$43 out in the wild. Cash money. Moolah. Dolla bills. Bread. That last slang term for money goes way back to the 1970’s, the ancient decade some of the other Generation X coots keep saying was so awesome. It wasn’t that awesome. We drank water out of people’s garden hoses when we were thirsty back then. Really. We did. That decade wasn’t near as cool as Gen Xers on YouTube say it was. But our dollars bought a lot more… usually at Kmart or Sears. “Blue light special on aisle 17!” #steveemigphotos

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We live in a world of Cash App, Zelle, Venmo, Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, EBT, debit and credit cards, instant Buy Now Pay Later apps, not to mention over 10,000 crypto coins. Why would anyone bother carrying actual cash around with all of these available? That’s a good question. Paper bills jammed in your wallet, making it fat and cumbersome. Random coins that can’t buy anything anymore, jingling in your pocket. Digital payment methods are just so smooth, easy. Why bother with cash?

Why? Because any digital payment method can be tracked, frozen, blocked, suspended, and in some cases, possibly hacked, cut off, or even seized. The U.S. Bank Secrecy Act, and other laws, require banks to monitor accounts for signs of potential fraud, money laundering, and other nefarious acts. Banks have algorithms that scan all accounts for a whole range of potential problems and illegal activities. We now live in a world where these algorithms can literally freeze your bank account, for days, while bank employees figure out if anything shady is going on. Your account can be accidentally frozen without you, or any actual human at the bank, being notified.

This can happen by mistake. There is so much information available about our personal and spending habits these days, that the algorithms create personal assessments of every customer. If you make a purchase that is unusual for your personal pattern, the algorithm can freeze the account, until the bank or business workers figure out if something illegal has been done. That takes days. Even if you have done absolutely nothing wrong, your bank or digital account money can be frozen temporarily. While it’s frozen, that prevents payments like automatic rent or bill payments, from being made. It can also keep you from buying groceries, gas, and other things, until things get worked out. In this type of incident, you do, eventually, get access to your money again, but it may take a week or two. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, that can mean some bills get paid late, which could add more drama, fees, and headaches to your life.

This has happened to me, personally, multiple times. Twice I’ve had my personal bank account completely closed, for no apparent reason. The bank does not have to tell you why it happened. Waaaaaay back in 2001, about three weeks after the 9/11 attacks happened, a bank account I had for over 12 years got suddenly closed. I still have no idea why. That really threw me for a loop. Much more recently, as a homeless guy, my “food stamps,” the SNAP program loaded on my EBT card, got frozen for three months. For three fucking months, my food money wasn’t loaded on the card. Every time I called or went to the office, they said it was a “technical error,” or something like that, and that it would work again in a day or two. I actually got sick because of the lack of food, and went to the emergency room at one point. As I write this, several million Americans just had their SNAP benefits get cut off, due to the recent federal government policy changes. The money they relied on for food just got cut off. Gone.

Once this has happened to one of your accounts or payment methods, just one time, you look at your debit card or app completely differently, from then on. Every time you use your card after that, in the back of your mind you wonder, “OK, is it going to work today?” I’m not trying to scare anyone. I’m just explaining that this type of accident will happen more and more, due to increased pressure to fight the actual crime and fraud in the banking world, the regulations passed in recent years, and the algorithms now in place.

The potential for an account being frozen by accident is just one reason, a good one, for keeping some actual cash on hand. Our physical money, U.S. Federal Reserve notes and coins made by the U.S. Mint, are good everywhere. You can pay actual bills in person, at an office, if necessary. You can buy gas, groceries, clothes, weed (in California and some other states), or whatever you need. You might even get 10 cents a gallon off on your gas by paying cash.

Cash on hand, actual physical bills and coins, gives you options.

So even in our hyper-connected, digital world, there’s still a strong case for having a little physical cash in your wallet, and tucked away at home somewhere. I’m not saying you have to live like a 1980’s drug lord, with millions of dollars in cash laying around. But it just makes sense to have a bit of cash on hand, in case of an emergency.

If you actually buy things with cash, like us older people often still do, it makes it harder to blow too much money on stupid stuff. Not impossible, but harder. It’s a lot easier to spend way too much money with a credit card, a phone app, or online, than it is with actual cash. So using cash, at least sometimes, can help you spend less, stick to your budget, and not blow as much money on stupid stuff.

If you buy things with cash, you get coins back. If you throw those coins into a jar or vase at home, it’s an easy way to save a little extra money without really trying. Not a lot. But some. That jar of change can really come in handy once in a while. Just extra coins. I’ll dive deeper into this idea in a future post.

The point of this post is that it makes sense for pretty much everyone to have some actual physical money around at all times. A $20 bill tucked into your wallet could pay for ride home after a rough night out when your phone battery is dead, and you have to call an actual taxi. Or it will get you street tacos or tamales from that little stand down the block. A bit of cash gives you extra options, it provides some peace of mind.

Everyone has different lifestyles. For one person, $10 in their wallet or purse, and $50 tucked away at home, will be a good back-up. Someone else may carry $80 discreetly in their wallet, and have enough cash to pay all their bills for a month in the closet safe, back at the house. The whole point of this post is to get you thinking. How much physical cash would give you a reasonable amount of peace of mind?

There are no paid links in this post.

In about 1991, I discovered late night “conspiracy” radio shows, while working 2nd shift at a small video duplication business. Way back then, much of the talk was about the New World Order, the secret “Plan 2000,” and how a group of bankers, business people, and politicians, were rapidly consolidating the ownership and control of major corporations into fewer and fewer hands. Business competition was slowly and steadily dying, and a decreasing number of people controlled more and more.

And aliens… occasionally the late night radio guys talked about the Grey aliens. But mostly they talked about secret groups conspiring to consolidate control of everything into the hands of an “elite” few. Then, around 2000, the New World Order conspiracy came out of the closet, into the open, and just became known as “globalization.” Now, 35 years after listening to those first crazy, late night radio shows at work, nearly every major corporation is an amalgamation of many once separate businesses. A few dozen people control the boards of these mega-corporations.

Meanwhile, the majority of people struggle with paying for gas, food, rent or mortgage payments, and monthly bills. The push towards a semi-oligarchy here in the U.S. has led to lower standards of living for tens of millions of Americans. The struggle is real. How do we all survive, maybe even learn to thrive, in the next several, chaotic, crazy years? #steveemigmemes

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Millennials are now in their prime working years, and largely shackled in an oppressive amount of debt. The oldest Gen Z people are in their mid-20’s, just beginning their life as working adults. To their generation, it looks like the Baby Boomers had an 80 year party, and left them both the garbage and the tab. “OK Boomers, thanks for leaving us your mess, and $39.2 trillion in government debt. And climate change.” Generation X people, my era, are creeping towards retirement age. Most of us are thinking, “Damn, I thought a nuclear Holocaust was going to happen before now, so I wouldn’t have to worry about retirement.” The concept of retirement itself, for a big percentage of Gen X, is fading fast as we head into our 60’s.

All of us, from age 60 down, look around at the world of 2026. Homeless people (like me) everywhere. Painfully high gas prices (but still lower than in Europe). Worries about getting laid off, if you still have a job. A.I. is coming for our jobs… and everything else. High food prices. Student loan debt for all age groups. Shrinkflation. Political polarization. Rising interest rates and rising payments on loans, credit cards, and other debt. Debt, debt, and more debt, like a foot fungus we can’t get rid of. It’s everywhere.

Some people are buying drinks at the bar and their groceries using Buy Now Pay Later apps. Large numbers of Millennials can’t afford to buy houses or have kids. Gen Z can’t afford to buy their fiancee’s engagement rings. That’s good, sort of, because the Chinese figured out how to grow real diamonds in labs, finally killing the value of the already overpriced diamonds. Women can’t even pawn their engagement rings after getting divorced now. Yep, Bling ain’t the thing no more. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, many working “real” jobs, live in cars, vans, or RV’s. The traditional jobs that do exist don’t pay enough to raise a family, in much of the country now. The list of issues goes on and on and on…

The majority of people under age 60 now are thinking less about actual retirement, and more about just trying not to become this guy above. “Bag car guy” is what I called this man, when I saw him occasionally, in 2021, in the San Fernando Valley. #steveemigphotos

As the United States of America heads into its 250th anniversary, less than a month away as I write this, things just keep getting weirder, more chaotic, and more expensive. As hundreds of thousands of people live homeless or live in cars, millions more people live with their parents or other relatives. At the same time, a small number of people have achieved absolutely ludicrous levels of wealth. Fifteen Americans have a net worth of over $100 billion. That’s $100,000,000,000. Economic polarity has grown exponentially, for decades, starting before political polarity grew to the current extremes.

Before wealth inequality really diverged to today’s levels, regional housing price polarization began to grow. We have major metro areas in this country where a backyard treehouse could sell for $400,000, and a three bedroom house sells for $1.3 million.

At the same time, throughout the rural areas, small towns, and many of the medium size cities across of the U.S., there are thousands of abandoned houses, and some really cheap houses. While median prices are more than one million dollars in the high end zip codes, there are houses for sale for under $50,000 in other places. Really. An actual house, for under $50K. Here’s a house in Barberton, Ohio, currently listed for $49,900, in 2026. Why did I pick Barberton, Ohio? Because that house is about 3 miles away from the first house my parents bought, in 1965, I think, for $10,000. That was the first house I lived in after I was born. Barberton is right outside of Akron, Ohio, which was the home to the Goodyear, B. F. Goodrich, Firestone, and General Tire, the car tire companies in the 1960’s. Akron was thriving then, known as “The Rubber Capital of the World.” Jobs were plentiful and paid well. Now, in 2026, Akron is a shadow of what it once was, like 150 other former industrial cities of the U.S.. We now have housing price polarity, as well as the political and economic wealth polarity.

I’ve always been interested in the future, since I was a little kid. I geek out on economics, future trends, and weird stuff like that. That makes me a geek, even among the tech geeks. I became an amateur futurist along the course of my life, trying to figure out what the future that we will actually live in would be like.

In the 1970’s, as a little kid, the Apollo space missions to the moon were going on. Actual adults then really though that, by the far off year 2000, we would really have flying cars, android robot servants, colonies in orbit and on the moon that normal people could visit, and maybe eventually colonies on Mars. Sound familiar?

We are now all living in “the future” of the children of young Baby Boomers and Gen X people like myself. Instead of living like George Jetson’s family, we have homeless people everywhere, working people living in cars and vans, and a world of economic, political, and housing price polarity. Technically, flying cars do actually exist, but they are lame cars and lame airplanes or now, quad copters. The Jetson 1 cost about $148,000, is electric, and flies for about 20 minutes. A “jet ski for the sky.” That’s cool, but still not as cool as the flying cars in The Jetsons or the 1982 Blade Runner movie. The Moller Skycar was the closest thing to the flying cars we dreamed of as kids, and that company ran out of money, and the Skycar never went into production.

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Here on my Substack site, I write a lot about different aspects of art, writing, creativity itself, and creative scenes. I write some series of posts, like the Simulpocalypse series, about the growing number of abandoned buildings and post-apocalyptic looking locations in the country today. I also have my Need Money Now series of posts with tips and ideas for surviving in tough economic times, like now.

While these different topics may seem diverse, they are all aspects that I think are important and needed to help us all work through this chaotic period of time, and ultimately create a new kind of society, a functional Information Age. I’ve been writing about today’s rapidly changing society for about a decade now, in several blogs and here on my Substack. So if any of you were wondering why I write long form posts that bounce around several topics, this is why. I think most of what I write may help some people understand this transition period society is in, and give all of you some ideas to make the most of it.

Why did I pick 2035 as an end date in the title? I think the late 2020’s, and early 2030’s, will be when the peak period of rapid change in society happens. I think that by 2035, we will be through the craziest part of this long transition period of society, and things should be calming down. Yeah, I know 2035 is a long way away. But that’s the way things look in 2026, from my point of view. Time will tell how societal change actually plays out.

Trying to figure out key ideas that will help us get through these chaotic years is a major theme of what I’m most motivated to write about in recent years, and now, in 2026. Maybe this post helps explain why I bounce from topic to topic.

Here are some of my deeper looks into the current changes happening in society, and where I think it’s all headed:

The Tumultuous 2020’s

The Big Transition- The unplanned transition of everything

Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now (2019-2020)

Do-It-Yourself- The DIY Ethic

Check out my Club White Bear Pinterest Board- a bunch of my 40 years of creative work, and direct links to many of my Substack posts

There are no paid links in this post.

Close-up of my latest Sharpie doodle art drawing, “Wave with clouds.” I’m not quite done yet. I need to get another silver Sharpie and finish it. Yeah, I gave the clouds a “silver lining” without even thinking about it. That’s pretty funny if you know me, since I’m always talking about economic doom and gloom. #steveemigart, #sharpieart, #doodle

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Way back in 2001, I rented a tiny room that a Latino family had built on the side of their house. It was $200 a month, so it was a great way to live cheap for a while. I could walk to Disneyland, and check out the Lego giraffe at Downtown Disney for free, if I felt like it. It was like a tool shed, but with painted drywall on the home built walls, and one tiny window. There was an attached bathroom and shower, but no hot water.

One day I was watching TV there, and MTV’s House of Style came on. There was a segment in the show about “How to make a doodle wall in your dorm.” It was a cheap way to spice up your dorm room or apartment. They told people to get some big sheets of butcher paper, and tape or tack it up on a wall. Then they said to get some markers, and just draw any kind of doodles on the wall. After a while, there would be a whole wall of doodles. Cheap, simple, decoration.

Check out my “Doodle Wall” Pinterest board

I didn’t give a damn about making my room look cool for guests, since I never had any. But the tiny room felt like a cave. After seeing that Doodle Wall segment, I thought it would be fun to make a mural on the wall with the door. I would draw a scene, looking out the mouth of a cave, with an ocean and a sunset. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to make the room look interesting, it just sounded like a fun project.

When I had this idea, I had never really spent time drawing with markers, other than occasionally using them as a little kid. I had been drawing my whole life, but I wasn’t that good. I drew with pencils as a grade school kid, then in pen and ink from high school on. I never used colors. I didn’t think of myself as a “visual artist.” I was just “a kid who could draw” in grade school, who occasionally drew pictures just for the heck of it ever since. I never got really into painting. So making a cool mural with markers seemed like a fun and easy idea.

So I went out looking for “butcher paper.” Once upon a time kids, there were big rolls of thick paper that butchers used to wrap up meat. Because… once upon a time kids, there were actually butcher shops, with butchers working there, who chopped up meat for a living. I only know of one actual butcher shop left, in Huntington Beach. I couldn’t find butcher paper. But I did find long rolls of banner paper, the kind that cheerleaders in high school used to make those “Go team!” banners with every week. I got a two foot wide roll of banner paper at an office supply store. I also bought a 12 pack of generic markers. Not even Sharpies, just the cheapest pack they had. I taped big pieces of the banner paper above each other, on the wall. I used a yellow marker to sketch out the outline of the mouth of the cave, and the ocean and sunset. Then I got a stool, turned on some music, and started coloring in the mural.

After about an hour, I stood back and looked at the blotchy areas I had colored in. It sucked. It didn’t look kind of bad. It really fucking sucked. It looked horrible. So I stopped coloring it in. I sat there looking at this attempted mural, and listening to the music. The colors just looked absolutely terrible. Bland, blotchy, stock colors. “There has to be a cool way to shade with markers that looks better than this,” I said to no one. I ripped down the banner paper from the wall and threw it away.

Since 2012, I’ve done dozens of doodle drawings, at least 100, just for the hell of it. I’ve sold 3 or 4 or them, I think. Not many. This is a pretty typical example of the drawings I was doing from 2018-2023, completely hand drawn in ink, 11” X 14”, Sharpies on paper. #steveemigart, #sharpie, #doodle

After the doodle wall mural idea didn’t work, I still had a lot of spare time, a cheap place to live, a big roll of banner paper, and a pack of 12 generic markers. I taped a big piece of the banner paper up on the wall, turned the radio on, and started cutting photos out of my old BMX, skateboard, snowboard, and rock climbing magazines. I started making big collages, using Scotch tape to stick the magazine photos onto the paper. I made these just for myself. It was just fun doing it, the whole process of making the collages.

In between photos, I would use the markers to try and find a better way to shade and add color. I tried making dots, hash marks (short parallel or criss-crossed lines), circles, and other ideas. Nothing looked really cool. But the finished collages were cool. This is what got me playing around and experimenting with markers, and later, specifically with Sharpie markers.

In the late summer of 2005, I actually got the chance to live in an indie art gallery in Anaheim, called AAA Electra 99. The owner of the gallery was a taxi driver I knew, named Richard. I was driving a taxi for a living at the time. I drove his taxi on the weekends, and from Monday morning, through Friday afternoon, I lived in an art gallery, in a small industrial building unit. There were lots of different paintings and drawings on the wall, and there was a mama cat and her six kittens living there. When I moved in, I had been working 70-90 hours a week driving a taxi for two years straight. I had not done a single creative piece of work during that whole time.

Within a week, I bought a roll of banner paper, and a 24 pack of Sharpie colored markers, and a few standard black Sharpies. I started experimenting with different marker drawing ideas again. Within a couple of months, I stumbled upon the idea of scribbling different colors over each other to create different colors and hues. That’s when my Sharpie Scribble Style technique was born. I have been exploring that technique for over 20 years now.

Check out my “Sharpie Scribble Style” Pinterest board

In 2012, I wound up living with my mom in a small apartment in North Carolina, after my dad died. Taxi driving in Orange County, California went downhill. I went from living in a taxi to living on the streets of Southern California. Business got that bad, and my health got really bad from the long hours, lack of sleep, and too much bad food. It’s a long story.

When I landed in North Carolina, I couldn’t find any job, except driving a taxi for a while. It didn’t pay there, either. Anyhow, I wound up living with my mom, doing the “guy things” around the house, driving her to appointments, and generally being a loser. During that period, I spent a fair amount of time drawing in my Sharpie Scribble Style, to kill time. In 2012, I got the idea to actually look up “Sharpie art” on the internet. Somehow, it had never occurred to me to google it before. Nobody was doing anything like my scribble style. But there was a guy named Jessie Armand who did some amazing black and white designs with Sharpies. His work looked amazing. He was drawing on people’s walls, on guitars, on motorcycles, even on a Lamborghini Gallardo. That black and white style was loosely called “doodle art” by people at the time. That was my introduction to Sharpie/marker doodle art.

I tried doing some black & white drawings, totally trying to bite Jessie’s style. My attempts sucked. But those abstract designs were fun to draw, and I started doing them every once in a while, just for the fun of it. In time, I developed my own style of doodle art, which wasn’t near as cool as Jessie Armand’s work, but they looked pretty good. The drawing above is a good example of those drawings.

This is a large doodle I drew, then colored in using my Sharpie Scribble Style. This is from about 2016, I think. #sharpie, #doodle, #sharpiescribblestyle, #steveemigart

In the 13 plus years since 2012, I’ve drawn well over 100 Sharpie doodle art drawings. Every one is a little bit different. I usually start with some big curved lines, leaving white space in between them. Then I would fill in the area outside of that curve with all kinds of different shapes. Most of these drawings were 11” X 14”, but I have done a small number of larger ones that were 18” X 24”. That’s the size of paper I use for most of my Sharpie Scribble Style drawings.

I tell people that I the doodle art is “just something I do when my brain is tired.” The mental aspect of doing Sharpie doodle drawings is different than when I do the scribble style drawings. Sharpie Scribble Style drawings, in my mind, are my “real art,” even though I draw from photos, usually graphite transfer the image, working from other people’s photos of rock stars. Drawing my scribble style is more intense mentally. Doodle art is completely freehand, and it’s more relaxing. I don’t plan out how my doodle drawings will look ahead of time. They are really intuitive, and they evolve as I draw them. I have no idea how they will turn out when I start one.

So I now have two entirely different styles, two completely different techniques that I do, using (mostly) Sharpie markers. I’ve never used Copic, or the “alcohol markers” that more traditional marker artists use. I’ve also never worked with paint pens, or similar types of markers. First of all, I’m always broke, and can barely afford the 24 packs of Sharpies I use. Alcohol markers and paint pens are really expensive. Second, I didn’t realize alcohol markers even existed until the late 2010’s, when I started watching some YouTube videos about other people’s marker art, once in a while. Third, I developed my Sharpie Scribble Style to get far more colors and better shading, specifically from Sharpie markers.

Since I didn’t go to art school, or hang around with art school students, I didn’t realize that “you can’t shade with Sharpies.” Every art school student knows that. I didn’t. Sharpies dry too fast. You can’t blend the colors while the ink is still wet, like you can with alcohol markers. Since I was too dumb to realize that shading with Sharpies is impossible, I figured out a way to do it anyhow. Sharpie Scribble Style, as I came to call it. I just kept doing color work using my own technique, and I leave the Copic/alcohol marker art to the people who specialize in that stuff.

Back to “doodle art.” A couple of years ago, it dawned on me that adding the female form to a doodle drawing might look pretty cool. Let’s face it, boobs are magic. And adding part of the curve of a breast or hips to the side of a doodle art drawing can look pretty cool. So I’ve tried that idea a few times. The first time I did this, a female friend saw the drawing photo on Facebook and messaged me, “I have to have that drawing.” That hadn’t happened before. So I have explored that idea with a handful of drawings since.

Check out my “Sharpie Doodle Art” Pinterest page

I’ve sold two or three of my Sharpie doodle art drawings, and I’ve sold 150-200 Sharpie Scribble Style drawings over 20 years, if I count the drawings that I did of kids’ names back in 2008-2010. The doodle art drawings I’ve done have always been just for fun. Until about three days ago.

I was sitting at a fast food place drawing the other day and saw a kid on a skateboard outside, in my peripheral vision. I didn’t pay much attention to him he was trying to learn kickflips in the parking lot, I think. I was busy doing a big doodle drawing, and listening to videos on my phone. After a while, the kid, who was about 14 or so, came in, and was checking out my drawing.

I pulled out my ear buds, and he told me the drawing looked cool. “Thanks,” I said. Then he asked if I knew who Mr. Doodle was. I told him I didn’t. He looked at me in astonishment. “You don’t know who Mr. Doodle is?” He asked if I sold any of my drawings, and if so, for how much. I told him I had sold a couple of drawings for $100 each. He made a sign with his hands of a small drawing, maybe 8” X 10”, “Mr. Doodle sells drawing this big for $1,000.” I looked at him, “Wait… WHAT?” We talked for a couple of minutes more. The kid headed back outside.

Then I looked up Mr.Doodle on my phone, and watched three or four videos about him. OK, the guy comes across as pretty looney, but his work looks kind of cool. It’s really similar to Keith Haring’s doodle art from the early 1980’s, but Mr. Doodle has taken that idea and run with it in his own direction. AND he’s making a decent living doing it, which is something I haven’t been able to manage in 20 years.

As of right now, I’m working on my second, large, doodle art drawing this week, since that conversation. We’ll see how it goes. I can draw doodle drawings in a lot less time than my Sharpie Scribble Style drawings. Those take 40-45 hours or more each. I can draw an 18” X 24” Sharpie Doodle drawing in 12 to 15 hours. Each one is noticeably different, and most of them look pretty cool when I’m done. Like I said, I’ve been drawing Sharpie doodle art drawings for about 13 years now, and have done well over 100 of them. I’ll soon find out if they sell locally.

So that’s how I came to start doing Sharpie “doodle art” drawings, and how many I’ve done over the last 13 years or so. They are still evolving, and every one I do looks different than the previous ones, the way I draw them. So time will tell where that leads…

There are no paid links in this post.

This is not the Encino Oak. This is the place where the people of Encino, California split a street, and built a small park, in honor of the biggest and oldest oak tree in the region. What’s left of the stump is in the background, just to the left of the American flag you see. The Encino Oak, or Lang Oak as they called it for a while, stood here for an estimated 1,000 years. The location is where Louise Street meets Ventura Boulevard in Encino, California. #steveemigphotos

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Think Vikings. Yes, the Norsemen and Norsewomen of Scandinavia, sailing their longboats over the cold, stormy north Atlantic Ocean. A group of Vikings survived the journey from Greenland to the east coast of North America over ten centuries ago. On the northern tip of Newfoundland, a giant island off the east coast of the Canadian mainland, there’s a site called L’anse aux Meadows. That’s where the Norse set up a small settlement in about 1,000 C.E. (A.D.). It’s the oldest, documented, non-indigenous, settlement in North America. It’s the only known Viking settlement in North America. It’s the first documented village in North America built by people from Scandinavian or European descent.

At the same time the Vikings were building that small settlement on the Atlantic coast, an acorn sprouted in what is now Encino, California, in the San Fernando Valley, just north of present day Los Angeles. That acorn was from what we now call a coast live oak, a species which ranges up and down the California coast region. Coast live oak acorns are thinner, and bullet shaped, different from the plumper acorns of the oak trees found in the eastern United States. That little sprout survived, grew into a sapling, and eventually a solid live oak tree.

When the Encino Oak finally died, felled by an El Nino storm on February 7, 1998, it was believed to be about 1,000 years old. This California live oak tree was huge. The trunk was approximately 8 feet in diameter, with a circumference of 24 feet. The canopy of the tree was enormous. How big? Imagine sitting in the bleachers at a high school football field. Now imagine that this huge oak tree was planted in the middle of the 25 yard line, on one side of the field. That whole half of the football field would be in the shade of the tree. It’s canopy stretched 150 feet across. That’s how big this tree was. That huge size, and it’s great age, is why they literally made a small park, and split Louise Street, to go around the tree, just south of Ventura Boulevard.

Halfway across North America, along the Mississippi River, east of the present day city of St. Louis, Missouri, was home to the indigenous city of Cahokia. It had about 1,000 people living in it when the Encino Oak acorn sprouted. The giant Monk’s Mound, which would eventually be 100 feet high, with a base covering 13 acres, was being built. Monk’s Mound, the tallest earthen mound in all of North America, built entirely of earth and clay, was built over the course of 200-250 years, from 900 or 950 CE, to 1150 CE. The Encino Oak tree sprouted during the middle of that long building process.

Far to the south, in current day Mexico, the Mayan city of Chichen Itza had 35,000 to 50,000 people living in it when the oak tree in Encino sprouted. Thousands of miles away to the east, in Europe, London had a population of only 10,000 to 15,000 people then. Paris had 30,000 people living in it when the Encino Oak sprouted. Rome had declined to only 20,000 to 30,000 people by then.

In the era around 1,000 C.E., Naples, Italy had a population of 30,000. Venice, Italy was a city of about 60,000 people. Seville, Spain had 90,000 souls residing in it then. East and south of Europe, Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, Turkiye, was one of the largest cities on Earth, with a population of approximately 500,000 people. Kaifeng, China was a metropolis of 1 million people at the time, far eclipsing every city in Europe. Even larger, Baghdad, in modern day Iraq, was the largest city on Earth at the time, with an estimated population of 1.2 million people in 1,000 CE. That was the human world when the little acorn in the future city of Encino, California sprouted.

This is the remaining part of the stump of the Encino Oak. When this oak tree in modern Encino was about 50 years old, Cahokia, near present day St. Louis, began to grow dramatically. Cahokia eventually became a city of 40,000 people, the largest indigenous city on the Mississippi River, and in North America, in pre-Columbian times. #steveemigphotos

When Dante Alighieri finished writing his epic poem, The Divine Comedy, in 1321 C.E., the Encino Oak was a large, grand old tree, and had already lived longer than most coast live oak trees do. The tree in Encino stood firm for nearly three and a half centuries when the bubonic plague, The Black Death, struck Europe, taking the lives of tens of millions of people. About half of the population of living on that continent died over several years, at that time. The Encino Oak was over 400 years old when Chinese explorers sailed down the west coast of North America, under the leadership of Zheng He, in the early 1420’s.

When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in about 1440 CE, the Encino Oak was a giant of a tree, already older than most, if not all the other oak trees, in the land that would become Southern California. The tree in Encino was about half a millennium old when Christopher Columbus first came ashore on an island in the Carribbean, in 1492, getting credit for “discovering America” for the next 500 years.

The Encino Oak’s 500th birthday happened about the same time as Michelangelo sculpted David and Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. The already giant oak tree had added about 40 more rings when the expedition of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese sailor exploring for Spain, sailed up the coast of California, in 1542. The giant tree had its 600th birthday while William Shakespeare was in his heyday of writing plays in Europe, already living to twice the age of most of its kind. The Encino Oak was nearing 800 years old when the founding fathers of the original 13 colonies of the United States of America declared their independence from England, on July 4th 1776, 2,724 miles away.

On August 5th, 1769, a group of Spanish soldiers and Franciscan monks, the Portola Expedition, made their way through a low spot in the small Santa Monica mountains. They left the future Los Angeles basin and arrived in the future San Fernando Valley. They marched over what’s now called the Sepulveda Pass, where the 405 freeway and Sepulveda Boulevard carry thousands of cars daily. That group became the first Europeans to see the San Fernando Valley.

A little to the west of where they entered The Valley, there was a large grove of oak trees, a small pond fed by a natural spring, a river, and the native village called Siutcanga. The river is now called the Los Angeles river, and it flows west to east through The Valley, into the basin near Glendale, then back west to the Pacific Ocean. The villagers were members of the Tongva, a group that ranged from the north side of the San Fernando Valley down south to what’s now Southern Orange county, as well as the having villages on the three largest of the southern Channel Islands.

The spring fed pond still exists, and it has been lined with bricks, in the shape of a guitar, for about 150 years. It’s now located in Los Encinos State Park, just east of Balboa Boulevard at Ventura Boulevard, in Encino. The state park is about where the Tongva village was, and later became the center of the Rancho Los Encinos. The original adobe house, and a later limestone house for the ranch, still exist in the state park. The Encino Oak stood about half a mile west of the spring fed pond. It had already lived three times as long as most of its kind, about 770 years, when those first Europeans ventured into the San Fernando Valley, and met the Tongva people living there.

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The tree was about 820 years old when Mexico won their freedom from Spain, and the land the tree lived in, then called Alta California, transferred from being a territory of Spain to a territory of Mexico. The Encino Oak was nearing 850-years-old when Alta California became part of the United States of America, and when gold was later discovered in the Sierra Nevada mountains, in 1849. A year later, California became a state, in 1850. The ensuing gold rush drew some 300,000 people to the territory of California, the first really big surge of humans into the state that is now home to over 39,350,000 people.

The real Encino Oak tree was over 900 years old, older than the fictional Star Wars character, Yoda, was when he died, when humans really started developing the San Fernando Valley. The completion of the California aqueduct in 1912 brought a large amount of fresh water to the Los Angeles area. Though that water flowed down the hills into, and through, the San Fernando Valley, it was not available to Valley residents for another year or two. Once it was, the cattle ranches of The Valley quickly began to give way to citrus orchards and farms. That led to the one big influx of residents into The Valley. The cheap land, and proximity to the growing city of Los Angeles, drew real estate developers. At one point, the land around the great tree was owned by someone with the last name Lang, and the tree became known to locals as the Lang Oak for several decades. But the tree was well over 900-year-old by then, and the landowner Lang came and went.

Beginning in the early 20th century, the city of Encino began to build up around the Encino Oak, then living through its 10th century. Encino is Spanish for "oak,” so the grand old Encino Oak, and the grove of other live oaks nearby, gave the city its name. OK, this is Los Angeles, and like many other “cities” in L.A. county, Encino is technically not a city. It’s a district or neighborhood, of the city of Los Angeles. The same is true of Hollywood and many other L.A. districts most people think are individual cities.

As Encino grew, a reservoir was built in the hills above the Encino Oak. That reservoir undoubtedly held back some of the water that would have flowed down and nourished the 900-plus-year-old Encino Oak. This may have also affected the underground water table that the grand old tree’s roots tapped into. Nobody is sure. As houses and businesses were built nearby, more and more of the land around the ancient oak was covered by concrete, asphalt, and buildings, further depleting the natural water reaching the Encino Oak’s root system. All of this development undoubtedly changed the nature of the soil around the tree as well. In the 1990’s, as the oak neared 1,000-years-old, it had issues with a fungal infection, and grew weaker. To be clear, nobody in Encino intentionally did harm to the giant oak tree. Development happened in the area around the tree, which was inevitable, as more and more people migrated into the San Fernando Valley. What specific effects the development had on the tree, no one really knows. On February 7, 1998, the Encino Oak was blown down by a strong winds during an El Nino storm.

The actual Encino Oak (aka Lang Oak), when it was well over 950-years-old. Public domain photo from the 1960’s or 1970’s (?). This photo is from the L.A. Library collection. Several of the old photos I’ve seen that people say are the Encino Oak are actually pics of another huge oak tree, in Pasadena. I learned that doing the research for this post. This photo, however, is the real Encino Oak, late in its 1,000 year life.

Trees can’t run. Once they sprout and grow into a small sapling, they have to stand there and take whatever the rest of the world throws at them. I have found no exact age for the Encino Oak. All the references say that it was estimated to be about 1,000 years old. Through the span of that millennium standing in what’s now Encino, California, this giant oak survived all of the heat, cold, rain, wind, fires, floods, drought, earthquakes, rare thunderstorms and lightning, and mudslides, that happened to it, and around it. It survived more than 13 normal human lifespans worth of ants, beetles, other insects, squirrels, and all of the other living creatures in its immediate environment. Throughout its whole life, members of the Tongva people lived in the region around the great oak tree.

It was believed, at least by the immigrants to The Valley in the last 250 years, to be “the oldest tree in Southern California.” To qualify that, it was the oldest known tree in the inhabited parts of SoCal. The ancient bristlecone pines are up to 5,000 years old, to the north, in Inyo County. I just learned there’s a 1,500-year-old tree in the San Gabriel Mountains (see link below), though it’s much harder to access than the Encino Oak was. There’s also a colony of clonal trees in Riverside County that, as a group, go back 13,000 years as a living organism.

Back in the 1990’s, when was a TV crew guy, I worked one day at the Disney Ranch in Santa Clarita. One of the guys working there showed us a huge tree, a live oak, I believe, that was 6 or 7 feet in diameter. They thought it was one of the oldest trees in Southern California. So, there are some other, really old trees still in Southern California. Check out the link below (that I just found) to learn more about five of them.

The tiny little mini-park where the Encino Oak stood for about 1,000 years is still there, at the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Louise Street, in Encino. I stumbled on it back in 2020, when I got off the bus, grabbed some snacks at a nearby store, and was just looking for a place to sit down and eat lunch. I wound up on these benches right next to the old tree stump, with cars passing by on both sides of me. I read the little plaque about the Encino Oak, which has disappeared recently. The tree stuck in my mind, and months later, I looked it up, to learn what I could of its story.

The last question is, “If humans hadn’t developed the land all around this 1,000-year-old oak tree, would it have survived another 100 years? Another 300?” Civilization, without a doubt, had a detrimental effect on the Encino Oak, during its last 100 years. Even so, the tree had already lived 3 or 4 times as long as most live oaks live. Could it have lived longer? Almost certainly. Would it have lived decades or centuries longer? None of us will ever know.

Like many of the obscure locations I write about here on my Substack, I found the story of this huge, old tree fascinating, and finally got around to writing a post about it. While a few people may find this post, and actually go take a selfie by the Encino Oak’s stump, it won’t be many. I wanted to tell the story of this tree’s life to remind us all, myself included, that many of the things and places around us have stories of their own. Some of those stories are pretty interesting, if you dig into them.

Disaffected people, trees, plants, and animal populations can’t advocate for themselves in the human world. They can’t hire publicists or lawyers when threatened. That part is up to us. Maybe by telling part of the story of the long lived Encino Oak tree, I can remind us all to pay a little more attention to people, places, and creatures around us that can’t tell their own stories, so we might help out the ones we can.

Thanks for reading this post. I’ve got ideas stacked up in my brain like a Pez dispenser, waiting to be written and published. Stay tuned for more weird, obscure, and hopefully entertaining and informative posts.

To learn about some more extraordinary trees in the southern half of California, check out the link below.

Five Famous Trees to Visit Around Southern California (PBS article)

There are no paid links in this post.

In 1950, the ashes of writer Edgar Rice Burroughs were spread under this black walnut tree. This small, lush yard, in front of his longtime office, is only feet from busy Ventura Boulevard, in Tarzana, California. He was one of the most influential writers of the early and mid 20th century. Thousands of people drive through the San Fernando Valley daily, right by this small yard, having no idea the story behind this location. #steveemigphotos

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Off the top of your head, name the 5 best known fictional characters of the last 150 years. Not cultural creatures like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Anti-Christ. Think of characters that appeared in some novel, play, movie, TV show, comic book, or even a video game. Can you think of 5 characters that every 5-year-old kid has heard of, as well as people who are 105-years-old, and everyone in between? Superman. Spider-Man, Batman. Maybe Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Yoda, or Darth Vader, although I think there are people in nursing homes who aren’t familiar with them, as well as really young children. Sherlock Holmes is up there on that short list, probably James Bond, too. But there aren’t that many fictional characters that are household names to people of all age ranges.

Those are the kind of characters that come to mind, when you’re trying to name characters that everyone has heard of. There are a lot more popular characters that most of us would come up with, but that lose out when you ask if the very young and very old people alive today would know them. One of those handful of best known fictional characters from the last 150 years is Tarzan.

More than 100 years ago, way back in 1910, there was a man named Edgar, living in Chicago, with his wife and two young children. He was 34-years old, and feeding his family working as a wholesaler of pencil sharpeners. As a younger man he had joined the U.S. Calvary in Arizona, but was let go because of a “weak heart." In the years between, he had worked many odd jobs. He had been an accountant, a gold miner, a railroad cop, a cattle driver, and a door to door salesman. He made around $15 a week working as a salesman.

As the story goes, one night Edgar was reading some pulp fiction magazines, like The Argosy and The All-Story Magazine, that were popular in that era. The pulp magazines would contain short stories, or several different novels, with one chapter published each month, so you had to buy the next issue to keep reading that particular story. The pulp magazines were not high literature, they were cheap, action packed, widely entertaining reading for the masses. As the legend goes, Edgar Rice Burroughs read some of those stories in 1910, and he thought something along the lines of, “These stories are rot. And these writers are getting paid for this rot. I could write rot this bad… and probably quite a bit better.” Something like that. So Edgar Rice Burroughs sat down started writing in his spare time.

Burroughs wrote a story about a Civil War veteran named John Carter. Carter goes into a cave, and somehow gets teleported to Mars. Alone, on a strange planet, he soon runs into the weird creatures who live there, and adventures ensue. In 1911, Burroughs sold the serial rights to the John Carter novel to All Story magazine for $400. That was equivalent to several months pay at his regular job. Suddenly writing seemed a lot more interesting than selling pencil sharpeners. Edgar wrote a second story, but it didn’t sell. So he wrote a third novel. That novel was Tarzan of the Apes, and he sold the serial rights to The All-Story magazine, in 1912, for $700. The story of the baby whose parents had been killed, then was raised by apes in the wild jungles of Africa to adulthood, was a hit.

After the serial success of Tarzan, Burroughs wanted to publish the story as a novel, but no one wanted to publish a “pulp story” into a real book. Pulp stories were seen as cheap, throw away fodder for the average people, not real literature, at the time. It took him two years, but Tarzan of the Apes went to print as a real book in 1914. Again, it became a huge hit. With the money from the Tarzan novel, Burroughs moved his wife and now three children to California. He bought a huge tract of land in the San Fernando Valley, aka “The Valley,” just north of Los Angeles. Movie studios had been moving west, mostly from New Jersey and New York, to California, for less than ten years, at that point. What would become the Hollywood film industry was just beginning to take shape. The San Fernando Valley, over the hills from Hollywood, was still mostly open land at the time, orchards, ranches, and farm land, just beginning to get developed in a few places.

On his new estate, looking out over The Valley, Edgar Rice Burroughs sat down to write sequels to Tarzan, and then more John Carter stories. The original John Carter story was published in book form, A Princess of Mars, in 1917. Burroughs went to work to produce the very first Tarzan movie, a silent movie, in 1918. He was not just a creative fiction writer, he was also a pioneer in how he promoted, published, licensed, and sold his fictional work. He was the first writer to create a personal corporation for his work, founding Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. in 1923. The company is still run from the same small office, located at 18352 Ventura Boulevard, in Tarzana, California

All together, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote 24 novels in the Tarzan, John Carter, and other sci-fi/fantasy series. Those books have sold over 100 million copies in the 115 years since his first story was published, according to Wikipedia and The Wertzone blog. That puts E.R.B. (as his family and fans often refer to him) in the top 100 selling authors of all time, according to that Wikipedia list. That list begins with William Shakespeare, with Agatha Christie 2nd, J.K. Rowling at #7, and many more current, popular writers further down. Burroughs comes in at #96, two places above James Michener, and Japanese mystery writer Seiichi Morimura fill out the top #100. Edgar Rice Burroughs books dramatically outsold the famous, and more critically acclaimed contemporary authors in his early years, like Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby).

With the creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. in 1923, Burroughs turned Tarzan into the first real multi-media character. He had a sense of multi-media thinking, intellectual property, and character brand awareness, decades before these concepts really gained traction in the literary, publishing, and business world. He licensed Tarzan to appear in Sunday newspaper comic strips and and later in comic books when, like the original novel, nobody thought that was a good idea.

More than 45 Tarzan movies and TV series have been made between the 1918 silent Tarzan of the Apes and The Legend of Tarzan movie in 2016. That Tarzan movie racked up $356 million in worldwide box office revenue, roughly doubling the budget to make the movie. The ape man is still very popular, well into the 21st century. Netflix produced a Tarzan and Jane animated series, beginning in 2017. In 2022, Sony Pictures bought the rights to do another Tarzan movie, re-inventing the character and story, yet again, for the 21st century. I can’t find proof that they have gone into pre-production or production at this point.

There are multiple “concept trailers” for “Tarzan 2026” on YouTube right now, all of which appear to be AI generated, and they feature a handful of different top movie stars. I’m not sure if these are movie industry test trailers, or if they are fan generated AI clips. In addition, one porn tube site listed 108 videos when I searched “Tarzan,” and other had over 200 hits, so there are also a lot of unsanctioned, XXX Tarzan videos out there, as well. That explains a huge part of the long lasting popularity of the character, I think. Millions of men have wanted to be the heroic Tarzan, and millions of women have wanted to hook up with the jungle raised, primal man that the character Tarzan represents.

John Carter on Mars has not generated anywhere near the popular appeal that Tarzan has in recent decades. But those books definitely still have a hardcore, cult following in the sci-fi and fantasy world. What I find interesting is that the John Carter novels, and E.R.B.’s other space and sci-fi fantasies, had a very inspirational effect on the younger generations reading those novels, in the early decades of the 20th century. There’s a great quote by novelist Ray Bradbury (of Farenheit 451 fame) about Edgar Rice Burroughs.

“But as it turns out- and I love to say it because it upsets everyone terribly- Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world… Burroughs put us on the moon. All of the technologists read Burroughs.”

-Ray Bradbury on the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs

Bradbury said that he met a lot of actual scientists and technologists of the mid-20th century, the beginning of the space age, that were inspired to “do something romantic with their lives” because of the Burroughs novels they read as kids. That influence is something that can’t be quantified, other than the large sales numbers of the John Carter of Mars novels in the early and mid-20th century. The interplanetary adventures of John Carter, written by Burroughs, inspired many of the actual scientists and technical people who helped actually put humans into space in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s. Burroughs also inspired other writers and creative people, including George Lucas, who brought Star Wars to young Generation Xers, people of my generation, along with the Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha kids watching and reading the more recent Star Wars adventures.

That said, the John Carter stories don’t seem resonate as much in the 21st century, when kids can punch up actual footage of Mars on the internet, and video of the outer planets and their moons, from space probes. The latest Princess of Mars movie, starring a modern version of John Carter, was made in 2009, but it bombed at the box office, and the planned sequel was never made. It grossed $284 million worldwide after costing about $350 million to make. There could be many reasons for this, starting with a less than ideal script, or any of the other things that happen to movies. The vast majority of Hollywood movies do not earn much, if any, profit, and the small numbers of blockbuster hits make up for those dozens of box office bombs each year. Several of the John Carter novels, and other Burroughs sci-fi, are available as audio books on Audible. So you can check them out on your commute or next road trip, if you like.

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Anyway you look at it, the pencil sharpener salesman from Chicago did really well for himself, once he started writing stories. In 1919-1920 alone, over two million Tarzan books sold, according to one source. With the money made from the sales of the novels, Burroughs moved his wife, and three kids at that point, to Southern California in March of 1919. For the sizable sum of $125,000, bought the Mil Flores estate from General Harrison Gray Otis, former publisher of the Los Angeles Times newspaper. The 550 acre tract of land started with 1,000 feet of frontage on Ventura Boulevard, and rose up the small Santa Monica mountains, to the south, up to the crest. There was a large, 20 room house high up on the hills, with a great view of The Valley.

Burroughs inherited a herd of goats from Otis, and added hogs to the ranch. The idea of wealthy people becoming “gentleman farmers” was popular at the time. Several movie stars tried their hand at farming, including Lucille Ball and Ricky Arnaz, among many other actors and movie industry people. Enamored by that idea, Edgar Rice Burroughs raised the goats, hogs, and planted alfalfa, barley, corn, and lima beans. Irrigation was made available to the San Fernando Valley only 6 or 7 years earlier, and small farms and orchards were popping up all across The Valley. Like most of the other gentleman and lady farmers, it didn’t pan out financially. By late 1920, Burroughs was losing money with the crops and livestock.

But he kept writing, the books kept selling, and he kept it all going. By 1922, he had the idea of selling lots on his ranch, down by Ventura Boulevard, to create an artists colony. A marketing campaign was planned, and they started selling lots in the lower part of Rancho Tarzana, as the estate came to be called. Land sales were slow, and the artist’s colony idea slowly fizzled out. In time Burroughs carved out a big chunk of the land to create a country club, complete with a golf course, polo fields, and one of the first swimming pools in The Valley. The hacienda house became the clubhouse, and Burroughs moved to L.A. for a while.

Eventually, a more reasonable plan to develop part of the rancho was put into action, with real estate agents handling the sales. The community began to build. In December, 1930, Tarzana got it’s own post office, and the rancho became the foundation for the city of Tarzana. OK, like many of the “cities” in the Los Angeles metro area, Tarzana is officially a neighborhood, or district, of the city of L.A.. The same is true of Hollywood, by the way. Tarzana is now home to about 37,000 or 38,000 people, and stretches across nearly nine square miles, much larger than the original rancho E.R.B. owned. With its close proximity to Hollywood and the L.A. region’s entertainment industry, a number of well known people, besides Burroughs, have called Tarzana home. Actress Blake Lively and pro skateboarder Paul Rodriguez were both born in Tarzana, and Lisa Kudrow grew up there. Ed Asner, Bob Crane, Jon Lithgow, Kaley Cuoco, Selena Gomez, and Khloe Kardashian have all called it home, at one point or another. Tarzana may be the only city in the world named after a fictional character. Google only showed two islands named Robinson Crusoe as its competition in that category, one off Chile, and the other in Fiji.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, as fate would have it, was in Hawaii when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, drawing the United States into World War II. He literally saw the attack happen live, standing several hundred yards away. In his mid 60’s at the time, Burroughs signed up as the oldest war correspondent working then, and covered the war for the multiple media outlets. Returning after the war, he lived in Encino, next to Tarzana, until his death in 1950. His ashes were spread around the base of the black walnut tree, in the small yard of his longtime office, pictured above. There is no marker or memorial there, though. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. is still run out of that office, involving several of his family members, among the staff.

At the time of his death, the Tarzana branch of the L.A. library didn’t carry any copies of Tarzan books, because they weren’t considered “literature” then, even though he had sold around 40 million books total by his death. How’s that for gratitude? The L.A. libraries do carry many copies of his books now. After becoming fascinated with E.R.B.’s story, local librarians helped me find the oldest copy of Tarzan of the Apes in the entire Los Angeles library system. That was a hardbound, 1935 reprint of the original 1914 version of Tarzan, which I enjoyed reading. There is a tribute marker to E.R.B., on the sidewalk at 18663 Ventura Blvd., a couple of hundred yards west of Reseda Blvd., across from Yolanda Street. In addition, the Tarzana Community and Cultural Center, farther west at 19130 Ventura Blvd., has a permanent display commemorating Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan, as part of the history of the city.

So that’s a look at the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, John Carter, and one of the 100 bestselling writers of all time. His unusual final resting place is just part of his fascinating story. Below are some links to more information about him and his work, for those of you interested. Thanks for reading this post, I have a lot more to come.

Edgar Rice Burroughs background and history

John Carter Files channel- “Remembering Edgar Rice Burroughs”- 5:12

Biography TV Documentary- The History of Tarzan/Edgar Rice Burroughs- 45:21

Brad Bell channel- “The History of Tarzana, part 2”- Visiting the Tarzana Community and Cultural Center

Tarzan movie trailers

Tarzan the Ape Man trailer- 1932- starring Johnny Weissmuller

Carol Burnett doing the Tarzan Yell

Tarzan the Ape Man trailer- 1981

Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes trailer- 1984

Edgar Rice Burroughs book cover art by Frank Frazetta

Frazetta Girls channel- “How Tarzan saved Frank Frazetta’s career”

Frazetta Girls channel- “The Edgar Rice Burroughs covers that changed everything” - Frazzetta’s art- for E.R.B. covers- part 2

There are no paid links in this post.

In 1911, a one time pencil sharpener salesman in Chicago sat down to write a story to sell to pulp fiction magazines. He had just sold his first story for $400 a huge amount of money at the time. The story Edgar Rice Burroughs came up with for his sophomore novel was Tarzan of the Apes. He sold it as a serial story to a pulp magazine in 1912, and Tarzan went on to become one of the most recognized characters in literary history. This was the first of the 100-year-old plus novels that I read last year.

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More than a year and a half ago, while sleeping on the sidewalk as a homeless guy, my backpack got stolen. I had my backpack under my head, using it as a pillow. Two people came by late at night, one grabbed my backpack, pulled it right out from under my head, and they took off with it. They weren’t moving very fast. But, by the time I woke up, realized what had happened, got my shoes on, and headed after them, they were too far away for me to catch up, let alone try to get it back. They got my old, but decent, refurbished laptop, two phones, and a bunch of my Sharpies and art supplies.

Before the heist, I spent much of my time researching, writing, and doing social media for my blog and Substack, along with drawing my Sharpie Scribble Style pictures to sell. I had to revert back to using the public computers at the local library, and that meant spending less time on the computer every day. I suddenly had two or three more hours each day to do something, and still had almost no money to do it. I started reading more, which I hadn’t done much of in quite a while.

I read a book about the San Fernando Valley, “The Valley,” north of L.A., where I’ve been living homeless since late 2019. A sidebar piece in that book taught me about a guy named Edgar Rice Burroughs. In 1910, he was a pencil Sharpener salesman from Chicago working to provide for his wife and two kids. One night, he read some stories in a pulp fiction magazine, which were really popular then. After reading a few he thought, “This is drivel. I could write drivel this bad.”

So Edgar sat down in his spare time and wrote a wild story about a Civil War hero who went into a cave on Earth, and somehow got teleported to Mars. That character, John Carter, became a hero among the Martian people in the tale. Edgar Rice Burroughs sold that story, A Princess of Mars, in 1911, for $400, to one of the pulp magazines. That was a lot of money then.

So he sat down to write another story. Writing suddenly beat the hell out of selling pencil sharpeners. His next story was one you may have heard of, Tarzan of the Apes. He got it published in another pulp magazine in 1912. Then he worked to get it published as a novel in 1914. It became a huge bestseller. Edgar Rice Burroughs moved to California soon after, and with his Tarzan and John Carter money, he bought a huge chunk of land right here in the San Fernando Valley. A decade later, in the 1920’s, he developed some of the land, and it became the city of Tarzana, named after Tarzan. Burroughs’ many John Carter and Tarzan novels have sold more than 30 million copies since, and been made into comics, TV shows, and many, many movies. It’s 115 years after that first story sold, and many of his books are still in print, and there is yet another Tarzan movie due out in 2026.

That whole story fascinated me, and I got the oldest version of Tarzan of the Apes I could find in the L.A. Library system (thanks librarians!), a 1935 printing of the original 1914 novel. I read the book. While there are parts that seem silly today, it was still an interesting read. Tarzan has become one of the best known fictional characters of the 20th, and now the 21st centuries. Everyone knows who Tarzan is, from ages 5 to 105. You can’t say that about many characters.

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A while after I read Tarzan, a book called Mary’s Monster kept catching my eye, as I walked down that aisle at the library. I’ve learned that when a book (or movie) repeatedly catches my eye, I need to check it out. So I checked out Mary’s Monster, a mostly visual book, that tells the tragic story of how Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley came to write the novel Frankenstein. Mary’s story is tragic and amazing at many levels. She started writing Frankenstein at age 18, and it was published when she was 19, way back in 1818. Insert mind blown emoji. Heck, insert ten of them.

Then I decided I needed to read Frankenstein. This was several months before I heard that there was a new Frankenstein movie coming out. So I read Frankenstein. The language was formal and flowery, and it was a slow read. But it was well worth the time I took on it. Frankenstein is a brutal story of revenge, and was a completely different story than I thought it was, much like the original Tarzan. Really old novels had grabbed my attention. Over the next several months, I read a few more of them.

Over the course of 2025, I got on a kick and read eight really old, classic novels. Those novels were: Tarzan of the Apes (1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826), also by Mary Shelley, Robinson Crusoe (1719), by Daniel Defoe, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), by Oscar Wilde, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), by H.G. Wells, and The Invisible Man (1897), also by H.G. Wells. and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), by Jules Verne.

I didn’t read these novels because I had to. I didn’t read these novels for college credit. I didn’t read these novels because someone told me that I should read them. If there was any underlying reason, it was to see why these particular stories are still in print, and in some cases, have been made into movies or TV shows in our current era.

They are very different stories. Tarzan is about a couple that gets put ashore from a ship in the wild jungles of Africa. The couple gets killed, but their baby survives, and a female ape raises it as her own. In Frankenstein, a 19th century scientist surgically creates a large human out of pieces of corpses, and brings it to life with electricity. Then he abandons his “monster,” because it scares him. The monster survives, educates itself, and seeks revenge for its abandonment. The Last Man is a post-apocalyptic novel written in the early 1800’s, but set in the years 2070-2100. A pandemic begins to kill off the people of Europe and Asia. Ultimately, there is only one man left, wandering the empty cities alone. Robinson Crusoe is about a guy who gets shipwrecked. But he doesn’t learn his lesson. He goes to sea several more times, and eventually gets shipwrecked again, alone, on a deserted island in the Caribbean. He lives alone for nearly 30 years. The Picture of Dorian Gray is about an incredibly handsome young man, living among English aristocrats. He makes a wish one day for everlasting beauty. A painting done of him in his youth plays a key role in this tale. Doctor Moreau is about a man who gets put ashore on a little known island in the Pacific. The Island is home to a scientist who does experiments, surgically combining humans and animals, forming a variety of mutant creatures. The Invisible Man is about a scientist who discovered the secret of making animals and humans invisible. He makes himself invisible, but can’t figure out how to make himself visible again. His discovery gets him into all kinds of trouble. In Eighty Days, a very proper English gentleman takes a bet from a colleague that he can’t circumnavigate the Earth in 80 days or less. From a very structured daily existence, he sets out on a series of adventures to circle the globe using the means available in the late 1800’s.

The first thing that struck me across these books was the more formal language used. Yes, language itself has changed to some degree over the last 307 years, since Robinson Crusoe was published, the oldest novel I read. To put this in perspective, Robinson Crusoe was published 13 years before George Washington was born, and 57 years before the United States became a country. That’s a long time ago. Widely used words, slang terms, and popular phrases have come and gone many times since these books first came out. More than that, there were not tens of thousands of books being published every year when these books appeared. These books were all written when a large percentage of the population was still illiterate, a smaller part of the people actually read books, and there was nowhere near as many novels as we have now. There were no giant Barnes & Noble stores with 100,000 books under a single roof. Books were a much more important personal item when these books came out. When someone back then sat down to write a novel, it was a more formal affair. The language in most of these novels has that sense of formality in them.

Another insight was that none of these books were the story I thought they were. With the exception of The Last Man, Mary Shelley’s little known second novel, I had some idea of what these books were about. I had watched old Tarzan movies on TV as a kid. I saw Swiss Family Robinson as a kid and Castaway as an adult, both takeoffs of the Robinson Crusoe idea. I had seen variations of Frankenstein, and seen TV promos for old movie versions of The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I thought I had some idea of what these stories were about.

But every single story, the original versions of these classics, was something much different than I thought it was. In the original Frankenstein, the monster was smart. In the original, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster read Dante’s Inferno, and other classic literature. I always thought the monster was a big, mindless oaf, because the versions and spoofs of Frankenstein I had seen, all had a stupid monster in them. So this was my biggest insight from reading all these books, every one of these original stories was something different than I thought it was.

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What makes these novels classics? Why are these stories still in print, 100-200-300 years after first being published? All of them have deeply human elements in the stories. Things that we can all relate to in some way. Love, loneliness, thirst for power, addiction, lust, hate, envy, vengeance, greed, heartbreak, elation, struggle, manipulation, revenge, deceit, questioning whether God does or does not exist, and the rest of the themes and emotions we all deal with. These stories, underneath the setting and the drama, all have truly human themes playing out. I think that’s a big part of why these stories are still around.

Another thing I noticed about these novels was the pacing, the narrative drive, compared to modern novels. How we think about time has changed dramatically just from my Gen X childhood to the world of the 2020’s. Pretty much everybody seems perpetually rushed these days, there’s always somewhere else to get to, something else to do, and never enough time to get everything done. As a kid, I remember of this crazy concept called “spare time.” Even adults would just hang out and do nothing at times back in the 1970’s. Time moved a lot slower then, compared to today’s hyper-connected, frantically-paced world. When you go back to the late 1800’s and before, time moved much, much slower than that.

Much has been made about how movies and TV shows have sped up, actually having far more edits and shorter shots, than movies made decades ago. For example, take the long, slow, tense, but beautifully shot and edited Union Station scene, from the 1987 movie, The Untouchables, compared to early MTV promos. Slow pacing versus much faster pacing, or tempo, that’s what I’m talking about. The argument is that today’s short attention span people struggle, or lose interest, when a movie or TV show has a long, drawn out shot, and doesn’t move as fast as they’re used to. We are so used to life, and media, moving at a very quick pace these days. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about this concept in literature.

Today’s adventure based novels have a much faster pace than novels written in the 1960’s or 1970’s, let alone those written more than 100 years ago. Things happen faster in modern books, and the stories are constructed so that they move quickly, beat by beat, with excess description edited out. These eight old novels, for the most part, played out at a much slower pace. The authors took time to let the story slowly unravel. To be honest, I found that pretty refreshing.

OK, Robinson Crusoe and The Last Man both really dragged in the middle. In both of those, for a while, I kept thinking, “Alright already… Get on with it!” They slowed down too much, and I thought about quitting reading with both of those. That’s really unusual for me. If I start a book, I nearly always finish reading it. But the less rushed pace of these books was something I found refreshing, compared to a modern novel, like something from say Dan Brown, Michael Crichton, David Baldacci, or Dean Koontz. I’ve read The Hobbit and the Trilogy of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien, The epic novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, written by Ayn Rand, and most of J.D Salinger’s work, written in the 1930’s through the 1960’s. None of those books were paced as fast as today’s novels. But these much older novels, generally speaking, had an even slower pace than those mid-20th century novels.

After those larger, general, insights on the eight, 100-year-old plus novels, I began to notice some of the things they had in common. Robinson Crusoe, Tarzan, The Last Man, and The Island of Doctor Moreau all had shipwrecks, or people being put ashore in deserted places, as part of the story. Being shipwrecked, or abandoned in a “wild” place is a great story construct. An author traps characters, putting them in a world much different than the one they’re used to, where they’re stuck, and just have to deal with it. This concept has been used hundreds of times in books and movies since.

Another theme was the mad scientist archetype. Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Invisible Man all had mad scientists in them. This usually leads to them creating or inventing something that at first seems wonderful. But these wonderful discoveries or inventions come with a dark side, and the scientist then has to suffer through the unplanned side effects and consequences of the discovery or invention. Dr. Frankenstein created his monster, was scared of what he had done, then abandoned it. Doctor Moreau created half-man half-animal creatures, and then those mutants wound up living in a dysfunctional community on the other side of the island. Bad neighbors. In The Invisible Man, Griffin worked for years to discover the secret to making animals, and eventually himself, invisible. But he can’t undo what he has done, and it begins to drive him mad. With the mad scientist archetype, the question always becomes, “Just because you can create something new, does that mean you should create it?” In our lifetimes, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novels and movies are great examples of this same theme.

Of the eight really old novels I read, The Picture of Dorian Gray was, by far, the most well written book. It came out in 1890, around the same time that the novels by H.G.Wells, Jules Verne, and the Sherlock Holmes mysteries were really popular. The era that our modern concept called steampunk is based on. But Dorian Gray is not about science fiction. It’s about the lives of aristocrats. Have you ever watched the news in our modern era, and seen politicians, business people, or maybe even religious extremists, and thought, “How did these people become such douchebags?” The Picture of Dorian Gray is about how people, particularly wealthy aristocrat types, became major douchebags. Our news today is chock full of douchebags. I don’t need to name any names, you know who they are. This book explains where douchebags come from, how they come to be. Dorian Gray is also a story of the “be careful what you wish for” idea. It’s a story of beauty, wealth, sophistication, luxury, depravity, addiction, and corruption. If any of that has piqued your interest, this book is well worth reading.

As I read through these eight novels over the course of several months, I began to wonder where all of these novels were on a timeline, compared to each other. For example, I always thought that Frankenstein and Dracula must have been written around the same time, probably the late 1800’s, that dark, gothic-inspired, steampunk era. Nope. Frankenstein was published in 1818, and Dracula came out in 1897, 79 years later. They were published in the same century, but were not even close to each other in time. That completely surprised me.

Robinson Crusoe, the oldest novel I read, was published 193 years before Tarzan of the Apes. That’s a wide spread of time. So I did a little research, and made a list of the different years that great works of literature that were published, all before 1925. That list starts with the Epic of Gilgamesh, written down in Sumeria, roughly 4,100 years ago. The list goes through time and ends with The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, just over 100 years ago. I gave the list to a few friends and the librarians at the library I work at daily. A couple of those people told me they found the list really interesting. So I did a Substack post with that list, here it is:

Writing: A timeline list of books and novels more than 100 years old

There it is, my main thoughts after reading eight novels that were all written more than 100 years ago. I didn’t write this post to suggest you need to read one or another of these books. Honestly, it kind of bugs me when people tell me I need to read a certain book. Their suggestions almost never sound interesting to me. Then I wonder, “Just how crazy does this person think I am?” Suggesting a book is one thing, “Hey, have you heard of ____________, it’s about ______________. Does that sound interesting to you?” That’s a different vibe.

In this post I told you about why I wound up reading eight really old novels, and some overall thoughts about them as a group. I gave a really brief look at what each story was about. There are several links to movie trailers for most of these books, so you can get a better idea what they’re about. If one or more of these books sounds interesting to you, maybe it’s worth reading. If not, cool. Read what you find interesting.

One last thought that came from writing this Substack post. While I was looking up the movie trailers to link in this post, I noticed that there is a big difference between the movies made in the 1930’s-1950’s based on these novels, and the movies made in more recent decades. Every group that re-tells these stories in a movie or a TV show adds a lot of current bias and thinking, and they have much different takes on these stories as the decades pass. I found that interesting.

That’s it, a look at why some stories last through the decades and the centuries, and what it was like to read eight really old books. Perhaps this post will lead you to some new reading material that you hadn’t thought of before. Perhaps not. Either way, carry on, and thanks for reading this post. There’s a lot more to come.

There are no paid links in this post.

I shaved off my 2023 winter beard in phases. This is the neck Mohawk phase. This facial hair style didn’t take off. But who knows, maybe the hipsters will discover it 40 years from now and make it cool. Maybe not. Me, spring of 2023. Not cool. #steveemigphotos

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Just Another Day…

Wake up in the morning

Hoping to die

No energy to fight

No energy to cry

I feel hungover

But I don’t drink

No will to shower

Even though I stink

Dark dreams every night

Though not quite nightmares

I wrestle the dementors

Losing hope, will, and care

I wake breathing heavy

Don’t remember the dream

Spiritually bruised and battered

This has become routine

In poverty’s quicksand

I slog up to my chest

My thoughts search for will

And then seek the rest

Pictures of a “real life”

Have long ago faded

I still have lots of ideas

I don’t want to be jaded

A future in an apartment

Now seems a pipe dream

I just want to earn a living

Not kiss ass and scheme

With caffeine and a muffin

I crawl out of the muck

I struggle to my feet

And groan the word, “Fuck…”

In a purgatory program

Undead and un-alive

“Get on Disability,” they say,

“There’s no need to strive”

“You’re not right with God”

“You didn’t live your life right”

“Fuck you,” I reply

How about that insight?

Poverty’s a war

A one person war of attrition

I count up my change

Just simple addition

There are seeds to be planted

There is art to create

That’s what keeps me going

As I spar with Fate

I bitch and I moan

I pimp slap my doubts

I struggle to the keyboard

And let it flow out

This is who I am

There’s no reason to quit

It’s just another day…

Let’s go create some shit!

-The White Bear

Again… this is a poem about getting over the doubts that all creative minded people wrestle with, and struggling through the morning blues. My doubts and negative thoughts gang up on me most in the morning, for some reason. This has been worse than usual over the past few months, thought doubts have always been there, to some degree. It’s an inherent part of doing creative work of any kind, wondering at times if it’s worth it.

It’s something I’ve heard many highly creative people talk about. Some days it’s just a hard, dark slog to get going, for the first half an hour or hour in the morning. I wrote this poem recently, during one of the worst of those mornings. This is one of those poems where just getting the words down on paper had an immediate healing effect on me. Creativity can do that. I’m sure there are plenty of other people out there who can relate, to some degree.

Once I get up, drink some iced tea (I’m not a coffee guy), and get moving, I’m fine. I write, draw, or work on something I feel good about. The continuous, years long struggle to turn this work into an actual living, is a big part of the dark feelings. If I could “just get a real job,” I would have done it years ago. After years of taxi driving in the 2000’s, then getting stuck in North Carolina for a decade, where I literally couldn’t get hired for any job, except more taxi driving, destroyed my work life. Now I don’t have any work history to even put on a resume’ after 1997. For real, every company I’ve worked for since got bought out or went out of business.

All that is on top of being a nearly 60-year-old, overweight guy, with almost no teeth, who looks a lot like a mountain troll. Maybe a bridge troll. In either case, job hunts in an already depressed job market just haven’t paid off… in many, many years. I have as good a chance at making a living with my art and writing as I do at anything else, at this point. So I just keep plugging away at it. Moment by moment, it’s just another day…

There are no paid links in this post.

This is Alex Leech, from England, launching off the H.B. High stage into a wall ride, while in holiday in H.B.. I never saw anyone else try this trick here. The video quality is sketchy, it’s a still from S-VHS footage that I shot way back in 1991. This pic shows the stage and part of the quad area, with the little four step set, matched by another one on the other side of the stage. This still is from a 1991 flashback segment, at 7:27, in my 2000 BMX freestyle video, Animals. Yes, I know these were primarily skate spots, I’m using BMX shots in this post because they come from my own personal footage. #steveemigvideo

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Public Service Announcement- If you’re a street skater from any era,sit down and watch this video, made way back in 1990. Just watch it. New Deal- Useless Wooden Toys.

Huntington Beach High School sits 1.4 miles inland from the Huntington Beach Pier, a large campus on the corner of Main Street and Yorktown Avenue. In the mid 1980’s, when street skating first became a thing, H.B. High became a well known skateboard spot. Over the years, from about 1985 to 2008, there were three main spots, all focused around H.B. High. The campus itself had several skating obstacles spread throughout. There was the stage in the quad, and the covered hallway adjoined to the stage, with several small, 2 and 3 step sets of stairs. There were the two benches across the quad, with a three step set near them. There were benches that made good grind ledges behind that. Then there was the 4 step and 5 step set, with a small rail that had a kink on the end, near the driveway. There were small manual pads there, a big manual pad out in the parking lot, and parking blocks in the lot as well, at one point.

Then there was Pay ‘N Play, where the pickle ball courts are now. Pay ‘N Play was a set of coin operated, indoor racquetball courts, with a large, outdoor, multi-court basketball court area in front of it. The courts were made from incredibly smooth concrete, and were perfect for skateboarding. The Pay ‘N Play area was popular with freestyle skaters, and was also a place where street skaters would bring small launch ramps, leading to huge nighttime sessions, often with 40 or 50 skaters or more.

The number of skaters that skated at H.B. High, and the amount of time police spent chasing them out of the school, was considered a problem, for years, by civic leaders. In 1994, the city built its second public skatepark (after The Ashtray) next to the track, by the school. The skatepark was tiny, and nothing was over 2 feet high. But it was well built, had solid obstacles, and did give skaters a legit place to skate day after day. It didn’t completely keep the skaters out of the school, but it helped. The H.B. High skatepark then became the primary skate spot for daily skate sessions by skaters, from 1994, until it was torn down in 2008.

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Now I’m an old, HAS BEEN BMX freestyler, and the BMXers of the area occasionally rode H.B. High through all those years as well. Pay N’ Play was a great place for flatland, though it never got really popular for that. But mostly the school was a skate spot in a city where John Lucero, Mark Gonzales, Bob Schmelzer, Don Brown, Pierre Andre’, Per Welinder, Hans Lingren, Ed Templeton, Jason Lee, Jeremy Ramey, and many years later, Geoff Rowley, among others, were all locals at some point.

There are different types of skate and bike spots. There are spots where riders and skaters go to session and practice on a daily basis. There are also spots that become famous in videos, proving ground spots where high level skaters and riders go to try and land a big trick that hasn’t been done there yet, NBD’s. Two posts back I looked at the history of Hollywood High School as a skate and BMX spot. That’s a spot where people go to land big tricks on the famous 12 and 16 stair sets and handrails. Hollywood High is a Mid School/New School spot that rose to fame in the late 1990’s, and continues to be an NBD, Big Trick spot.

Huntington Beach High was the other kind, a daily session spot in the earliest years of street skating and BMX street. I know it sounds crazy now, but back in those days, we used to just go skate ride, solo or in small groups, and not even think about shooting video. Crazy, huh? We went to these spots to session day after day, practice the tricks we already knew, and to think up and try new tricks. It wasn’t about just One Big Trick in those days. A lot of fundamental tricks were either just being invented, or just bring taken to the streets then. There was a bigger focus on being original, coming up with something new, not just doing a known trick bigger. It was still mostly about competitions and trying to get a photo in a magazine in those days, the video era hadn’t taken over yet. In those years from the mid-1980’s into the mid-1990’s, Huntington Beach High School thrived as a daily session spot.

Huntington Beach High skate and BMX footage in videos

Let’s Go Skate- Schmitt Stix- 1987- Hans Lingren freestyle skating at Pay ‘N Play- 16:52, then some street ramp skating

Epicly Later’d- Ed Templeton- Part 1- mid 1980’s- Lots of shots of Ed skating Huntington High ( starting at 3:29) when he was really young, then, Don Brown skating at Pay ‘N Play (3:56). Then there are Don Brown, Jason Dill, Paul Schmitt, and Ed talking about the Pay ‘N Play scene of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s

Barge at Will- Vision- 1989- Don Brown- freestyle skating at Pay ‘N Play- 1:27-2:02

Rubbish Heap- 1989- World Industries- Ron Chatman- 11:59-12:36- Parking lot, the two benches, quad area; Mike Vallely- 27:40- really long manual at the Pay ‘N Play sidewalk

Speed Freaks- 1989- Santa Cruz- Mike Vallely- 00:00-1:04

Useless Wooden Toys- New Deal- 1990- Armando Barajas- 2:54, 3:13, 4:12, 4:33, 5:00, 5:09, 5:15; Justin Girard- 8:22, 8:29, 9:09, 9:17, John Duff- 11:06; Ed Templeton- 21:09-21:18, 22:17, 23:23, 23:58, 24:09, 24:16, 24:29-24:38; Hans Lingren at Pay ‘N Play- 38:47; Random- 42:16, 42:21, 42:34, 42:37-43:17

Video Days- Blind- 1991- Rudy Johnson- 14:33- benches, rail, nose manual; Jason Lee- 17:07- benches, small kink rail

Live- Toy Machine- 1991- Joe Hemeth- 8:18, Charlie Coatney- 13:33-13:57; Ed Templeton-16:53, 18:03, 20:44, 21:10

Thrasher- Best of Ed Templeton- ‘90-’92- 00:06-00:16, 1:03-1:16, 1:40-1:46, 1:54-1:58

Animals- (BMX)- Steve Emig- 2000- w/1991 flashback footage- Keith Treanor-6:29-6:55, 7:07-7:16 (the wall ride was by the old back driveway into the school parking lot, now it goes to houses); Alex Leech- 7:25, Steve Emig (1999)- 9:48, 10:10

Alphabet Soup- Vision- 1991- Joe Gruber- 26:07, 26:19

Heavy Metal- Toy Machine- 1995- Ed Templeton- 7:01-7:09, 7:27-7:40

Tom Penny at H.B. High skatepark- (90’s?)

Jason Acuna (aka Wee Man)- 1997- several shots at H.B. High skatepark

Jump Off a Building (raw footage)- Toy Machine- 1997-98- Geoff Rowley, Alex Moul, Kerry Getz

Just goofing around. That’s me, Steve Emig, mid-air, upside down, 8 feet in front of my bike. I shot this in 1999, doing a front flip over my handle bars into the high jump crash pads, on the track, at Huntington High. I’m going from right to left, and my bike is bouncing backwards after hitting the end of the pad. I learned to do these while working as a crew guy on the American Gladiators TV show, in the early 1990’s. We had lots of crash pads sitting outside on our set, and I started trying these flips into the pads one day at lunch. At my peak, I could fly 16-17 feet from the bike. the crash pads are ten feet long. Video still from my 2000 Animals BMX video (10:10). #steveemigvideo

In the first few years of the 1900’s, a couple of developers bought up land in the middle nowhere, on the beach, in Orange County, California. They started a small beach town they called Pacific City, dreaming of it becoming the Atlantic City of the west coast. It was a great location, but there was nothing else around then, and few people bought lots. The developers made a deal with railroad magnate Henry Huntington in 1903. He would build a Red Car trolley line from Long Beach south to the little town, and they would change the name of Pacific City to Huntington Beach. The trolley made H.B. much more accessible to people from Long Beach, and even downtown L.A.. The little beach town began to grow, although slowly.

Huntington Beach High School was built in 1903. On May 24th, 1920, oil was discovered, really close to where the school now sits. Suddenly little Huntington Beach became a boom town. The population exploded from around 1,500 to 5,000 in a single month. It went from a quiet, secluded beach town to a rowdy little village with oil derricks ranging from about Lake Street north, all the way through Sunset and Seal Beach, into southern Long Beach. Fortunes were made. Not surprisingly, the H.B. High teams became the Oilers.

The original wooden pier in Huntington Beach was built in 1902, then was heavily damaged by a storm in 1910. The pier was rebuilt using concrete, and had a grand opening in 1914. Part of that event included a “surf riding” demo by George Freeth. George, along with the younger Duke Kahanamoku, was part of the group that brought surfing back at Waikiki in Hawaii, in the early 1900’s. So the action sports roots of Huntington Beach go all the way back to 1914.

By the 1950’s, there were a bunch of local surfers hitting the local beach break. Much like the skateboarders of the 1970’s and 1980’s, they were’not looked highly upon by more respectable people. Then the surf music, surf movie, and surf culture explosion of the mid 1960’s took place. Jan and Dean wrote a song about Huntington Beach, “Surf City,” in 1963. The surf culture took hold, and set the stage for the skateboarders, BMXers, snowboarders, motocross free riders and FSMX riders that followed in the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s. With the second big skateboarding boom in the 1980’s, and the rise of street skating as its own genre’, Huntington Beach High School rose as a major session spot for the freestyle and early street skaters of Orange County.

There are no paid links in this video.

These are my feet in the Pacific Ocean in the summer of 2019. After being stuck back East for about ten years, I was finally back in Southern California. I had lived in SoCal, mostly in the Huntington Beach area, from age 20 in 1986, until age 42 in 2008, when life rudely pushed me out of this state. I lived in four states before I moved to California, and one state since, but Southern California is the only place that has ever felt like home to me. I’ve been trying to get my life back on track since 2019. The writing has gone well, my Sharpie art has gone pretty well, the financial aspect of life hasn’t. But I keep plugging away at it. #steveemigphotos

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Substack is a platform designed for writers. I watched a few interviews with the Substack founders nearly three years ago. According to them, the idea was for writers to create a digital newsletter on some niche subject, make small posts frequently, on a regular basis, and attract subscribers that pay a small monthly subscription fee. If all that worked, writers could make a living writing about something they were really passionate about.

When I started writing here in August of 2023, I soon realized I wasn’t geared to do that kind of writing. So I just started writing posts on ideas that seemed interesting to me. I quickly began to write long form posts on a variety of subjects. Basically, I did Substack completely wrong. I didn’t really care.

Over time, I wound up writing niche posts on several themes, and then some longer series of posts. To celebrate my 150th post here on Substack, as well as somewhere over 11,000 total views (why is there no ‘Total Views’ in the analytics?), and my 27 subscribers (Thanks!), I’m going to link to my top posts and series.

My Pinterest Boards thank link directly to multiple posts,

Simulpocalypse Series- There are tens of thousands of empty buildings in the U.S.- this series is about the apocalypse we were promised vs. the apocalyptic-looking places we got

The Poet Series- How I became The White Bear- I wrote the first poem I can remember 50 years ago, and have written at least 400 or 500 since, and managed to lose most of them…

History of BMX/Skate Spots Series- Posts about locations that are famous for people riding BMX bikes or skateboards at them

Art and Creativity Writings- Posts with thoughts on many different aspects of art and creativity

Writing and the Writing Life- Posts with thoughts on different aspects of writing

Creative Scenes- Thoughts on the many different types of Creative Scenes, and why they are important. I just started this board, not much there yet…

Steve Emig- The White Bear’s Substack- Links to many of my early Substack posts

The “Art & Creativity,” “Writing,” and “Creative Scenes” theme boards are works in progress. None of them have links to all of my posts on each theme, and I build the boards a little at a time.

Non-Substack stuff on my Pinterest Page

My Pinterest main page

My “Art Inspiration” Pinterest board

“My Sharpie Scribble Style Art” Pinterest board

My most popular Substack posts

Number One- 1,240 views- BMX: The History of Sheep Hills

Number Two- 1,040 views- TV/Film- Circus Liquor in North Hollywood

Number Three- 649 views- Simulpocalypse #4- Vacant and abandoned places in Southern California

Some of my favorite posts

D.I.Y.- The Do It Yourself Ethic

Freaks, Geeks, Dorks, and Weirdos- Why these words on in my logo

The Role of Creativity in Society from 2025 to 2029

There are lots of posts that are not linked from this post. Remember, you can just scroll down the entire list on your phone (with the Substack App) or on your tablet or laptop.

My other social media

My Facebook- Steve Twb Emig- North Hollywood- Where us Old School BMXers talk about how cool we used to be- “Twb” stands for “The White Bear,” my nickname/poetry pen name (Seriously, it’s not a racist thing, just a nickname from a poem I wrote decades ago)

My Twitter- @steveemig43- Something to offend everyone (Yeah, I still call it Twitter, not X, Leon)

If you found your way to this page somehow, thank you for checking out my work. Hopefully you find something in my 150 posts that you feel is worth the time it took to read, and maybe even was insightful or inspiring. If not, I have about 1,075 posts on my main blog (out of about 50 blogs I’ve tried out), which confusingly is also named Steve Emig: The White Bear ( but it’s on Blogspot).

Thank you to my 27 subscribers for the support! I do actually intend to add paid subscriptions at some point, and put some stuff, but definitely not all, behind a reasonable paywall. But I’m not there yet.

Thanks again to anyone who has has read any of my posts… anywhere. As crazy as it sounds, I still have a ton of ideas to write about, and I’m going to keep doing this as long as I can. Be cool to each other. Rock on. And do something creative, or support the people who do, whichever makes the most sense for you. There’s lots more to come.

There are no paid links in this post.

The Hollywood High 12 step rail, which faces north, right on Highland Avenue, just south of Hollywood Boulevard. The 16 step stairs and rail are on the opposite side of the landing above, facing south. #steveemigphotos

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When it comes to street spots for both skateboarding and BMX freestyle, there are the practice spots where people go to session day after day, and then there are spots that become a proving ground for top skaters and riders. The Hollywood High School stairs and rails are the second kind. The 12 and 16 stair sets outside the school’s theater, and the two handrails down them, came into play in the late 1990’s, when rail skating down big sets really started happening.

Skateboarding-

Ryan Sheckler- Milestones w/Torey Pudwill- Hollywood High

Hollywood High 16- Top 50 tricks

Hollywood High 16 step/rail- 90 tricks from 1998 through 2022

Game of SKATE down the Hollywood High 12 stair

World’s Most Dangerous Game of SKATE! - With Bam Margera - Hollywood 16 stair

First thing to know, Hollywood, California is not a city, it’s a district of the city of Los Angeles. Most people don’t realize that. Another thing most people don’t know is that there are three Hollywoods in the L.A. metro area. There’s the Hollywood you know as the movie capital of the world, there’s West Hollywood, and there’s North Hollywood. West Hollywood actually is its own city, and, as the name suggests, it’s just west of the famous Hollywood, and is known mostly as a gay and arts enclave. Then there’s North Hollywood, the odd one out, the least cool of the trio, which is also a district of L.A.. North Hollywood is on the opposite side of the Hollywood Hills, the hills where the world famous Hollywood sign stands, in the San Fernando Valley. North Hollywood is wedged between Burbank and Studio City, where most of the actual “Hollywood” TV and movie studios are really located.

BMX-

The Perfect Rail- Hollywood High 16 Stair- Our BMX- narrated by Dennis Enarson

LA Bangers with Mike Hoder

BMX: Kareem VS. Hollywood High

Snowboarding- Yes… snowboarding- at Hollywood High

Jenkemmag- “How did a bunch of snowboarders session Hollywood High?”

PlunderBiscuit- “Snowboarding Hollywood High!”

This area of Southern California was originally occupied by the Tongva tribe. In the 1700’s, Spanish missionaries traveled through the area. The small pueblo and mission that grew into Los Angeles was founded way back in 1781. Yes, that’s just five years after the original 13 colonies declared their independence and became the United States, on the opposite side of the continent.

L.A. was founded by a group of 44 Spanish settlers from what is now Mexico. About half of those original settlers were Black, African Spaniards. The whole region was part Alta California, a huge territory of Spain, which later became part of Mexico in the 1800’s. Alta California included what are now the entire states of California, Nevada, and Utah, along with parts of what are now Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming. It was a massive region. Just the three current states of California, Nevada, and Utah are more than 30% larger than the entire thirteen original colonies on the Eastern seaboard, not counting the rest of Alta California. Freakin’ Eastern pipsqueaks. They didn’t really figure out how to make states until they got west of the Mississippi River. Heck we have counties in California that are bigger than Rhode Island. Anyhow, nearly all of Alta California became part of the United States in 1848, just in time for the California gold rush in 1849.

The original, and most famous Hollywood, was an area north of downtown Los Angeles in the late 1800’s. It was nestled against the small Santa Monica mountains, the Eastern parts of which are now referred to as the Hollywood Hills. In the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s, Hollywood was mostly groves of oranges and other produce.

Around 1907, people from the early movie studios in New Jersey checked out Los Angeles, as a possible location to shoot movies. The 300+ days of annual sunshine and mile climate seemed like a great place to set up a movie studio. Because stage lights hadn’t been invented yet, movies were shot outside, with natural sunlight for lighting. Indoor scenes then were shot in rooms with no roof, using natural light. A small studio moved to the L.A. area in 1909, and several other studios followed in the early 1910’s. Hollywood became the main location for the fast growing film industry by the 1920’s.

Hollywood High School was formed in an empty building in 1903, and the first part of the current high school was built in 1905. With so many movies being shot within blocks of Hollywood High, the school developed a serious and well respected drama program in the 1910’s. The school produced many great actors through the early years, the Golden Age of Hollywood, and well into the 1960’s. Famous actors who studied at Hollywood High School include Faye Wray (original King Kong), Judy Garland (Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz), Mickey Rooney (Yankee Doodle Boy), Alan Hale, Jr. (Skipper from Gilligan’s Island), Carol Burnett (The Carol Burnett Show), Stephanie Powers (Hart to Hart TV show), John Ritter (Jack from Three’s Company TV show), and Meredith Baxter Birney (the mom in Family Ties TV show), among others.

In the late 1960’s, the Hollywood area started becoming run down, and the school’s drama program suffered. It didn’t attract as many young actors as in earlier decades. By the 1980’s, their were homeless people sleeping on campus on a regular basis, and a high fence was put up around the school to keep them out. That fence came into play for skaters and BMXers in later years, with ollies and bunnyhops over it. On the high wall above the stairs and rails, there’s a mural featuring several prominent actors, including Judy Garland, Rudolph Valentino, and Bruce Lee, among others.

I’m pretty sure these feet belong to former Bones Brigade member Chet Thomas. This boardslide is from the 2000 Christian movie Extreme Days (37:47), and is one of the early clips at Hollywood High’s 12 step rail that even hardcore skaters don’t know about. He also ollies the 12 step in the movie. I got hired to make a couple of launch ramps for the movie, and was on set one day, which is how I know Chet Thomas was the main stunt skater they used for the movie. I tell that story in the later part of this Substack post. I’m pretty sure Extreme Days is still the only Christian movie with a 50 second fart lighting scene in it (38:20). I’m not kidding.

By the mid 1990’s street skating had progressed to a point where large sets of steps, like the Hollywood High 12 and 16 step sets, were sought out by skaters. By about 1998, the Hollywood High 12 and 16 step stairs and rails started showing up in skateboard videos, and later in BMX videos. You know how that goes. When someone ollies a big set of stairs in a video, then someone else wants to push the progression and kickflip the set. The rails soon came into play. Different skaters or BMXers want to land big tricks art the spot, once it becomes famous, and the progression continues. The most amazing thing is that these sets of stairs have been available to skate or ride for about 30 years now, so the progression at this spot just kept advancing, making these steps legendary to skaters and BMXers worldwide.

The use of the Hollywood High School 12 and 16 sets and rails came right around the time that the huge Hollywood & Highland complex was being built, half a block away. That complex pulled tourists away from Hollywood Boulevard and Vine, which had been the most famous spot in Hollywood since the 1940’s. So, for most of the last 30 years, thousands of tourists from around the world visit Hollywood Boulevard, barely half a block away from these two sets of steps, world famous in the skateboard and BMX worlds. Now you know the basic history of this legendary skate/bike street spot. If you come visit Hollywood, you have a reason to wander half a block downhill from the tourist crowds, and check this place out for yourself.

There are no paid links in this post.

I like big books and I cannot lie… Yes, I’m a geek. I like to learn stuff, at least stuff that I find interesting. This is a pandemic era selfie, a maskie, outside of the Iliad Book shop in North Hollywood, California. Iliad is one of, if not the, coolest used book store in Southern California. I know, I know, I was outside, I didn’t really need the mask. It was a habit at that point. Besides, I look better when wearing one. #steveemigphotos

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The Library of Alexandria, in Egypt, is widely believed to be the single greatest repository of knowledge in the ancient world. The library reportedly contained 500,000 different books and scrolls, although that number is believed to be an exaggeration by many. More than 2,000 years ago, the goal of the Library of Alexandria was to collect all of the knowledge of the known world at the time.

How much information do you think that added up to in today’s terms? That entire historic library held an estimated 10 to 50 gigabytes of knowledge. Yep, 10 gigs. Maybe up to 50. That doesn’t sound like much in today’s world. To put that in perspective, this one hour video of birds chirping, in uncompressed, 4K video, produced just for cats to watch, is roughly 15 gigs. Yes, this single video takes up as much space on a hard drive as the low end estimate of entire Library of Alexandria.

To be fair, the legendary Library of Alexandria was mostly text, hand written, hand copied text in those days. It would have had maps and some diagrams, but no digital photos or video that eat up data, like most of our content in today’s world. That was, by most accounts, the greatest collection of knowledge, the best place to receive an exceptional education, in the ancient world.

In the roughly 2,000 years since, there have been all kinds of forms of education, from mostly non-educated feudal farmers, to apprentice systems for many trades, to the various colleges and universities, and our K-12 public and private education system here in the United States today. This current childhood education system was largely created in the 1800’s to turn farm workers into the factory workers needed as the world moved into the Industrial Age. These two education systems, K-12 and the various colleges and universities of the U.S., are still our official education systems. People have been complaining about our public K-12 education system as long as I can remember. Yes, our primary school system was initially built for an era that no longer exists, and there are plenty of newer teaching methods that could improve it in many ways. Thousands of good teachers, my sister among them, work diligently to prepare kids for the world they will face as adults, making the most of the system. Many teachers would love to implement new and and different techniques and processes to improve this system. But it’s the system we have now, and we need it.

For many students leaving high school, going to a college or university, our higher education system, becomes the obvious next step. This system is also needed, and it, too, has a lot of issues. The most obvious issue with higher education is that it has become far too expensive to be worthwhile for millions of students. At today’s rates, the risk/reward trade-off no longer makes sense for some majors or areas of study, and for people who won’t make high incomes when they graduate. In addition, a college degree no longer guarantees a good paying job when people graduate, like it did 30 or 40 years ago. No one should still be paying off student debt 20 or 30 or 40 years after attending college.

These financial issues have as much to do with Wall Street and the bundling of student loans into the SLABS financial securities system, as with the colleges and universities themselves. We need a higher education system, but as we move further into the emerging Information Age, our colleges and universities will struggle for many years to create a more viable system. We need a system that doesn’t shackle tens of millions of people with life long student debt, and a system that teaches them the actual skills they will need to succeed in a world that will actually exist in the coming decades. Both the current K-12 system, and the higher education system, will change dramatically over the next decade or two, to adapt to the changing needs of our evolving technological-based society. Both of these systems are needed in today’s world. But we have a completely different education system now, as well, one that wasn’t planned.

I’m referring to the gigantic collection of digital content now known as “the internet,” all of the various social media apps and platforms, all of the podcasts, audio books, and digital books, all of the educational videos and TV shows available on streaming platforms, and anything else accessible by the various search engines in place now. By search engines, I don’t just mean Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, and the web search platforms. YouTube, the biggest video streaming platform by far, has its own search engine. Pinterest is, among other things, a search engine for photos and videos. Various other audio and video platforms have their own search functions for their content. All of this content includes more than just “the internet” or World Wide Web, as we once called it.

Not to knock the Library of Alexandria, but “the internet” contained an estimated 1.9 billion websites by August of 2023, according to a quick Google search. That does not include all the other digital content that’s not on the web, the social media content, podcasts, audio books, digital books, and millions of videos. In 2024, the total amount of content on the internet reportedly totaled 149 zetabytes, and has been estimated to contain 175 zetabytes by the end of 2025. That’s 175 trillion gigabytes. Written out, for dramatic effect, that’s 175,000,000,000,000 gigabytes. That’s an amount of data so impossibly large we can’t even begin to get our minds around it.

Here’s what I find funny, plenty of people still say, “We need to completely upgrade or re-invent our education system.” Uh… HELLO… we did. It’s just that this new “education system” in today’s world is not our official schools, colleges, and universities. It’s all over the world, stored in bits and pieces, in hundreds, probably thousands, of server farms, millions of hard drives, and in laptops, tablets, and phones. Sure, when people talk about building a new education system, they are usually talking about revamping our K-12 public education system. But the reality is that we, collectively, as 8+ billion people on Earth, built an education system that dwarfs the ancient, and very impressive, Library of Alexandria. And we did it in about 30 years.

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That massive repository of ancient knowledge in Alexandria was mostly built up over a couple of hundred years. The 175 trillion gigabyte internet has been built over about 31 years, roughly 1994 through 2025. Yes, techies, I know the roots of the internet go back to CERN and Arpanet, beginning around 1969-1970. But the bulk of the World Wide Web, now collectively called “the internet” most of the time, really got going around 1994, or maybe 1995, when Netscape came along. When you put it all together, along with many more millions of gigabytes of related videos and other content, and all the social media content that’s not actually on the internet, we’ve created the largest “education system” in human history, in a little over 30 years.

Gobekli Tepe, now considered the oldest example of “ advanced civilization,” was built roughly 11,500 to 11,000 years ago. Us modern humans and our crazy technology, built a system full of knowledge that dwarfs any previous collection, millions of times over, in just three decades, and we did it kind of by accident. There wasn’t a big plan, a national or global plan, to “build the greatest collection of knowledge ever.” A whole bunch of separate groups, building many different kinds of technology, created pieces of technology, and a series of systems of communication and content publishing, that gave billions of people places to create many kinds of content. A lot, but not all of it, is educational in some way. Once these systems and platforms existed, and Web. 2.0 came along, billions of people started creating and adding things, mostly for free, that they thought needed to exist. The internet, and all the related platforms and content that now exist, add up to the greatest crowd sourcing experiment in human history. And that is really fucking cool in many ways we don’t think about today.

Yes, I can feel the mental daggers through my computer screen. “How can you call this huge compilation of cat videos, fail videos, porn, ignorant content, misinformation, disinformation, more porn, insane videos, more cat videos, and assorted filth, an ‘education system?’” Good question. Here’s my good answer. When you need to learn how to use a new app or software update, where do you learn it? Probably from a YouTube video, or maybe a website post, usually one uploaded for free, by someone in another part of the world that you don’t know. Do you need to learn how to operate that new function on your phone? A YouTube video teaches you. Do you need to find out who won Super Bowl XVII to settle a bar bet? A website answers your question. Most of us use this gigantic “education system” almost every day, without ever thinking about it as an “education system.”

Have you ever stopped to think that every single business, large or small, has employees use the internet to learn many of the skills they use daily in their jobs. Businesses save hundreds of millions of dollars each year, because they don’t have to create training videos for every new skill, software change, app, or bit of knowledge their employees need to do their jobs. We all just find some website or video that teaches us these skills. Billions of times a week. For free. That’s an education system.

Yes, there are thousands of cat videos, fail videos, lots of porn and smut of various kinds, and a ridiculous amount of bad information, misinformation, and intentional disinformation out there. That’s true. But that’s not all there is. Do you want to refresh your algebra skills for a new job? Kahn Academy, and several other channels and sites, have you covered. Want to learn how to crochet? There are a bunch of videos, like this one, to get you started. Want to hear a lecture on quantum mechanics from the Royal Institution in London? Here’s a link to a lecture. Want to learn how to install and alternator in a classic, 1965 Ford Mustang, this video will help. Want to find a great little bed and breakfast in the Adirondacks? Google it. Want to learn how to replace the screen in your storm door? Check YouTube for a how-to video. Want to learn which super car goes 0-100 miles per hour the fastest? Search online. Want the odds on the pro basketball game tonight? Go into a search engine on your smartphone. Want to find a list of 50 great murder mystery novels? The University of YouTube and Google State will help you find an answer. Or maybe another search engine or site, depending on your personal preferences.

My point is, we now have more knowledge, more widely available, much of it free and widely accessible to 3 to 5 billion people around the world, than ever before in human history. Ever. No president, king, queen, or CEO in history had access to the amount and variety of information that most of the people on Earth can access now. We, as a human species, have already built the greatest education system in human history. The catch is, there are billions of ways to get distracted when you start searching, and there’s a hell of a lot of crap out there to wade through. We have to learn to judge the biases of different sites and content creators, and use our brains to discern good information from propaganda and bad information. But there is an absolutely incredible amount of good, legit, solid information available, mostly for free, to all of us, as well. That’s amazing, yet we take it for granted today.

One problem with today’s digital “education system” is that it’s self-directed. It’s not mandatory, like our K-12, official education system. One person can dig in and learn about the history of country rock music, and then learn the basics of playing a guitar online, and build a brand new skill set. Another person can watch 27 consecutive fail videos, then half an hour of porn, then they order a 12-pack of beer and a pizza to be delivered to their door, and then start a two hour Facebook comment war with a complete stranger who disagrees with their political views. This second person is leaving a lot of potential knowledge on the table, and not getting the most out of what’s available digitally. That’s each person’s choice. There’s a great variety in the amount of “education” people get out of this amazing new, digital repository of knowledge. People with a drive to learn new things can leave other people in the dust intellectually, making them much more employable, more productive, and possibly far more entrepreneurial and financially successful as well.

What we choose to use to learn online, and how we choose to use, or not use, the internet, social media, and the many platforms available, varies widely. But the reality is, someone who wants to learn a lot about things they find interesting, can accumulate an incredible amount of useful information. This is new. It has never existed to this degree, ever before in human history. This gigantic educational system is available, much of it for free, not accounting for the cost beverages and Hot Pockets consumed while online.

My point with this whole post is that we already have created an entirely new “education system,” though few people think of it that way. We all learn a lot of day to day skills, like tech and software updates, how to use new devices, and things like recipes and how-to’s for household projects, on a regular basis. For those of us old enough to remember researching in encyclopedias and using library card catalogs to find a 14 year-old book for reference to use in a high school report, what possible now digitally is like a kind of magic. We don’t take the time to appreciate just how cool all of this access to information really is, despite the negative aspects.

If you think about the internet, social media, audio and video streaming platforms, and the many different available search engines a little bit differently now, than I’ve done my job in this post. Now go refill your beverage, nuke some Hot Pockets, or some other snack, and go forth into the interwebs, and learn something cool.

There are no paid links in this post.

This is a Sharpie doodle drawing I did in 2019 or so, making fun of myself, and the idea that earning money for creative work is automatically “selling out.” Harking back to the days of publishing my first BMX freestyle zine in 1985, and the creative projects I’ve been doing pretty consistently over the forty years (40 years?!) since. Sometimes those creative projects were my job, like magazines, a newsletter, BMX videos, and being a crew guy several TV shows and in the Cirque du Soleil box office. But most of the time I was working on smaller, self-directed projects, that didn’t make money. Somewhere in the 1990’s I decided that I was on this creative journey for the rest of my life. That change in mindset makes a huge difference, and that’s what this post is all about. #steveemigart

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There are a whole bunch of reasons to write, draw, paint, make music, or do any other type of creative activity. At the most basic level, these activities are worth doing just for the enjoyment of doing them. They can help us work through pain, heartache, and personal issues. Throwing a pot on a wheel, drawing a picture, playing an instrument, or editing a video can help us as a human, just through the act of doing it.

Once we get past that initial point, we tend to do creative work for a whole range of other reasons. As creative people, we may do creative work to try and make people like us. Sometimes we create stuff to try and get people to fall in love with us. We may do creative projects to prove that we actually have talent to the people who put us down earlier in life. Sometimes we do creative work to “become a star,” dreaming of becoming a rich and famous writer, painter, choreographer, filmmaker, actor, or whatever.

Once we hit a certain talent threshold, when we become reasonably accomplished at the basic medium, we often do some form of creative work to make money. This may be working on a crew of a TV show, doing freelance graphic design work for people, selling paintings or drawings online or through a gallery, or putting music or videos online to sell through streaming services. While there’s a huge taboo about admitting this, which I still find really stupid, most creative people want to make money from their work, at some point.

How many painters or musicians do you see giving their original work away for free? Few… if any. Sure, we share digital photos of our art, or digital files of songs online and on social media for free, that’s promotion 101 in today’s world. But you don’t see many artists giving the original paintings or drawings away, or musicians sending out vinyl records or CD’s to fans for no charge. Sometimes the work takes off, and someone makes really good money selling their work, and gains notoriety, maybe even serious fame. Most of the time, most artists of all kinds, don’t make much money for their work, if any. But we keep doing it. While it’s cool to pretend the money and fame doesn’t matter, these things are a huge part of the motivation for the majority of creative people, no matter how much we may pretend that’s not true.

As we keep working over the course of years, though, something else happens. We get to the point where we simply enjoy being able to do the work, day after day. It doesn’t necessarily get easier to create, but there comes a point where we enjoy the actual process and focus less on the end result. We may do what feels like a great project, and nobody thinks much of it. There’s not much response. We get depressed, let down that it didn’t hit like we had hoped. What do we do then? If we have a serious working artist or creative person around us, real professionals or longtime veteran artists, they tell us, “Forget the project that didn’t work, and get started on the next project.” That time in between projects is where many artists, of all kinds, get lost. It’s easy to go off the deep end when we’re in between projects, and don’t have something to focus on. Whatever our vices are, booze, drugs, food, sex, dangerous activities, it’s those in between times where many talented people sink low, and some never make it back to the creative world. When one project is over, no matter what the world thought of it, get to work on the next one.

The reality is that we don’t know which piece of work will really connect with people. Sometimes we do something that seems to flop at first. But it’s a solid piece of work, and it just sits out there, somewhere, simmering. Every now and then, somebody we don’t know about stumbles across that piece of work, and they really like it. Over the course of months or years, that piece slowly builds its fan base. The piece may become a cult classic, or a major positive influence on a group of people we didn’t even know existed.

Other times, we realize years later, that the project that went nowhere turned out to be a key piece of our story. Maybe it was a tangent that we needed to follow to expand our knowledge, thinking, or learn a particular skill set. Maybe the project that bombed led us to meet one or more people who become a critical part of our life later on. Maybe that project that didn’t fly brings us to the attention of someone who helps our career years later. Maybe we rewrite that unpopular story 20 years later and it becomes the seed of something much greater. All of these things, and many other things happen, over the course of a creatively directed life. When we’re working on a project, we never know what may become of it in the future. Creative projects, works of any kind of art, take on lives of their own once we put them out there in the world. They often have many effects weeks, months, even several years later. That’s part of the magic of doing creative work over a long period of time.

Sometimes we do a piece of work, put the photo of it out there online, and put a few links to it, and nothing happens. For months. Maybe for years. Then, suddenly, one person with a following finds it randomly, and thinks it’s great. They blast it out to their posse, sharing it and talking it up. Out of nowhere, it goes viral in a small online community, or even a not-so-small community. Boom! Weeks, months, maybe years of that piece just sitting there, and suddenly a group of people we didn’t know existed really love it. Maybe it just spreads our name and work to a new audience. Maybe that sudden and unexpected exposure turns into some money, a new project, maybe even long term, continual paid work. This is how things really work when you do creative work over a long period of time. This is particularly true in today’s hyper-connected world of smartphones, social media, and the internet.

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When we figure this out, like all of the other professional creative people working all over the world, we begin to see that the point is to sit down every day, or nearly every day, and just do our work. There’s a dedication to art or any kind of creative work that we need to commit ourselves to, if we plan to do the work over a long period of time. In time, that’s what becomes precious to us, just being able to sit down day after day (unless you’re a dancer or someone who stands to work), and just do the work, day after day after day. In time, we realize that we are drawn to this creative life for a reason, it fills some need in the Universe.

However we understand it, it’s our job as artists and creatively driven people, to notice things most people don’t, dive into weird ideas, and do some kind of creative work, day after day after day. That work affects, inspires, or makes people laugh or cry or think. Our work may help complete strangers get through a really tough time in their own life. It may inspire a positive change in a stranger’s life. Most of the effects our creative work has we never actually hear about.

How many times have you listened to a particular song, for example, when you were feeling down. Does the creator of that work know the effect it had on you? Usually not. But the effect was there, and every single day, millions of pieces of different kinds of creative work help tens of millions of complete strangers, around the world, get through their day. The vast majority of the time, the artists never know the effects they had. That’s a key, critical part of life in human society, and in this crazy Universe we’re ambling around in.

We eventually realize that we don’t know what piece of work will hit. We don’t know how much or little impact a project may have. We don’t know if it will earn us a living, or if we will work a day job, gig work, or freelance work for years, to get by and pay the bills. But we realize that the creative work needs to get done, that’s part of our little role in the Universe and human society, as it plays out. So we stop struggling to do the creative work, and just sit down, day after day, and actually crank out the work. Some projects fizzle out. But we complete a lot of the projects, and we put that work out there into the world, time after time, in whatever way seems most appropriate. Then we let it do its thing, and we get back to work on the next project.

I’ve been homeless, on and off, in one form or another, for about 18 or 19 of the last 25 years. Most of the time, I’ve had no studio to draw my Sharpie Scribble Style drawings. I’ve had no laptop to work on much of the time. I’m working on a library computer today, my last laptop got stolen months ago, as did the laptop before that. I keep working anyhow.

Every day I wake up, usually pretty grumpy and pissed off. I have lame dreams sometimes, and mornings are hard for me much of the time. I drink some iced tea (I’m not a coffee guy). I eat some breakfast. I shake off the morning doubts and frustration, and I say, out loud, “OK, let’s go create some shit.” By “shit" I mean, stuff, some kind of creative work. Then I come here to the library, or go somewhere where I can work on my drawings, and I do my work. As a homeless guy. Day after day after day. This is how I keep going. This work is what I do. Whether I get paid for it or not.

Over these 25 years struggling with homelessness, I’ve published a few zines in the 2000’s. I published a 48 page zine all about taxi driving through history that was a hit among other cabbies, among others. I wrote another zine all about Huntington Beach that became my most popular zine ever, I gave away well over 250 copies of it, and is was also 48 pages, I think. I’ve written and published close to 3,000 blog and Substack posts since 2007. I’ve done over 300 of my Sharpie Scribble Style drawings. I’ve sold more than 100 of those original drawings, most of which took me 35-45 hours, each, to draw. I don’t care what you say, that’s a heck of a lot of creative work for a guy who, for a bunch of reasons (not drugs and alcohol, those aren’t my issues) has struggled to make a decent living for 25 years. I just haven’t been able to find a “real job,” since my taxi driver days from 1999-2007. I put a lot of my time into creative work, since paid work remained elusive. I didn’t set out to become a famous artist with my Sharpie drawings. I started selling my drawing to make a little pocket money because I couldn’t find a real job when I was in North Carolina. Ten years later, I’m still selling drawings, and they are a lot better now.

That’s what I’ve done in the long chunk of years that Life decided to kick my ass, and while I struggled to find a “real” job. I didn’t get all that work done by staring at the keyboard, looking at blank pages in my sketchpad, or whining on Twitter about why it’s hard to sit down and write. I just got in the habit, and it is a habit, of just sitting down day after day, and doing something creative. If the writing wasn’t flowing, I would draw something. If I didn’t really want to draw, I might take a bus somewhere and walk around shooting photos of things I found interesting.

In addition, day after day, I put my finished work on my blog, on Facebook, on Pinterest (I prefer it to Instagram), and on Twitter, where I somehow manage to offend lots of people while only having 350 followers. I link multiple times to each piece of work from different places, to help people find it in the future. For free. I’ve put a ton of work out in the world for free. Yeah, the original drawing will cost you some money, but if you like one of my drawings, download the photo off of Pinterest, or wherever, and print it out. Put it up in your cubicle at work, above your desk at home, or wherever you want. I’m not losing anything by you making a copy of my work because you like it. It’s more promotion for me. Maybe one of your friends will ask about it, and I get a paid job from them some day. I never know. It happens.

If you are serious about doing creative work over a long period of time, whether you get paid for it or not, then dedicate yourself to doing the creative work, day after day. If you are really busy, and who isn’t these days, dedicate yourself to a period of time that your can realistically fit in your schedule, on a regular basis. This isn’t about making a living or getting “rich and famous,” it’s about spending the time needed to do the actual creative work that the Universe has put you here to do. That’s the dedication side of creative work.

If this post makes some sense to you, I highly recommend reading Steven Pressfield’s book, The War of Art, because this is a huge part of what that small, but powerful, book is all about. I heard about that book from Internet marketing guy, blogger, and author, Seth Godin. After reading a few of Seth’s books, I eventually I picked up The War of Art and read it. Then I read it two more times over the following couple of years. That book really clarified something I had partially learned intuitively, but hadn’t really thought out clearly. Every day now, I “add to the pile” of my creative work out there in the world. This post is the latest piece added to the pile.

Are you ready to do the same? Think about it. then go create some stuff.

There are no paid links in this post.

Sunset over a corner of the Pacific Ocean. The golden orb that creates our days sinks behind Palos Verdes, as seen from the north end of Bolsa Chica State Beach in Huntington Beach, in 2020. #steveemigphotos

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It’s been about 50 years since I laid in the front yard of our big, old, yellow farmhouse in Shiloh, Ohio. I went out into the yard that sunny day to think up a haiku poem that I needed to write for my 4th grade class at school. This is what I came up with.

In the grass I lie

Gazing at the blue heavens

I lie wondering

I was just doing an assignment as a 9-year-old for school. But I did actually go outside and lay down on the thick, green grass, near a large pine tree, to come up with the poem. I didn’t just sit inside on the couch, with our black and white TV blaring. That day, as a kid in the yard, I didn’t think of becoming a poet someday. I had no thoughts of becoming a writer of any kind. Writers weren’t cool in the working class, 1970’s world I lived in then. It was just a bit of school work. Yet that haiku, the first poem I remember writing, sums me as well as any of the 400 or 500 poems I’ve written in the 50 years since.

I was a shy, goofy, introspective kid, not knowing that a a little over a decade later, a woman would inspire me to start trying to “write a hit song” for her to sing with her band. She said she liked me because I was a writer. I was the editor and photographer of a little BMX freestyle newsletter. I didn’t think of myself as a writer then, even though, at age 21, it was my second consecutive paid writing job.

I started writing ideas for song on yellow legal pads I took from work. Those dozens of really, really bad “songs” sucked. They really sucked. That woman got me to start thinking of myself as a writer. As we all know, pussy is one hell of a motivator for young men. I kept writing song ideas, though I had no idea how ot actually structure a song.

When she dumped me, I wrote my first pretty good “song,” called, “Journey of the White Bear.” We still worked together for a while, but in a few months, she went one way, I went the other. But I kept writing “song lyrics” that I never intended to actually sing. I didn’t play any instruments, I didn’t want to start a band. Writing those “songs” had become a habit by that point, and my lyrics were improving, little by little. In time, I looked at the dozens of “songs” that I didn’t intend to sing or record, and realized I had somehow become a poet. I’ve been a poet ever since.

Just for the record, I did actually have a punk band in Ohio called The Stain record two of my punk songs, both of which are in my 1990 BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend. So, technically, I did become a songwriter, or lyric writer, for a minute. The better of the two songs is called “Mom’s Imagination,” and is at 44:10 in that video.

In those years of the late 1980’s, I had two main creative outlets. The first and foremost was the new, weird, little sport of BMX freestyle. I went out nearly every night for two or three hours, and learned to do tricks on a BMX bike. I didn’t think of it as a creative outlet then, it was a sport to me. A kid who sucked at sports in my younger years, by 1987, I had become a mediocre amateur on the national scene of a rising action sport. I was one of about 1,000 really hardcore riders in our little sport then, all hoping to turn pro, go on tour, meet a lot of girls, and make a bunch of money. It was a physical creative outlet, and it would be decades before I realized how much riding my bike every night taught me about doing creative work. I just went out and rode, and improved for about 20 years. I never came anywhere near being a pro caliber BMX freestyler. But I did get into the BMX and skateboard businesses, I met most of the pro riders and many of the industry people, and became a part of the scene in the 1980’s and into the 1990’s.

My second main creative outlet in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s was the one no one knew about, poetry. By the time I realized I had become a poet, I looked at writing all those lines of rhymes was mostly therapy. I wrote ideas when they came out me, trying to work through my personal issues, my debilitating shyness, and all my other hang-ups.

Writing poetry was a cheap form of therapy, and I had absolutely no intention of ever showing what I wrote to anybody. I poured my inner fears, thoughts, and laments into those poems. They were literally hidden away in the back of my journal notebooks. All the filled up journals were hidden in a box, under a bunch of other stuff, up on a shelf, in my bedroom closet. Those poems were private thoughts no one would ever know about, as far as I was concerned. Written torment of me wrestling my personal demons, in ink.

Once you start doing some kind of creative work on a regular basis though, things happen over the years that later seem to be written in Fate. A few years later, a roommate loaned me a book of poems authored by a well known punk rocker. Reading those poems got me to dig out my journals, when my roommates were out of the house, and start reading through all of my poems. I had about 200 of them written across 10 or more journals, by that point.

After reading through them, I decided to publish a zine of several of my poems, though the idea scared the shit out of me. But I did it. “Journey of the White Bear,” my poem written after getting dumped, was the first poem in that zine. My roommate read my zine of poems and gave them I pretty solid review the next day, much to my surprise. Then the hazing began. He started calling me “The White Bear,” razzing me about that first poem. He didn’t call me “White Bear,” it was always “The White Bear.” Then my his girlfriend and my other roommate started calling me that. That’s when the “The” got capitalized, and it became my nickname in the BMX scene in the Huntington Beach, California area. Well, except when I lived in the P.O.W. House, a house full of pro BMX riders and industry guys, where they called me Sluggo. Anyhow, "The White Bear stuck, and I took it as my poetry pen name. And I kept writing poems.

I have now been writing poems for about 50 years. I can’t remember what month I wrote that haiku in 4th grade, but late 2025/early 2026 is the 50 year anniversary of me writing poetry, which I didn’t realize until today. Somehow I finished this series, The Poet, right at that big milestone. The poems are usually quite a bit better now, much longer, and come much less often, then those dozens of poems I wrote back in 1987-1988. But I still write poems. I wrote two more this week. One was a short punk song type, a funny, middle-aged parody of a Ramones song. The other was long, philosophical, and mostly sucked. But I’m still writing poems.

This long series of my newer poems and posts about writing poetry, The Poet, is the story of how writing poems intertwined with my life over the last 50 years. I hope some of you out there got something out some part of this series, either from the poems or the prose. I hope that writing this may help a few other people, maybe more than a few, in your own creative journeys, or in whatever life you live. Maybe this will inspire a few people to start writing poems, or to share or publish poems they have already written. That’s what it’s all about. We’re all putting ideas out into the Universe, our perspectives and stories. Our work and thoughts bounce off each other, and inspire new work in each other sometimes. Keep on writing, and see where that pen, that amazing tool that links the unseen world of thoughts with physical reality, will take you. Below is one last poem for this series, my 2024 re-write of “Journey of The White Bear.

Go back to The Poet- #1- “How I became The White Bear”

The Poet- #21- “Journey of The White Bear”- 2024 version

There are no paid links in this post.

Jimi Hendrix mural in North Hollywood’s NoHo Arts District, framed by barbed wire. In the late 1980’s and 1990’s, the Lankershim Blvd. area of North Hollywood, California was pretty run down. A big effort was made to bring creative groups into the area, and the NoHo Arts District emerged. This Creative Scene is made up mostly of small theaters, a couple of comedy clubs, TV/Film industry offices, and there used to be at least two or three major recording studios in the area. The pandemic had a devastating effect on the small live theaters, and some did shut down. Unlike many arts districts, there’s very few art galleries, so it’s a much different scene than a place like Laguna Beach, down in Orange County. The creative people of North Hollywood helped bring a vibrancy to the area in the 1990’s, and most of it continues today, despite the pandemic’s effects. #steveemigphotos

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As I’ve mentioned many times in my blogs, I got into BMX bikes while living in a trailer park, outside Boise, Idaho, in the summer of 1982. I was 15, just out of my sophomore year of high school, when my family moved there. There were about a dozen of us teenage boys living there, miles outside of the city, and isolated. It was hot in the afternoons, but we all met up outside, after supper. There weren’t enough teen girls to mess around with. So us young guys started spending more and more time each evening riding our cheap BMX bikes on small jumps that a motorcycle rider had built a couple of years before.

Over the course of that summer, we pushed each other to improve, we built up our bikes with better parts while building our riding skills, and BMX became our thing. In the fall we discovered the local BMX race track, and started racing. Those guys in Blue Valley mobile home park were the first of many BMX scenes I belonged to in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

I spent the next decade, 1984-1995, mostly hanging out with BMXers and skateboarders. In those early years of BMX freestyle, I noticed how BMX grew by individual scenes, small groups of riders pushing each other, and eventually introducing other people to our new, weird, little sport. Each scene was a little different, and had its own vibe.

When I moved to Southern California, and started meeting a bunch of skateboarders, I saw that the same thing was true in skating. I became fascinated with how these scenes started, grew, evolved, and what made some scenes thrive more than others. Years later, I realized that art scenes, music scenes, and entrepreneurial scenes of small business people operated in much the same way. I saw how these different types of scenes overlapped and interacted with each other. I began to call all of these groups of people “Creative Scenes,” and I’ve written quite a bit about these scenes over many years in my blogs.

One thing I learned about Creative Scenes is that they often form in odd, abandoned, or unused places. A couple of artists will rent a long vacant storefront in the sketchy part of town, and turn it into their studio and gallery. They do this mostly because the unused, unwanted buildings have the cheapest rent. The less they pay in rent, the less time they have to work a day job, and the more time they have to create. In a similar way, a handful of skateboarders will find a little known ditch, or an empty parking garage with really smooth concrete and a manual pad, and start skating there day after day. A scene develops. A few BMX riders will find an unused piece of land, with trees hiding it from the neighbors, and start building some jumps. For a variety of reasons, often because of cheap rent or no rent, creative people seek out desolate pieces of the urban environment. When you have lots of ideas, lots of energy, and not much money, free or cheap places make good places to practice one creative craft or another, whatever it is.

If they stick around that place, their creative work usually begins to attract some other creative people, BMXers, skaters, visual artists, garage bands, photographers, YouTubers, local entrepreneurs. Creative people, doing creative things on a regular basis, attract more creative people. The scene develops an energy, a vibe, as people with lots of ideas work, hang out, talk, argue, hook up, and socialize with each other.

Creative Scenes that make it past the early stages have a way of bringing life to an area that was once pretty dead. These little groups of interlocking Creative Scenes create a vibrancy when they get going, sometimes growing into the local arts district, music district, BMX trails, skating area, or small business district.

Mother beaver with kit, public domain image.

This video about releasing beavers into dry, barren lands is a good natural analogy for how Creative Scenes can lead to the rebirth of dead parts of towns and cities

This is where the beavers come in, like in the video linked above. Beavers, the 30 to 60 pound rodents that chew down trees and build dams, have been released into dry, desert areas in Washington, in the last decade or two. Even when there was almost no running water, and no real trees around, the beavers used the available brush to build little dams. When the spring rains came, the sketchy looking damns slowed down the water flow, and spread it out. Little by little, just by doing what beavers do (get your mind out of the gutter), they brought a new vitality to the desert area, their dams created small ponds, and began to bring the driver river gulches back to life.

In months new plants sprouted up. Then came small trees, which the beavers used to build better dams and create bigger ponds. Over a few years, the beavers bred, cut down small trees, built more dams, and brought these watersheds back to life. Insects came back, frogs came back, birds came back, other land creatures came back. Eventually, even salmon and other fish came back to the ponds and rivers. The release of a small number of beavers did what millions of dollars worth of human created engineering projects could not do. The beavers brought a vibrancy back to the once dried up river systems.

Woman with skull mural, NoHo Arts District in North Hollywood, California, 2021. #steveemigphotos

While it’s not a perfect analogy, small groups of people, Creative Scenes of various kinds, can have a similar effect on abandoned, run down, “dried up,” urban areas. Most art scenes and many music scenes began with a small group of people moving into the worst part of town. They found an old, cheap building, rented it, and spent time doing their work. Most of us are familiar with some arts district in some city that was once an run down eyesore, and then grew into a vibrant arts or music scene over the course of a decade or two. If the arts districts really take off, they eventually become trendy, with luxury condos and boutique shops all over. Then the up-and-coming artists can no longer afford to live there, so they go somewhere else. Many of us have seen that arc play out, as well.

In today’s world, we have more dilapidated and run down areas all over the country than we have creative scenes. Small towns today often have a bunch of small, empty storefronts where “Main Street America” used to thrive, 40 or more years ago. In larger cities, there are now often abandoned factories, areas of old, empty storefronts, and maybe a dead mall or a couple vacant big box stores, or a half empty shopping center. I’m not saying artists, garage bands, a skate or bike park, and small businesses can revive all of these areas in every city. But a few of the weird and creative people in town might be able to help revive some of these districts and locations, in many places.

We are in a really chaotic, transitional period of time, on a Big Picture level. We’re in, or on the verge of, an economic recession as well. These are the kinds of times where lots of creative people seek out places to give some of their new ideas a try. Creative Scenes rise up, and some thrive in the more abundant times that follow. What sketchy, abandoned buildings are in your area? Do you have an idea that might bring one of those places back to life? Daydream a bit, and see what happens.

If you liked this post, check out this one, “Creative Scenes: Things that are Creative Scenes.”

There are no paid links in this post.

The Tumultuous 2020’s continue, and us Generation X people are looking out at the chaos, as things just seem to get crazier and crazier. TV and movies told us we would probably have a nuclear apocalypse in our 20’s, when we were still young enough to enjoy it. It didn’t happen back then, but these days we have the Simulpocalypse, apocalyptic looking places, all over. Check out my series on that, if you haven’t already. #steveemigmemes

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Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, as I write this. Twenty million people lose health insurance the day after tomorrow. We might be at war with Venezuela, but nobody seems to be sure. Food prices are still ridiculous, though pizzas are still a deal at 7-11. With today’s Buy Now Pay Later phone apps, there are people buying groceries, and even their morning coffee, on a payment plan. Job layoffs are rising. Car payments are more than I paid for my apartment rent by the beach, in the 90’s. Housing prices are still high, but starting to crash in places like Florida and Texas. Will World War III start soon? Toss a coin. People are speculating about it on TV and on the internet, a little too much.

At the same time, many people are creating cool new things, building new businesses, making great music, making us think, and making us laugh. I try to do those last two on a regular basis, though I’m not sure how often it works.

Thank all of you for reading my posts, and a HUGE thanks to my 25 subscribers! My brain has a nearly infinite playlist of ideas to write about, so there’s plenty more to come in 2026. I hope 2025 wasn’t too crazy for you, and I wish you the best 2026 possible. I think it’s going to be crazier than the last six years of this decade, but with plenty of opportunities as well.

The entire financial and economic world is suddenly going, “Wait… what?” Silver, yeah the metal that coins used to be made from before we were born, it’s price is up 154% in 2025, blowing away all other major investments. Not too many people saw that coming. Gold is up 63% this year, Nvidia stock is up 35%, the Nasdaq is up 21%, and the S&P 500 is up 17%… for now. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is down about 5% for the year. How the fuck did that happen?

Silver stackers, hiding quietly in the shadows for decades, are celebrating. I’ve personally bought over 70 ounces of silver in my life, starting with a single ounce in 1980, after the big price spike. I’ve sold all of them, many at a minor loss. I figured that I’m probably up a little bit over all, I did well on a bunch in 2006, but I don’t own any silver now, which bums me out. Props to all of those stackers who do. #steveemigmemes

Back in 2008, while living homeless in Newport Beach, another guy out there joked that I was crazy. The line above was my response, just made up on the spot. That line stuck in my head, and I made a meme out of it 3-4 years ago. #steveemigmemes

I’ve been writing on Substack for nearly 2 1/2 years now, and had 143 posts published when I started this one. This is a quick post to round out the year. Again, Happy New Years to all of you, thanks for reading, and I’ll keep trying to being some interesting ideas and thoughts as we head into 2026. My sketchy, homeless, living situation has improved some, I’m now staying in what they call “tiny homes.” I’ve made some overall progress in basic life stuff in the last three months, and hope I can keep it going in the new year. See you all in 2026!

Things change. This boarded up storefront in North Hollywood, California didn’t look like much, for decades. But this was the home of The Alley music rehearsal and recording studio. For 43 years, from 1973 to 2016, hundreds of the best known rock and R&B bands, singer/songwriters and other musicians rehearsed and recorded here. This studio is said to be part of the inspiration for the Eagles’ song “Hotel California.” Michael Jackson recorded three albums in this building. Prince recorded two albums here. The Red Hot Chili Peppers auditioned over 1,000 guitarists in this building in 1993. In the 2010’s, the owners passed away, leaving no heirs. In addition, the music recording world has changed with new technology, people can now record and edit pro caliber music almost anywhere, with a good microphone and a laptop. Now there is a paint store in this building. Sad as it is to music lovers, the incredible history of this building is unknown to almost everyone who drives by daily. Only a few of the older neighbors remember this building’s story. Change. #steveemigphotos

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Why is it that so many industries seem to be collapsing these days?

“Hollywood”/the movie industry. The music industry. The global maritime shipping industry. The U.S. auto industry. The trucking industry. The U.S. healthcare industry. The residential real estate industry. The commercial real estate industry. The construction industry. The home improvement store industry. The electric vehicle industry. China’s EV industry. The motorcycle industry. The global garment industry. The luxury/accessory industry. The luxury watch industry. The Air Jordan/collectible sneaker market. The U.S. tourism industry. The diamond industry. The U.S. farming industry. The pharmacy store industry. The airline industry. The animation industry. The high tech industry. The fast food restaurant industry. The fast casual dining industry. The video gaming industry. The RV industry. The insurance industry. The shadow banking industry. The crypto industry. The rental car industry. The classic car industry. The eBay sellers industry. The toy industry. The bicycle industry. The tattoo industry. The craft beer industry. The used guitar market. The sports card market. The collectible toy market. New York City. San Francisco. Los Angeles. Las Vegas. Florida. Texas. California.

If you go into the search bar on YouTube, and search “collapse of ________________,” and insert any of these industries, markets, or locations listed above, videos will come up. There are multiple videos making the case that each of these industries, markets, or locations above is collapsing. There are people making videos, each making the case that one of these things are in serious decline, possibly even dying off for good, right now, in late 2025.

I want to be clear, I’m not saying that all of these things are actually collapsing, but there are industry insiders, or researchers online, who believe that each of these industries, markets, or locations are in a major economic correction. Sure, some of these titles are partially clickbait, but all of these things, and more, are in visible downturns.

The obvious questions are: Why are these entire industries (and others), in such a serious downturn? Why are they all in a downturn at the same time? Why are they are they in a serious downturn right now? I have an answer to these questions. It’s not the only answer, but it’s a major part of the story of all of these declines.

In late 2019 and early 2020, starting before Covid-19 was on our radar, I wrote a 20 chapter online book/blog called, Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- Book 1. In chapter 13, “The Big Transition: The Unplanned Revolution of Everything,” I wrote about why every single industry was going to have to go through a period of catastrophic change, a major paradigm shift, in the 2020’s. My ideas built upon earlier work by a few great thinkers. Here’s how I came to that conclusion.

One major theory I thought really helped explain the chaos of the early 2000’s was The Third Wave concept by futurist Alvin Toffler. In his 1980 book, The Third Wave, Toffler proposed a really radical idea for the time. He believed that the United States was leaving the “industrial-based society” that we had been in for 300-350 years, and were were moving towards an “information-based society.” In 1980, at a time when most U.S. factories were still thriving, producing physical goods, that idea sounded crazy to most people. At least until dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, of American factories began to close down, due to outsourcing of labor and to new technology, in the 1980’s, 1990’s, and into the 2000’s.

Alvin Toffler wrote several more really well-researched books, diving deeper into different aspects of this period of change, as we moved out of the Industrial Age, and into the Information Age, as we came to call them. This “Third Wave” concept made a lot of sense to me, particularly in the late 2000’s, when I read Toffler’s final book, Revolutionary Wealth (published in 2006), in 2009. By then, it was apparent that, for several decades, different industries had gone into major phases of change, moving from Industrial Age business models to Information Age business models.

In the 1970’s the telecommunications industry, then based on landline telephones, began to change and evolve rapidly. The old rotary dial phones, with monthly billing for local and long distance calls (who remembers?), began to change. They morphed into the 12 key keypad phones, then into car phones, pagers, early brick cell phones, flip phones, the Blackberry keypad phones, and eventually into the smartphones, the iPhones and Android-based models, that we have now. That’s a catastrophic shift in both technology and the underlying business model, from about 1975 to 2008. About thirty years from single landline, rotary dial phones on the kitchen wall, to pocket-sized super computers that people now carry with them everywhere. Now there’s a monthly fee model that includes calling, texting and many kinds of data use. All that happened so we could not only call people, but also text, share photos and video, watch cat videos, sporting events, porn, and argue on social media with complete strangers from around the world. That’s just the change in the telecommunications industry in the last five decades. The change in the telecommunication industry alone has not only changed how we live our daily lives, it has changed what kinds of work and lives are possible in today’s world.

In the 1980’s, the office equipment and video revolutions really took off. In offices, fax machines, desktop computer stations, personal computers, dot-matrix and then laser printers changed the office world forever. At home, VHS and Betamax video cassettes battled with laser video discs to watch movies and tape soap operas. VHS won. The VCR’s were soon followed by home video cameras, first huge and heavy VHS based, then higher quality S-VHS, and later in the decade, much smaller 8mm, Hi-8, VHS-C, and S-VHS-C camcorders. Suddenly, average people could start shooting video of everyday life, and making our own “movies.” By the end of the 1980’s (much to my surprise) I was a low-budget, DIY video producer, as were many other people. By the late 1980’s, most of us headed to a video store Friday evening to rent videos to watch over the weekend. Movies didn’t have to be watched in theaters anymore. Major changes in the movie, TV, video, and office worlds occurred in the 1980’s. The 80’s weren’t just about Ronald Reagan, MTV, cocaine, and hair bands, a lot of other stuff happened as well.

In the 1990’s, the music industry went digital, beginning its morphing into an Information Age business model. The 8-track tapes and vinyl albums of the 1970’s led to cassettes, and then digitally recorded CD’s, in the 1990’s. We all had to rebuild and re-buy our whole music collection on CD’s. Then in 1999, with one click of a mouse, an unknown programmer named Shawn Fanning uploaded Napster to the web, and nuked the entire music industry instantly. The free music file sharing era began. Again, it’s the same underlying theme, the Industrial Age business model began to die off, and the Information Age business model began to rise up with new technologies and new businesses. Now people stream music they don’t own on their phones, or watch and listen to it on YouTube, if you’re a goofball like me. Yeah, vinyl albums still exist, as a niche industry, but that’s not where the money is. We all have access to millions of songs, interviews, podcasts, and can listen to much of it for free, or very inexpensively. We don’t have to buy ten song albums for $16 anymore. But lots of musicians still struggle to make a decent living. These days songs are free or cheap and most concerts cost a fortune to attend. The Industrial Age music business began to die off, and the Information Age model began to rise up, and is still morphing into a model that fits today’s technology, consumer behavior, and social norms.

Around the turn of the century, the year 2000, with the rise of Web 2.0, and the internet itself going mainstream, the newspaper, magazine, and book publishing industries got gorilla pimp slapped by the riding new possibilities of online media. With the internet, e-readers, and the emergence of social media platforms, the publishing, TV, and movie industries all followed the music industry into the digital abyss. Things really began to change in the 2000’s, as DVD’s and Blu-Ray lost ground, Netflix blew up and evolved from renting out DVD’s by mail to streaming, and YouTube was born. Again, it’s the same underlying theme, the Industrial Age business models began to die off, and new, Information Age models rose up to start taking over.

In the 2010’s, the already declining shopping mall business brought us the dead mall trend. As technology improved, people got more and more comfortable with typing their credit card numbers into a computer, buying items online, and later on-phone, and having packages shipped to their front door. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and thousands of small online stores began to rise to prominence. Brick and mortar, physical stores struggled more and more. The rise in private equity and hedge funds loading major brands with debt in mergers and acquisitions also helped doom many well known retail brands. Radio Shack died. Toys-R-Us died. So did dozens of other household name chain stores. Most others scaled back their number of stores. So did many more. By the late 2010’s, the Retail Apocalypse began. Tens of thousands of physical stores, between 2015 and 2020. There was a small resurgence in retail in 2021-2023, buoyed up by pandemic bailout money. But the trend of retail stores closing down is even bigger now, a decade later. It’s the same story, the Industrial Age business model for these industries began to crumble, and new, Information Age model businesses began to rise up, and they began to take over. I began to call this idea, the continuation of Toffler’s "Third Wave idea, “The Big Transition,” as I wrote about it in different blogs in the late 2010’s.

All of these things are part of what Alvin Toffler first clued us in on in The Third Wave, way back in 1980, and in his later books. In Toffler’s work, he looked forward and tried to figure out how the major trends of all the new technology and changing social norms would play out over the coming decades. But his last book came out in 2006. The iPhone and Android smartphone models were still two or three years away. Social media was just getting popular on college campuses, and was far from mainstream for adults. YouTube was a year old and videos were a limited to 2 or 3 minutes. People still took taxis home from the bars and clubs at night, Uber and Lyft were still a few years away. Bitcoin was still three years away from being invented, and a decade away from even being on most people’s radar and spawning the crypto revolution. An incredible amount of what Alvin Toffler first foreshadowed has happened since his last book in 2006, and since his death in 2016. Brilliant as his work was, nearly everyone has forgotten about him, in the crushing onslaught of all kinds of content from today’s creators, amateur and professionals, alike.

An incredible amount of change, and a still accelerating rate of change, had a long, long way to play out, and those trends continue to play out. In addition, only a small number of industries have really made it most of the way through the transition to truly Information Age business models. Dozens and dozens of older and more traditional industries and institutions are still being run largely with Industrial Age business models and by older people with Industrial Age mindsets.

Have you figured out where this is going yet? One huge, underlying reason that dozens of industries seem to be “collapsing” right now is that they are… finally… moving deep into the transition phase from their Industrial Age business models into the coming Information Age business models. The kind of catastrophic change that happened to telecommunications, video, business equipment, music, movies, TV, publishing, shopping malls, and brick and mortar retail stores is now happening to every industry that’s left. No business, industry, or single human gets spared from The Third Wave that Alvin Toffler introduced us to. Now it’s hundreds of different industries that are being forced to change. Most of them are blaming the pandemic, the supply shock issues caused by the pandemic, or the changing consumer tastes of the Millennials and Gen Z people entering the adult world. Younger generations make great targets and scapegoats for older, Industrial Age-minded business owners, not to mention politicians who’ve been in office since the Ice Age. But it’s not their fault, either. This massive period of change, “the unplanned revolution of everything,” as I called it 5 1/2 years ago in Dystopia, started before most of us were born.

All of this change has been slowly happening in each of these industries for 30-40-50 years or more, and that place of change has been continually increasing. If you dig into any of the industries, institutions, or locations listed above, you’ll find the seeds of change that were happening decades ago. The Status Quo never likes to change, and nearly always collapses from irrelevance after fighting for decades to avoid change.

In addition, one ultra long term trend predicted that we were due for a major recession, possibly an economic depression, beginning in about 2020. The pandemic bailout response, the largest amount of new money created in U.S. history in a short period of time, postponed the recession that we all setting in now. Financial recessions put added strain on any business, institution, industry, state, city, or person still operating from an Industrial Age mindset or business model. That’s why I called that chapter of Dystopia, “The Unplanned Revolution of Everything” back in early 2020. This isn’t a revolution started by a political party or a radical group. The revolution of the Third Wave, or The Big Transition as I refer to the core idea, is happening as a result of new technology and new social models that the technology makes possible or demands. Nobody gets spared in this revolution. The everyday world is changing rapidly in all kinds of ways, and every person, every business, every institution, and every industry, eventually, have to adapt to the world we actually live in, to stay relevant.

The Third Wave that Alvin Toffler saw coming 45 years ago continues to play out. He put the start of the new era at 1956, the first year that “white collar” workers first outnumbered “blue collar” workers in the United States. Now most young people don’t even understand what the terms “white collar” and “blue collar” workers even mean. We have already changed that much as a society. Just to be clear, the Third Wave idea is not anti-industrial. It just predicts that the manufacturing of physical goods would become a much smaller part of the economic landscape, and need a much smaller percentage of a country’s workers, than was needed in during the 20th century. Personally, I'm not against manufacturing in the United States. I believe that we should manufacture anything that’s viable here in the U.S.. But with technology and the good quality and much less expensive manufacturing in many other countries, a large number of products simply can’t be economically and viably produced here.

I believe we will hit the peak period in the rate of change in the next several years, the late 2020’s or possible early 2030’s, as a major recession or long period of economic stagnation forces everyone to rethink their own place in the world. It will force business owners and social leaders to reassess their work in the world as well. As dozens of industries, and thousands of businesses create or adapt Information Age business models, the pace of change will begin to slow down. Cumulatively, we will all help build all the parts of the Information Age that we need to move forward as functional societies. Some people will drive innovation, while most people will vote with their feet and their wallets on what works and what doesn’t, among the new technologies and social norms. When the pace of business and economic change begins to slow down, social, political, and geopolitical change should calm down dramatically as well, over the course of several years.

I believe Toffler’s Third Wave concept, that the U.S. and major nations are moving from an Industrial Age society into an Information Age society, is a macro idea to other macro ideas. There are all kinds of other trends and things happening, but they’re happening inside of the larger, Third Wave idea. Yes, the pandemic shutdowns, layoffs, surge of bailout money, and then post-pandemic slowdowns have done a number on many industries. Yes, the current U.S. high tariff campaign has wreaked havoc on businesses large and small. Yes, there are all kinds of other, more industry-specific trends and issues happening as well. But I believe The Third Wave concept is a great Big Picture way to think about, and to partially explain, why so many industries are having major troubles right now.

Change. We now live in a dystopia that the novelists, TV writers, and movie directors of earlier decades did not see coming. We are not in a one world government, authoritarian society, like George Orwell predicted in his novel 1984, or like the graphic novel, V for Vendetta, predicted. We are not in a post-nuclear apocalyptic world like in the Mad Max, Damnation Alley, and similar movies predicted, either.

Our dystopia is a decades long period of massive and unprecedented technological, economic, and social change.

If it feels to you like you’re hanging on for dear life as the world continually morphs around you, that’s because that’s exactly what is happening. Hang on, and try to figure out how best to cope, and maybe even thrive, in this incredible, and incredibly stressful, era of human history. Periods of great change are not just hard to deal with, they are also the times of the greatest opportunities, as well. We are all in this chaotic time period together, even though we are highly polarized right now, and argue with other people so much. If you look for the opportunities in this crazy era, you’ll probably find some amazing ones.

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Close-up of a homeless woman and her dog on the bus one night here in the San Fernando Valley, 2023, I think. When I was a kid, lots of people thought we would all have flying cars and human-like Android robots by the year 2000, or at least by 2020. No one predicted that homelessness, unaffordable housing for working people, and student debt would be some of our biggest societal crises. #steveemigphotos

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“This decade, the Tumultuous 2020’s as I’m calling them, oozed in quietly, then turned Godzilla on us all of the sudden.”

-Me (Steve Emig) in Chapter 20 of Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now,” first week in June, 2020.

We are in a long period of massive, and accelerating change. That’s what it all comes down to.

Six years ago, in October of 2019, after more than 50 years of wondering about the future, and 30 years of watching economic markets social trends, and reading about futurist theories, I woke up one morning with a concept. I had lots of interrelated ideas in my head about where our society was heading. But I never sat down to try and make sense of them or organize them.

The insight that morning was to go back and watch 20 or 30 movie trailers from the dystopian future movies from my childhood, high school, and young adult years, and see what kinds of futures they predicted for us all. Then I would contrast the futures that novels, TV shows, and movies predicted against what had actually happened in the 35 years since I graduated high school. I realized that I was already living in “the future” of my high school aged self.

I actually watched more than 40 movie futuristic movie trailers and TV show intros, ranging from Metropolis, released in 1927, to Alita: Battle Angel, from earlier in 2019. I watched trailers from many futuristic classics, like 1984 (1956), The Time Machine (1968), the original Planet of the Apes (1968), Soylent Green (1973), Logan’s Run (1976), Mad Max (1979), Blade Runner (1982), my personal favorite, Tank Girl (1995), V for Vendetta (2005), and The Hunger Games (2012), among many others. You can check out my original list of movie and TV trailers in this post.

During that research, I found out that the original Blade Runner movie from 1982 was set in Los Angeles in November, 2019 (check the slate at the beginning of the trailer). I was just over the hills from Los Angeles, living homeless in the San Fernando Valley, in November of 2019, as I sat down to write out my ideas about the future, morning after morning, in a local McDonald’s. There wasn’t a replicant to be found, and homeless people, like myself, were considered the biggest social problem in an L.A. Times survey that month.

I filled a whole paper notebook with ideas about the future, in November and December of 2019. Themes emerged. I believed we were headed for a major recession, maybe a full blown economic depression, in the 2020’s. The theories I found that best described our times also foreshadowed that the accelerating change in our world would lead to years of even more rapid change, building up to a crisis point, and ultimately a complete restructuring of society. Much of this was based on the 1980 book by futurist Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave. But several other theories and long term cycles, along with decades of my own observations and ideas, played into my thinking as well.

By mid-December, 2019, I had a lot of writing aboutt our future, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it. On December 21st, I pre-built a blog on Blogger with 20 empty chapters. At the time, I thought I might use 10 or 11 of them, but I added other chapters, just in case I came up with more ideas as I wrote them. I pre-built the blog so the whole thing, a free, online “book” in blog form, could be read in order, chapter by chapter, instead of last chapter first, like most blogs. Each chapter was blank at first. That night, December 21st, 2019, I started filling in the book/blog, idea by idea, chapter by chapter. I didn’t think out the whole thing ahead of time. I let one idea, one chapter, lead to the next. I called this “book/blog thing,” Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, Book 1. I thought I might some day write more ideas, a “book 2,” later on.

When I started writing, Covid-19 was some regional thing happening in China, not really on my radar. I did not see the pandemic coming. I was looking mostly at economic and business trends. By the time I finished writing Chapter 20, the final chapter, it was the first week in June 2020, and the United States was in the early weeks of the mandatory lockdowns. Even then, we thought “the whole Covid thing” would be over in a month or two. We still had no idea how much that virus would affect the whole world on so many levels.

The whole 20 chapters of Dystopia led up to the idea that we were then, in 2019, in “the future” of us Baby Boomers and Generation X people’s teenage selves. It wasn’t an Orwellian future like in 1984, with a one-world government holding absolute control, forcing worldwide conformity of all people. The future we were living in 2019 was also not the post-apocalyptic world of a small number of humans wandering around after a global, nuclear, World War III.

Our “future” was now, and it was (and still is) a decades long period of massive and continuous change. As Alvin Toffler first wrote about in 1980, in 2019 we were still moving out of the fading Industrial Age, and into a still emerging Information Age. We were then, and still are, in a long transition period between these two ages. Our “dystopia” was, and still is, change, a long period of massive societal change.

The combination of the theories of the late futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, a little known thinker from India name P.R. Sarkar (Law of Social Cycle), modern urbanist and professor Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class), and my own observations over many years, pointed to society running into major inflection points in the coming years. It looked to me in late 2019 like the 2020’s would be a decade of intense economic, social, and geo-political change, rivaling the most chaotic decades in modern history. The night I built the Dystopia blog, I dubbed this decade The Tumultuous 2020’s. If nothing else, the first six years of this decade have lived up to that moniker.

If you are interested in Big Picture thinking, you can check out the 20 chapters I wrote in Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now. Each chapter can be read separately, or you can read it start to finish if you find it interesting. That “book,” makes the case, and explains why there is so much change in today’s world, building on the decades old work of the three theories that I thought best described the macro picture that best encompassed what has been happening in society for decades now.

"Creative scenes. Thousands of small groups of motivated and creative people, are how the United States, and the world, will be re-imagined, re-engineered, and rebuilt. That’s where the remaining pieces of the Information Age will come from. A huge part of that will happen this decade.”

-excerpt from Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, Chapter 20, “Our Dystopia is CHANGE, it’s time to mold a new reality.”

The simplest way I can describe all the change in society today is to say that we now have to now build a society that matches all the things our smartphones make possible. We all walk around with these tiny supercomputers in our pockets, devices that the best futurists 50 years ago couldn’t imagine. But most of our industries, our governments, our laws and legal structure, our education systems, and our overarching social beliefs, have not caught up.

We have to build a society that’s as cool as our smartphones are. That process takes massive amounts of change, at every possible level, and it takes decades to actually happen. We are in that long process of change, slowly and chaotically trying to build a new kind of society, a functional Information Age. I think in the next few years, the second half of The Tumultuous 2020’s, will see the peak of this rapid change, and we will begin to slowly settle in to a more stable world, although it still take many years to stabilize.

That’s The underlying idea of The Tumultuous 2020’s, a phrase I coined nearly sixe years ago. If you want to dive deeper into this idea, clicks the links to “Dystopia,” above.

There are no paid links in this post.

Unknown, barefoot skateboarder with a layback on the Huntington beach Pier Bank, around 1974 or 1975. It was on the north side of the pier, which is just off to the left. The Pacific Ocean is about 100 yards behind the people in the background on the left, and there was the lower section of a beach parking lot above the bank, to the right.

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There have always been spots that skateboarders and BMX freestylers went to session on a regular basis. In the earliest days of skateboarding, these were just places with smooth asphalt or concrete, not many pebbles to hit, and often a hill to ride down. As urethane wheels made skateboarding much more forgiving than early steel or clay wheels, skaters sought out new terrain to push their limits. In those explorative years of the mid-1970’s, concrete and asphalt embankments became a favorite of skateboarders. A few years later, BMX freestylers mimicking the kickturns and 360’s of the skaters also sought out banks to ride. They referred to these slanted places as “banks.”

Some spots were locations skaters and riders went to for a session day after day. These were practice spots, fun spots to ride. In time, word got around, even though the best spots were often kept secret, sometimes even from friends. As spots started showing up multiple times in magazines, some spots became known nationwide. During the DIY video days of the early 1990’s, another type of spot evolved. Some spots became proving grounds. One skater would ollie a set of steps or a gap, and sometime later, someone else would come along to try and kickflip the same steps or gap. Later, someone else would try to land a harder trick on video there. The Gonz Channel at Embarcadero, the El Toro Gap, Wallenberg, and the Hollywood High School 12 and 16 steps and rails, these are a few examples of “proving ground” spots.

The H. B. Pier bank was a session spot. It wasn’t big or gnarly. It was just a fun bank to skate and ride. During the summer and on the weekends, in the mid-1970’s, there were lots of beach goers wandering by, and some would stop and watch the skaters. On the north side of the H.B. pier then, a large set of steps dropped down from pier level to the walking/bike path, and the beach itself. As you got to the bottom of the steps, on your right side, was a mellow bank, maybe 30 or 40 feet long. It was only about 3 or 3 1/2 feet high. The bank transitioned smoothly from the concrete area underneath the pier, and it flattened out on top. Three or four feet from the top of bank was a curb at the edge of the car loop, allowing vehicles to turn around at the end of the lower beach parking lot.

The bank wasn’t huge or really long, like those at Kenter elementary school, up near Santa Monica, or the Santa Ana River Ditch, running a long the east side of Huntington Beach. But the H.B. Pier bank was at the beach. Some of the thousands of beach goers, particularly girls, could watch the boys skate. In the evenings, and on weeknights, few people were around then, and skaters could session without much hassle.

A view of the north side of the Huntington Beach Pier at dusk, 2019. #steveemigphotos

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In a beach town full of surfers, many of whom also skated, hundreds of skateboarders had thousands of hours of sessions on the pier bank. It was a practice spot, and a place to show your skills to the crowds on the weekends. Ultimately, the pier bank became too popular, and a series of short, telephone pole sized posts were set into the bank. A huge, heavy chain was run through the posts, making it to impossible to skate.

That’s how the H.B. Pier bank looked when I moved to H.B. in early 1987, chained off. As a BMX freestyler, I soon became a local at the pier on the weekends, joining a small group of top freestyle skateboarders, and BMX freestylers, practicing our tricks and street performing for the crowds on the weekends. Because Huntington Beach had 8 miles of wide beaches and parking lots along most of it, H.B. drew people from all over Orange County, the Inland Empire, and even parts of L.A. County. Anybody from the skate or BMX world could show up on any given Saturday or Sunday, from local kids to top sponsored amateurs and pros. Riding at the pier in the late 1980’s, I heard stories of the sessions on the bank years before, before the chain.

Then, in the spring of 1989, the chain keeping the banking from being sessioned suddenly disappeared. For about a month, there were nightly sessions by skateboarders and and occasional BMXers, like me. While H.B. is really populated these days, the area under the pier was pretty quiet then on weeknights, and we could often session for 2-3-4 hours, without getting hassled by the police or anyone else. Then, just as suddenly, the chain was back in place, blocking off the banks, and we were bummed.

A few weeks later, in the late spring of 1989, the huge chain disappeared again. The nightly and weekend sessions on the banks started up again. That time, the chain remained missing, and skate and bike sessions continued well into the fall. The rumor I heard later was that the first time the huge, 300 pound chain disappeared, it was dragged far out into the sand of the beach. A metal detector looking for lost jewelry found it, and alerted the city. The second time the chain mysteriously disappeared, the rumor was that it was dragged out into chest deep water, during a a really low tide, directly underneath the pier itself. The original chain was never seen again. If that rumor is true, then the giant chain has been rusting under the water, under the pier, for 36 years now. Eventually, the city got a new huge chain and installed it, and the Huntington Beach Pier bank sessions ended for good.

In January of 1988, the end of the H.B. Pier was damaged by waves during a strong winter storm. The pier itself was closed. Construction of a new pier began in 1990, and it re-opened in 1992. New stairs were built on the north side of the pier. Part of the old parking lot on the north side of the pier was turned into the current Pier Plaza, including a large amphitheater section facing the walk/bike path and the ocean. There is now a small concrete wall where the H.B.Pier bank once stood. At the corner where that wall meets the walk and bike path, there are three flag poles.

In all the years that the Huntington Beach Pier bank was a session spot for skateboarders and BMXers, only few skateboard photos where shot there. It’s also featured in this 1975, untitled skateboard documentary. It shows some footage of skaters on the pier bank, beginning at 1:45.

The Huntington Beach Pier Bank is no more, but you can still see skateboarders cruising by on a regular basis. Huntington Beach has grown tremendously from the funky surf town it was, up through the 1980’s and 1990’s. There are multiple hotels, upscale restaurants, tourist shops. Even today though, Jack’s Surf Shop and Huntington Surf and Sport still occupy the prime corners at PCH and Main, right across the street from the pier. And if you walk a bit south on the inland side of PCH, TK Burger is still there, one of the few holdovers with the surf vibe of the 1960’s-1990’s.

Check out my Pinterest board “History of the Huntington Beach Pier Bank”

If you liked this post, check out my post about the Viper Bowl, an Old School skate and bike spot hidden in the Hollywood Hills.

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Cup o’ ramen. Really cheap. Easy to make. Reasonably good. Ramen. Back in the 1980’s and 1990’s, when money got tight, I learned how to eat super cheap with ramen, like millions of others of young adults in Generation X.

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I discovered generic ramen within a couple months of starting my first real job, the BMX magazine job that brought me to Southern California, way back in 1986. I was living with roommates and responsible for cooking my own food for the first time ever. I was 20-years-old, and I’d never had to budget my money and live completely off my own paycheck before. As is typical of many 20-somethings, I spent too much money one week, and wound up running out of food, and only having $2 or $3 to get me through until Friday’s lunch time paycheck.

I went to the local grocery store, looking for the absolutely cheapest food to get me through Thursday’s dinner. Even back then, most food seemed too expensive. As I walked through one aisle, the lights suddenly flickered and went dim. Then one light popped on full power, like a spot light, focused on a lower shelf of the market shelf just in front of me. I heard a sound like food angles singing. I looked on that shelf, and there were yellow packets of generic ramen. There were three types, chicken, beef, and the always scary shrimp flavor. Each single packet cost 22 cents. I bought 3 or 4 packs of chicken and beef ramen, spent around a dollar with tax, and headed home.

OK, that’s not exactly how it happened. But I learned a great lesson that week. Ramen isn’t food, it’s starvation insurance. That amazing little yellow packet for 22 cents could get me through dinner time, and make me feel reasonably full until the next morning.

I’m not talking about real ramen, the fancy pho noodles that come in many variations at trendy Asian restaurants. I’m talking about those little generic packs of ramen you buy at the grocery store. Now, nearly 40 years after that first ramen meal I cooked for myself, those packs of ramen are still only 39 to 50 cents. Inside those magic packets are a bunch of dry, folded things that somehow turn into long, skinny, noodles when you boil them in water. There is also a little, magic, silver packet in there. You boil some water in a pot on the stove. Once you’ve got a good rolling boil, you put the noodles into the pot (us seasoned ramen eaters break them up in the package before opening it, so they won’t be so long), and let them cook until pliable. At the last moment, you tear open the packet of magic dust, chicken or beef flavor, and add it to the noodles, and stir it into the boiling water. Then you turn off the heat, take the pot off of the hot burner, put the ramen into a bowl, and cool to eating temperature.

Somehow, those enigmatic little packages, the dry noodles and magic dust, turn into a substance the resembles chicken noodle or beef noodle soup. You have a basic meal that will get you through several hours, and feel that you have eaten, for under 50 cents. Generic ramen isn’t real food, it’s a cheap, magical substance that imitates food, tricks your stomach, and gets you from Thursday afternoon to Friday morning, when your paycheck comes in. Or whatever day that happens for you.

In the early 1990’s, the BMX and skateboard industries, the industries I had been working in for a few years, both died. Sales dropped for major companies, we entered a national recession, and lots of sponsored riders and industry employees lost their incomes. We all got odd jobs, shared rooms in a house to save money, and learned to push the limits of ramen consumption to save money (and to spend more money on beer).

But, as amazing as ramen was at saving food money, it got really monotonous if we ate it for multiple meals in a week. So we started experimenting with ways to use other cheap foods to make more meals, using a pack or two of ramen as the base. Remember, if you try these ideas, cook all chicken, meats, and vegetables thoroughly.

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Enough preamble, here are several ways to make cheap meals using basic ramen packs:

(One) Ramen with vegetables- Add canned or frozen vegetables, like carrots, peas, lima beans, or corn to the ramen, to make it into a cheap version of chicken or beef vegetable soup. If you use frozen vegetables, heat them up a little first in a separate pot (they are usually pre-cooked, but make sure), and add them to the ramen right after adding the flavor packet. Stir it all together, let them soak up a bit of the ramen’s flavor. Then turn off the heat, let cool, and serve. If you want to do this with fresh vegetables, cook them thoroughly first separately, then add them as described above.

(Two) Ramen with potatoes- You can either peel and boil potatoes in water until done. Or you can take a raw potato, cut the eyes out and wash it well, then “nuke” the potato in the microwave until done (usually about 3 1/2 to 4 minutes each), then peel it (use a potholder, it’s hot!), and cut it into bite size chunks. Add the cooked potatoe to boiling ramen right after the flavor packets, and finish the ramen as described above.

(Three) Ramenetti (ramen spaghetti)- Cook ramen noodles in boiling water as usual, but save the flavor packet, you can use it for another meal if you like. When the noodles are firm, pull the pot off the burner, and pour the noodles into a strainer, to strain the hot water off of the noodles. Heat up some of your favorite spaghetti sauce from a jar on low heat in another pot. When it’s a good temperature, turn off the heat, and stir in the noodles. Or put the noodles on a plate, and pour the spaghetti sauce over them, whichever method you prefer.

(Four) Ramen noodles with butter and lemon pepper- Cook the ramen noodles as above, and pour them into a strainer. Turn the heat to low, and put a little bit of butter into a pot. You don’t need very much. Melt the butter slowly, without burning it. When the butter is fully liquid, turn the heat off, and pull the pot with the butter off of the hot burner. Stir the ramen noodles into the melted butter, a wooden spoon or plastic spatula or spoon work well, so you don’t scratch the pot. Then sprinkle a bit of lemon pepper (available in any grocery store spice section) on the noodles. Sprinkle a little bit on, and stir it in to the butter coated noodles. Taste them, and then add a little more lemon pepper, until it suits your taste. A little lemon pepper goes a long way. Lemon pepper is also great on grilled chicken breasts, among other things

(Five) Ramen with chicken- You can grill chicken breasts without the skin, or cook other parts of the chicken. Cook them fully, and cut into small pieces. Or you can take some cooked, leftover cooked chicken, and “pull” or shred the meat, with your clean fingers or a fork. Either way, make chicken ramen like described above, and then add the cooked chicken right after adding the chicken flavor packet. You can also break up a cooked hamburger into pieces, and add it into beef ramen the same way. Again, make sure chicken or beef is fully cooked before adding to the ramen.

(Six) Ramen stew- Cook ramen noodles and strain them well, as described above in #3. In a separate pot, warm up a can of pre-cooked beef stew, like Dinty Moore or a similar brand. Pour the cooked noodles on a plate, then spoon the hot stew over it. Or you can pour the noodles into a large serving bowl, and then add the cooked stew, and use a serving spoon or spatula to mix the stew into the noodles. You can also do this with chunky soups as well, in which case you definitely want to put it all in a large mixing bowl and mix it up to serve it. If you’re feeding a few people on the cheap, you can cook several packs of ramen noodles and use two or more cans of stew.

(Seven) Crunchy ramen stew- Make the ramen stew like described above. When you are ready to eat it, you take some corn chips (chips and salsa type chips), Fritos, or Doritos, and crunch them up in your clean hands, and put them on top of the ramen stew. Mix them into the noodles and stew as you eat. If you put them in too early, they’ll get soggy.

(Eight) Chili ramen- Cook ramen noodles and strain them, as described above in #3. In a separate pot, warm up a can of your favorite (pre-cooked) chili. You can put the cooked noodles on a plate, and add the chili on top, or you can put the noodles into a large serving bowl, and mix in the chili. This is the ramen version of chili mac.

(Nine) Crunchy chili ramen- Make the chili ramen as described above. When you’re ready to eat, use your clean hands to smash up corn chips, Fritos chips, or Doritos into small pieces, and sprinkle them on top of the chili ramen. Stir that crunchy goodness in as you eat.

There are nine different ways to make a better and more filling meal, starting with a 39 cent pack of ramen. These are basic ideas, and once you try one of more of them, you can experiment with different options. You can also do most of these with any kind of pasta, though it takes longer to cook. Consider these ideas possiblities which you can use your own creativity to build on.

There you go, ten different really cheap meal options, most of which I’ve done multiple times myself. Ramenetti and ramen noodles with butter and lemon pepper were my favorites back in the days of the 1990’s recession. I would saute’ chunks of onion and green peppers in butter with basil, and add those on top of my ramenetti (or actual spaghetti). Live cheap, eat well, and forge on through this recession!

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Here I am, on a chilly winter day in Richmond, Virginia, posing with a giant mill wheel, age 52, in 2019. I was not a cool kid. At all. Ever. I was super shy, the shortest kid in class through 6th grade, I couldn’t say my S’s and R’s well until 6th grade, I had big buck teeth, I was chubby until high school, and I sucked at every school sport, except dodgeball. Yes, I was a dork that got picked on a lot. Even among my few close friends, I still felt like kind of an outsider much of the time. I pretty much always felt like a dork or a weirdo growing up. Later, while in high school, I got into BMX racing, and then the emerging sport of BMX freestyle. That gave me some confidence, and I began to work through my shyness, and started coming to grips with my creative drive. These processes have been going on ever since. In my late 50’s, I’m still weird, but much more comfortable with my drive to do creative work, and much, much more prolific, even if I don’t make much money at most of what I do. #steveemigphotos

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Freaks. Geeks. Dorks. Weirdos.

Those four terms mean a lot of different things to different people. So what do I mean when I use these terms, and why do I have these words on my logo, at the bottom of nearly every post here on my Substack? This post is where I will answer that question. I googled those four terms just to see what came up.

The word freaks once brought up mental pictures of actual physical “freaks,” people born with very visible birth defects or abnormalities. The 1932 movie Freaks comes up at the top in a search, as in the odd group of people in an old time circus sideshow. These days, we tend to think of a freak as someone who is really into something, possibly obsessed, or someone who dresses or adorns themselves in an unusual way. “He’s a bass fishing freak, he’s out on his boat almost every day.” The freaks I’m talking about are the people outside the norm who are freaks about art, movies, books, music, creativity, entrepreneurship, and those kinds of things. My freaks aren’t the people who have sex with aardvarks while skydiving, people have piercings in their sternum, or people try to build lasers in their basement after smoking an 8-ball. The freaks that use creative expression, or a love of other people’s creative work, those are the freaks I’m talking about. Let’s face it, you can see a person with neck tattoos or 14 piercings (5 or more not visible) working in nearly any fast food joint these days, those things aren’t freaky anymore.

Next up, the geeks. How many of you know that, about 80 or 100 years ago, a geek was a circus or carnival performer who would bite the heads off of chickens or even snakes. People would pay money to stand outside the fence of the “geek pit,” and watch those acts, back in the 1900’s-1940’s era. Yep, that’s what geeks meant to many of our grandparents and great-grandparents.

These days, the term geek is much more closely tied to the term nerd. Geeks are often associated with computer coding and high tech work of some kind. But I think of geeks as, once again, outsiders who tend to be really smart in some area. It doesn’t have to be computers, but any fairly obscure passion that involves reading big books, and spending a lot of time thinking about things that bore the heck out of most people. I’m an economics and futurist geek, and a huge fan of people like the late Alvin Toffler. Really. I actually enjoy watching financial markets and social trends, trying to figure out where society is headed. That stuff is geeky even to most geeks.

Dorks. This term is also closely tied to the nerd idea these days. Dorks can be the skinny kid who’s really smart, but gets picked on by jocks. Or it can be the chubby guy or gal, usually with above average intelligence, and pretty inept socially. The social ineptness sometimes goes away as we get into adulthood, and sometimes it follows people much of their lives. Dorks can be artistic, musical, technically skilled, or just odd. Again, these are another aspect of the kids who feel like outsiders in their school years. Many dorks blossom later in life in some creative way, as artists, musicians, writers, or in some other form.

Another type or outsider, weirdos, may or may not be overly intelligent. They take being odd to another level, doing something farther outside the norm. Skateboarding and BMX freestyle were definitely weird things to spend most of your time doing when I got into them. Nearly every kid learned to ride a skateboard in the 1970’s, and every kid rode bikes in the 1980’s. But spending most of your time doing those things was definitely not cool back then, it was weird. Those sports have grown tremendously in the last 40 years, yet are still, somehow, outsider activities. There are plenty of other weird ways to spend your time in today’s world.

Weirdos may either express their weirdness in their physical appearance, or they may simply get really into obscure activities, and push the boundaries there. They may or may not make a living doing those weird things, and may become well known, or live in relative obscurity most of their lives. But they deviate from the norm in some interesting way, and break new ground.

As the world gets crazier and crazier, there is a greater and greater need for the artistic, creative, and entrepreneurial freaks, geeks, dorks, and weirdos in society. This is a drawing I did to put on a skateboard deck, in November or December of 2019. The penciled part at the bottom reads, “ Shit’s about to happen…” A few weeks later the Covid-19 pandemic hit U.S. shores, and financial markets crashed. The United States went into a 3 or 4 month economic depression, until the bailout money started flowing. Shit really was about to happen when I drew this. #sharpiescribblestyle, #steveemigart

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One day, a few years ago, I was thinking about the people I admire for being innovative, people who I thought pushed the limits, and expanded our world and thinking in some way. In my mind, there is a wide range of people in this category, people in business, the arts, sports, and from the spiritual side of things. None of those people are or were “normal.” A line popped in my head, as they sometimes do. “Most of the progress in the world comes from the freaks, geeks, dorks, and weirdos,” I said out loud. I liked that line, and wrote it down somewhere. A year or two later, I made this meme below, using that line. In the years since, that basic idea has expanded in my thinking. After writing on Substack for a while, I designed my black triangle, Club White Bear logo, and then began adding it at the bottom of my posts, with the words, “Freaks, Geeks, Dorks, and Weirdos.”

In my mind, the people who interest me most are people who have deviated from the norm in some way, and usually pushed the limits of society. A lot of these people were involved in creativity in some way, either in art, music, literature or in the business world, as entrepreneurs, founding some new business. So when you see the words “freaks,” “geeks,” “dorks,” and '“weirdos” in my writing, or in my logo, innovative and creative people are the ones I’m referring to.

I also want to include all the people who may be closer to “normal,” but spend time and money supporting the creative and innovative people leading progress to our world. We definitely need all those supportive people, too, going to indie art shows, music gigs in small clubs, buying art and products from living artists and small time entrepreneurs. These are also some of the people who help support today’s creative people on platforms like Patreon, and here on Substack. I want to give a huge “Thank You” to all of those supportive people who have helped me, and many others, put creative work into the world.

This is the meme I made of this idea, using a vintage, public domain photo I found online. The girl riding the alligator was a photo taken in the 1940’s, I think, at a reptile farm in Los Angeles. Full Circle blog is one of the blogs that I started a while back, then abandoned. I have lots of those. That blog was about writing. It’s still out there online, though the first three posts have disappeared for some reason. #steveemigmemes

That’s it, that’s what the “freaks, geeks, dorks, and weirdos” means in my logo below, and when I use those words in my writing. Again, thanks for reading, I’m always trying to write things that I’ve learned that may be helpful to other creative people in their lives.

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