my drawings on Facebook. The more creative I got, the more my mental health improved, even if my financial life was still tanking.
My mom and I never got a long well, and after a serious argument in the summer of 2017, I moved out, and went to live in the woods in nearby Winston-Salem. I lived in a tent behind Bolton Park, near Hanes Mall, and drew Sharpie drawings for food and day to day money. I sold them online and through a really cool local record shop, Earshot Music, thanks to Phred the owner, and the art director, Jane Buck. I owe them both a huge "Thank you!" It's been a tough decade since. I never have made a real living since, but I keep blogging, drawing, and putting out creative work. I've scraped by financially for many, many years at this point.
When I started this blog, I really didn't know if anyone would ever read any of it. But I wrote more stories about my days in the BMX freestyle and skateboard worlds in the 1980's and 1990's. I also wrote about anything else I found interesting. This blog had 150,000 or so page views by 2023, when I jumped over and started writing mostly on the Substack platform. I've added posts now and then since, but just left this blog, sitting there on the web. Around that time, the blog started getting big chunks of views from obscure locations like Hong Kong or Singapore. For real. This was about the time VPN's showed up, so I thought that might be what was going on. Those big blocks of views from all over the world just kept coming. I still don't know what's going on with them. Whatever the case, the blog just rolled over one million total page views last night.
Thank you to everyone, anywhere, who has read this blog, or any of my blogs, over the last 19 years that I've been blogging.
There are over 600 Million blogs online, and the vast majority of blogs never even get 1,000 views. One stat says that 96.55% of ALL blog posts get ZERO traffic. Every single post on this blog, more than 1070 total, have views. Blogger (owned by Google) is a tiny part of the worldwide blogosphere. I can't find any specific Blogger blogs with one million views, but there are some that get 1 million views a month. Technically, Huffington Post, and similar websites, are blogs. There are many news and mainstream blogs that get a million views or more a month. A few may get millions of views a day. But that's not true of personal, niche blogs. So this is a really cool milestone to reach.
Just for the record, I write all my posts myself, and don't use AI. I've written somewhere around 3,000 blog posts in 19 years, though I deleted all my blogs (maybe 1,500 poststotal) in late 2012. Then I started all over.
Also, I have never made money on my blogs, at all. From a monetary standpoint, all of my 50+ blogs are financial failures. I don't blog for money, and haven't put ads on my blogs, except for trying Adsense for a couple months in 2009, but I never got the money. I've never done affiliate marketing, either. It just doesn't really work with my style of blogging. Ads clutter up blogs, and the money isn't worth it on niche blogs. Now, most of the sales of my Sharpie Scribble Style drawings have been to people who read my blogs, so I have made money, but not much, indirectly, thanks to my blogs.
Like I said, I do most of my writing on Substack now, so while I'm stoked on the views on this blog, check out my Substack for my more recent writing.
(Click "No Thanks" on the first page, and then scroll down the list of posts, see if anything sounds interesting.)
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