Gone Walkabout

"I'm going for a walk, not the after dinner kind."  Classic Bad Religion, 1994.

I "live" in the San Fernando Valley these days, as a homeless guy.  I just went down to Orange County for a couple of a days.  For those of you who read my Facebook rant yesterday, I didn't go to O.C. to meet cops, though that always seems to happen in Orange County these days.  To be honest, I "went walkabout," in a Crocodile Dundee kind of way.  I needed some time to think, to walk around a bit, wander a little, and let some news ideas bubble up in my head.  Among the Australian Aborigines, there was a tradition of boys, on the edge of manhood, to go out and wander the desert for a year, on their own.  The idea was that these young guys figure out who they are, they would test their survival skills, and become a man in the year of living alone and wandering.  There's a crazy 1971 Australian movie called Walkabout, which features a young Aborigine guy on his walkabout, and he meets two white kids stranded in the desert.  I discovered that movie in the 1990's, when I was a clerk in a video store, and watched all kinds of little known movies.  This was one of the cool ones I discovered then.

Four years ago I was 49 years old, broke, living with my mom in a tiny town in North Carolina, and unable to get hired for any job there.  I decided to completely focus on trying to make a living with my weird Sharpie art.  I wasn't known as an artist.  It was a fucking stupid idea, by anyone's standards.  Guess what?  I never did make a decent living in the last four years.  But I managed to survive as a "working artist," for four years, most of that time while living homeless.  I'm now known as an Sharpie artist, as well as a Has Been BMX industry guy from the 1980's and 1990's.  I've sold over 80 original drawings, each of which took 35 to 45 hours to draw.  My drawings and prints are hanging on walls in 11 or 12 U.S. states, several countries in Europe, Russia, on 5 of the 7 continents.  I had no idea any of that would happen.  I went all in on something everyone thought was stupid.  I couldn't get a "real job," so I focused on art, and made... and sold... a whole bunch of pretty cool drawings.

This blog, and my related social media sites, is about adventures, at all levels, from the mellow adventure of taking a walk around a park snapping cool photos, like I did in Newport Beach yesterday, to the life threatening adventure that four years as a (mostly) homeless working artist has been, to the grand adventure of life itself.  Our lives are a series of adventures, whether we think about it that way, or not.

My simple decision four years ago, to become a working artist, led me to places I couldn't imagine then, like sleeping outside on a 25 degree night when it snowed ten inches in Richmond, Virginia.  But it also led me to sitting at the Huntington Beach pier watching Martin Aparijo sign prints of a drawing I made of him.  Martin was one of the guys I totally looked up to when I started focusing on this weird thing called BMX freestyle in 1983-84.  That turned into quite and adventure, as well.  It was really cool to have Martin (and John "Dizz Hicks, Dave Voelker, and China aka Krys Dauchy), let me draw pictures of them to sell.  But I'm at the place where artwork alone will not make me a living.  So I had to wander for a couple of days and think about where to go from here.  So I "went walkabout." 

Martin Aparijo, BMX freestyle pioneer, longtime pro rider, and huge influence on my riding BITD.  He's holding one of the limited edition prints of the drawing I did of him, right after signing a bunch of them.  Huge thanks for letting my do that, Martin!

This new blog will be my primary focus from now on.  I'll still write some old school BMX freestyle stories on Steve Emig: The White Bear, mostly because it has over 96,000 page views, and I just want to break 100,000 before I set it aside.  But this blog will let me share more photos, and tell the tales of some of my weird adventures I've had, and chronicle the new adventures I'm having now, large and small.  I'm not going to give up on my Sharpie scribble style artwork, I'm just going to dial it back, and work on other projects that give me a better chance of actually making a living again. 

So that's where I'm at now.  I have no idea where this blog and this "adventuring" idea will lead me.  But that's the whole point.  I've got some projects in mind to start with, and I wake up psyched to work on this series of ideas.  I'm not sure where the income will come from yet, but figuring that out is another part of the fun.  Stay tuned for lots of photos and more adventures...