Update May 14, 2025- Writing A LOT and drawing a bit...

 Marilyn Monroe drawing, in my Sharpie Scribble Style, which I finished recently.  If you're a Patreon supporter of mine, you'll be getting a small copy of this (11" X 14"), as soon as I can get them sent out, which might be a few weeks.  I left the little thing in the bottom of the photo in case anyone steals this pic, so they don't get a great copy.  I've been thinking about drawing Marilyn Monroe since I landed in Hollywood, in September 2019.  But no photo seemed right... until I saw this one.  

Last summer, my laptop got stolen.  Actually, my whole backpack got stolen, from right under my head, while I was sleeping.  The couple who stole it got away with my laptop, two cell phones (my Obama phone, and the old iPhone 5 I used to take photos), all my Sharpies, a notebook (journal) or two, my harmonica, and $7 of something.  In normal life, that stuff wouldn't be that hard to replace.  But I don't live a normal life.  

I've replaced the Sharpies and basic art supplies.  I still didn't get a new phone, I just don't use a phone like most people do.  Nearly all my writing and communication happened on my laptop.  I still haven't replaced that.  The last year has been me just trying to get by day to day, and do as much creative work as possible.  Your Patreon support (about $65 each month), helps me with a few things I need on the first of each month, and I thank all of you for that.  

Now it's May, and the SoCal rainy season, mild as it was, is pretty much over.  As a homeless artist/blogger, weather plays a huge role in my life.  During the rainy season, I pretty much just get by, writing as much as I can using the local library computer.  Your Patreon support helps me keep working, a long with selling the occasional drawing, and "flying a sign," panhandling on local freeway off ramps. 

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack 

You don't have to subscribe to my Substack to read all the posts right now.  Just click "No thanks" on the first page, and it'll take you to the posts, 109 of them, I think right now.  I have dozens of posts on different creative themes, and other themes as well.  

So here's what I've managed to do in the last year or so.  I've been writing A LOT on Substack.  That platform was designed specifically for writers.  I currently have three series of articles going on Substack, please check them out if they seem interesting:

The Poet- How I Became The White Bear- I've written somewhere around 400 to 500 poems in my life.  This series features tells how I got into writing poetry, my process for writing poems, and features the poems I've written over the last few years.  

Simulpocalypse- This is a term I coined to describe how every day civilization goes on as normal, while we have a growing number of vacant and abandoned buildings, and full post-apocalyptic looking places, in the U.S., simultaneously.  This series dives into the tens of thousands of empty buildings from several different angles.  

Recession 101-  I just started this series, because I think we're finally sliding into the major recession (depression?) that I've been writing about for 7 years now.  I haven't been writing about this recession just because it's the "next recession," but because this will be a world changing recession.  This series is aimed more at the younger generations, who haven't lived through a full blown recession in their adult lives.  

When I get a bank account again, hopefully over this summer, I will be able to get paid subscribers on Substack.  It makes a lot more sense for a writer, and I'm thinking about asking about $7.50 a month.  With 500 paid subscribers, after fees, I'll be able to rent a room, after paying taxes.  With 1,000 paid subscribers, after paying fees, taxes, etc, I'd be in business as a truly functional artist and writer, and be able to actually live as a human (sleep in a bed, take daily showers, cook my own food, etc) again.  This is the general direction I'm heading, bit by bit.  

I'm still adding to my main Blogger blog: Steve Emig: The White Bear- which now has over 1,000 posts (1,050 ish), and over 418,000 total page views.  But I've backed off on this to a large degree, and only add a post once in a while.  

So that's where I'm focusing most of my time.  As I've been just getting by week to week, I've been writing A LOT, and drawing a fair bit.  If you're helping me out, this is the work you're supporting, and I truly thank you for the help.  

Sharpie drawing of motorcycle racing champion, Kenny Roberts, that I did for Sean Ewing, who's had me draw several bike, motorcycle, and car drawings.  

That one time I got a two page spread photo in a BMX magazine

 I don't have a laptop, can't save screenshots like normal.  But if you go to page 16 of this scan, in the Raleigh Hyper Shock bike test.  That's me in the Vision Street Wear T-shirt, doing a Shingle shuffle under the Huntington Beach Pier.  The sequence is David Morris, the other Raleigh team rider, who was a better rider than me, but from the Pacific Northwest, so he didn't get much coverage.  

The bike is the upgraded version of the pink Raleigh Hyper Shock freestyle bike I got when we did a bike test on one at FREESTYLIN' magazine.  The latter version, in this test, was chrome with a better color combo for the stickers.  I actually really liked the way the Raleigh rode.  It had Hutch Trick Star clone geometry, Torker-style twin top tubes, and a small loop frame stand that worked really well.  

The downside was that to hit the price point, they weren't all chrome-moly, and the handle bars were mild steel, too.  So I loved the way they rode, but I snapped 6 or 7 frames in a year, and snapped one pair of handlebars mid air on a bunnyhop.  That wasn't fun.  I actually nicked the jagged edge of the handlebars when I bailed, and cut my ball sack a little.  Not cool.  

If there had been a full chrome-moly version of that bike, I would have kept on riding them.  That was my second "factory sponsorship," after the horrific OTW (Off The Wall) bikes I rode for a couple of months in early 1986, while living in San Jose.  The OTW piece of shit bikes morphed into Air-Uni bikes, then eventually Ozone, which actually were good bikes.   Photos by Steve "Guy-B" Giberson.  May 1988 issue of Freestyle magazine (the Super BMX freestyle mag).  

May 1988 Freestyle Magazine scan

Maurice Meyer local TV segment featuring NorCal freestyle ams from 1986

This TV segment featuring Skyway pro and Curb Dog legend, Maurice Meyer, was shot in late June or July 1986.  I love this for a bunch of reasons.  First of all, Curb Dog visionary leader, Dave Vanderspek got most of the coverage back then, being a really charismatic guy in general.  So it's really cool they focused on Maurice, aka Drob, in this TV segment.  Another cool thing is that part of this footage was actually shot at Golden Gate Park, where riders from around the S.F. Bay Area would get together every weekend.  

Another cool aspect is that several of us ams from that scene then got a little cameo as well.  You can see Karl Rothe at 4:22 (later editor at BMX Plus!), Mike Perkins at 4:26, Chris Rothe at 4:34(Big in Ebikes off road riding now),  Mark McKee at 4:43 and 5:04 (later skateboard deck designer/art director at World Industries Skateboards), and me at 5:07 chasing my bike, an Idaho parade riding trick.  If you look really close, you can see Tim Treacy doing a backyard for a second, a year before that trick really took off in freestyle.  

Links to a lot of my writing...

 My first blog was a taxi driver blog in 2007.  It sucked.  I think my mom and the cops were the only ones who read it.  When I landed in the spare room of my parents' tiny apartment, in November of 2008, I had 24/7 access to a computer, tied to the internet, for the first time in my life.  

After a couple weeks of "surfing the internet" and watching too much porn, I started blogging about my days working at FREESTYLIN' and BMX Action magazines in 1986.  I was bored, depressed, and couldn't find any job in North Carolina.  About 30 posts in to that first BMX blog, one post went viral among Old School BMXers, and a few started emailing me.  They said, "These stories are cool, keep writing!"  Or something along those lines.  So I kept blogging.  

I've written over 2,800 blog posts since then.  In late 2012, shortly after my dad died, during a real dark moment, I deleted everything I had written online at that point.  In a matter of minutes, well over 1,200 blog posts disappeared.  That was stupid, I regretted it immediately, but it happened.  Not long after, I began blogging again.  Here are my main pieces of work online, that are still out there on the interwebs.

Steve Emig: The White Bear blog - This now has over 1,000 posts, and over 350,000 page views.  Over the last year, I got huge groups of page views from weird places, and I'm not sure what's up with all of those views.  But, even without the mystery views, this blog would have 180,000 to 200,000 legit views.  That's a lot for a personal blog.  

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack- Substack is a platform designed specifically for writers.  I've been doing most of my writing there for a year now.  These posts are much longer, in general, and on many different themes.  You can subscribe (for free, for now), and get each post sent to you as an email, if you want.  

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack Pinterest page - This page acts as a big Table of Contents, where you can see memes for each of my Substack posts (except the most recent ones), and you can click a link directly to the individual posts.

Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- This is a 20 chapter book/blog where I explain the crazy times I saw coming in "The Tumultuous 2020's."  I wrote this between October 2019 and the beginning of June 2020.  I built the blog on December 21st, 2019, then wrote and published it, chapter by chapter, in the six months afterwards.  

Freestyle BMX Tales (Version 3) - The original Freestyle BMX Tales blog was my main BMX freestyle blog, written from late 2009 through 2012.  In that time, it had over 500 posts, and over 125,000 page views.  This was the biggest blog I deleted in October of 2012.  The current version is #3 of FBMXT.  The 2nd version I did on Wordpress, but later deleted.  

Steve Emig's Street Life blog - I gave up the SE:TWB blog for a while, and did this blog, in 2022.  The last post, the one that comes up first, has links to several other blogs that I've done.

"Addicted to Blogging" blog post- In this post, I list 30 of my blogs (which still isn't all of them), but these all have 1,000 page views (or real close to 1,000).  I've tried well over 50 different blog ideas in the last 16 years.  

OK, I realize that this is an absurd amount of writing.  This is what happens when a writer can't make a decent living for 16 years, scrapes by, and just keeps blogging.  I have lots of stories and lots of ideas.  If you ever get really bored and want to dive down into my writing rabbit hole, these are the main entrances.  

Huh?

 Sometimes it seems like more of an honor to be excluded than to be included.  Heh, heh, heh.

46:25 in This Clip.

Interview of Rodney Mullen I did on page 29 of the scan at This Link, in 1986.  Also a great photo of Vision freestyle skater and longtime H.B. local Don Brown on page 28 of the scan.  

The perils of writing your own thoughts in a blog...  Whatever.

Blogger's note- 10/2/2024- Since you may be wondering what this post is about, I'll explain it.  In late September of 2024, the staff of FREESTYLIN' magazine got a rare group induction into the USA BMX Hall of Fame.  Andy Jenkins, Mark "Lew" Lewman, Spike Jonze, Don Toshach, Janice Jenkins, Valerie Adlam, and Dian Harlan were all inducted.  I heard about this a couple of days after the ceremony, when one of my Facebook friends had some photos of the event.  

I worked at Wizard Publications, on both BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, from August 1 to December 31st 1986 (roughly the December 1986 through April 1987 issues).  I replaced, best I could, Don Toshach, a real professional magazine guy, with an actual English degree.  The most important part of my job was proofreading each issue, of both magazines, during my time there.  Ultimately, I just didn't fit the scene there, and they laid me off.  Nothing crazy happened, I just wasn't the right fit for Wizard, and they hired Spike a couple of months later.  He definitely was the right fit.

I worked on five or six issues of FREESTYLIN while I was there on staff, plus I had my first freelance article, and a piece about my zine, in the August 1986 issue.  For whatever reasons, I was not included in the induction.  This could be because someone thought I didn't work there long enough, but more likely because of my 2008-2009 blog FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales. In that blog, I told a whole bunch of behind-the-scenes stories about working there.  I completely deleted that blog in October of 2012, but I have written some stories about working at Wizard in later blogs.  Whatever the case, I just started laughing when I heard I had been excluded from the Hall of Fame induction.  I was not contacted by anyone before the ceremony or since.  To be honest, I just find the whole thing amusing.  Whatever, guys...  So that's what this post is about.  

Journey of the White Bear 2024

In the Fall of 1987, when I was working at the AFA as the newsletter editor and photographer, a woman walked in one day.  She was there to interview to be our new receptionist.  She was tall, voluptuous, beautiful, the singer in a rock band, 25 -years old, and experienced in many ways.  I was a shorter, 21-year-old BMX freestyle dork, really naive, and still a virgin.  She got the job, we started dating, and she broke me in and taught me many things.  I decided to write her a hit song, and I started writing all kinds of "song lyrics," which eventually turned into poetry.  

About nine months later she dumped me, because I was a clingy dork, and too hung up on her, after our relationship had run its course.  I was crushed.  The night she dumped me, I listened to Don McClean's "American Pie" over and over and over, and I wrote a poem called "Journey of the White Bear."  It was, by far, the best poem I had written.  Even she liked it, and the poem scored me a couple weeks worth of post break-up sex.  The chorus of the poem/song went:

Nothing's right or wrong

In this world today

Nothing's black or white

It's all shades of grey

She shattered my semi-autistic world, where everything was black and white, right or wrong, and showed me at least a dozen shades of grey.  We soon went our separate ways, and I kept writing poems, and not telling anyone about them.  By then I figured out poetry is the cheapest form of therapy.

In 1992, living on the floor of Chris Moeller's tiny "Winnebago" apartment in Huntington Beach, Chris showed me a book of Henry Rollins' poetry.  It was called Black Coffee Blues.  I read it and thought, "Shit, I can do this.  Hell, I already have done this."  I started going through the notebooks of poems I'd written, that no one knew existed.  

Over the course of about three months, I took my 200+ poems, read through them, and picked the best ones.  I typed them up on my typewriter, and made a HUGE zine.  It was 80 zine pages thick or so.  I had to bind it together with duct tape, it was so thick.  I published around 90 of my poems, written from 1987 to 1992.  

The zine was called We're on the Same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing.  The first poem in it was "Journey of the White Bear."  In the poem I called myself the White Bear (naive goofy oaf), and that girlfriend from 1987-88 was the Black Leopard (experienced older woman).  The term "cougar" for an older woman dating younger men hadn't been coined yet.  She wasn't black, she was white, the poem had nothing to do with race.  It was about a naive dork meeting a woman who schooled him in the ways of life and love.  

All copies of that original zine, and the original poem, that I know of, have been lost.  Last month I started working on a writing project that I hope will be a "real," printed book, someday.  I'm calling it "The Poet."  That first poem, once Chris Moeller read it, led to him calling me The White Bear.  Soon nearly everyone else called me that, too.  So I took that as my poetry pen name, on the next two poetry zines I published.  

A couple weeks ago, after digging into memories, I wrote a new version, a 2024 version, of "Journey of The White Bear."  Here it is.  You are the first to see it.

Journey of The White Bear 2024

A long time ago

In a northern land

A white bear left

For the place of man

He went to seek fame

He sought fortune and truth

High standards and intentions

He wouldn't be uncouth

It was two little wheels

That set him on his quest

In BMX freestyle

He wanted to be the best

That's how it starts

These travels through time

Bright lights catch our eyes

But we really seek the sublime

Doing tricks on a bike

The Universe's ruse

That drew me into

Some crazy poet's shoes

A woman more experienced

A singer of songs

Made me question the answers

And experience rights and wrongs

Black Leopard, White Bear

Found passion and lust

I gained a poet's pen

And learned when not to trust

Hundreds of hours

In parking lots I rode

Seeking out the stoke

Struggling with my emotional load

The baggage of childhood

Of times bad and worse

Began to trickle out

In verse after verse

The Black Leopard faded

Into memory's twilight

The songs turned to poems

And I continued to write

In time I did share them

Which scared me to death

My pen name got christened

Another step on my path

The mysteries of life

I dug into deep

One by one, little insights

Into my poems, they did creep

I worked jobs, rode my bike

Read books, fasted at times

When twenty years had passed

I'd written hundreds of rhymes

The path of a poet

Screaming into God's ears

Dives into the depths

And swims among all fears

I wrestled with my demons

Sometimes with success

To all of those watching

My life sure looked a mess

It took 40 years

From the first haiku I wrote

Until the Universe gave in

And let me cross the moat

From high on a spire

In wisdom's castle seldom seen

I glimpsed the Great Story

Playing out, scene after scene

A short, but timeless moment

The answer to my quest's call

I was shown the inner workings

There's an order to it all

And then everything was different

Yet the same, just as intense

Precious things lost all worth

But life, it now made sense

The seeker's rebirth

Catapulted back to my life

It was just another day

There was no end to strife

My troubles still existed

But fear held far less sway

I began to rebuild my life

Moment by moment, day by day

The Great Play goes on

And still I play my part

But now I know why

I must write and I must make art

-The White Bear

New poem: "Exploring"

 Exploring

I can't remember

When it began

Wandering and wondering

Across the land

Many early memories

Are me, exploring the woods

Meandering along creeks

As every kid should

Through cornfields and wheat fields

On a bike, through city streets

I explored each new town

Seeking kid-sized treasures and treats

One place led to another

A peripheral glimmer, then full stare

Always asking the same question

I wonder what's over there?

-The White Bear