1970's Wheelin' and dealin- How my dad got me a free go-kart

Not exactly, but this project is pretty dang close to the go kart my dad got me in trade in about 1978. It was a 3.5 horsepower, 28 mph piece of awesome for me.

My dad, Tom Emig, was a guy who liked wheelin' and dealin', as we called when I was a kid, in the 1970's.  He was a draftsman/engineer by trade.  He designed machines, and drew huge pictures of machine parts, by hand, pencil on paper, in those pre-computer days.  Those huge drawings, often 3 by 5 feet, were taken out into the factory shop, and machines were built from his drawings.  That's how he made a living. 

But dad had been a wheeler and dealer since childhood.  He'd find deals at garage sales, fix or repair something, and then resell it for some extra cash.  In his years after high school, he lived with his parents in Wadsworth, Ohio, and would buy and sell guns, cars, motorcycles, Vespa-type scooters, boats, and whatever other mechanical things he came across.   He graduated high school in 1955.  By the time he married my mom in1964, nine years later, he had owned 40 cars. 

 Here's my dad in front of one of his favorite cars, a powder blue, 1957 Ford Thunderbird, and a shot of the T-bird itself.  My dad owned three T-birds, a red 1955, a white 1955, and this one.  These classics sell for $35,000 to $50,000 these days.   Wish he'd passed one down to me.

The car buying slowed down when my dad got married.  By the time I was a kid, old enough to remember, my dad was buying selling guns from gun shows, he was an avid target shooter.  He also bought and sold bicycle parts, small appliances, and whatever else he could find a deal on at garage sales.  As my mom, dad, little sister Cheri, and me moved around Ohio in the 1970's, cabinets full of random tools, broken appliances, and random junk filled out basements.  Dad fixed stuff at times, but was always buying and selling little things.  In today's world, that's starting to become popular again, as people look for "side hustles" to earn extra money.  What my dad called "wheelin' and dealin'" in the 1970's, is known as "flipping" today. 

Of all my dad's deals when I was a kid, one was my favorite.   I was about 12, so it was 1978, I think.  My dad worked at Plymouth Locomotive Works, in Plymouth, Ohio, a company that made custom railroad locomotives, like this one.   

Like all factories, the shop floor at PLW got cluttered up with random boxes, scrap metal, unused pieces of machinery, and other junk.  One day, the owners walked through the factory, and and told the shop foreman to clean the place up, get rid of all the random junk.  So a list of stuff was itemized, a memo was typed up, and everyone in the company could bid on the stuff they wanted to get rid of.  My dad didn't want any of the big stuff.  But he knew the shop foreman well, and said, "Hey, I'll give you $15 for the junk pile in that little corner over there.  To the foreman it looked like a few old boxes, and some scrap metal.  The foreman said, "Deal, get it out of here in the next couple of days."
So my dad backed up his 1968, black, Mercury Montego, that my sister Cheri had named Herbie, after seeing the Herbie the Love Bug movie.  Herbie dutifully carried the junk to our house, and I helped my dad unload it into the basement.  My mom was not happy with my dad bringing home "more junk," but then, my mom wasn't happy very much anyhow. 

First we sorted out the scrap metal, pieces of copper, aluminum, and steel.  I went with my dad to a scrapyard that weekend, and he sold the scrap metal for $45.  Boom! triple his $15 investment back in a week.  So my mom had a little more shopping money, and the additional junk was forgotten by her. 

Over the next several month, my dad and I sorted out hundreds of assorted nuts and bolts, small machine parts, and other stuff from the $15 purchase.  On the weekends, I'd ride with my dad around to little junk stores, independently owned hardware stores, and other small businesses as he tried to sell or trade the stuff.  In the course of about a year, my dad made another $400 from the parts, little by little.  On one of those Saturdays, my dad and I stopped at a random hardware/junk shop not far from Shiloh, Ohio.  My dad talked to the shop owner, as I eyed three go-karts,hanging on wall.  My dad wound up trading some things called series parallel switches for a little money, and a brand new, $150 go-kart for me.  My dad was hoping for more money, but the owner wasn't in a buying mood.  But he saw me checking out the go-kart.  My dad and the shop owner talked, argued, told jokes, and wheeled and dealed for 45 minutes or so.  We left the shop with about $20, and the go-kart.  I was beyond stoked to have my first motorized vehicle. 

We lived on a rural gravel road, with very little traffic.  The perfect place for a 12-year-old, like me, to race a go-kart around.  I had a lot of fun on that go-kart, and learned how to slide a car, which came in handy driving in snow in Idaho, years later.  I even accidentally tipped the go-kart over once, while giving my sister a ride to her friend's house.  If you ask Cheri, she'll say I rolled it on her.  It wasn't that dramatic, it just kind of tipped over slowly, like Fred Flintstone's car when the big ribs are put on the tray.  But me and the go-kart, pretty much landed on Cheri, which was funny.  She still won't let me live that one down.

The moral of this story is, with a wheelin' and dealin' attitude, a flipping mindset, my dad turned a $15 junk purchase into about $450 cash and a go-kart for me.  Flipping is fun.  As our country drops into this crazy depression (yeah, that's what it really will turn into), a lot of people and businesses will be selling millions of items super cheap in the next few years.  It's a great time for flipping.  Keep your eyes peeled for deals near you. 

A few auction deals right now- 6/16/2020

 This this is for sale.  For real.

Here's a few things on the GSA (General Services Administration) auction site right now...

Brown leather couch in Sweetgrass, Montana- $10.

 Airplane fuselage- Redmond, Oregon.  DIY motorhome project anyone?  Where are the Monster Garage guys when you need them?  $2,000 minimum bid (not met yet).

1986 Cessna 210 airplane- El Paso, Texas.  $42,500 (reserve not met).  They have 3 of these for sale. A quick search showed these selling for $145,000 to $200,000 in good shape.  

2011 Ford Ranger XLT- Otisville, New York- $390.  Scrap title, can't be driven.  Still pretty cheap. 

A tidal wave of good deals...

This is from late April, and now it's playing out.  Neiman Marcus, J.Crew, J.C. Penney's, and Hertz are the big names that we know have gone bankrupt, and are trying to restructure, buy time, and become viable businesses again.  We'll see, eventually, who succeeds.

"There are tens of thousands of small and medium sized retailers, throughout the United States, that are closed, that are facing an existential liquidity crisis..."

-Mark Cohen, Former Sears Cananda CEO, in clip above

I've written this in several blog posts before.  Recessions (or depressions, like this one) are when the whole world goes on sale, and almost no one wants to buy.  That means deals on all kinds of stuff, including liquidation sales, bnakruptcy auctions, and other places. 

As those of you who read my last blog know, I've been struggling to make a living selling my Sharpie art for the last few years.  It's a long crazy story, but I was at a place in 2015, where I couldn't find ANY "real" job, and focusing on my artwork to earn money made sense.  I didn't have many viable options.

Now I'm back in the L.A. metro, and the economic collapse I've been writing about for three years has finally begun.  The artwork isn't going to make me a living in this environment.  I'll keep drawing, and selling drawings.  But I"m making a big pivot back to something I did as a side hustle back in the 2000's, mostly while I was a taxi driver.  When I was a kid,my dad called it "wheelin' and dealin."  These days, it's known as "flipping"... buying deals on houses, cars, and merchandise of all kinds, then reselling it for a higher price.   I got into buying storage unit auctions in about 2004-2005, and bought and sold several, while working 70+ hours a week as a taxi driver.  I actually tried to go full time into doing that, to escape taxi driving, but wasn't able to make it happen then.  I made money on every deal except one (which I'll write about soon).

The point of this blog post is:

Damn near everything is going on sale!

 It's not a single blow out sale.  There are several huge, long term, social and economic cycles and trends that are converging.  This convergence is wreaking havoc on the business world, and especially brick and mortar retail stores right now.  The Retail Apocalypse is hitting Ragnarok level.  There will be bankruptcies and liquidation sales all over the place.  That's on top of all the auctions and deals already happening in the world.  The time to flip everyday items for cash has never been better.  I'm writing a big zine on this idea, for people interested in flipping items as a side hustle or a business.  Here are a some of the random deals I found yesterday, doing a bit of research for that project:

 This Ford pickup truck is on a government surplus auction site right now.  $50 minimum.  No bids.  It's somewhere in Arizona.

 This boat is also on a government auction site, $25 minimum.  No bids.  I think it was in Louisiana, maybe Texas.  Somewhere on the Gulf Coast.  I know there are people in Louisiana that like to fish (or catch alligators).

This drum kit is on a government surplus auction site.  $10.  No bids.  OK, it's in Wyoming, a long way to travel for drums.  But somebody in Wyoming likes to play drums.  

This leather couch and chair were listed on Craigslist, FREE, in the L.A. area a couple days ago.  My point is, thee are a lot of good deals out there on everyday stuff.  I'm going to change my focus from trying to make a living off of artwork, to flipping stuff, like these items, to get back to making a decent living again (which will allow me to do other projects, like The Ultimate Weekend II video).  With the economy collapsing, there's never been a better time to do this.

 If you're looking for a good deal on something- pretty much ANYTHING- now, and the next 2-4 years, will be a great time to do that.  Cool furniture, a great guitar, cars, trucks, real estate, whatever.  If you like finding deals and reselling them for a little (or maybe a lot) of cash, it's a really good time for that, too. 

Stay tuned to this blog for more ideas on finding deals, flipping used items, and other ways to start or build a small business in today's crazy world.  

Why I started selling artwork 4 1/2 years ago...

Kurt Cobain, Sharpie scribble style drawing, 18" X 24", November 2017.  This was the first drawing that sold at my first solo show.

The first two decades of the 21st century have been a rough ride for me.  My weird line of odd jobs led to a good paying job as a lighting technician in 1998.  Basically, I was a lighting roadie who didn't go on the road.  I worked in a warehouse in North Hollywood, cleaning and prepping lights to go out to TV shows, movie premieres, and corporate parties.  I made $14 and hour, got a fair amount of overtime, and liked my job.  But I had what appeared to be a tiny hernia when I started.  That turned into a huge hernia, due to the daily heavy lifting.  I had to take time off, had issues with my insurance, was unable to get surgery, and wound up working as a taxi driver in late 1999, back down in Huntington Beach.

In 5 months, I went from a cool job with money in the bank to living in a taxi, working 7 days a week.  That was my situation as I watched the new millennium roll in, on New Year's Eve 1999.  I soon had a room to live in again, but a long period of struggle began.  My car got towed in 2000 for parking tickets, when I was just starting to get back into the entertainment industry.  Back to taxi driving, an industry which soon got disrupted by new technology.

That intro into the 21st century led to what has now been 20 years of financial struggle.  I just figured out that I've spent 11 years and 9 months in some form of homelessness, since August 1999.  I was working full time (or far beyond full time in the taxi) for 7 1/2 or 8 of those years.  And I've now spent 3 years and 9 months actually living on the streets, in three states.  There have been a whole bunch of reasons for this struggle, and that list does not include alcohol and drug use.  Those aren't my issues.  I don't drink at all these days, I just quit when driving a taxi.  I don't use drugs, other than the occasional prescription for an illness.  The stereotypical homeless issues aren't what led to this struggle.  I had an incredible amount of pressure from outside forces on my life, I didn't have a real strong direction at times, and I just couldn't find a "real job" for years at a time.  Nobody wants to hire a former cabbie for a "real" job.

By November of 2015, I was living with my mom, at 49 years old, for three years, after my dad's death in 2012.  We lived in a small apartment in a tiny town in North Carolina.  I couldn't get hired for any job at all, not even for a restaurant or gas station clerk.  We lived off my mom's social security check, and I drove her around for doctor's appointments, shopping, and scraped by.  The only thing I did that made any money was my weird, unique Sharpie marker art.  I'd occasionally get asked to draw a kid's name, by their mom, to put up in their room.  I'd done those drawings for my niece and nephew, and others wanted drawings.

So I decided to focus on my Sharpie marker art.  It wasn't some idea of "I want to become a famous artist."  It was simply that nothing else I was doing then gave me any chance of making any kind of living.  So I stepped up my artwork, started drawing people, and promoting my drawings on Facebook.  I had a following from doing several years of blogs, for the Old SchoolBMX freestyle world.  While I have always been a creative guy, I was never known as a visual artist.  I literally didn't have a dime when I started.  I only had some art supplies, and a $65 refurbished laptop, still running Windows XP in 2015.  I had no idea what would happen.

Because I was just scraping by for so long, and in and out of homelessness, I couldn't raise any money from family or friends to give my little business idea a real chance at "success."  But I started getting orders.  I learned how to promote my art well online.  I started selling artwork, originals that first took 22 to 25 hours each.  These days, my large drawings take 40 to 45 hours each, and I can sell them for $150-$160 pretty easily.  So I can sell art, at least until this Covid-19 shutdown hit hard.  But I was never able to make decent money for the time I was putting into my drawings.  But I HAVE been able to scrape by, as a working artist, for 4 1/2 years.  I had no idea if that was possible when I started. And now I have about 120 drawings to show for this time period.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, and the economic downturn, things have finally slowed down, though I was doing better when the virus first hit.  But I'm back in Southern California, where I want to live, and in a big metro where other options are available, now that the virus and recession have slowed down buying of almost everything.

I'm now going to head in another direction to work on earning money, though I still want to spend some time doing artwork nearly every day.  But I somehow managed to survive, though homeless much of time, as a working artist, starting from nothing, in an obscure, rural, North Carolina town.  I have very little money, but I have this body of work online, and have established myself as a unique and halfway decent visual artist.  And that's pretty cool.  I've sold about 90 originals and maybe 120 prints, over this time.  My art has sold, and is hanging on walls, on 6 of the 7 continents, a 8-12 countries, and a dozen U.S. states.  Really.  I never expected that back in 2015.

My point for this post?  I tried something that sounded ridiculous, and had a lot of success in spending time doing work I loved doing, but didn't make much money.  In crazy times, when options seem limited, you never know what is possible, until you try.

Kobe Bryant tribute art skateboard deck, one of my recent works. #sharpiescribblestyle

Paycheck mentality versus cash flow mentality

This peaceful sounding stream isn't in this blog post to make you feel calm, or help you meditate. It's here as a metaphor.  But it's a 12 hour video, so if you want to play this in the background to help you relax in these stressful times, go for it.  

Most adults in this world have a really poor understanding of money.  Our school systems were intentionally set up to not teach averagepeople about money.  But that's a whole different matter.  This is a short blog post to explain a very basic idea, since 42 million plus people have recently been laid off, though a couple million have been re-hired, which is good. 

When you work a regular job, you get a paycheck.  If we use water as a metaphor for money, a paycheck is like getting a bucket of money.  You get a set amount, and you can use all of that money, that "bucket" of water, to pay your rent, mortgage, student loans, car loans, and buy food, clothes, household goods, and other products you need to survive.  If you have some extra, you can put some in savings, or maybe invest in something like your 401k, stocks, maybe a gold coin or two.

When you're used to working for paycheck, for that bucket of water, when you lose your job, you suddenly lose that week's bucket, and the bucket you're used to getting each week or two weeks. So you nautrally think about how to get another bucket of water (money), on a regular basis.  You sign up for unemployment, so the government will give you another, smaller bucket of money every week, to get by, until you can (hopefully) find a new job. 

But if you can't find a new job, and you decide to start some small business, you need to stop thinking about buckets of money.  A good business person thinks about money as a stream, like that one in the video above.  A business tries to build a stream of money, and ultimately, several streams, or even rivers. all flowing constantly.  You want money coming in day by day, in a constant stream.  You may get on the phone or computer and sell your product to create that stream every day.  You may have an online store where you have people ordering your products online, 24 hours a day, and you ship out the orders every day.  So as a business, you have bits of money coming in, continually, not one big bucket each week.  When you need to pay a bill, as a business, to buy office supplies, pay the rent on your office, or buy products to resell, you dip a bucket into your stream of cash, you take a little water out of the stream, and pay that expense.  But the business' stream, of money, keeps flowing (if you're doing a good job running it). 

So if you want to go from being someone who had worked a typical job, working for a paycheck, for your whole life, to someone who runs a small business, you need to change how you think about money.  It's not about getting another bucket of money, a big check.  It's about creating a continuous stream of money flowing through your business.  So think about that for a while, as you plan for how to move forward in this weird, crazy, Covid-19 affected world. 

Being underestimated... Sophia Amoruso of Nasty Gal and #Girlboss

Read #Girlboss.  That's all I'm gonna say. 

Potential Side Hustles for 2020

With 40 million people newly out of work as I write this, and another million or so likely to added tomorrow, side hustles are on a lot of minds.  Here's a very smart, hard working woman, sharing her best advice on side hustles.  This video was made in January, you know, before... things got epically crazy.  But many of these should still be viable, and maybe right up your alley.

There will NOT be enough good paying jobs for the next ten years. Period. Now what?

At the beginning of June, 2017, exactly three years ago, I moved out of my mom's small apartment in Kernersville, North Carolina, where I'd been living for "free" for nearly five years.  I moved into a lean-to, yes a freaking lean-to, in the woods in Winston-Salem.  I couldn't get hired for any job whatsoever in K-ville, and had begun to sell my Sharpie art online.  I started, literally, without a dime to my name, just art supplies, and a $65 refurbished laptop. 

My mom's place was a completely toxic environment, and she couldn't handle money.  Every time I sold a drawing, I couldn't even invest the $50 I made into more supplies.  I intentionally became homeless, simply to have the chance to build my art into a business, some day.  OK, it's still not a "real" business," but I've sold 90 or so originals, and over 100 prints, and have survived mostly off those art sales, ever since. 

After three days in the woods behind Bolton Park in Winston, some guy gave me an old, six man tent.  I lived in that for about 11 months, until a few days after the Carolina lynch mob showed up, in May 2018, insisting I stop blogging.  But that's a story for another day.  Anyhow, I had been a taxi driver before that, until computer dispatching (new technology) disrupted the taxi industry (before Uber and Lyft disrupted it more). 

I'm smart, I can learn most skills quickly, I work hard and smart, but I still couldn't find a job in that area.  ANY job.  I didn't start selling art with some dream of being a famous artist some day.  I started selling it because selling my Sharpie drawings was the only thing that made me any money at the time.  Art was simply the best place for me to start.  I've had several people help me along the way, in bits and pieces, but I've never been able to raise enough money, at one time, to give my business a legitimate chance at success.  But I have sold a lot of artwork. 

Three weeks into living in the woods behind Bolton Park in Winston, I started a new blog, combining my Old School BMX freestyle stories, my Sharpie scribble style artwork, and my thoughts on the future and the economy.  That last part is what my geeky, brainiac side is fascinated with.  The second blog post I wrote, this one, on June 27th 2017, was about the long term trend of humans losing jobs to new technology.  I embedded the very same video above in that post.  I saw this long term trend of massive job loss as one of the biggest issues facing our society in the next 20 years or so.  It's part of our continuing shift from an Industrial Age society, to a fully functional Information Age society.

A study by Oxford University, in England, in 2013, concluded that about 47% of all human jobs, could be lost to new technology, "in the next 20 years."  Hey, guess what?  We are now 7 years into that 20 years.  Even worse, 40 million Americans have lost their jobs in the last 2 1/2 months.  Most of those are supposed to be temporary layoffs, but it's becoming clear maybe half will be permanent. 

This brings us to the uncomfortable truth, there simply will not be enough good paying, traditional jobs, for the next ten years, and probably 20 years.  So what do we do?  

Professor Richard Florida, known for writing the book, The Rise of the Creative Class, and several later books and articles, suggests working to make service worker jobs better paying jobs, through unions, getting Congress to raise minimum wages, and other similar measures.  That's a great idea.  But it requires American Republicans and Democrats to work together on a major issue.  I simply don't see that happening fast enough, if at all.  Those who want to work on that issue, more power to you.

In three years of thinking about this issue, the best real world solution I see is for millions of Americans to start some kind of small business of their own.  For a couple of years now, I've thought working to encourage and help millions of Americans to "create their own job," in other words, some small business or freelance gig, is the best solution. 

With the Covid-19 pandemic triggering the already weak economy to finally collapse, we're now in the place where some solution needs to happen, fast.  So if you're suddenly out of work, along with 40+ million recently laid off people, and 4 1/2 million unemployed before that, what do you do?  Start by asking yourself these questions?

What skills do you have that you may be able to do as a freelancer, side gig, or small business?

Are you willing to learn the other skills needed, and take on the responsibility, of being a small business?

Look around your town or city.  What products and services does it need right now?  Can you provide any of those?

What do you actually like to do?  You're much more likely to stick with something you enjoy (for the most part), than with something you're doing just for the money.  

 What ideas came to mind answering these questions?  Start there.

As I struggle to get my own little business going, this blog will share my thoughts, ideas, lessons learned (from successes and failures), and videos from other people, creating and thriving in small businesses.  Hope it may help you in this crazy time we find ourselves in.  Much more to come.