At fifty years old, I'm way overweight after years of taxi driving and bad eating habits. I'm starting to lost the weight. As an old BMXer, I went looking online for a good bike to get me riding again. I kept seeing Todd Lyon's posts on Facebook, he's the SE Bikes brand manager now. I checked out his video for the SE Fat Ripper, and that's when I found this clip by Seth's Bike Hacks YouTube channel. This video is the reason I decided to start saving up for a Fat Ripper. I've become a fan of Seth's YouTube channel.
As most of you reading this know, I've been telling old school BMX stories in my blogs since I moved to North Carolina in November 2008. Moving here, I lost all my bike videos and DVD's, I lost all the master tapes to videos I produced, and I lost dozens of hours of raw footage ranging from 1989 to 2007. I had been planning to make my own documentary of BMX freestyle at some point. Because I couldn't borrow money to get my stuffed shipped from California, I lost one of the best raw footage collections in the freestyle world. All I had left were memories. So I started blogging.
In the last nine years, I've written about 800 posts about the early days of BMX freestyle, and I have lots more to tell. I'd like to thank all of you who've read and enjoyed my bike tales over the years.
When I came to NC, I couldn't find a decent job. It was late 2008 and the bottom was dropping out of the economy, so I wasn't alone. I eventually drove a taxi here for a while, and spent a year struggling to survive while living in my taxi. I've also been selling my Sharpie artwork here and there to make a little money. I'm too old to get hired at entry level jobs here, and my "eclectic"work history seems to keep me from getting a good paying job in some other area. But I spent most of my life in highly entrepreneurial Southern California. When I couldn't find a decent job, I thought, "OK, I'll create my own job."
But the truth is, I wrote most of 800 or so posts on the different versions of Freestyle BMX Tales while I was homeless and looking for work. At the same time, I've been educating myself on how writing and art works in today's world. It's a completely different industry than when my zine landed me a job at Wizard Publications in 1986. In today's world, many magazines have died, websites have taken over, and most make money from ads and links. But something else has happened thanks to the web and today's crazy technology. Millions of people have started websites, blogs, YouTube channels about things they are actually passionate about. This blog is one of those things, and so is Seth's You Tube channel above. Today's tech let's creative people in little niches create all kinds of stuff to share with the world. But there's been one huge problem. Money.
Either creative people need to finance their creative work from their job, and do it as a hobby. Or they need to dumb it down for a mass audience and try to be one of the small number of people who makes a ton of money on YouTube from ads or through affiliate links on blogs and websites.
But there's another option. With a service called Patreon, you can support creative people doing cool stuff in a way that doesn't require us to dumb stuff down or sell our souls just for advertising dollars. You can now support people just because you're stoked on what we do.
I've done a lot of things over the years. Telling stories about the early days of BMX freestyle is not my main focus now. My main focus is writing zines, blogs, and doing artwork to encourage people to build creative scenes. After reading lots of books that would bore most of you, I've learned that "creative scenes," like local bike scenes, skate scenes, art scenes, music scenes, actually play a huge role in creating jobs in today's world. We got into BMX freestyle in the 80's because we liked this weird, new, creative sport-type thing. Along the way, we formed little local scenes. We also discovered the DIY ethic and started shooting photos, putting on shows, making zines, videos, magazines, and bike companies. Because we liked riding, we created an entire industry that created a ton of jobs. The same thing happened in skateboarding, snowboarding, high tech, and dozens of other creative areas.
But now we're in a world where tech is taking over human jobs by the millions. One industry after another has lost jobs to new forms of technology. The high paying factory jobs of our childhood are gone, and no one is replacing them. People looking into the future are really worried about jobs for humans in the next few decades. I see one viable solution. Millions of people will have to create their own jobs, in new businesses in dozens of new industries.
I'm taking what I've learned from being a part of many creative scenes, and taking those ideas to a new generation of creative people. Some will be middle-aged geezers like myself, but most will be younger people who create stuff, but haven't experienced how a creative activity, like BMX freestyle, can turn into a whole new industry. This is my work. Writing and drawing IS MY JOB NOW. If you want to support my work, you can do it on my Patreon page. You get goodies, by the way, for different levels of support.
You can also support Seth's YouTube channel on the link at the end of the video above. Welcome to the world where you can directly support and communicate with the creative people who do stuff you're stoked on. You now have the power to support the people doing the things you think are good in the world. Go for it.
I've got two new blogs now:
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