We Must Become Our Own Heroes

This is the last surviving poem that I wrote:

You must risk
If you're to succeed
For when you grow
Sometimes you bleed
Each must climb
Over the fence
For the only cage
Is ignorance
Each Jedi knight
And Shaolin monk
Evolved from
A lowly punk
Don't get caught
In the world's throws
We must become
Our own heroes

-Steve Emig

I've written about 500 poems, and I self-published three small booklets that contained about 100 of those poems.  When I left California in 2008, I had 165 newer poems spanning 10 years.  The hand-written copies were in my storage unit, and the digital files were on my laptop in a pawn shop.  As luck would have it, I wasn't able to retrieve either.  I lost what was left of my possessions, a great amount of video footage that chronicled the early days of BMX freestyle, and all my poems.  I was devastated when I lost all this stuff, and fell into a deep depression.  For a creative person like me, losing my creative work was almost like a death in the family.

Soon after, I started blogging about my memories about the early days in the sport of BMX freestyle.  I started off as a kid in Idaho doing tricks on a little bike, and I stumbled into the industry, working with several of the top people in the sport.  When I started blogging, I knew almost nothing about how the internet really worked.  Much to my surprise, one of my blog posts went viral in the old school BMX online community.  I didn't even know there was an online community.  I wrote over 200 posts on that first BMX blog, and it got about 20,000 total pageviews.  I started another  BMX blog, wrote over 500 posts over about three years time, and that garnered over 80,000 total pageviews.  Connecting with all those old friends, and some new ones, through my blog, helped keep me going.  

I also started a blog about panhandling and homelessness as a joke, since I spent several years in various stages of homelessness.  Just for the record, I was working full time most of those years, and I was still homeless.  My panhandling blog became the top panhandling blog in the world, and I was once contacted by John Stossel's producer when they did a TV show about freeloaders.  I shared my knowledge of the subject with them, and John himself actually dressed up and panhandled in New York City for an hour for the show.  Their research found General Electric was the biggest freeloader in the country, raking in a huge amount of taxpayer's money.

While I had two of the top blogs in the world, I couldn't find a job here in Kernersville, North Carolina.  I did wind up driving a taxi in Winston-Salem for a year, but I quit for two reasons: I was working 90 hours a week and making less than $200, and my dad had a massive stroke and his health started fading fast.  During my dad's last weeks on Earth, I literally lived in the woods and panhandled bus fare and food money so I could go visit him every couple of days.  When he died, my mom asked me to move in with her.  That's where I've been living ever since.

Soon after that, I started having psychological symptoms that put me in the hospital twice.  During my second hospitalization, I was put on really strong medication that turned me into a zombie.  While my severe symptoms faded away, I slept for 11 or 12 hours a day, I lost my motivation in life, I stopped reading, I stopped doing artwork, and I just plain felt like crap.  When I complained to my psychiatrist about my side effects, he said it was probably sleep apnia.  I lived like a zombie for two years, with my side effects making me more depressed.  Then one day I just got fed up and stopped taking my meds.  I began to feel better in a few days, but my severe symptoms came back.  After a month, I was back in the hospital again.  The psychiatrist there listened to me, and put me on new meds.  My symptoms faded.  I spent about ten days in the hospital and then went to three weeks of intensive out patient therapy that helped me a great deal.  I started reading and doing artwork again.  My energy level and ambition improved, and I started walking to lose weight.

But now I'm 48 years old, I weigh close to 350 pounds, I'm unemployed, I have a really sketchy work history that looks terrible on a resume', and I have thousands of dollars in medical bills.  Applying for dozens of jobs in this area netted me a single interview at a fast food joint.  Once the manager saw me in person, she wasn't interested.

This is where my background in BMX freestyle and skateboarding come in.  The first life lesson I learned in those sports was that when I fell, I had to get back up and try again.  So that's where I am now.  It's pretty obvious that with my lousy work history as a taxi driver, I'm not going to find a well paying job in this area.  I can't even find a crappy job.  So I'm going to have to create my own job.  That sounds crazy to most of the people I know here in North Carolina.  But I spent most of my adult life in California, and creating your own business or job is a pretty common thing out there.  I can't even count how many people I knew as dirtbag BMXers and skaters in the 80's and early 90's that now run their own successful businesses.

As our society transitions from the Industrial Age that I was born in to the Information Age that is evolving, lots of people are finding themselves in a similar predicament to me.  This new blog is for all of us wrestling with life in the 21st Century in a world that has changed so much from when we were kids.  The change just keeps on coming in virtually ever aspect of life.  This new blog is going to chronicle my new start and what I've learned over the years that applies to life today.  Enjoy.