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.