Why do you write?

In 1985, I bought an old, Royal, manual typewriter, much like the one in this video, for $15 at the San Jose Swap Meet.  I had just moved there from Boise, Idaho, and the weird, new little sport of BMX freestyle was my life.  I used that typewriter to start a zine about BMX freestyle, as a way to meet the other riders in the Bay Area.  That was the start of my writing "career."  In less than a year my zine landed me a magazine job in Southern California.  I had no idea that would happen, and it definitely wasn't my goal.  But that zine, San Jose Stylin', changed the entire course of my life.

Why do you write?  Do you just have something to say to the world?  Do you want to be a bestselling author or novelist some day?  Do you want to write a script for Hollywood and win an Oscar?  Do you want to become a famous writer?  Do you just want to be a "working writer?"  Do you think being a writer will get you laid?  Do you just love torture?  Do you want to make a fortune writing stuff that impresses that asshole professor in college who told you that you didn't have what it takes to "make it" was a professional writer?  Or do you see yourself as a conduit of information from some unknown source that needs to come into our physical world as books, movies or some other written form?  Or are you someone who has been writing for years, and you're just going to keep doing it, money or no money involved, because it's who you are?

There are a lot of reasons to want to write.  If money, fame and glory are your main reasons, you probably won't stick with it long enough to find any of those.  But if you have something to say to the world, or you keep coming up with ideas that seem like they should be part of a book or movie, you may be in it for the long haul.  

I started a zine when I'd only heard of them in a FREESTYLIN' (BMX) magazine article.  I'd never seen an actual zine.  I wanted an excuse to meet the pro BMX freestylers of the San Francisco Bay Area.  BMX freestyle, which was largely unknown to normal people in 1985, was my life.  I was 19-years-old, and couldn't afford to go to college.  I didn't really have a drive towards anything that needed a degree, so I worked at a Pizza Hut, and spent nights creating a really ugly, but pretty solid zine.  Less than a year later, FREESTYLIN' magazine (and sister mag BMX Action) offered me a job.  I didn't consider myself a writer then, I wanted to be a pro rider, a BMX freestyler, not a writer.  I didn't really click with the staff there, and got laid off after a few months (and replaced by 18-year-oldBMX/skater kid Spike Jonze).  

My next job was a year as writer/editor/photographer for a BMX freestyle newsletter.  Near the end of that, I was beginning to enjoy writing, and starting to feel like a "writer."  In the 33 years since, I've only been paid to write for two months, another short-lived BMX magazine, in 1998.  But I've written and published 40+ zines, including three of poetry.  And since 2008, I've tried 25-35 blog ideas, and written well over 2,400 blog posts.  I did that for free, writing things I, personally, wanted to write about.  Those posts pulled in over 435,000 total page views, so much of what I've written has actually been read by some people.  Along the way, over 36 years, I've become much more aware of my creative process, how I work, and how I write. 

I don't get writer's block really.  On the contrary, I'm usually exploding with far more ideas than I can sit down and write.  If I don't have a ready idea for one blog or piece, I usually have an idea for another, so I'll work on that.  Part of our influence in the 1980's BMX freestyle scene was punk rock, with it's DIY (Do It Yourself) attitude.  So self-publishing, in zines, blogs, and one ebook, made sense to me.  I've never given myself one rejection letter.  I've never really tried to get a book published by a traditional publisher, I cranked out one ebook last year, and sold a few copies.  Most of my blogging, since 2008, has been about my life in the early days of 1980's BMX freestyle.  I became an industry guy, a video producer, and knew all the pros and industry people of the first wave of what is now a worldwide sport.  So I had a lot of weird, little insider stories from that world.

Over the 36 years I've been writing pretty consistently, my reasons for writing have changed.  I consume a lot of information, and then think about it, like most avid readers do.  There came a point where I realized I needed to write my thoughts on different subjects, to let what I've learned flow back out into the world.  If I just read, I would be like a big lake with a river flowing into it, just filling up more and more and more.  But to really flow, like life itself, I needed to let my thoughts flow back out of the lake, producing my own river of content.  I'm not saying that's a good metaphor for everyone, but it works for me.  I write a lot more than I read these days, but I spent the 1990's and 2000's reading 250 or 300 books, and listening to 150 more on audiotape.  

I write because, as an organism, I get curious, I read and learn, and then think about what I've learned.  Then I pretty much NEED to write something, to put my take on that subject back out into the world.  That's what works for me, and why I will self-publish in blogs or zines, even with no money coming back, much of the time.  

That said, I've been struggling with homelessness, in and out of it, since I became a taxi driver in 1999, and I need to start making a decent living again.  I plan to do that primarily by writing, and with the unique Sharpie marker art I do, (#sharpiescribblestyle) as another creative outlet. So that's why I write.  I'm just geared to take in info, ponder about it, and write my take on this subject or that one, mostly with non-fiction, but now with some fiction as well.

So I'll ask again, why to you write?  When you find the deep reason for it, a lot of daily writing issues seem to fade away, at least to some degree.  When you figure out your own process, and work with it, a lot of the torture aspect goes away as well, at least in my experience. 

How "Fight Club" was written by Chuck Palahniuk and screenwriter Jim Uhls

I just stumbled across this one this afternoon.  Personally, I thought the Fight Club movie was one of the most original, brilliant, intense, fucked up movies I've ever seen.  Years later, I learned these was actually a book, and read that, too.  This 13 minute video gets into the nuts and bolts of how the original story, and then the movie was written.  Good stuff.  That's all I'm going to say. 

Can you predict the future?

Here's the best video I could find showing the surf at the Huntington Beach Pier.  I moved to H.B. in January 1987, and lived there most of the time until late 2008.  So when I imagine sitting on a beach, looking at the waves, this is the one I imagine.  The vast majority of days the waves are 2-4 feet high, with 5 foot sets.  The surf shown in this clip is all from big days, and barrels happen sometimes, but are really rare in H.B..  

It's a simple question:  Can you predict the future?  

Most people would instinctively say, "No," then hesitate.  You probably think it's a trick question, since I'm starting this blog post with it.  Or maybe you want more information, you want details, "How far into the future?"  

For an example, will the closest traffic light to your house turn green, at some point, about an hour from now?  You most likely said, "Yes."  If not, you might want to move to a better location, with less backed up traffic.  You just predicted the future.  How did you do that?  Traffic lights are a machine, one that works on a timed pattern.  Green, yellow, red.  So unless it's broken, that light will turn green, just about an hour from now.  You can make this judgement, predict the future of that light, based on its reliability, and on a pattern.  There's a really small possibility that the light won't keep working.  A storm or other power outage could happen, and that light could lose power, and then your prediction would be wrong.  But the odds are well in your favor, due to the light's reliability, and its steady pattern of changing, that it will turn green just about an hour from now, within a couple minutes or so.  

Now, let's step this idea far into the future.  Think about your favorite ocean beach.  It could be one you visit often, if you live on a coast.  It could be one you've been to on vacation.  It could be a beach you've seen in movies or on video.  Picture the waves on that beach.  Now, how big will the waves be, at exactly this time, 50 years from today?  Can you make a good prediction?  

Back in the late 1990's, I lived on 15th Street, in downtown Huntington Beach, for nearly 3 years.  If I wasn't working in the morning, I'd often ride my bike down to the 6th Street donut shop, right on Pacific Coast Highway, and get a donut or two, and a Diet Coke.  Then I'd cross the street, sit on the edge of the upper parking lot level, and watch the surfers, while I ate my donuts.  I never did learn to surf while living in H.B., but I went Boogie boarding a bit, and was surrounded by surfers, and surf talk.  On most days there, on the north side of the H.B. Pier, the waves would be 2-3 feet high, with 5 foot sets.  That's about average.  "Sets" are the groups of large waves that come every few minutes, usually caused by a storm hundreds or thousands of miles away.  

So if I said, "Fifty years from today, at this time, the waves on the north side of the Huntington Beach Pier will be 2-3 feet high, with 5 foot sets," there's a good chance I will be right, or pretty close.  About 60% of the time, maybe more, that's about right.  Now there could be a storm across the Pacific at that time, and the waves would be overhead, say 6-7 foot high, like some in the video above.  So my 50 year prediction would be wrong.  Or if I hedged it a little bit, and said, "In 50 years, those waves will be 2-4 feet high, with 5-6 foot sets," I'd raise my chances of being right, by expanding my target range slightly. 

So I just made a 50 year prediction that probably has a 40% to 65% chance of being right.  How?  From experience of watching the waves daily in H.B., over several years, I know the average height.  It would take some outside element, a big storm at the right time, in the right part of the ocean, to prove me wrong.  Also, waves are a regular natural cycle, they are something that keeps happening, and go up in down in size, influenced by a whole range of oceanic and atmospheric influences.  So I'm betting that the same basic cycle will exist in 50 years, because I've seen it in Huntington Beach over the 34 years since I first watched those waves.  They are pretty much the same now as they were in 1987.

So when you can find some repeating pattern or cycle, and it works over many years, you can make reasonably good predictions, well into the future.  Not perfect by any means, but reasonably good.  A forecast would be a better name.  You can forecast what the waves will be like, with a reasonable degree of certainty, barring major outside events.  

If a huge breakwater is built offshore, blocking the wave action a half mile out, then there won't be hardly any waves.  Also, climate change could alter the weather patterns, and the wave patterns, which could make the average waves larger or smaller.  But you can make a prediction, even fifty years into the future, if you have some kind of long term waves or cycles involved.  

There are waves and cycles in all kinds of things.  The weather, the seasons, ocean waves, planets revolving around the sun, stars appearing at certain times from our viewpoint, meteor showers and comets appearing at certain times, all these things go in cycles of some sort.  You get the idea.  

There are patterns, and sometimes pretty regular cycles, in the doings of animals and humans as well.  Will ducks fly south this fall?  Yep.  By and large, most of them will.  How about 20 years form now?  Yep, it's a safe bet most of them will fly south then, too.  

So you CAN make relatively good predictions, even years into the future, if you have some kind of long term cycle to work with.  Not perfect predictions, but reasonably good predictions.  You can predict a wide variety of things days, months, or years into the future, if they go in some kind of cycle or wave.  Astronomer's can tell you when Hailey's comet will come into view 2,000 years from now, to the day. Yes, there are things that could change that.  The comet, or Earth, could be hit by huge asteroids, or a black hole could sweep through and suck the Earth into oblivion.  But those are tiny, very remote possibilities.  Chances are, the astronomer's prediction will be right, 2,000 years from now, on when you can see Hailey's comet.  

But can you make 99% accurate predictions years into the future?  That seems impossible.  Think about your favorite beach again.  Look at the waves, watch them crash, and look at how big they are.  Now, 50 years from today, will there still be waves hitting that beach?  

Heh, heh, heh.

-Steve Emig

Simple and free SEO for your blog, website, online work

Promoting your own creative work, isn't selling out, it's just sharing.  If you want people to see, read, watch, or experience it, then you have to let them know.  This is a sarcastic Sharpie doodle I did a while back.  

If you do any kind of work online, like blog, write articles, upload music, a You Tube channel, an Etsy or eBay store, asmall business website, whatever, then you know those three frustrating letters. SEO.  Yep, Search Engine Optimization.  It sounds scary, even daunting.  People think the evil algorithms are out to push their online work to the edge of the cyber world and crush their dreams. 

In the last couple years, there's been a huge upswing in free speech suppression, censoring, and there are some truly evil intended algorithms in places, it seems.  But generally speaking, it's still not really hard to get your web page, whatever kind of site it is, to rise up in Google and Bing rankings.  In the last 13 years, I've started over 25 blogs, written over 2,400 blog posts, on personal blogs, and pulled in over 439,000 page views.  This blog post details that.  So while I haven't made money directly from my blogs, I have got the SEO part pretty well down.  So here's my #1 idea:

Put 20 links from a blog or other website of yours to your new blog.  

Seriously, that's it.  I started learning about SEO in 2009, and this has been my Go To starting SEO technique since then.  Most of my blogs are LOCKED in the #1 spot on the first page of Google results.  Same with Bing, though I never use Bing.  Check for yourself:  Steve Emig: The White Bear, Crazy California 43, #sharpiescribblestyle (my sharpie art hashtag,which I OWN, use "images"in the search), Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, Book 1, Block Bikes Blog, Freestyle BMX Tales.  Those are all my work.  Locked in the #1 spot.  

If you have a blog already (and you should have a personal blog for this reason alone, if no other), then just go into your blog posts.  Either go into your most popular posts, or the last 20 on your blog.  Somewhere in the blog post, simply add something like:  "Hey, I have a new blog called _____________, check it out."  Link that whole line to your new blog, website, online store, whatever.  Do that 5 or 10 times, each day, until you've got 20 links from your blog to your new site.  

Then just let it set, and keep working on the new site.  As the "spiders," or whatever they are, crawl through the internet's data, they'll see those links, and your new site will rise slowly up the ranks.  You can usually be on the first page of Google results in 1-2 weeks.  It usually takes 1-3 months to hit the #1 spot, depending how entrenched the current #1 is.  You may bounce around the top 3 or 4 spots for a while.  But if you keep blogging, or updating your website, you'll eventually LOCK into the #1 spot. 

If you don't have a website or blog to link FROM, to your new site.  Go to Blogger, and start a personal blog.  It takes about 3 minutes to start a blog.  It takes a little time to pick a theme, and do the basic design.  If you have something you want to blog about, then do that theme for your blog.  If you're just starting a blog to use for backlinks, then do 20 posts of something.  "My 20 biggest fishing catches."  "My 20 favorite vacation photos."  "The 20 best photos of my cat" (kid, aardvark, llama, '57 Chevy, dogsled, whatever).  Take the time to create a Blogger blog with 20 posts, and put a photos and 1 or 2 sentences about the photo, on each post.  That's all you need.  If you don't know how to do any part of that, go to YouTube, and look up a How-to video.  That's how I learned this shit, and I was a digitally retarded, and a Luddite back in 2008, when I got started. 

Once you do this, you have a blog with 20 posts sitting out there on the interwebs.  Anytime you need to promote a new site, put one link from each post on that blog to your new site, over 2-4 days.  Then wait.  That's it.  The algorithms go to work... for you.  Seriously, that's the biggest part of SEO... for anything.  

As you do more blog posts or update your new website, link to it from your various social media pages, and wherever else.  More links help, as time goes on.  But 20 good backlinks, from your own site, is all you need to start getting a site moving up the ranks.  Now get to it.  You're welcome. 

There is no Failure: The Five Levels of Throwing a Pot on a Wheel

 

Here's  good video showing how you throw a cool shaped vase on a potter's wheel.  When I was in high school, my friend Darrin and I always sat down at the wheel aiming to throw something like this.  It didn't always work.

In my junior year at Boise High School, my best friend Darrin took pottery class.  I didn't.  Drafting was my "easy A" class that year.  Darrin got really into pottery.  By the second semester, the teacher would let him go into the pottery room at lunch and throw pots when no one else was there.  Being his best friend, I started tagging along.  We'd talk about whatever was on our minds as I watched him throw a pot.  

After a few days, he showed me how to knead the air bubbles out of a lump of clay, and I started messing around, building things out of clay on a table, as he threw pots on a wheel.  In another week or so, he showed me the basics of throwing a pot, starting with how to put the clay on the wheel, center it, and push the hole in the center.  I got that down. Within a couple of weeks, I began throwing small pots myself, usually tearing them off the wheel, and tossing them in the pug mill.  That's a machine where we threw extra clay, and things that didn't work.  The machine recycled it into new clay.  

By the end of our junior year, I was throwing pots at lunch that I could pass off as mediocre first year pottery student pots.  Since I wasn't in the class, and hadn't paid the materials fee, technically I wasn't supposed to do that.  But I took home a few small pots before I even took the class.  I signed up for pottery my senior year, and Darrin and I often went in at lunch to throw extra pots.  We both wound up making whiskey jugs that we sold to mountain men for $5 each.  Those were the guys who dressed up as old time mountain men, and had big rendezvous up in the mountains, where they'd throw tomahawks, shoot muzzle loading rifles, drink whiskey from handmade jugs, and have a good ol' time for the weekend.  

As Darrin and I talked about pottery, we thought up more ideas to try.  We started sketching ideas for different shapes of vases in our school notebooks.  Every day when we sat down at the wheel, we had some really cool vase in our head.  That was our goal.  But clay seems to have a mind of its own at times.  Sometimes we'd pull the cylinder up too high, it would get wobbly, and fall over.  Sometimes it would get too wet, and collapse.  Other times we'd just make a movement that would send the pot off center, and screw it up.  

No matter the outcome, it was always fun to sit down at the wheel to throw.  Sometimes we ended with a cool pot, sitting on the wheel to dry, and later fire and glaze. Sometimes we'd completely screw up, and scrape all the clay off the wheel with a little piece of fishing line, cutting the lump remaining clear from the wheel. We came to the conclusion that there was no failure when throwing pots.  If we screwed up, there was a next step, and a step after that.  Here are our classifications of the results of a sitting at the potter's wheel.

One- A vase.  Bottlenecks were the hardest for us to throw well, and one with a great looking profile was the goal.

Two- A spittoon.  Not as cool as a vase, but something we could glaze and take home.

Three- A bowl.  Much lamer than a spittoon, but if it was a decent size, it could still be something to fire, glaze, and take home.

Four- A ashtray.  Lots of people still smoked in the 80's.  Not hard to make, but still something to take home, and we could always find a smoker who wanted a free ashtray.

Five- A learning experience.  Even if we wound up with nothing, and scraped all the clay off the wheel, it still didn't feel like a failure.  It was just fun to sit down and throw, even when there was nothing to show for it.

In the years after, when I got really into BMX freestyle, along with my skater friends, it was the same thing.  Even if we didn't invent or land a new trick, it was still fun to get out and ride or skate.  I think the same idea applies to all creative work.  Some days you wind up with something really cool, some days you wind up with a learning experience. Most days you wind up with something in between.  

But it was still good to sit down and write, draw, paint, play music, freestyle, skate, snowboard, or just do something creative.  As worst, it's always a learning experience.  If you go at creative work with this attitude, you spend a lot less time beating yourself up when things don't work out exactly as you planned.  You just call it a learning experience, and move on, to try and create again.

What would you most like to read?

 Over the last week or so, I've been trying to figure out what to focus on.  I've written over 2,400 blog posts  in the last 12 1/2 years or so.  A lot of people have read them.  Haven't made a dime off the writing itself, but I  built a following in the Old School BMX freestyle world, and sold a bunch of my Sharpie art to people in that world.  

But life has brought me back to the area where I first decided to "get serious" about writing, and try to write "something great," 30 years ago.  Now I have a pretty good grasp of how I write (and create in other ways), and why I write.  It became obvious it's time to move into a different part of my writing life.  

These times in between projects are the weirdest.  I'm kind of drifting on multiple levels, and this is a pivot away from trying to make money with my Sharpie art, to working more on writing.  As I thought about what direction to head next, I kept thinking of one of the best novels about writing I've read.  Seymor, an introduction, by J.D. Salinger.  I won't totally give it away, but there's a part where the older brother asks the younger, "What would you most want to read?  Write that.  

So that's what I've done the last 2 or 3 days.  I wanted to find what I was actually excited about writing.  An idea, a concept came together.  I have a direction again.  Feels good.  More on this project later.

When you write a book... meme

 The one meme I've made  about writing.  Here are a few others I've made, not about writing.

We've all had that roommate with the crazy girlfriend in our 20's...

Check out my Pinterest board

 Me stemming across a gap to shoot video of Keith Treanor and Alex Leech in 1991, as an independent BMX video producer guy. 

I'm more of a writer than anything else, and have been for 35 years.  My Sharpie Scribble Style art has been keeping me barely alive for 5 years, but I'm pivoting to focus more on writing now.  Check out my Pinterest board,  Steve Emig. 

I'm a writer/blogger/artist/ Old School BMX freestyler who does all my own stunts.  Flipping off my bike, over the handlebars, into some crash pads, 2001. 

Another view of the flips over the handlebars.  That's me, upside down, in the middle of the frame.  Those crash pads are ten feet long.  Just goofing around.

Full Circle-where the blog name comes from

This is South Weddington Park in 2021, now right next to the Universal City bus/Red Line train station, built several years ago, and hidden behind a wall.  In 1991, I used to sit on the little hill on the left, next to my freestyle bike, and write whatever came into my mind.  This is the spot where, 30 years ago, I first decided to try to "become a real writer."  

My first "real" TV industry job, working as a production assistant on the 1991 Supercross and monster truck TV series, got me commuting from Huntington Beach up to Studio City, just over the hill from Hollywood.  What started as a day of logging footage of monster truck driver interviews, turned into a 3 or 4 month production job.  When that ended, I got a job as a video duplication guy in a small business in North Hollywood, and moved into a sketchy, ghetto apartment nearby, where I rented a bed by the week.  I rented a bed, $40 a week, not the whole room.  I worked second shift on that job, and began to wander the east end of the San Fernando Valley on my BMX bike during the day, since I didn't have a car.  

That was nearly six years after I published my first BMX freestyle zine in September 1985. I started San Jose Stylin' to meet other BMX freestyle riders in the San Francisco Bay Area, after moving from Boise to San Jose with my family.  I was a year out of high school, and working at Pizza Hut and riding my freestyle bike most of every day, hoping to be a pro rider some day.  Instead, 11 issues of my San Jose Stylin' zine landed me a job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, a month after my 20th birthday.  At age 20, without ever taking a college course, I was proofreading two magazines.

That led to editing a newsletter the next year, which led to video work, which led to working at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company.  That closed down in 1990, and I self-produced a freestyle video that year, The Ultimate Weekend, which lost me a bunch of money.  But I started doing some freelance video work.  A former Unreel co-worker called me one day, and got me a job working in the production office of the supercross and monster truck shows that year.  Four years of me working in the BMX industry, it "died," and I became a video duplicator guy, and TV crew guy. 

I never thought of myself as a writer while while publishing my zines, working at the magazine, and when I began working at the newsletter.  But I came to realize I liked writing at the newsletter, and was pretty good at it.  Then I started dating a singer in a local rock band, who wrote her own songs.  So I started trying to write song lyrics for her.  They sucked, but she got me started thinking of myself as an actual "writer."  

So it was nearly five years after my first paid writing job that I began to really want to become a "real writer."  I began to ride my bike to Weddington Park in the mornings, to escape my crazy apartment and roommates.  I sat in the shade of these small trees, and just started writing whatever came into my mind.  I wanted to write a "great novel," or screenplay, or something great.  But mostly I wrote crap, journal type stuff about my day to day life.  

But then, after a couple weeks of that, every once in a while, a cool idea would pop into my head, and I'd write it out for two or three pages.  So my real journey as an intentional prose writer began at Weddington Park, in 1991.  Somehow, my crazy life landed me back up in this area, though homeless, in 2019.  A couple months ago, I realized it had been 30 years, and a crazy journey in both life and writing, and I somehow came full circle, back to the Weddington Park, Studio City/North Hollywood area.  But now I understand much more about why I write, how my process works, and have a bunch of writing, if not paid writing, under my belt. 

I still have never published a "real" print book.  I did publish a 263 page ebook about BMX in early 2021, and sold a 50 copies.  But I've written and put out about 30 zines, 25+ blogs, over 2,400 blog posts, and landed well over 435,000 online page views since those days writing in the park in 1991.  I've learned a lot about writing, life, and my creative process in the last 30 years.  I've learned a lot more about why I write, as well. 

Now, that I've come full circle in 30 years, this blog is about my ideas and things I've learned in that last 30-35 years of writing, and life in general.  So that's where the name comes from. 
 

Why writers and artists often want to be "catchers in the rye"

This is me, Steve Emig, blogger, artist, and self-published writer for 36 years now, as well as fat, homeless guy, last night (8/21/2021), where I sleep, on the sidewalk, in the San Fernando Valley.  I woke up thinking about what I should really be doing with my life right now.  What should I really be writing?  This blog was the answer that came to me.  

A huge number of us had to read The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, in high school.  I don't know if this is still happening, but in Generation X and much of the Baby Boomer generations, this was a standard novel to have to read in school.  Most of us were told the book had been banned in some parts of the country, and even thrown on fires in book burnings, in some cases.  So we wanted to actually read it, just to see what the ruckus had been about.  First published as a serial in the 1940's, then as a novel in 1951, the novel caused an uproar for the reclusive writer, J.D. Salinger.  In Catcher in the Rye, main character Holden Caufield is a teenager struggling with issues many teenagers struggle with.  That's a theme that often riles up some people.

In one part he's talking about what seems to be a kid's rhyme, "Catcher in the Rye," which is where the title of the novel seems comes from.  It actually comes from an old Scottish poem from 1782, by Robert Burns, "Comin' Thro the Rye."  Holden explains his vision of this rhyme as him being an older kid near a big cliff.  Little kids are playing in the field, a field of rye (it's a grain, like wheat), and when the kids stray towards the edge of the big cliff, Holden saw himself as the Catcher in the Rye, he would grab them before they fell off the cliff.  Catch them before they went over the edge, and guide them back away from the edge.

That's the metaphor I got while reading the book, a person who is kind of detached from the rest of the world, but a sort of unofficial guardian.  When someone gets too close to the edge, in life itself, the Catcher in the Rye goes over and guides them away from the edge, and back into the game they were playing.  That part of the book struck me, because I, too, wanted to be a "Catcher in the Rye," in that sense.  I wanted to save people from falling off the edge, into suicide, or other "cliffs" in life, where people go off the edge.  

In the 35 plus years since I read that book high school, I've talked to a couple other people, also people who survived rough and abusive childhoods, who wanted to be "Catchers in the Rye" in life.  I came to think that many of the kids grew up with lots of issues from whatever abuse they survived as children, went on to want to do something helpful as adults.  To be sure, people drawn to to be "Catchers," in this sense, are pretty fucked up as teens usually, and usually well into adulthood.  But I've also found a brutal honesty in these people.  And often a drive towards artistic or creative work.  We know as young people, that we're fucked up, and there's usually some kind of drive to "straighten our shit out," "get our heads screwed on straight," or whatever phrase you want to use.  

I think this is part of why so many people from tough backgrounds are drawn to writing, and the arts in general.  In much of artistic and creative work, you can have a positive effect on other people.  In writing, music, visual arts, and many other forms of creative work, there's chance to make other people laugh, smile, or just help them cope during a rough time.  That's one chance to be "Catcher's in the Rye," in a sense.   

The other main way is just being friends with someone.  Stepping in when you see someone struggling in a way where you can help.  "Hey, you OK?  Cause you look like shit right now?  What's going on?"  Those talks can really bring people back from the edge of the cliff.  Sometimes.  It can also push people closer to the cliff, depending where their mindset is, and how you go about it.  It's always dicey.

I'm a fat, homeless, 55-year-old loser to most of the people who see me.  But in the 36 years I've been writing, and doing other creative work, I know my writing has helped at least a few people back away from the cliff.  I know this because they've told me so.  That's powerful to know.  To know your creative work, of some kind, has had that effect.  I've also talked personally to a handful of people who were near suicidal, and in a few cases, very close to suicide, possible even homicide.  It's dicey, you never know if it's going to work, when trying to talk someone down, "back from the cliff".  But once committed, you have to see people as far as you can in that moment.  

I've talked to a female friend who was a long time cutter, as she had a blade to her wrist on the other end of the phone call.  When we hung up, I knew she was in a somewhat better place, but I didn't know if she'd sink back deep into depression over night.  I hung up not knowing if I'd see her again a couple of different times. 

I've also talked to a couple people, complete strangers, who were on the verge of potentially committing crimes to me, in one case, as a taxi driver), just to go back to the prison they'd just got out of.  They came out to an overwhelming situation, and I turned out to be the person there, in the moment, trying to defuse the situation.  We all get into these situations, to some degree, at some point.  My cutter friend, who was 18 then, has a successful career now, 20-some years later.  We've gone our separate ways, but she's doing well.  As for the guys fresh out of prison, they got through the tense spot where I talked to them, and were in a better place when we parted ways.  On those occasions where I was the "Catcher in the Rye," things ended well.  

But part of the reason I went to an effort in those cases, was because of a time in 1989, when I pro athlete I knew, wanted to talk, because he was struggling.  I didn't know him well, but enough to talk to him.  I was kind of patronizing, and didn't realize just how down he was.  I pretty much blew him off.  Maybe I could have made a difference that day, maybe not.  But I didn't really try.  A year later, still struggling, he flipped out and murdered a young woman he knew.  Many of you will figure out who I'm talking about.  I'll leave his name out of this.  There were lots of other people, over a year's time, who also could have helped him.  But I didn't, when the chance presented itself.  

That was a hard lesson.  So I've tried to do a better job in the years since.  He's still in prison for his crime.  I was one of many people who might have helped, and I didn't.  That failure dug deep, and has changed my actions a lot since. 

On the other side of the coin, I've had plenty of my own struggles, and and there have been a lot of people who have helped me, in many ways, along my path, pushing me "back from the cliff."  Sometimes we have the chance to be a Catcher in the Rye, and sometimes we need one ourselves.  The point?  Try to keep people away from the edge of that cliff, when we can, in the ways we can.  None of us can help everyone.  But each of us can help some people, in some ways, in some situations.  

I've learned to try and do the best I can, when I'm drawn into those situations.  I've also learned that I can't help everyone, and not to beat myself up, forever, if I can't help someone in some situation.  The point is to try, when you can, in the ways you can.  Also, accept help when you need it, in the ways that make sense.  Don't let people push you into other trouble, but when legit help comes along, use it.  

My point in making this the first post in this new blog is to throw the idea out there that artists and creative people, in many cases, are often drawn to be "Catchers in the Rye," in some sense, with their creative work.  There's a reason you are drawn to the work you are drawn to, even if everyone else thinks it's stupid.  If there's a really strong pull to a project, I've found there's usually a good reason for that, your work will likely have a positive effect, somewhere down the line.  You may never know it, though.  That's part of the the way things work out, over time.  But sometimes, if you do good creative work, someone will tell you that your work had a profound effect on them.  And it feels really good to know that, as an artist, writer, or any other kind of creative person.  It also makes you realize that possibility in future writing or other creative work. 

So there's an idea to think about, especially if you're a creative person, whether you get paid for the work, whether it's really popular, or not.  The potential is there.  

So that's my nice, sweet, light, thought to start a brand new blog.  There's a lot more to come in this blog, stuff like this, and some lighter more entertaining stuff, too, probably.  We'll see where this leads.  

If you haven't read "Catcher in the Rye," I'd recommend it.  Salinger's stories about the Glass family, are great reads, too, better, that The Catcher in the Rye, in my opinion.  Those are Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey (good for actors), Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction (EVERY writer should read this).   Now go ponder this a bit, then create something cool.