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

A seeker into the mystery...

This 3 minute clip, in Spanish, shows a lot of the visuals of the coolest comic book series I ever read, Seekers into the Mystery.  It was written by longtime comic book writer, J.M. DeMatteis.  This fifteen issue series was published by Vertigo way back in 1996-1997.  

"It's raining grace..."

Seekers into the Mystery - 1996-1997 (read the whole 15 issue comic series online)

There are some crazy anime ads on this link that you need to ignore, just to warn you, and usually a kaptcha or two to get to each issue.  But you can read Seekers into the Mystery, start to finish, issue by issue.

Either you're a seeker in life, or you're not.  If you're someone who went to church as a kid, and found that a lot of people seemed really hypocritical, but thought there must be some deep truths somewhere buried in the religion somewhere, you're probably a seeker.  Or if you had an interest in the supernatural as a kid, if you wondered about ghosts, psychic abilities, mystical ideas, UFO's, Atlantis, and similar weird stuff, you're probably a seeker.  Or if you felt like an outsider, and just seemed to look at the world differently, and more intensely, than other people around you, you are probably a seeker.  If most people around when you were a kid seemed kind of shallow, and didn't think about life near as deeply as you, you know what I'm talking about. If this paragraph sounds completely corny and stupid to you, then you are not one.  

Whatever else went on in my life as a kid, I was a seeker from early on.  My childhood home was always a place of unnecessary drama and thick psychological tension.  Living in that world, I spent a lot of time really depressed and scared as a kid.  My home was a place I didn't want to be most of the time.  Due to this I wound up really shy, and afraid to make decisions in general, because pretty much everything I did seemed to land me in trouble.  I was a pretty good kid, I didn't go out looking for trouble, I tried to avoid it.  But I always seemed to be in trouble anyway.  Because of this, I questioned life itself from a really young age.  I wondered what might happen in the future that would make the emotional pain of childhood worthwhile.  I was a seeker from the earliest age I can remember.  I sensed that there had to be something that made life make sense, some underlying reason that so many people had to endure all kinds of hardships, particularly as kids.  

Basically, I wondered, "What is the point to life?  Why is there so much pain and fear and darkness in the world?  Is there some underlying thing, some secret knowledge, that helps make sense of it all?   I spent my life looking for answers to these basic questions.  My 20 years riding a BMX bike every day helped me evolve in some sense, and learn a lot about myself and the world.  But I also read at least 250 or 300 books over the years, mostly non-fiction, seeking answers.  

In 1996, I was a furniture mover in Huntington Beach, working for a local company called Happy Movers.  Our office was in the old Seacliff shopping center, at the corner of Main and Yorktown.  Our boss had an office in the back of the center, and our trucks were parked in the lot out back.  Close to our office was a small comic book shop run by a middle aged woman.  I started wandering in there and checking out the comics, when we got finished with our jobs early.  I was never a comic book guy, and not a fan of superheroes in general.  But I liked a lot of the art, so I wandered around, checking out the comics coming out in that era, 1996.  Soon I started talking to the owner, and she began to turn me on to different comics, beyond the standard superhero stuff.  She suggested Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, which was pretty cool.  I also bought a couple of issues of Sin City, because I liked the pure black and white style of the art.  

Then one day I saw a comic called Seekers into the Mystery, I think issue #3 had just come out.  The title caught my attention first, and then the artwork.  I bought the first three issues and read them.  As someone who had already been seeking a deeper meaning of life, Seekers was right up my alley.  I followed it, issue by issue, as it came out, and collected and read all 15 issues.  I loved this comic series.  

I've only read four complete comic series in my life, Sandman, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and Seekers into the Mystery.  Seekers is the only one I actually followed, issue by issue, as it came out.  The others I read as full graphic novels, years later.  

Seekers into the Mystery is the story of Lucas Hart, a mostly washed up Hollywood screenwriter, who likes to hike in Griffith Park.  He runs into this weird homeless guy named Charlie Limbo, and things begin to get weird.  If you're a seeker, someone who needs to find out what the point to life itself is, I highly recommend reading Seekers into the Mystery.  It's a beautifully crafted, well written, and very enlightening story, combined with great art as a graphic novel.  

This comic series popped into my mind a little over a month ago, and I looked it up, to see if anyone had the full series.  I wanted to buy the issues on eBay or somewhere, and read them again.  Since it's such an obscure comic series, it never occurred to me that it might all be readable online.  But it is.  When I found it, I read the whole thing in two days, and it really inspired me (again), creatively.  

Almost three weeks ago, after re-reading Seekers, I got the idea to write a book called The Poet, featuring a guy named Thomas, a character that's been slowly evolving in my head for 25 years or so.  In 17 days, I hand wrote 78 pages of this idea for a novel.  Then I realized that Thomas is me, but if I was cool.  The whole story was just too much of my life, very thinly veiled.  About three days ago, I realized that I just needed to write my own story of how I became a poet in my early 20's, and a writer overall.  So I just began writing that book, my own story called The Poet.  

Along with some black and white doodle drawings incorporating the female form, that's what I'm up to these days.  

I've been just been scraping by since my backpack got stolen a couple of months ago, and I lost my phone, laptop, and most of my art supplies.  I can't upload photos, I still haven't got a new phone or laptop, and I've just been scraping by money wise.  I'm not hinting or asking for more help, simply describing the current situation.  I should be able to order a "new," refurbished laptop soon.  

I've been really busy creatively, although a lot of it has been offline.  So that's where I'm at right now.    I'm going to use this blog to write about what I'm up to, for my one Club White Bear member, and my 5 Patreon supporters, and a handful of other people.