Goofy alien drawing, in my Sharpie scribble style, from 2011, I think. I figured out a cool way to shade with Sharpie markers in 2005, but I wasn't sure what to do with that style.
In late 2015, I was miserable. Can anyone now, in April 2020 relate to that? Yeah, I thought so. I was 49 years old, 368 pounds, unemployed, and living with my crazy mom in a tiny apartment in a small town in central North Carolina. I could not get hired for any job. Period. Not a cashier job at a gas station, not a restaurant job. Over 140 online applications, over a couple of years, led to nothing.
I've done all kinds of work, three years in restaurants when I was younger, and hard labor like furniture moving. But I have also written for BMX magazines, worked on the crew of TV shows like American Gladiators, been a roadie-type lighting guy in the Hollywood area. My most recent "career" was as a taxi driver, 5 1/2 years in the Huntington Beach area of Southern California, and then a year when I moved (though I didn't want to) to North Carolina, where my family wound up living.
I was born near Akron, Ohio, and grew up moving around small towns and rural Ohio as a kid. I was a smart, really dorky, Midwest kid. I was an incessant daydreamer, and liked to read and draw and wander around the woods. My childhood was a time, the 1970's, when the American Middle Class was still going strong, and there were thriving factories in every city and small town. Men worked in the factories, or the office next to the factory, like my dad, a draftsman/engineer. Women mostly stayed home with the kids. Families could live on one income pretty easily then. Most couples could save for a few years, maybe borrow a little money from Grandma, and buy their own house, while still in their 20's or early 30's. My parents bought their first house for $10,000. But we moved a couple years later, while I was still a toddler.
Every adult I knew hated their job, or at least hated their boss. But they wouldn't quit. They made good money, and hating your work for 40 hours a week was the price everyone was expected to pay for providing for their families. It was simply not to be questioned. You didn't have to like your job, you just had to do it. Companies back then didn't want your ideas or thoughts, they just wanted to My dad, a mechanical genius, really liked his work, solving mechanical problems, and designing machine parts, or whole machines, like buses or locomotives. But there was also some asshole at work that made the job tough to deal with. shut up and do your job.
Then, in the late 1970's, something weird started to happen. Factories, which everyone assumed would be in business forever, started to shut down. At the same time, new technologies began to appear and invade our lives. Cable TV. Pong, the first video game. Personal computers that you had to learn code to operate, but couldn't really do anything. Video cameras. Technology kept progressing, and part of that was new tech and industrial robots that took millions of human jobs, while millions more jobs were outsourced to places with cheaper labor. Those Midwestern factory jobs first went to the American South, like Alabama or Mississippi. Then jobs moved to Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and eventually China.
The slow-paced world I knew a kid, that never seemed to change, started changing rapidly while I was in high school. To find better jobs, my dad moved us west. From 8th grade in Willard, Ohio, we moved to New Mexico for a year, then Boise, Idaho for my high school years. A year after I graduated, my family moved to San Jose, California, where my younger sister went to high school. I finished my summer job in Boise, managing a tiny amusement park, then moved to San Jose.
Though I was pretty smart, I didn't have any money to go to college, and didn't have any real career draw. I wanted to start a business of my own, someday, so I "took a year off" to work and hopefully figure things out. So I worked at the Boise Fun Spot amusement park, then a big Mexican restaurant. In San Jose, I got a job at a Pizza Hut, and soon became the de facto night shift supervisor.
What sent my life in a weird direction, was getting into BMX bikes in high school, while we lived in a trailer park, for a year. I got into BMX racing, and then, in 1983, the emerging sport or BMX freestyle, or trick riding. I was one of those kids that always sucked at sports growing up. With BMX, I found something I loved enough to stick with, and get good at. BMX freestyle, which was something most people didn't even know existed in 1984-85, became my life. I riding my bike, practicing my tricks, for 2 or 3 hours everyday, and often more.
In San Jose, I knew there were a handful of pro riders in the Bay Area, and many good amateurs. So I started a zine, a small, self-published, Xeroxed (the term we used then for photocopying), mini magazine. I read about zines in FREESTYLIN' magazine. I started my own zine as a way to meet the San Francisco Bay Area freestyle riders. That worked, and soon I was riding with some of the best guys in our tiny sport. My zine wound up landing me a job at Wizard Publications, the publisher of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, located in Torrance, California, southwest of L.A..
At the end of July in 1986, I got on a plane in San Jose with my BMX bike, a suitcase, and $80. I was picked up at LAX, and driven to Torrance, by my new co-workers and roommates, Gork and Lew, and FREESTYLIN' editor, Andy Jenkins. I was suddenly a part of the BMX bike industry, and riding with the top riders in the sport at night. My heroes had become friends and acquaintances, at age 20. While most people my age were working lame jobs or a junior in college, I was proofreading two national magazines.
I didn't click well with the guys at the magazines in a working way. We all got along, but I just wasn't punk rock enough then, and not the right fit for that crew
. I soon got laid off, and they replaced me with some unknown, East Coast BMXer/skater named Spike Jonze. He turned out to be the right guy for that job, and crazy talented in the long run.
I got a job editing a BMX freestyle newsletter. That led to producing low budget videos. That led to a job at a skateboard video company. That led to working on TV show crews in my mid-20's. And that led to me burning out in 1995. I wound up working as a furniture mover, and doing a few other odd jobs in the 1990's, and then becoming a taxi driver in 1999, then into the 2000's.
Taxi driving began to die in 2003, when the CB radios used for dispatching in the cabs were replaced by dispatching computers. I wasn't a tech guy, wasn't real interested in computers or "that internet thing," in the early 2000's. I didn't own a computer. I went to the library and rented time on a computer to check my email, and Google a couple of things. I was a serious Luddite then. I didn't realize then that it was new technology that would kill the taxi industry, first with cab dispatch computers, then later with Uber and Lyft.
So I ended up a deeply depressed guy, living with a crazy woman, my mom, in a state that I fucking hated, North Carolina, in 2015. The only thing that I did then that made me any money, was doing Sharpie drawings of kid's names. Moms from church, or from my niece's cheerleading team, would ask me to draw the names their kids in block letters, fading the kid's favorite colors. I made $20 each for 4-5 hours work. But I did one drawing every few weeks, if that often.
Finally, in November of 2015, I decided to focus all my efforts on making money with my Sharpie art. I started, literally, without a dime. My mom was always in financial crisis mode, and I lived there for free, in exchange for driving her wherever she needed to do, doing the "man" things around the apartment, and that kind of thing. My mom, being who she is, belittled and berated me for not having a job 15 hours a day. It sucked.
When I did make a little bit of money, when I sold a drawing or something, she immediately created a crisis that needed exactly that much money. Then nagged me until I handed it over. When it comes to guilt trips, my mom is a Yoda-level master. One of her brothers thinks she has Borderline Personality Disorder, though she never has, and never will go to a psychiatrist. How bad is Borderline? Put it this way, if Satan had a horrible mother-in-law, she'd have severe Borderline Personality Disorder.
I was struggling with serious depression the whole time I was living there. Coming back from the worst bout of depression, I decided to go with my creativity, double down on figuring out on how to make money with my artwork. When I started, I had a bunch of Sharpies, a dollar store sketch pad, and a $65 refurbished laptop, still running Windows XP in 2015. The one asset I did have, was that I had blogged about Old School BMX freestyle since 2008, and I had a small but hardcore blog following. They became my first customers.
Princess Leia drawing I did in late 2016. By some quirk of fate, I started this drawing a couple days before Carrie Fisher got sick, and was still working on it when she died.
I stepped up my art game, and drew a picture of Bruce Lee, my first hero as a kid, as an example. I sold a drawing for $20. Then got asked to do another. Then another. I've scraped by for 4 1/2 years now, across three states, by selling drawings. I've actually sold over 80 major original drawings, and over 100 small prints. I sold them all pretty cheap, BUT I SOLD THEM. I'm still selling them. I'm still struggling, but as so many of America's businesses shut down, I'm still working. One good thing about drawing, no one has to be within six feet of me while I"m working.
Since I started with absolutely no money, and moved out of the toxic apartment in NC. I've been homeless most of the time since. But I have also managed to keep working, despite a slew of really crazy circumstances.
Along the way, over these last 4 1/2 years, I learned a heck of a lot about using my blog for promotion, and using social media platforms for building my building my web presence as an artist and writer.
So as I continue to work to build my art from a kind of small time freelance thing, to a legit business making me a decent living, I'm starting this blog to share things I've learned about marketing and small business promotion in today's world. As I looked around in recent months, I've seen that most businesses, of all sizes, don't use today's internet, social, and mobile technology to anywhere near its full potential. So this blog is a way to share my own lessons learned, and tips, as well as share tips from the other people starting, building, and running micro and small businesses well.
There are all kinds of facets to running a business in today's world. One major aspect is that we've had over 26 million people laid off in the last 5 weeks, due to today's economic downturn, triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. This means millions more Americans suddenly need alternative ways to earn money. So that's the basic idea I'm starting this new blog with.
Here's a second version of the original Bruce Lee stencil drawing I did, when I got serious about making money from my unique Sharpie art. #sharpiescribblestyle
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