It's been 36 years since the first little shot of me doing BMX freestyle (sort of) in this Maurice Meyer segment from a local San Francisco TV show. That's me chasing my Skyway T/A with hoopty parts at 5:07. When this was shot at Golden Gate Park, I was just getting ready to move to Southern California to take the job my little BMX zine led to, at Wizard Publications.
Here are links to my main blogs:
epic blog post on why these sports exploded in the last 50 years
Finding new ideas and uses for old and abandoned buildings
BMX/skate/action sports/art spots
Version 3
Cool places in California
The economic downturn/chaos from September 2019 thru 2027 or so
My 20 chapter book/blog about the 2020's
links to a bunch more blogs
You can also help support my blogs and writing work on
I started my first zine in September of 1985, right after moving to San Jose, from Boise, Idaho. I had just turned 20. The clip above was shot in late June or July of 1986, when I was one of the Bay Area BMX freestyles that rode in Golden Gate Park, when I could get up to The City on the weekends. My self-publishing career started with my San Jose Stylin' zine, and continues today, December 2022, as I write this. My self-publishing includes about 40 zines, staff writer/editorial assistant/or proofreader at three BMX magazines, nearly a year as the editor/photographer of the AFA newsletter, American Freestyle, over 400 poems written (and nearly all lost), and somewhere over 2,500 total blog posts written (2007 to present), which have dragged in over 450,000 total page views. I call myself a writer, you're free to disagree, if you like.
Since my incredibly bad taxi driver blog in 2007, I've tried over 50 blog ideas, I think. My big 5 blogs, in popularity, have been FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales (2008-2009), Freestyle BMX Tales (Original version- 2009-2012), Make Money Panhandling (2010-2012), Freestyle BMX Tales (3rd version- 2015-2017), and Steve Emig: The White Bear (2017-present). Those four have pulled in over 397,000 page views. Not bad for personal blogs, mostly about Old School BMX Freestyle, art, and a little economics. I deleted the first four of those blogs when I got stupid one night, during a dark time in my life, shortly after my dad's death in 2012.
This blog, Steve Emig's Street Life, filled a spot when I had retired Steve Emig: The White Bear for a while, and tired of the four blogs I replaced it with. Eventually, I decided to go back to "White Bear," since I didn't really want to write about homelessness, which I've become far to experienced at.
One post on "White Bear," about some guys talking about fucking with me while I slept homeless, got ALL my blogs banned from linking on Facebook and Instagram, for some reason. Even the blogs I started later on got banned. One post.
So I decided to end this blog with links to a bunch of my main blogs, if you want to check out more of my stuff, after stumbling into this blog. 
The Damn Team, street performing dancers, Hollywood and Highland, where I used to sell artwork, or try to. One of my many photos taken on the streets.
