Rudy has gone on to narrate all three of my novels, and as anyone who has listened can attest, he’s a natural-born voice actor. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d be good, of course. He’s a terrific actor, hilarious improv comedian and all around awesome stage presence. But to pull off three dialogue-heavy books—three hundred thousand words of talking in different tenses, styles and accents—is a serious feat.

In addition to my three novels, Rudy narrated Flamingo Thief, a novel written by my grandmother, Susan Trott. While she published fourteen novels in her career, she only has one other audiobook, The Man on the Mountain Top, and the main narrator is Stanley Tucci. So Rudy is in good company.

I met Rudy in fourth grade and we quickly became friends through a shared love of Will Smith albums, Harry Potter, and skateboarding. We skated and/or nerded out on skate videos pretty much everyday until the end of high school. His part in Sk8Helena (2001-ish) by Justin Corbett is infamous around town. Rudy eventually moved to New York City where he performed with the Upright Citizens Brigade for over a decade. Today, Rudy lives in LA where he is raising his son with his equally talented wife Liz Noth (who also helped narrate Off Clark). He is currently working for a brewery, playing semi-serious baseball, and squeezing in voice acting work in his closet studio, among other creative endeavors. We still skate together every chance we get and Rudy continues to have a much better heelflip than I ever will. I asked Rudy about his experience recording audiobooks so far, here’s his take:

WR: What’s the hardest part about recording at home?

RB: The hardest thing was not having an actual soundproof booth. So I’d find a time to start reading when I thought I could really get a lot done. And then immediately the leaf blowers start going, or a helicopter starts flying overhead, and I just had to pack it in for the day.

What was the most annoying sentence I made you say?

I can’t remember specific annoying sentences, but there were definitely a handful of times where I had to edit out me cursing your name for a word or sentence that I had trouble enunciating. To be honest, I probably blocked them out from my memory.

Do you have a favorite of the books you’ve narrated?

I think Top of Mason was my favorite to record, probably because it was the first one and it was just exciting to be doing it, period. Plus, I remember really getting into the hill bomb scene, and it was the first time I just felt myself flowing in the “booth.”

Did any characters you read particularly stick with you?

I think recording Richie for Off Clark was the most fun. I just knew how he should sound right away, and it was really easy to slip into his voice. Apparently paranoid stoner is an easy place for me to go.

Any characters you dreaded?

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, but man, it was hard to do a British accent for Mo for an entire book. I don’t think I’m particularly good at it, and to be honest, it’s not my favorite type of accent to hear.

What advice would you give aspiring audiobook narrators?

I would say do more research ahead of time than I did. And even when you do it, be prepared for a lot of trial and error. Give yourself plenty of breaks and realize that sometimes you’re just not in the right headspace to record.

Any voice acting heroes or recommendations?

I grew up on Jim Dale reading the Harry Potter series and Tim Curry doing the Series of Unfortunate Events, and Jim Dale just was so good at the characters voices being subtle, but switching right into them pretty flawlessly. And Tim Curry could just deliver a dry, funny line perfectly. I also like a lot of voice actors in the animated comedy world, and the first one that comes to mind is Maya Rudolph in Big Mouth.

What have you noticed about listening to audiobooks since you became an audiobook narrator?

Honestly, I haven’t actually listened to an audiobook in years. I actually prefer to just read them, and most of my listening is podcasts, which I know is not actually very cool. Also, most of the audiobooks I’ve listened to were road trip listens and that’s kind of tough with a five year old.

What drives you crazy about other narrators?

The thing that immediately turns me off is when a reader goes really hard on characters’ voices, like makes a really big choice and is trying to act the hell out of it, which rarely works. Sometimes it does, and when it works, it’s great. But if that’s not working, it’s a big swing and a miss, and I find it pretty unlistenable. I’d rather somebody just do a subtle version of a character and not try to bring them to life. At the end of the day it’s somebody reading a book to you instead of you reading the book. So I still like the reader to leave some of this up to my or the listener’s imagination.

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Interested in making your own audiobook or podcast? This rest of this article focuses on the tools you’ll need to process audio in Adobe Audition. Audiobook hosting platforms have very specific quality control requirements, and while the process is kind of a pain, the listening experience makes it worthwhile. Keep reading for a step-by-step guide, along with suggestions for how to upload, publish and invoice.

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Rory Gladwell doesn’t recognize him until he’s almost at her register, one customer away. She double takes, then triple takes, then asks the customer she’s attending to tell her their order one more time.

“Oat milk latte, with two expresso shots,” the regular with the orange beard says.

“All of our ess-presso drinks come with two shots,” Rory says, her response automated. The bearded man should know this. She shouldn’t have to repeat the phrase or correct his pronunciation. He’s not European, he doesn’t get a pass.

“Great,” he says, but Rory is only thinking about the person in line behind him. She knows his face as if he’s a regular, but she’s only ever seen him on the internet and in print magazines. His slender, handsome face. Bushy eyebrows and perfect skin. Three years ago, she literally pinned his portrait onto the wall of her dorm room. Right next to Harry Styles and Timothée Chalamet. And now he’s in her coffee shop. Rory blacks out during his order. She can barely make eye contact. Luckily there’s a machine recording what he says. Rory is merely the input bot, tapping her fingers. The barista will do the Lord’s work. He’s with a friend, a tall, skinny white guy she recognizes from podcast interviews and behind-the-scenes Instagram and TikTok videos. He’s the cameraman, the man who made the man—her favorite man. Timothée and Harry have nothing on Deon fucking Magnus.

“I’ll have a cold brew, please,” the filmer says next. Larry is his name. Larry Thompson. He’s a genius. The fangirl in her must be showing because she hasn’t asked their names but has carried out their orders with their names attached. Surely she’s blushing. They have to know she knows who they are.

“Your drinks will be ready around the corner,” Rory says, another automated response. She’s conscious of the NPC-like phrases shooting from her mouth, but she can’t hold them back. The professional thing to do would be to strike up a conversation, but she can’t.

“Yo, this is kinda random,” Larry says. “But you skate, right?”

OK, now there’s no way her face isn’t a bursting explosion of red. Her cheeks physically hurt.

“Yeah,” she says, fiddling with the iPad. She flips it toward Larry, then flips it back. He’d already signed and tipped. Generously.

“I’ve seen your videos,” Larry says. “You rip.”

Did he really just fucking say that?

“Yo, Deon. This is that girl I was telling you about!”

Deon looks up from his phone and smiles at her. It’s a different smile than the one he just used to order his whatever-the-hell he ordered. Different from the smiles she’s seen a million times on the internet. This one is directed at her, meant for her.

“The heel-fifty girl?”

“That’s me,” she says. She can’t believe this is happening.

“You rule,” Deon says. His voice is soft and sweet, different than he sounds on podcasts.

“We just drove up from LA,” Larry says. “Frisco for the weekend. I was just showing Deon that spot you skate, the new one, right? Where is that?”

He’s referring to a recent video she posted of herself skateboarding that went viral. She likes to think it’s because of the execution of the trick, a heelflip frontside 50-50 on a brand new hubba inside a school in West Portal, but she knows the six hundred thousand views have more to do with her outfit and the fact that she went braless that day.

“It’s on the other side of The City,” Rory says. “That hubba is so perfect, ohmygod. You’d love it.”

She hates herself for saying “ohmygod” like that. Totally unnecessary. Rory smiles, but she’s pretty sure Deon isn’t even paying attention anymore. Larry is staring at her. He’s probably thirty-something. She’d never really thought about his age before. Could be twenty or could be fifty. He’s just a part of Deon, an accessory human. Deon’s twenty-six, only three years older than she is, but having followed his career like a desperate groupie for the last ten years, he seems much older.

“You down to show us that spot? And come skate it with us? We’re planning on skating Clipper too, but that could be a good warm up spot.”

“I’ve still never skated Clipper!” Rory says.

“You should come!” Deon says. He’s just picked up his drink. “That would be dope.”

“Yeah, for sure,” Rory says. Her chest is tight, face flushed anew. This can’t be happening.

“Perfect,” Larry says. “Cool if I hit you on Instagram? We can come pick you up or we can just meet you at the spot.”

“Let’s meet at the spot,” Rory says. She likes the confidence in her tone, the independence. She has no idea where it’s coming from.

“Cool,” Larry says. “I’ll hit you up.”

“Who is he again?” Rory’s grandmother asks. Rory called her the second her shift ended. This invitation feels like the biggest step toward her dream, the “in” she’s been waiting for, and she needs to share it with someone who might actually care. “Is he the Black one or the Mexican one?”

“C’mon, Nonna, I made you watch all his videos,” she says. “He’s from Seattle. Black, yeah. Also Thai, but it doesn’t matter. Point is, I’ve been obsessed with him since I was like thirteen. He’s all I used to talk about.”

“That’s right,” her grandmother says, lying. She doesn’t remember.

“Anyway, I’m going to skate with him and his filmer tomorrow. He’s, like, one of the best filmers in skateboarding. He basically turned Deon into the famous skater he is today.”

“How?” Nonna asks. An astute question Rory isn’t sure how to answer.

“It’s just, like, the way he films . . . and edits. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. He just makes people look really f-ing cool.” She barely remembers to self-edit. Nonna hates swearing, especially the f-word. She wouldn’t hang up on her if she let it slip, but she’d tune out.

“That’s wonderful, honey,” she says. “I’m so proud of you.”

Rory hesitates to ask how Nonna is doing, fearing the question will turn the conversation dark. She knows Nonna isn’t doing well. The symptoms were back yesterday, stronger than ever, and they couldn’t have gone away already. Before she has a chance to ask, Nonna says, “Your father wrote.”

“Did he?” Rory says. “Still alive, huh? How unfortunate.”

“Ror-ry, honey. That’s not kind.”

“C’mon, Nonna. You know I’m joking. But you also know I don’t like hearing about Dad. He’s your son, but I don’t consider him my—”

“Don’t say it, please, Rory. Just don’t, not today.”

Considering the events of the day and the good mood she’s in, Rory decides she can resist her usual spitefulness. Even if it’s indirectly toward the man who ruined her life.

“How is he doing?”

“Oh, not too well. But well enough. He sends his love, of course. You should know he’s thinking of you, every day. He wrote a great deal, but . . . well, I’ll let you read it some time if you’d like. He’s reading loads, he says. Scripture, and other books. It’s good to hear. Warmed my heart, it did.”

Rory stops walking and looks up at the sky, holding back tears. She imagines Nonna sitting on her worn wingback. There was a day it was red, supposedly, but Rory never knew it like that. Sun and several decades turned it to the faded orange it is today. She has to end the call, otherwise there will be real tears, and guilt, and pain. She doesn’t want to feel that today.

“I had a good feeling about today,” Nonna says. “You saw the date, right?”

“No, what is it?”

“June twentieth. Six two zero. And the year makes it a palindrome. I don’t much care for the sixes, you know that. But palindromes are good luck. Six two zero two zero two two six. Both ways! Very special.”

“Oh, the bus is coming,” Rory lies. “I gotta go. I love you, Nonna.”

“I love you too, dear. I’m so proud of you.”

At home, Rory Googles care facilities in Louisville again. If she wasn’t currently living in one of the most expensive places on Earth, she’d consider searching the Bay Area. But there’s no way she could afford anywhere in California. And that’s why she promised Nonna nothing longer than a year. One year of going for the thing she’s loved since she was seven years old. Really going for it, to make it her job. A career! And if after one year it doesn’t work out, she’ll move back to get a real job and help her grandmother for as long as she’s needed. The person who has taken care of her since she was twelve years old. She’s eight months in. Only four to go.

She picked San Francisco because it was once the mecca. Some say it has lost its meccaness, but Rory thinks it’s back. A distorted mecca, sure. A grungier, more alcoholic mecca. But the feeling she got during her California tour before the move was that the energy was strong here in The City, much stronger than LA or San Diego. New York wasn’t an option for her, what with their winters. Barcelona was too far away. It had to be California, and it had to be a city where she didn’t need a car. If she was going to give herself one year, a clean three hundred and sixty five days, every one of them had to count. So far, most days only counted for serving coffee to rich people—and sometimes super not rich people—at the only job she could lock down that afforded the flexibility she needed. Flexibility like asking for a Saturday off, last minute, so she can go skateboarding.

“Sure,” her manager, Mike, said. “Get it, girl.”

Rory knows he has a crush on her. He covers her shifts at the register whenever she needs him to, but she rarely ever plays this hand unless it’s absolutely necessary. She doesn’t want to “owe” him anything. But this is different. A session with Deon and Larry! And Rory, a recent, still pretty clueless, transplant, will be their guide? It all feels like a daydream. Too surreal to let herself believe it’s really happening.

That night, as Rory eats Chinese food in her kitchen, Larry DM’s her and asks if she has a shoe sponsor. She responds with a no. Larry DM’s back, quickly, asking her shoe size. She tells him that she’s a seven in women’s. Unable to resist, she asks why. “Any interest in trying out Deon’s new shoe?” he asks. “Um, ya totally!” She types. Then retypes. “Yeah, for sure,” then retypes again. “Totally!” Sent. She’s so embarrassed. But Larry responds with a thumbs-up emoji, so she lets herself breathe. Her roommate, Fiona, sits down next to her on the couch as she sets her phone down.

“Who you texting?” Fiona asks. She’s the most annoying of her roommates. The other two are quiet girls who work in tech. She often wonders how much money those two are able to tuck away each month. Like Rory, Fiona works in service and also barely scrapes together her seven hundred dollars for rent. It’s a cramped, two-bedroom Mission Street apartment that has passed between so many people, what’s left are four strangers coexisting and occasionally conversing. Not so different from the dorms her first two years at UofL. But moldier and sketchier with lots more street noise.

“Making plans for tomorrow,” Rory says. “I’ll be out early, it looks like.”

“Better tell Juliet,” Fiona says. “You know how hard she goes on Friday nights.”

While quiet during the week, Juliet, who she shares a room with, lets loose on the weekend. Rory’s hope is that this Friday, like the last two, she won’t come home.

“It’ll be fine,” Rory says. “What are you up to tonight?”

“I had a shitty week at the restaurant, I can’t imagine talking to people or being social. I’m probably just going to keep bingeing Gilmore Girls. I can make room in my bed if you want to watch?”

Rory has had the Gilmore Girls conversation with Fiona twice already, and she doesn’t want to do it again. Either Fiona has forgotten the details, or she’s just that callous.

“Thanks, but I’m just gonna go to bed early.”

“No worries,” Fiona says. “See you . . . well, probably not in the morning. And my shift ends hella late tomorrow night. So, see you when I see you, I guess.”

Fiona doesn’t close the door to her room and Rory hears the show come on. She takes out her headphones and plugs them into her phone, quickly finding a skate video to watch before the theme song comes on. She can’t risk hearing it.

Deon and Larry are late, but that’s OK. Warming up always takes a long time, especially when she has jitters like this. That’s why Rory never bothered with contests. In those environments, with all those eyes on her, the jitters never go away. She hopes they will today.

“Yo, sorry we’re so late,” Larry says, when they eventually arrive. “Deon wanted to go to this brunch spot, and it took forever.”

“No worries,” she says. The morning is foggy and cold, but after an hour of skating by herself—making three straight eights, and almost a straight sixteen—she’s ready to take off her sweatshirt. Something about the move seems too forward, though, now that they’re next to each other in the schoolyard. She doesn’t want to come off like she was waiting for them to arrive to take her sweatshirt off. It’s a light hoodie, and she planned on wearing it for the whole day. But she knows the attention the shirt she’s wearing under it draws when she gets sweaty like this, and decides to wait.

“Where’s the hubba?” Larry asks.

“It’s over in the back of the school,” Rory says. “Want me to show you?”

“Fuck yeah,” Larry says. “That thing doesn’t seem real. Oh by the way, here’s a pair of Deon’s new shoe, if you want to try them.”

“Are you serious?” she says.

“Yeah, for sure! Let us know what you think.”

“Thank you!”

She removes the hoodie and puts on the shoes as Larry sizes up the hubba. She feels a little weird, since just last month she received a free pair of Vans from some guy on the internet who says he works for the company. That felt like a stepping stone toward sponsorship. Pre-flow, if not a full on flowship. She likes skating Vans, has always skated Vans, but this Lissé shoe isn’t really that different from a Vans. They’re comfortable and fit perfectly.

Deon eventually shows up, and his famous ADD energy sends him straight to the top of the stairs. He’s talking to Rory and Larry, but it’s more of a rambling stream of consciousness. The questions he asks don’t need answers. The ideas he ponders aren’t discussions. Soon he’s skating the hubba with the relaxed ease he’s famous for. Larry takes out his iPhone and films everything he does. Rory isn’t sure what to do. Jump in and skate with him, or continue skating flatground off to the side? Really, all she wants to do is watch her hero do his thing.

“Man, that heelflip fifty you did on this is so sick,” Larry says. He’s walked over to where Rory is standing, where he left his camera bag. Opening it up, he begins screwing on lenses, attaching batteries and extending tripods. Noting the particulars of his gear, Rory does some quick math and starts to feel a little anxious about the number. They’re alone in this schoolyard with a casual sixty thousand dollars in camera gear.

“Thanks,” she says. “It was fun.” Lies, she thinks. Such lies. That trick wasn’t fun at all. It was torture. But she did it, after a battle, and made it look easy. A trick Deon, if he was regular-footed, could do in his sleep. In fact, he could probably do it switch in a couple of tries.

“You think you got that on Clipper?” Larry asks.

“No way,” Rory says. “I mean, I haven’t skated it before, but Clipper is huge. This thing is baby.”

“No, you got that,” Larry says. “Let’s get that today.”

He’s holding up the camera with the fisheye lens. It’s an 8k Sony that retails for twenty-five grand, the lens and accessories probably add up to another five. Thirty thousand dollars in his hand as he winks and then rolls away from her. Skating over to Deon, he absentmindedly fiddles with some settings. Two tripod angles follow, and eventually there are three cameras on the hubba. Deon rifles through a handful of basics and Rory eventually asks if she can skate with him.

“Of course,” he says. She feels his eyes on her differently, now that she’s taken off the hoodie, but she pretends not to notice. They take turns skating the hubba. She grinds it, tailslides it, and tries a nosegrind. Her legs won’t stop shaking. She’s not on her A game. They both cheer her on and Larry films everything. Deon throws out two impossibly difficult tricks, but doesn’t come close to landing them. Flails. He doesn’t even try to try, and Rory wonders why.

“All right, I’m ready to hit Clipper,” Deon says after sitting down. Rory is still battling the nosegrind.

“OK, I’m down,” she says, panting. Rory is not actually down. Far from it. With her inability to confidently skate this small, seven-stair hubba, how will she even approach the enormous twelve-stair? She’s happy to no longer look like a fool with her nosegrind attempts. Larry, without pushing her to keep trying, begins packing up. She finds this strange, rude even. Like his gesture to film her was entirely insincere. While partially relieved, she’s also offended and embarrassed. Clearly, they don’t see any potential in her. They weren’t impressed. All her fears of not being good enough are validated.

“Before we go, can I just film you do a heelflip on flat?” Larry asks. “You have such a good one.”

“Sure,” Rory says. She heelflips, surprising herself with a first-try make.

“OK, now can you just stand still on your board?”

She does as he asks, and Larry walks slowly around her in a circle, his camera pointed at her. He makes three laps.

“What was that for?” Rory asks.

“Just trying something,” Larry says. “I’ll show you later.”

They arrive at Clipper and Rory helps Larry assemble the pieces of plywood on the stairs needed for a proper run-up. They have a drill and everything. Building the roll-in ramp is quite a process, one she’s surprised they prepared for so thoroughly. Most crews who drive up from LA expect the locals to do things like this for them. These guys are the definition of pro.

Until they’re not. Another strange thing happens. Deon doesn’t really skate the famous hubba either. Well, he skates it, the same way he skated the small one. A few basics, a few bails. A back grind, a noseslide fakie. No real attempts at anything she knows he’s capable of. He just tosses a few impossible tricks, even for Deon. One flail looked like a big flip back tail, another some sort of nollie tre flip to something. The kind of tricks one might joke about. Then he just sits down. Larry doesn’t even seem bothered or disappointed. In fact, he seems pleased. Larry looks to Rory who is now standing at the top of the hubba, staring grimly at its crusty, battered edge. Nothing about the hubba looks appealing. And yet, it’s beautiful. This weathered slab of concrete, a source of desire for so many around the planet. They come to conquer this. And yet she can’t muster the courage to grind it.

“You got something you want to try?” Larry asks, now at the bottom of the stairs with his thirty thousand dollars in hand. “I got you.”

“Yeah, I think so,” she lies. In theory, yes, she wants to try all sorts of things. But not in the real world. Not today, with these still-quivering legs.

“You got it!” Deon yells from across the schoolyard. “Grind that bitch.”

She walks up the stairs to the top of the ramp they built. She tries to shut off all her thoughts, all her doubts. The best moments she’s had on her board are when she doesn’t think. Dropping in, she picks up speed quickly, flying toward the hubba. She lines up parallel and for a split second convinces herself it’s just a skatepark obstacle, or a smaller version like the one she just skated. She pops and lands on the hubba in a fifty-fifty. Her trucks immediately slip out, and she jumps off her board, leaping for the asphalt. Her feet make brief contact with the ground before the remaining impact is made with her hip. The feeling in her leg is gone. Her shoulder, she now realizes, has skidded across the ground. If it wasn’t for the hoodie she put back on in their car, her skin would be torn open. It’s the worst slam she’s had in years.

“You good?” she hears Larry ask. Rory opens her eyes, still on the ground, and looks up to see them both staring down at her.

“Yeah, I think so,” she says, breathing slowly through her nose. “Just . . . can’t . . . feel my leg.” She wills herself to stand, fighting back tears. She hates that she sometimes wants to cry after falling down. The guys never cry. They’ll almost cry out from frustration—whining and screaming like babies when they can’t do a trick—but they never cry from the pain.

“I’m good,” she says, forcing a smile. She avoids their eyes, fearing she’ll find pity staring back at her. A lot of guys in the industry still don’t know how to treat women who take the unique abuse skateboarding demands. The abuse they all experience firsthand. She knows many of them see it as unnatural. Pretty girls shouldn’t slam, they think. But that’s bullshit. Pretty girls have the right to slam just as hard as anyone. And they should also be allowed to cry a little when it really hurts.

“I’m going to make an order from Pancho Villa,” Larry says after she lets them know she’s done for the day. “You want anything?”

Their burritos arrive an hour later and she’s regained feeling in her leg. After they eat, Larry asks Rory to stand on her board with her hoodie on. He films her, then films Deon, circling him with his camera at various distances. It’s weird to see these two work together after seeing so much of their completed projects. The process is tedious and bizarre. She knows that B-roll is important and time consuming, but Rory doesn’t understand why Deon hasn’t actually done any real skateboarding.

A few hours later, after driving around with them and looking at spots, Larry says he needs to do some editing work and drops Deon and Rory off a bar in the Mission. Over beers, Deon speaks to her like an old friend, lamenting that he had always wanted to live in San Francisco, but never got around to it. Nervously, she rambles, unintentionally divulging too much of her life story. Her local scene, the lack of girls to skate with, the intimidating boys she eventually impressed enough to accept her. To her surprise, Deon is more inquisitive than she expects. He asks about college, what she studied, what she does for fun outside of skating. What it’s like to be a barista. He’s genuinely kind, the way she always hoped he would be. Other famous people she’s met have been so disappointing. Self-involved and fake.

“What do your folks do for work in Louisville?” he asks.

This would be the point in their conversation where she would normally distort the truth. Offer an easy answer to avoid the ugly parts of her story. Instead, she opens up, curious to see how he reacts.

“I actually grew up with my Grandma,” she says.

“Oh, cool. I did too,” he says. She already knows this, of course. There’s almost nothing he’s told her that she hasn’t already absorbed from podcasts and interviews. “Is it cool to ask what happened to your parents?” There’s something about his eyes, and the way he asks to ask, rather than ask, that she appreciates.

“Sure,” Rory says. “They died. Car accident.”

“Damn, I’m so sorry,” Deon says.

“It’s OK,” Rory says. “It was a long time ago.” The accident doesn’t feel that long ago, but acting like it was helps fend off further prying. She’s found the phrase works as a bookend, a way to cap the conversation. She hopes in time she and Deon might become close, that this won’t be just a single chance encounter where she unloads these raw pieces of her life onto him.

“Gonna hit the bathroom,” Deon says, downing his beer. “If the waitress comes by, will you ask for another Modelo?”

While he’s away, she wonders what it would be like to tell him everything about that fateful day. How her dad was wasted, as he always was that year. How his backslide into alcoholism made her mother take Rory and move them into her friend’s living room. How one day, after Rory’s mother got off work, he forced her into his car, even though—according to her coworkers who testified at the trial—she told him repeatedly that she wouldn’t get in. How when his car collided with that tree, going over fifty in a twenty-five zone, he flew through the front windshield and her mother didn’t. How her mom’s seatbelt pinned her to her death, and the seatbelt her father wasn’t wearing saved him. How her father wasn’t actually dead, but was serving a twenty-year sentence that would end in seven years. How on the night her mother didn’t come home, she waited alone in that living room, watching more than her allotted time of her mother’s favorite TV show on DVD, getting the news as the theme song came on. And how she dreads, every single day, that he might be released early, and what his return to freedom might mean for her sanity.

Instead they talk about San Francisco skate spots and Rory’s feeling tipsy as she finishes her second beer. Deon’s had four, sipping quickly while she blabbers. He asks her so many questions, it’s like he really cares. There are moments when the conversation feels like an interview. She eventually has to go to the bathroom, and when she returns, Deon is looking at his phone. He grins and then looks up at her.

“We should go back to the hotel for a minute.”

Something in his tone seems eager, and she hesitates. Why the presumptive we? And what would only take a minute? He’s smiling at her, paying the tab and refusing her request to Venmo him for her beers.

“Let’s catch a Waymo,” he says. She goes along with everything without asking questions. There’s a magnetic pull he has on her now, and he knows it. She had hoped he wouldn’t try to sleep with her, but now, as he ushers her into the driverless car, she has accepted the disappointing truth. All men are the same. Horny and sex-driven. What strikes her as strange, is that she never caught him staring at the places men usually stare. He remained focused on her eyes, his beer, and occasionally the basketball game on one of the bar’s many TVs. There weren’t any flirtatious laughs or gestures. No hand brushing her thigh under the table. She’s blindsided by his sudden boldness. “The hotel’s only ten minutes away.”

This won’t be the first time she’s fucked a skater she had once looked up to. On her first trip to LA at twenty, a heated skatepark session with multiple mid-tier pros resulted in one of them asking for her phone number. The next day the two of them texted all afternoon. Rory assumed he wanted to skate with her, maybe introduce her to some industry people, but he ended up just inviting her to a party. She went, eager to befriend a person she’d only seen on the internet. It was a long night, ending at a house far away from everything. He’d driven her there, and he was shit-faced by the time she knew that she wanted to leave. Her phone was dead and she had no idea where her aunt’s house was. So rather than resisting, she let the guy do his thing in that dark, stranger’s bedroom, hating every second of it. In the morning, after he dropped her off at the skatepark where they met, she never heard from or saw him again. Rory still follows him on Instagram for some sick, unexplainable reason. He has a family now. She likes his cute, family photos and whatever stupid skate tricks he posts. But she could never tell you why.

“Here we are,” Deon says as they pull up to the Mark Hopkins hotel.

“Wow,” Rory says. “You guys are actually staying here?”

“Don’t worry, it’s not as nice as it looks.”

It’s still light out, and everything about this feels wrong. Deon could have at least gotten her a little more drunk. He could have waited until it was dark. She hates the thought of someone spotting her being escorted into the entrance of this expensive hotel with him. She wants him to see her as an equal, not some sort of pro-ho. But she can’t bring herself to say no. It’s easier to just go along with it.

“You’re going to trip,” Deon says as they exit the elevator on the eighth floor. She waits for him to elaborate. What will she be tripping on? The view? The size of his bed? His erection? He uses a key card to open the door, and she pauses. Closes her eyes. Don’t do this, she tells herself. Just turn around.

“Rory?” Deon says inside the room. He appears in the doorway. “Come in!”

Fuck it, she thinks, opening her eyes. She smiles and follows him inside. The room is dark, and she sees Larry in the corner of the room, having transformed a small desk into a full editing bay. Cameras out, black cords everywhere. A monitor and his laptop open with skate videos playing.

“There she is!” Larry says. “Did you tell her anything?”

“No, I haven’t said a word,” Deon says enthusiastically. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“What’s going on?” Rory asks. Whatever she thought this was, it’s not that. She’s embarrassed now, hating herself for now feeling slightly disappointed that Deon isn’t going to try to have sex with her.

“Have a seat,” Larry says, standing up from his chair. “Dee, will you get the lights?” The room is dark, save for the illuminated screen. An unfamiliar editing program is open.

“You ready?” Larry asks.

“Yeah, I guess,” Rory says, laughing nervously. Larry clicks the spacebar, and the screen is filled by a wide shot of the hubba from this morning. In slow motion, Rory approaches, crouching down. The quality is beautiful, almost three dimensional on this screen. She hardly believes it’s real. The angle switches to a fisheye, spreading the grey hubba wide across the screen. Rory, to her amazement, releases from the squat and executes an immaculate heelflip frontside nosegrind.

“What the fuck?” she squeals. It’s all she can do not to scream. The camera angle switches back to the wide shot, and she performs another trick she never did—never even conceived of doing. A trick even more inconceivable than the heelflip nosegrind. Before she has time to ask what is going on, she’s watching herself roll up to the giant Clipper hubba. Here, unlike what happened in real life, she executes a perfect frontside noseblunt. She watches it from a fisheye and long lens perspective. She doesn’t understand. She’s watching something that didn’t happen, but did it? Did she black out and learn a new trick? Larry plays the tricks again as she stares. When the clips end, she repeats the only words that come to her. “What. The. Actual. Fuck!”

“Pretty amazing, huh?” Deon says. “Doesn’t it look real?”

“I don’t understand . . . how did you . . .”

“AI,” Larry says. “We’ve been playing with it for the last two years. Watch!” Larry moves the mouse around, clicking things, then punches the spacebar again. On the screen, Deon does five of the most mind-blowing tricks she’s ever seen. A nollie backside flip into a perfectly pinched switch front crook down the small hubba. A backside flip into a switch frontside 5-0. He does another but comes back to regular. On Clipper, he does a bigflip backside tailslide, somehow captured from three different angles. Then a nollie tre into a backside nosegrind. It’s unbelievable. She doesn’t see a trace of anything artificial. It’s her favorite skateboarder, doing what she’s always watched him do. But . . . better? More clear. Extra flawless. There’s even a shot to his face after the trick, showing his patented smile. Not the same one that was joking with her earlier at the bar, but similar. It’s a victorious smile, an exhausted and relieved smile. But it isn’t real. He never smiled like that today.

“Pretty sick, right?” Deon says. “Larry’s a fucking master.”

“I still don’t understand,” Rory says. “How does it look so real?”

“Ever since this technology hit, I’ve been toying with it,” Larry says. “At first it was just for fun, but it started to really . . . work. Then we slipped a few AI tricks into one of Deon’s Youtube videos, just to see if people could tell. It was just a throwaway edit. But no one said a word. Then we just kinda ran with it.”

The word comes to her mouth, but she doesn’t have the nerve to say it. Cheater. Her hero, is a fucking cheater.

“So we were thinking . . .” Deon starts, and for the first time in her presence, he seems nervous. “We want to start a new board brand, and we would really like to have you be a part of it. Small team, but it’s going to be legendary. We’re hoping to drop it next month. It would be easy work to fit you in. A couple sessions like today, and then we let Larry do his thing.”

“We want to make you the next big thing in skateboarding,” Larry says. “And with this tech, you will be.”

Rory is trying to slow her breathing, working to pause the heaving and near panic level panting. Her cheeks are going red again. This is so fucking weird. In another universe, this would be her dream. But this is so twisted and bizarre and fucked up. It would have been way simpler if Deon had just tried to sleep with her.

“I don’t know,” she finally says. “It feels kind of . . . wrong?”

“Look, I get it,” Larry says. “It’s a little weird. But you have to look at it in simple terms. Skateboarding is entertainment. We’re creating entertainment. You know the old magazines? Half the photos that were published in those weren’t the actual makes. Probably more than half.”

“But the skater eventually did the trick,” Rory says. “Even if the photo wasn’t the exact moment they landed it.”

“Not all the time. I know a lot of guys who had photos published of tricks they never landed.”

“OK,” Rory says. “But this is still different. This is straight-up lying.”

“Try to look at it like storytelling,” Larry says. “Storytelling always involves some lying. Look, it’s still your style, it’s still you.”

“And we can make sure you get a fat contract with Lissé,” Deon says.

“That’s right,” Larry says. “We know they’re looking for the next big girl. The ‘it’ girl. Their women’s team is weak right now. Just OG’s from the early 2000’s with no real marketing potential. They need someone fresh. And if we do this right, you can easily be that girl.”

“I know for a fact that Lissé has the budget for a couple mil. We know what kind of money they throw around.” Deon and Larry give each other a pound. Did they really just say “a couple mil?” As in millions? Plural? She wonders if that’s why they wanted her to wear Deon’s new pro model shoe. Was this their plan all along? All the questions she had from earlier suddenly have answers. Was their coffee order a coincidence? Had they known where to find her? She coughs as they stare at her.

“Sorry, but this is just a lot,” she says. “So you make me look better than I am in a video. You get me a big contract with lots of money. And then what? Is there any sort of . . . catch?”

“We build!” Deon says. “And you don’t have to do any of the suffering, no more shitty slams like the one you took today.”

“But what about, like, I don’t know. What’s the incentive for you guys to make me this big superstar?”

“Well, there will be a small commission,” Larry says. “But mainly, we just need you to build the brand. The women’s market is huge! Eventually we want to do apparel, and the whole nine. And we think you’d be perfect.”

“Look at Larry like an agent,” Deon says. “And if it helps, look at yourself like a model. I don’t know if you’ve done modeling gigs, but it’ll be no different. Just pays a lot more. But it’s not even about the money for us. We want to make beautiful videos. We want to grow a brand. And we want to make you the richest girl who ever skated.”

Seven months later, Rory wakes up with another hangover. She’s in a studio apartment in West Hollywood, and there are three random guys sleeping on different surfaces. Thankfully she’s in bed alone, though she vaguely remembers shoving the blond one away right before passing out. Her phone says it’s almost one in the afternoon, but you wouldn’t know it. Every day she wakes up with a mixture of gratitude and resentment for the blackout curtains she installed after moving in three months ago.

There had been no reason for her to keep drinking at the Roger Room until closing. And there was certainly no reason to invite these randos to come do cocaine in her apartment until six in the morning. But yesterday, she didn’t have anything important to do, and today she doesn’t either. Except maybe to visit her grandmother, who she hasn’t seen in a few days. And then maybe to pinch herself, and wonder how this is all really her life now.

As Deon and Larry promised, seemingly overnight, they turned her into a star. Less than a month after meeting them, in a surprise YouTube video released with little fanfare, Rory Gladwell was introduced to the world as the best female skateboarder alive. There were only twelve tricks, but they were so shocking, so advanced for women’s skating up to that point, that she was pretty much the only thing worth talking about in the skate media landscape for weeks. Where did she come from? How did she get so good? Who is her shoe sponsor? As they also predicted, Lissé quickly jumped on the bandwagon and Larry and Deon negotiated a huge contract for her. They feigned a cage match for her signature, roping Nike and Vans into the ring. But Lissé won, settling on two million dollars, paid out over three years. The largest shoe contract in women’s skateboarding history. Rory was so exciting for the industry, so novel, she almost overshadowed Deon’s own incredible AI-generated video part, the real intended focus of the release. But Deon didn’t seem to mind losing the attention. Creating the legend of Rory Gladwell from scratch seemed to be all he and Larry cared about.

Rory watched her socials jump from a measly seven thousand followers on Instagram and TikTok, to a combined 900k on both platforms. Posting the individual clips racked up millions of views. Almost all of her favorite skaters started following her. A bunch of them sent her friendly DM’s, many of them sounding a bit too thirsty. It felt strange to leave them “seen,” these men she had looked up to for so many years. The attention was nonstop. She was the focus of dozens of different podcasts. Too many articles to keep track of. Mainstream media even picked up on the sensation. Rory watched and read everything and hated how everyone focused on her looks. The undertone was a general shock that such a stereotypically attractive woman could be so good at skating. Before her, the best female skaters were usually children, and the industry watched them grow up. Following the contract, life quickly felt removed from reality. Which made sense. Rory Gladwell the skateboarder was a fictional character. Nothing about what she’d done to become this new, famous person was real.

Rory doesn’t care that her Nespresso machine is loud. After making thousands of espressos drinks at coffee shops over the years, slamming the bowl and hearing the coffee beans grind, it’s a relief to just press a little button and watch the coffee come out. She opens the blinds and light pours in, momentarily blinding her. One of the boys on the floor stirs from the noise. She makes another coffee, just to be louder. She spots the blond guy sleeping on the floor closest to her bed, and wonders if he really thought she would hook up with him with his friends right there in the room. What an idiot. In LA, she only seems to attract idiots. Her head is pounding as she sips her coffee. She checks her phone and scans the notifications. Lots of reposts, a slew of flattery she’s grown tired of hearing. In the beginning, she tried deleting all the comments about her breasts, but it’s a constant wave she can’t control. It still amazes her that the AI was able to simulate their movement so well. Seen in slow motion, they are unmistakably her breasts. But they aren’t, they were made by a computer. They had become the internet’s breasts. And once she convinced herself of this strange fact, she stopped caring what people said about them.

“Hey, you,” she says, lightly kicking the Black guy on her carpet. “Gotta go.” She repeats herself to the other two guys. They groan. Rub their eyes, adjust their groins. And through squints and sniffles and morning coughs, the three men shuffle out of her apartment and she can finally sit in peace.

Her grandmother knows nothing of the massive deception that has made them rich. Nonna is simply delighted that the world finally recognizes her granddaughter’s hard work. The care facility Rory found is only two miles away from her apartment, but she hadn’t anticipated that this would still involve a ten to twenty minute commute by car, depending on traffic. She could walk it in less time, but no one walks in Los Angeles. And besides, she loves her new electric car. Larry and Deon encouraged her to buy new things. She wonders if it’s because they think this income stream will last forever, or the opposite. Do they know it won’t, so they think she should enjoy it while she has it? Which, with the way she’s spending, won’t be long.

Yesterday, her second quarterly wire payment came in and the number bothered her. $166,666. And 66 cents. When she did the math, she was disturbed to find that she would be making exactly $666,666 each year. Even the cents came out to .666. Sure, after taxes and Larry’s commission her take home is different, but those aren’t the numbers she has to think about and see in her bank account. Rory had long given up on religion, and God, and any idea she once had of “the Devil,” but she still hates all those fucking sixes. Every three months, for the next three years. It doesn’t sit well with her.

In tandem with the income and her social media following, the numbers making up her living expenses have increased astronomically. To think she had once lived comfortably off only two thousand dollars per month! How had she done it? Her apartment now costs four thousand and Nonna’s new home is ten. After the down payment, her car still costs a little over a grand and she somehow spends over five thousand dollars every month on dinners, drinks and random shit she doesn’t need. The pace with which everything has become so costly is difficult to gauge and impossible to stop.

Whether it’s the hangover anxiety, the headache, or the new number in her bank account, she decides she can’t see Nonna today. She’ll call instead. Rory has always loved talking about coincidences and numbers with Nonna. Her last superstitious indulgence. Like the time when she was little and she got three dollars and thirty three cents as change at the grocery store. “That’s good luck, dear” Nonna said. “Best luck. Can’t beat three threes.” One time she was with Nonna and looked at her phone and the time displayed her birthday, seven seventeen. Nonna made her make a wish, and assured her the wish would come true. The old lady loves searching for meaning in the meaningless, and numbers are her favorite. And on top of Nonna’s belief that every coincidence contains a secret message, the woman is also certain that God is always involved. Or the Devil. It’s a flip of the coin. Rory usually plays along, but has long lost the belief. The coincidence conversations always felt like a joyful exercise, or entertainment. A way to connect with her sweet, eccentric and rapidly aging grandmother. But the deposit numbers change things. They’re too exact. She tries to convince herself that it’s just the guilt of the big lie, or the vodka poison working its way out of her body. She can’t help thinking maybe it is something else.

“Hey, just checking in,” Rory says into her phone. Nonna is still new to her cell phone, and it takes several calls before a nurse answers and gets the phone into her hands.

“That’s wonderful, dear. So nice to hear your voice. Will I see you today?”

“I can’t make it today,” Rory says. “Busy work day.”

She’s lying in her bed with nothing but a wet towel on her forehead. The cold shower did nothing for her, and putting on clothes would be a pointless exercise.

“Good for you, dear,” her grandmother says. “I haven’t seen your mother in a while, why hasn’t she called?” Rory closes her eyes and tells herself to breathe slowly. Go along with it, she reminds herself. No sense in correcting her.

“She will,” Rory says. “I just talked to her.”

“How is she?” Nonna asks. The sincerity in her voice both baffles and infuriates her. “And your father, I miss him. Tell him to come by.” Rory often wonders what he’s been writing to her lately. She gives Nonna every forwarded envelope, but never hears anything. It’s possible she forgets their contents, or refuses to believe her son is in prison.

The home, and Rory’s ability to pay for it, couldn’t have been more timely. Before dementia, her grandmother’s issues were rooted in her osteoarthritis. Pain management was the problem. But her Alzheimer’s decline was steep, a drastic shift into constant confusion. There wasn’t any rhyme or reason to it. She wasn’t locked in any specific time period or era. It was like her memory was in flux, moving from a previous decade to the present, spurred by faces and photographs or seemingly nothing at all. The physical pain remained, but her memory of it often didn’t, making the onsets all the more terrible. Two weeks ago, when Rory visited, for five seconds her grandmother looked at her like she’d never seen her before. Like Rory was a stranger! And then, boom! Her loving smile broke, tears welling with joy. Rory worries that the next time one of these lapses will happen they’ll be mid-conversation. The most consistent period Nonna seems to find herself in is when Rory’s mother and father were still together, and death and alcohol and tragedy hadn’t ruined all of their lives.

There were new rules, Larry had said. Deon was with him, nodding along. They were at Deon’s mansion, a week before the video was released. He lives in Laguna, an hour south of LA. His house rests on top of a hill, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The attention to detail is masterful. Stunning art, mini sculptures, and enormous picture windows. Rory could hardly take her eyes off the marble kitchen counter in the center of the kitchen. She’d never seen marble so thick.

“You have to be careful at skateparks,” Larry continued. “Just cruise around. Best to pretend like you have an injury. People’s expectations will be high, they’ll want to see you perform. It’s normal for pro skaters to just cruise parks, but just be careful not to overdo it.”

“Overdo it?”

“You know, like start doing tricks that might expose the . . . gap. Your abilities in the video will set a new standard. And skaters aren’t dumb.”

“And everyone has their own video camera,” Deon added, flashing his iPhone. “You gotta remember, people will film you without asking.”

“We had an incident a few months ago,” Larry said. “Dee was skating Cherry, and kept missing a backside noseblunt on the ledge. Some fucker posted a video on Youtube, questioning how Deon could ever flip in and flip out if he couldn’t even do a basic one. It went a little viral, and—”

“Nothing happened with it,” Deon said, defensively. “But it was annoying.”

“That’s why we built a private park,” Larry said. “So you and Deon can skate in private, at your real level, and still have fun.”

There’s one public park she knows is safe. A place where she can sweat and be outside, and do the thing she loves. Away from a musty warehouse with zero ventilation or AC. She hates the training facility. It usually takes two hours with traffic, and Deon is rarely ever there. She can’t bring friends, not that she’s made any real ones in LA, and she hates the smell inside. It’s also a scary place. A deserted industrial park filled with anonymous warehouses is the last place she wants to be alone. So she goes to the park with lots of deep bowls. She’s not a transition skater, so no one will expect her to do anything crazy. She can pump around, scratch the coping, activate leg muscles she wouldn’t use otherwise. Sweat out the booze and drugs from her system. Maybe afterwards she’ll be capable of facing Nonna. Considering her forgetfulness, Rory might be able to honestly confess her sins. Unload her burden on someone who loves her unconditionally. And then, within a few days, it’ll be like it never happened.

Instead she skates until she slams, hanging up in the deep end of the biggest bowl. She falls straight to her shoulder, her neck whipping her head to the concrete. Not hard enough to knock her out or even swell a bump, but enough to freak her out. She lies there, wanting to scream in pain, but holds it in. I deserve this, she thinks. A fully padded older bowl troll knee-slides down to inspect the injury and make sure she’s not concussed.

“I’m fine,” she says. He doesn’t recognize her. A soul skater, out of the loop, thank God.

“That was a rough one, sweetie,” he says, with a voice straight out of The Californians. “You sure that shoulder isn’t broken? Or your collarbone?”

“No, it’s OK,” she says, rotating it. It hurts like hell, but she won’t be a victim. She stands up, waving off his assisting arm. “I’m fine.”

“You’re one bad chicka,” he says. He pats her on the back and she twists away from his hand.

“Thanks for checking on me,” Rory says. She could use a boost getting out of the bowl, but she won’t ask this guy for help. She tosses her board up, pulls herself out with her good arm, and walks back to her car.

She doesn’t touch her board for two months while her shoulder heals. She doesn’t slow down the drinking, either. Timing her visits with Nonna in the evening when her hangover has slipped away, but right before she’s started drinking again is perfect. Not quite clear-headed when they talk, but neither is Nonna. Her confusion is getting worse. Today Nonna asked why her own mother doesn’t answer her calls. Rory is pretty sure her great-grandmother died in 1980, which means Nonna must think she’s somewhere in the 1970’s, the farthest back she has gone so far.

“Her phone must be broken,” Rory says.

“Well, she should fix it,” Nonna says. “Her only daughter is trying to call her! Will you tell her, if you see her, Rory? I’d really like to speak with her about something important.” What’s it like to live in two time periods at once? Rory wants to ask. How can you know me, but also think your mother is still alive? Instead, she asks about her mom.

“What did you think of her when you first met her?”

“Oh, your mother was gorgeous, simply gorgeous,” Nonna says. “I liked her straight away. She’s tough on my boy, tougher than I was. And it’s good for him.”

“How did they meet?” Rory asks. She knows the story, but likes to hear Nonna tell it.

“They fell in love working together, if I recall. That awful McDonalds. Really, you should ask them, dear. I wasn’t there. I just heard about it.”

“But you really liked her? Right away?”

“How could I not?” Nonna says. “She’s one in a million. I meant to call her yesterday, they had Gilmore Girls on the television. She loves that show. We used to watch it together, with you too. And before, that’s how you got your name. Did you know that? I never did love it like she did, but it made me think of her. How come she hasn’t been by to visit?”

“So we’re thinking of making another video,” Larry says. Deon is next to him, staring at his phone. They’re in Venice, sitting at a restaurant known for its nightlife, down the street from where Larry lives. Food has just arrived at their table. Rory flags down the waitress and asks for another vodka sonic. “China spots are insane,” Larry continues. “I got a guy who has scouted a couple cities for us, and he’ll give us any pin we need. We’re going to bring in a new kid from Japan, little phenom.”

“Cool,” Rory says. This will be her first international trip with them.

“How’s your shoulder?” Larry asks. “Will you be able to skate?” She can’t stop herself from snorting. She could have a full body cast, and it wouldn’t make a difference to him or the video he intends to create.

“It’s better,” she says.

“What happened again?” Deon asks, looking up from his phone for the first time since they sat down. She knows he’s angry with her for getting hurt. That with their arrangement, injuries should be a thing of the past.

“Hung up skating this bowl,” she says. “I was just cruising around.”

“That’s right,” he says. She can see he no longer cares. So long as she hasn’t compromised the arrangement by street skating in public. Rory still wishes their relationship had become something more than it is. She never wanted anything romantic, but figured he’d be a mentor, or at least a friend. Not a best friend or anything, but a skate friend. They were conspirators, partners in a crime, yet he still feels like little more than an acquaintance. He has never once made time to hang out with her one-on-one. Never once invited her to dinner at his home, or to skate with him at the warehouse. Larry has, acting as a proper team manager should, but every encounter with Deon feels artificial, every conversation lacking authenticity. She senses now that his initial kindness was a performance. A charming act. Which makes sense, given the direction his life is going.

“So glad you’re feeling better,” Larry says. “I hate skating transition. I’d stay away from those bowls if I were you.” She can’t stand the condescension in his tone. “Well, we’re thinking we’ll leave in two weeks. Should be mellow. Just a ten day trip. Deon has a role in a new Apple TV show, so he has to be back by the first of next month. You haven’t been to China, right?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“It’s something to see,” Larry says. “At least once. Spots will blow your mind.”

Nine months ago, an all expense trip to China would have made her froth at the mouth. The sort of opportunity only available to the sponsored elite. But today, she wants to get it over with as soon as possible. They make small talk for the next half hour as they eat their food. Rory isn’t hungry, but she eats her dry fish tacos anyway. She finally catches a buzz as her fifth drink arrives. Rory sees how Larry and Deon are looking at her, but she doesn’t care.

“There’s one thing I should tell you,” Larry says. His voice, combined with the way he’s looking at her, has a fatherly intonation, making her suddenly uneasy. “There’s a video circulating on YouTube that, well . . .” Larry looks around the restaurant. Lowering his voice, he continues. “The video suggests that your skating is . . . fake.”

“It is,” Rory says, chuckling. “Are you that surprised?” She immediately regrets the bitchiness of the question.

“Well, yeah, we are a little surprised. Anyway, it’s been gaining views. Apparently this asshole dug up some iPhone angle of you falling at Clipper. I don’t know who filmed it, but they must have been outside the school. Bad luck. Anyway, he makes this whole investigation into the tricks you did there, and elsewhere, and it’s not good. We’re working on getting it taken down.” Downing the rest of her vodka sonic, she feels her heart flutter with what is initially anxiety, but slowly blends into relief. Maybe this is what she needs. An exposé. A public revelation that they’re all cheaters. The money is nice, but deep down she knows this all needs to end.

“Who is he?”

“Same guy that tried to come at me,” Deon says. “Just some fucking nerd. He’s got something personal against me, I think.”

“How are people responding?” Rory asks. “Like, in the comments.”

“Fortunately, there are a lot of people defending you. Calling him sexist, a misogynist. Which is good, honestly. For now. I don’t think people believe him, it should fizzle out in a few days. But I just wanted to give you a heads up.”

The video doesn’t fizzle. It catches an unlucky wave, the debate more viral than the accusation itself. Everyone wants to weigh in, like some sort of high stakes political campaign. It’s impossible for Rory to not watch it all happen in real time. Strangers bitterly arguing with strangers in the comment sections on every social media platform and skateboarding forum. There is so much passion, so much hate, and so much blaming of hate. She agrees with each side. Yes, it’s wrong to accuse the woman of not being as good as she claims to be. And yes, isn’t it obvious that the woman is a fraud? Somehow, she wants both sides to win. Rory hasn’t weighed in or responded to anything herself. She won’t even open her direct messages on any platform. There’s a true ugliness lurking there. Anonymous men who have decided to loathe her with all their being. Men who threaten to do terrible things to her as punishment. Boys who, a part of Rory thinks, are right to hate her for lying and making millions of dollars from it. The only comment that doesn’t sit well with her, that she can’t stop thinking about, is the one pinned to the top on YouTube. She knows the commenter personally and already despises him.

“I grew up skating with her,” the comment from JimmyTheJuice reads. “There’s no way this ISN’T AI. Sorry to say she could never be that good.” Jimmy Pinole. That scrawny fuck. “Sorry to say I beat you in S.K.A.T.E. when I was thirteen and you can’t get over it,” she types as a reply. Then deletes. “Sorry to say I didn’t want to suck your dick in the bathroom at the skatepark when I was fourteen you fucking pedo,” she types, then deletes. Calling him a pedo isn’t totally fair. He was sixteen at the time. But accusing him of being one would feel good. “Sorry to say you’re a hometown hero who never made it because you weren’t good enough.” Delete. “Sorry to say you’re a deadbeat dad who smokes meth.” There are so many things she could write about Jimmy Pinole, but she closes the website before the keyboard aggression gets the best of her. It’s not worth it. In truth, she’s surprised more of her friends from back home haven’t jumped into the debate. There’s a silence there, an uncomfortable void.

Several of her skater friends reached out when all the success began. They were happy for her, amazed by her apparent leveling up after moving to California. Most of the boys she grew up with offered encouragement and support. “Always knew you’d make it!” “Love the progression! Keep it up!” “You’re insane! Don’t forget the little people.” She hadn’t forgotten them. In fact, she sent a bunch of those guys from the skatepark care packages. The ones who had always been nice to her received free shoes, shirts and boards. Rory hadn’t thought about it at the time, but were those bribes? Had she, without intending to, paid for their silence?

“You seem distracted, dear,” Nonna says. She’s been sitting next to her grandmother for a while, massaging her hands the way she used to do back in Louisville. “Is everything all right?”

“Yeah, I’m all good,” Rory says. “Just stuff at work.” Nonna looks at her, puzzled. It’s clear she’s forgotten everything about the money and what it is that Rory does for “work.” She wonders if she even knows they’re in Los Angeles.

“Have you heard from your father?” Nonna asks. “He hasn’t called or written in a long time. I’m beginning to worry.” Rory switches hands, gently rubbing Nonna’s wrinkled wrist before stroking her thumb, and then individual fingers. The truth is, she has heard from him, indirectly. She wouldn’t even try to explain it to Nonna, but during one of her masochistic doom scrolls, this time on Instagram, she found a comment that sent her spiraling. “Your father is proud of you,” it read. She clicked on the profile, private with a description reading, “Luke 23:39.” She Googled the name and found an article from twenty years ago about a burglary gone wrong. First degree murder. A friend from prison.

“Nonna, do you like it here?” Her grandmother appears to snap out of an aimless stare, making direct eye contact with Rory.

“It’s lovely, I suppose,” Nonna says. “But I miss my chair.”

“Let’s leave.” Rory helps her grandmother out of bed, packs up everything she deems essential while Nonna directs, and they walk out of the care facility.

“Where are we going, dear?” Nonna asks as Rory helps buckle her seatbelt.

“The airport,” Rory says. “And then home. I’m done with all of this.”

“Done with what?”

“Everything,” Rory says, and for once she actually believes what she hears herself saying. Everything must end. It’s time to blow it all up. “And you know what?”

“What, dear?”

“I miss your chair, too.”

I always thought skateboarding was too nuanced to fake, and thus safe from the tentacles of artificial intelligence. But then I watched Chris Joslin treflip El Toro, years before actually doing it. And that wasn’t even AI. That was just some clever editing. I haven’t seen any convincing AI-generated skateboarding yet, and I hope we never do. This was an exercise in imaging that world.

If you’d like to read more stories from my ongoing collection, The Streets of Lissé, subscribe here or consider my novels: Top of Mason, Off Clark, and High Street Lows. You can purchase a print copy, download them for your Kindle, or listen to them on Spotify, Audible or wherever you listen to audiobooks.

I’ve also (finally!) changed the name of this newsletter. “Stick to Skating,” had always been a place holder, but years went by without thinking of something better or deciding what I really wanted to do on here. The name was meant to be self-deprecating—the jab pro skaters often hear whenever they try something that isn’t skating—but every time I posted something it looked more like a command. “STICK to skating!” Yikes. My apologies if you thought I was bossing you around like that.

I’m calling it “r&d” (research and development), because that’s my favorite type of skateboarding, and it allows me to expand what I write about here to include more than just skateboarding.

Full Lengths

A lot of great full lengths have been hitting the ‘tube. June was especially strong, with a handful of highly anticipated long ones finally landing alongside surprise (to me at least) releases. It’s insane that people used to claim that the full length was dying. Though shifty in its form, the full length is alive and well. This blog accepts a wide variety of lengths and formats for this category. Also, I didn’t have time to watch the Detroit video by Palace before putting this out. Additional shout out to the DUOS contest by Pocket, which as of writing has not come out in full. Compiled together, it’s basically a full length, on top of an amazing idea for a contest. Also, I really enjoyed LOOP by Keyaki Ike as a concept piece. Hope to see more projects like that in the future.

10. Abnormal Communication : Episode 6

I had a funny encounter with Mark Gonzales this year. It was at the Boston airport and we were waiting for the same flight to Paris. I went up to say hello, and though we’ve skated together and talked a handful of times, he had no memory of ever meeting me. When he asked where I was from, I told him Northern California. His eyes lit up and he asked, “Santa Rosa?”

“No,” I said. “I’m actually from Napa.”

“Oh cool, do you know Francis Ford Coppola?”

We talked for a little while. He asked the questions only Gonz would ask—“What style of skating do you like to do?”—and then I left him alone. Sitting down, I thought about how odd that conversation was. Why did he say Santa Rosa, out of all the Northern California cities? San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento. All of Marin County. And then I realized, Wait, I was born in Santa Rosa. That is sort of where I’m from. This fact almost creeped me out. Did he sense it? Even the Coppola question felt tailored to me. Francis is connected to some people I grew up with in St. Helena and while I wouldn’t say I know the legendary director, I have met him a number of times and even had dinner with him once. He’s probably the most famous person associated with Napa, but it’s pure happenstance that I’ve had interactions with him.

An abnormal communication to say the least.

This video is a solid offering from the three stripes squad in SF. I love seeing the OG’s still killing it. I thought we were going to see a Daewon manny at Pier 7. Has that ever hapened? Nikolai rules and Kai is having a really good year. But the standout, of course, is young Julian. More on him later.

9. Nick vonWerssowetz: Ultraman

   I have a confession. I haven’t always liked the look of Portland spots. There’s something dreary and bland and crusty in a way that just doesn’t appeal to me. It could be my bad luck skating there. I’ve been a few times on skate trips, and it’s always been rainy or I’ve been unlucky. Or the spots are just truly too rough for me to handle. But this video made me like it. A lot! Made me even want to go there and skate. So Sebo, my apologies for any disinterest in skating your spots. I’ll get up there one of these days.

8. Nyjah Huston: Return to Sender Tour

   There’s a lot of discourse on Nyjah right now, particularly about his head injuries. I won’t go into that now, but he is without a doubt the gnarliest skateboarder of all time. The video part he was able to produce during a brutal Northwest tour, skating the unappealing, crusty spots I mentioned before, would be any other skater’s best work. How he’s able to skate day after day on a tour like this is shocking. Ewan did a great job turning this tour into a proper doc. I’m curious what else Nyjah has in store for this year or next. I hope whatever it is, we don’t have to watch him almost die.

7. adidas : OKWR

   Is it a full length? A tour video? This falls somewhere in between, but I like the compact eight minute run time and the spots/skating in here. Huge Kotora fan and I love Kai Kishi’s tech powers. Can’t wait to see more from both of them.

6. Giddy #14

   A few too many ride-on grinds, and I wasn’t all that into the music, but I love this filmer and the format, and the final part made up for anything the rest of it was lacking. I love that this is a homie video with no-names alongside the big names. Makes me want to skate Paris or all the other cutty corners of France and Europe these dudes shredded. Though I’d never heard of him before this video, I will forever be a fan of Amélien Foures.

5. Nike : Creased

   The thirteen minute “full length.” When it works, it’s perfect. Send the skaters to a few cities and see what happens. It’s especially magical when one of those skaters is Antonio, and another is Troy Gibson. It’s basically one long montage, which can end up feeling lazy when not done correctly. But this one hits. Especially that switch flip back noseblunt. When I went to that spot in PR a few years ago, that was my heavy claim, but I couldn’t even get myself to try it. There are some tricks you just want to see get done, more than doing them yourself. And that one couldn’t have been done better. Thank you, Antonio.

4. Violet: Squeaky

   I’ve never been the biggest fan of Strobeck skate videos. Even cult favorites like Cherry. When it came out, I didn’t really get the hype. I respect the work, and every now and then there’s a part in one of his videos that gets me super hyped, but I’ve come to accept that they’re just not really for me. The man has an eye for talent though and I love that he’s out there continuing to make these videos. I think Troy Gibson is one of the illest out, and Joe Campos is truly something special. And then obviously, Kader. I think we all want this to be his year. Some incredible tricks in here and I’m hyped to finally see the Thrasher cover footage. Fingers crossed he has more in store for ‘26. I would love to see him with the SOTY trophy. That said, like most of Bill’s videos, it could have been a quarter shorter, maybe even half, and it would have packed a better punch. But again, I’m probably not the intended audience. I love to see the cutty NY spots. Patrick has me worried that tight pants are coming back. With them being out of fashion for so long, seeing a return feels jarring. Almost hard to watch some of those clips. But hey, I respect challenging the norm. I hope for everyone involved that this company lasts.

3. Foundation: Today Tomorrow Forever

   Speaking of companies lasting, it’s incredible that Foundation is still here, offering us amazing skate videos like this one. Especially considering there isn’t a properly shoe-sponsored rider in this squad. And speaking as a someone who still loves to film video parts but lacks the financial incentive to do so, it’s not easy making these things! I really love the creativity that went into some of these parts, and it’s dope to see a company doing more than including one token female skater. Austin and Aiden are true masters, and Tanner really impressed me. This video deserves a bunch of rewatches. Good work, crew!

2. Postcard: Vertical City

   This wouldn’t be a proper blog if I didn’t shout out the homies. This one hurts a little to watch turn out so good, because I really should have been in it. I even had tickets to Hong Kong! March 2020. You can probably guess why I didn’t end up going, though in hindsight Sebo and I should have just barged it. Hong Kong was sealed shut for years after, and eventually, as restrictions loosened, Patrik started filming. He ended up getting a stacked squad, and though it’s under Postcard (Patrik Wallner and Tommy Zhao’s production company), it feels like a Visualtraveling video. This paints HK as an idyllic skate destination, but don’t be fooled! It is not. The fact that Pat, through all the various obstacles and bust factors, made this happen is a true testament to his dedication as a filmmaker.

1. Spitfire X Thrasher : San Francisco Burning

   Next to Hong Kong, for different reasons, San Francisco is one of the hardest cities to skate. It’s rough, it’s raw, and it’s been skated to hell for almost forty years. So to pull of a full length exclusively in San Francisco, is a feat. There are plenty of classic spots, but lots of new ones as well. They lurked hard and dug deep and there are some clips I still can’t believe actually happened. Namely, the backside noseblunt slide by Nikolai. Thank you for doing that. The main reason this ranks number one for me is Miles Silvas, who is continuing to prove that he is a once in a generation talent. The switch hardflip? The bigspin backtail bs flip? The kickflip down the Duffy gap? Not much of his skating seems like real life. I like to think he’d be my favorite even if he wasn’t a friend, and someone who has blown my mind since he was a fourteen-year-old grom. But since I have watched a lot of his progression first hand, seeing his continued hard work come to life makes these moments all the more special.

Video Parts

I’m still working out exactly how to structure and categorize my skate video ranking. These aren’t exactly my top ten favorite “parts” from the quarter, because many of the parts within the full lengths are better than some of these. But I believe there’s something special about a stand alone project, even if they’re often little more than commercials for brands. Skate short? Solo video? I’ve tried other language, but nothing feels right. So we’re back to basic skate brain. Here are ten great video parts from Q2.

10. Kilian Zhender : 4M

    I have a soft spot for ex-team riders, especially the ones who can do switch flip backside noseblunts. Kilian hails from Switzerland, and is one of the nicest guys you could meet on a session. He rode for Organika but never fully got on, and since then he’s floundered a bit in sponsorship-land. It’s great to see him with his name on a board.

9. Keenan Lewis : IRL

   Though I don’t remember when or where, I’m sure I’ve seen a Keenan Lewis part before. But it’s never going to not be strange that I can watch a skater who I barely recognize, and think that he’s the best skater ever. Creative, stylish, gnarly, and versatile. Like, how is this Keenan not a pro on adidas? It makes no sense. I hope he ends up as one some day, since he sure as hell deserves it. But for the time being, I’ll be watching this part a lot this year.

8. Tiago Lemos: SKF

   Now normally a minute and thirty second clip would not be designated a “part.” But every Tiago clip is worth three from anyone else, so the brevity works. That nollie frontside heel? That magical fake ollie survival after the backside noseblunt? The pure power blended with high skate IQ? We’re lucky to have him.

7. Julian Agliardi : Monster

   It must be strange to know you’re the new chosen one. There’s no way Julian doesn’t know it. Hand-picked by Nyjah. Contract with adidas. Seems to be able to do whatever he wants on a skateboard. What a strange pressure he must feel. Or perhaps he feels none of it. Just enjoys skating. On paper, the tricks he’s doing are so mind-boggling, you’d think he was actually Nyjah reincarnated. The song feels ABD but works. I hope this kid doesn’t get burned out, because as a chosen one, the world is truly his for the taking. And there’s no telling how far he’ll take it.

6. Alexis Ramirez : Do It To Em

   Alexis getting a Nike contract reset a balance in the sponsorship universe. When corporate shoe contracts feel so dependent on cool guy clubs or name relevance, however old, it’s nice to see a humble hard working skater land the big one. It feels like a return to meritocracy. Alexis is pure raw talent, but someone I feared wouldn’t end up on anything after DC. I hope this isn’t a footage dump because the Nike chapter is closed. Or if it is a footage dump, I hope it’s because the man has so much more coming down the pipeline, we’ll finally see a Sk8mafia Dunk or a big presence in the next Nike full length.

5. Jack Springer : Flash

   Is it Bubba? Is it Jack? We may never know, but what we do know is that whoever he is, his tech skills are undeniable. Fresh spots and fresh takes throughout, despite the blandish Southern California setting. I haven’t really followed this dude’s trajectory or what he’s done in the past, but I love what he’s doing today.

4. Jeremy Leabres : Glitched

   Many of us looked at Jeremy Leabres like a chosen one when he first popped out in 2013. He had the style, the flick, the power, and the sponsors. I felt like his MADE part was an important arrival. Like he was going to be a P-Rod, Leo, or Ishod. At the very least a future SOTY. So what happened? Why is he, thirteen years later, still better than ever but floating without a paying shoe sponsor? This part is amazing, and the only thing holding it back from the top spot for me is the song. And normally I’d finish with saying something like, “I hope he gets on Cons,” but with that whole program crumbling and a recent post showing him skating in New Balances, I guess I’ll just leave it with, “I hope he’s happy.” Whether or not the American corporate shoe companies thinks he’s worthy of financial support, he’s still one of the best.

3. Antwuan Dixon : FTP

   Last year, Chris Joslin’s post tre flip celebration with his kids brought a tear to my eye, and this year Antwuan skating to Cat Stevens brought another. Though it seemed like he’d been back for a while, this video part solidified his return. Like Joslin’s final SOTY push, the So-Cal spots are a little boring looking, but seeing him back in action at full tilt made up for it. I hope we get to see more of Antwuan in years to come.

2. Dylan Jaeb : Quasi

   I love this part and have watched it many times. Dylan, speaking of chosen ones, is him. But there’s a breeziness here that holds the part back. He seems to scale his powers down. The speed is there, but it doesn’t feel like he’s pushing the limits of his ability. And I respect that. Leaves his fans wanting, and doesn’t cap expectations for later pro parts. A lot of people do their best work in the build up to going pro, and then take their foot off the gas. It’s smart to hold back. I could have done without the second song, as there are really only a few extra tricks and I like the vibe and energy of the first song a lot more. The fakie flip is absolutely incredible. I wish I’d thought of bringing boards to put on the grass when I skated Rincon. Might not have taken me seven different trips to get the switch tre. I’m going to continue watching this part to get hyped to skate.

1. Torey Pudwill : Plan B

   I love when skaters stays true to who they are, and Torey does just that in this part. No trend hopping. No ride-on grinds. No lazy filler clips. Just Torey doing the hardass tricks only he can think of and do. Even though the song was technically in a DGK x Zero “Fresh til Death” tour video (yes, I’m that big of a nerd AND Lil Wayne/Adele fan), I’m so happy he used it. He’s my age, but doesn’t seem like he’s aged a minute. Keep killing it, Torey.

Skater of the Quarter?

It’s between Troy, Julian and Miles, and I almost want to go with Julian. He seems to have some real momentum right now. Watching his Monster part, he does a frontside heel flip down a relatively small set. A ten, maybe. Could be a nine. Point is, it doesn’t really seem like one of his go-to tricks. And then, a few months later, Boom! Wallenberg! That tells you something. He’s got it like that. But I have to pick Miles. He’s got the best video part of the year so far, with solid showings in other adidas edits. You can’t kickflip the Duffy gap that perfectly and not be the “Skater of the . . . something.”

Books

A quick top five. I always think I’m going to be concise when writing these book and skate reviews, but it never happens.

5. The Best American Short Stories 2025

   Out of the twenty stories in this collection, there are only a few that didn’t fully grab me and make me either laugh or cry. I was pleased to find a story from fellow skater Bret Anthony Johnson, “Time of the Preacher,” which is also in his latest collection. A standout for me was “Underwater” by Hannah Kingsley-Ma. No novels yet from her, but I’ll be looking forward to whatever she writes next. If you need an easy short story collection, grab this one.

   

4. Stephen Kinzer : Poisoner in Chief

   If you’re like me, and knew nothing about MK Ultra and the CIA’s search for mind control, this book will completely blow your mind. The details Stephen Kinzer digs up about the operation and the man in charge, Sidney Gottlieb, is unbelievable. The sections about the apartments in SF and other cities that were used by hired prostitutes to lure men so they could unknowingly drug them with LSD are especially upsetting. I always thought it was a conspiracy that the CIA was instrumental in the spread and distribution of LSD, but according to this book, it’s a hard fact. They ran through trials on every major drug hoping to find a way to control people’s minds, leaving a mess of victims along the way and no actual way to do it. Knowing what we (as a country) have done in the name of self-defense, it’s disturbing to think about what we are probably still doing. There’s much more to this book than MK Ultra, and it’s all very shocking. Highly recommend this one.

3. Jess Walter: Cold Millions

   I’m continuing to enjoy every Jess Walter book I find, and this one is fantastic. Not my favorite, but very good. Set during the turn of the 20th century in Spokane, Washington, this novel follows the lives of union activists during a time when labor movements were aggressively suppressed. Part buddy adventure, part historical fiction, if you’re interested in labor/union movements and generally fun reads, you’ll love this book.

   

2. Tom Perrotta: Ghost Town

   As readers of this newsletter should know by now, I’m a huge Tom Perrotta fan, and I was thrilled to read his latest, Ghost Town. Staying true to the small town, slow build suspense niche he’s mastered, this one has the same propulsive energy and clever humor that keeps you turning pages. I couldn’t put it down. The story is about a successful writer asked to come back to his New Jersey town to speak at a commemoration for his father, causing him to reflect on a defining period of his childhood. As with many of his other novels, the stakes feel small and huge at the same time. Tom P is the GOAT.

   

1. Barbara Kingsolver: Demon Copperhead

   I was scared to read this novel. While I’d heard good things, and I love Barbara Kingsolver, I was worried it would be too depressing. And while there is plenty of darkness and tragedy, there is so much joy and happiness nestled in. It’s a devastating story of the opioid crisis, and what feels like an origin story for the oxy phase, and it’s truly heart-wrenching. I’ve never read David Copperfield, so I’m not sure how much is actually lifted. But this is without a doubt one of my favorite reading experiences of the last few years.

   

Thank you for reading! Please share your favorite reads and any parts/videos you think I missed.

I first watched Marc Johnson ride a skateboard in 411VM Best of Volume 4 when I was nine years old. It would be years before I could really appreciate the magic he was doing with those untied shoes and socks and khaki shorts. Not only the difficulty of combos like the manual trick in that one line (a nollie bs flip fakie manual revert), but the subtle genius of the sequence of subsequent manuals (seen above). A satisfying completion. One of the many video part devices that Marc would use over the course of the next fifteen years. A way for him to share his superior intelligence.

411VM Best of Volume 4 (1997)

There were many other devices and qualities that cemented him as one of the most important skateboarders of all time, not least of which were his innovation, style, and productivity. His approach to sequences—stringing together tricks that work off each other at the same spot or similar ones—probably ranks low on what most people love about his skating. But it’s something I’ve always admired about Marc. The intentionality blended with spontaneity. The way some tricks probably happened without him thinking about them too much, and others made him absolutely suffer.

Pretty Sweet (2012)

A week before he died, I had the urge to watch the last two video parts Marc Johnson produced in his career. After watching his part in Pretty Sweet and the underrated B-sides edit “Lost and Lakai’d,” I looked up how old he was when they came out and was shocked to learn that he was only thirty-five. Three years younger than I am now! This knowledge rocked me. Though I consider his Pretty Sweet part his best work, I thought he was ancient when that video came out. At the time, the mere fact that he was still producing high quality clips felt like a gift from the skate gods. But he was young, respectively. Especially considering many of the clips were probably a few years old. He was just a guy in his early thirties. A kid, in other words. And then for thirteen years we only saw clips sprinkled here and there. He never got back into the swing of filming video parts. Watching the parts again, knowing his age, I wondered what he was up to and hoped he was OK. I also wanted to know why he stopped.

“Lost and Lakai’d” (2013)

I never got to know Marc personally. Thinking about it now, knowing he’s gone, it’s strange to think that I can’t even remember where or when it was that I met him. Was it at the Berrics? Beibel’s Park, perhaps? I don’t think we skated together, just a quick hello. Maybe nothing more than a friendly nod. No chance to tell him that for years he was my hero. That as a child I copied his white socks and khaki shorts. And later, his style, trick selection and approach to filming video parts. That I continued copying and attempting to emulate his skating until the day I met him, making him—when I really think about it—the single most influential skater in my life. I never got to thank him for the joy he brought me and my friends.

Though I often returned to Marc Johnson parts for inspiration, I’d never done a marathon until the other day. Watching his parts in roughly the same order I first saw them, it’s wild to see his footprints across my entire development. It’s almost embarrassing how much I continue to try to be like Marc Johnson. Like, Jesus, dude! Be your own person! The adherence to white t’s and button ups. Switch tres. Nollie flips. Nosegrinds and nosemanuals and an obsession with 180 manual combos. The manny kickflip to manny. Some stair and gap hucking, but mostly low impact tech. What I couldn’t do in regular stance I adapted to my own comforts. Backside flips worked better for me switch. His fakie tricks I learned nollie. I swapped the nollie heel out of the nosemanual and nosegrind for a nollie flip. There was a lot I skipped of course. Proper heel flips. Tasteful handrail tricks. Switch frontside heel flips. In fact, I bet there are dozens of other pro skaters who pulled inspiration from Marc, but with entirely different selections borrowed from his bag of tricks. That’s another thing that makes him so special. His bag was exceptionally deep.

Modus Operandi (2000)

Transworld Magazine’s Modus Operandi was the second video part of his I watched, and this one really really changed me. Sure, Rodney and Daewon were getting tech, but they didn’t make it look so elegant. They also didn’t jump down big shit the way Marc did. The song evokes emotion. His fits are dope. His style is poised and flowy. And there’s something clearly focused about his approach. He was selective with his tricks. Playful, yes. But overall, serious. Marc’s Modus part is a masterclass in how to construct a perfect video part.

Man Down (2001)

There’s no way my middle school skate crew would have had as much fun skateboarding if the Tilt Mode Army hadn’t made their videos. We loved everyone, but especially Louie Barletta, who seemed like the mascot, and Marc, who felt like the captain. For us, Man Down made Marc a God. Because while anyone can copy clothing, tricks and even form, it’s impossible to emulate authentic goofiness and clever humor. Man Down showed us that difficult skateboarding is best fused with silliness and high-level messing around. It’s good to dress like a dork and do dork tricks before and/or after mind-melters. It’s fine to set up janky ramps in an ugly parking lot and call it a street spot. Chauncy Peppertooth and his companions demonstrated that skateboarding could and should always be fun.

Tilt Mode Army (2000)

I actually didn’t see the first Tilt Mode video until after Man Down came out on DVD, but Marc’s Tilt Mode Army part is an perfect compliment to his Rolling Stones-soundtracked masterpiece. Moodier and more serious, but still mind-boggling, relatable and quotable. I don’t think I would have done so many fakie and regular mid line turnarounds if it wasn’t for Marc.

Yeah Right! (2003)

Yeah Right! felt like yet another Marc Johnson arrival. He surprised the world with an introduction to Chocolate, adding a crucial ingredient to an already highly anticipated video. We all loved enjoi, but seeing him in the Crail camp elevated him, somehow. Continued his God-like ascension.

There are so many beautiful moments from this part. I love the flowy lines, NBD bangers, and clever sequences. The song seemed to capture the essence of Marc during this period. Sadly, the song wasn’t the same on the mass-produced DVD. A bunch of the songs were different and I never understood what happened there. It was even edited differently. Must have been something with the music rights. So if you were lucky to own the VHS or the “limited edition” DVD, you know the feeling I’m talking about with this song. And if you only had the other one, track the original down on YouTube and download it, ASAP.

Hot Chocolate (2004)

Hot Chocolate revealed a more personal, candid side of Marc than we’d previously seen. We also got to see a taste of the work ethic we would eventually learn a whole lot more about. A short and simple part, but one my friends and I were obsessed with.

I used to think it was Arto in Sorry who made me want to switch tre flips down stairs, but after rewatching Marc’s Hot Chocolate part, there’s no mistaking that it was Marc. Not just this part, but every part has a good one. The simple, most elegant flip trick that can be done.

Fully Flared (2007)

Fully Flared arrived almost twenty years ago, but I remember the day I first watched it like it was yesterday. I was in my dorm room with John Lupfer. We were both sponsored ams, and we’d heard stories from the lucky guys who went to the world premiere. We turned off the lights for our own private premiere experience. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. A bar had been raised, with Marc seemingly taking it higher than I thought imaginable. Each song carried its own feeling, like we got three parts in one. John and I would each go out and start skating differently, as did the rest of the skateboarding world. Rightfully, a Thrasher Magazine Skater of the Year trophy would follow. And though Marc took a break, this wouldn’t be the last Marc Johnson part we’d get. But it almost was, as filming for Fully Flared almost killed him.

Marc was very candid about his struggles with alcohol and depression, particularly during the Fully Flared era. I suggest watching or revisiting his interviews and podcasts. As of writing this, we don’t yet know a cause of death, but from the Instagram obituaries written by the people closest to him, there are hints of suicide or overdose. Whether intentional or not, Marc’s death is a tragedy. Cause doesn’t change its permanence.

When I lost one of my best friends to an accidental overdose, the first person who confirmed his death told me it was suicide. Hearing that destroyed me. Imagining one of my friends in such a depression that he would kill himself is horrible. The guilt is tormenting. Questions like, “What could I have done differently?” haunt you. I hated it. To learn later it was an accident, I felt a huge relief. The sadness remains, and addiction-related deaths usually involve some level of self-destruction and depression. But accidents happen. We can accept accidents. A suicide reverberates differently. A person should never feel like they should end their own life. Especially someone like Marc, who brought so much joy, inspiration and value to the world. Thinking of his family, friends, and thousands of other fans like me, I really hope it wasn’t suicide.

There has been a lot shared about Marc since his death. Many thoughtful send-offs and beautiful tributes. I hope he knows he was loved. One that stuck with me is an interview that Anthony Pappalardo (the writer) did with Marc in 2017. In it, Marc is lamenting about how Instagram and the internet changed the way we look at pro skaters:

“That’s what social media has done to our heroes. It has robbed us of our heroes. When I started skating you had two magazines a month that were really small and you had maybe two videos a year, maybe. You only got to see your favorite skaters periodically and everything was left to the imagination. You built up this thing about these people and you picked your favorites and there was such a gnarly gap, there was a wall. There was a divide between you and your hero.”

Marc never did too much on social media. Aside from his occasional interviews, I never got to know him. He remains my hero. Despite his well-documented and self-confessing flaws. My heart breaks for all of Marc’s friends and family. Especially for his son, Avery, who is a phenomenal skateboarder in his own right. And since I never got to say it in person, I’ll say it here:

Thank you, Marc.

Also, thank you everyone who pointed a camera at Marc or edited his footage during his time on Earth. The Memory Screen compilation is exceptionally great as it works in some memorable selects from tour videos and montages. Here are the parts I didn’t watch growing up.

More reading, listening or watching Marc:

https://www.simplemagic.ca/take-something-that-was-pure-thought-and-make-it-reality/

https://www.thrashermagazine.com/articles/marc-johnson-from-soty-to-hell-and-back-interview/?ref=simplemagic.ca

https://boiltheocean.wordpress.com/2026/05/29/watching-forever/

ARTLESS

REST IN POWER MARC JOHNSON

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2 months ago · 33 likes · 1 comment · Anthony Pappalardo

I’m a big novel guy, but my two favorite reads of the quarter are short story collections. My favorite is Encounters with Unexpected Animals, a new release from Bret Anthony Johnston, a wonderful person who I’ve decided is the greatest writer who skateboards. His stories don’t often involve skating, but he sprinkles in easter eggs in a way that lets you know he’s the real deal. And he is! As a skater and especially as an author. This collection is lighter than his previous, Corpus Christi, but just as poignant and heart-wrenching. He’s a master at using a few simple lines of dialogue to capture complex relationship dynamics or deep family or personal trauma. He’s amazing.

My second favorite is The Angel of Rome by Jess Walter. There are two stories in here that just completely broke me, in ways that were absolutely wonderful. “To The Corner” and “Town and Country” had me both laughing out loud and hopelessly weeping. Jess Walter is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers, someone I’ll be recommending to friends and acquaintances who are looking for fun, humorous, plot-driven books with unforgettable characters. And his short story collections do not disappoint.

My first Pulitzer Prize read of the year is Trust by Hernan Diaz, which I initially struggled to get into. Once I figured out what the author was doing, I was into it. I’m not going to say I love it, but I respect the craft. Also, a different perspective on the 1929 crash and reading about how some may have weathered the Great Depression was interesting. The ending was very satisfying. The novel I most enjoyed is Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, a fantastical adventure set on an island near Antartica. It’s about a family living alone on the island and a woman who washes ashore. Slightly unrealistic at times, but gripping and heartbreaking throughout. Highly recommend.

In the nonfiction department, I finally finished listening to The Power Broker by Robert Caro. It took me a couple years, but I made it through the sixty plus hours of learning about Bob Moses and his awesome and fucked up influence on New York City and Long Island. I wish I’d been living in the city while listening to really grasp how he altered the greatest city on earth for better and for worse.

Full Lengths

It’s been a good season for full length skate videos. As usual, I can’t quite figure out a consistent system for ranking videos or organizing my thoughts. So today I’m offering a top ten countdown for full lengths and solo parts.

10. Volcom “Microwave”

Going into 2026 I thought Volcom was a wrap, so it was interesting to see a full length video leaning heavy on an Australian cast. Simon Bannerot was an obvious highlight, but that could be my U.S. bias coming through. I have yet to watch this guy skate in person, but he seems ripe for the rare and coveted Rick McCrank award, which some say is better than SOTY. The video left me with more questions, though. Is this a “OZ” video? Is the Euro, North and South American smattering of faces an indication of who is left on the “international” team? Is Volcom based in Australia? A more diligent journalist might research this and provide you with those answers, but this is a video blog. And my official report is that this video is . . . pretty good!

9. Adidas “Red Brick Run”

Mr. Dibbs back in action! I don’t often consider tour edits worthy of a “Best Full Length” placement, but skate video standards aren’t what they used to be. It’s incredible what a crew of the world’s best can do over the course of a couple trips. This felt like a throw back, in the best possible way.

8. New Balance Numeric “Charlie & Davide”

Now is a two part video a full length? Maybe yes but probably no? Crusty spots, solid 4:3 production. These guys rip, and that’s really all there is to say on the matter.

7. Quasi “Hard Reset”

I’m not going to lie, it took me a couple weeks to actually watch this video. Thinking it was actually a FEATURE FILM length skate video upon release, I was so disturbed by the timestamp that I just skipped through and watched the parts that interested me. It turns out the video is only twenty-four minutes long, it’s really good, but the rest is . . . I don’t know. I still haven’t watched it. Maybe I will someday. But it’s a shame to see so much effort go into twenty-four minutes and then throw on another hour of nonsense onto the timeline. I appreciate video makers trying to do something different, but this old dog was just left feeling pissed off. A few notes. Music, not good. Cooper Qua and Jason Nam . . . really good! Bobby, keep writing (I guess?), but we’d love to see some tricks. Jake, you shouldn’t have let them use that switch bs flip. Tainted the rest of the (really good!) footage. Justin, great spots and tricks, but keep the shirt untucked. Does wonders. Dick, superb spot hunting, but are 5-0 to back tails and fakie 50-50 shuv 50-50’s really acceptable video part tricks? No, but it’s all good. The wallrides made up for it. And yeah, let’s be honest. Many of us, myself included, really just wanted to know if Dylan Jaeb had some footage.

6. Anti-Hero “Dumpster Dive”

My only real critique of this video is that it didn’t have quite enough Austin Kanfoush footy. Also, there’s something about these particular Mexico spots that, when mixed with other ditches and Southern California spots, looks a little bland. Otherwise, this video is a banger. Easy listening, funny antics, classic 1-8 shit. Solid Grant showing, as always. Nick Matthews never disappoints. Finn is fluid and fun to watch, and Gus always entertains. Special shoutout to Tony Trujillo, who was the first sponsored skater I ever saw skate in person. As someone who was born in Santa Rosa, I’m obligated to be a TNT fan for the rest of my life.

5. Adam Robo “Downtime”

I’m still baffled by how it’s possible for two skaters in one local video to exist with the sort of talent that would win them Rookie of the Year at the 2006 Transworld Awards, but in 2026 I still have no idea who they are. Even after watching the video more than once, I still don’t know their names. Dude who kickflip back overcrooks and the last guy are amazing. I recognized Romel Torres, he rules. And of course, my brother Sebo Walker has a very solid part, with more hucking than should be expected from a father of two working a full time job. His part rules! Homie videos shouldn’t be this good.

4. Naquan Rollings “Roadkill” Ep. 4

New York City is the greatest skate city on Earth. I love this squad, and I love what Naquan did with the editing for the intro to this. Unexpected songs through out, with an excellent Jiro part thrown in the middle. Long live NYC homie videos.

3. Awaysted “Into Otherness”

San Francisco is the (other) greatest skate city on Earth. This squad dug up some crusty spots, activated some new ones, and produced solid gold at some of the classics. Blake Norris is one of my favorites, and I was very impressed with both Nate Guest and Myles Tussey. I’d never seen a full part from Myles, and I have to say, the man has excellent trick selection. The shocker for me was the Golden Gate Bridge clip. First off, bust wise, it’s the hardest spot to get away with skating in The City. Second, I’ve driven by that spot all my life and never noticed that as a manual spot. Mind blown emoji X 3.

2. SOUR “The Sour Solution 3,3”

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what to call this video. Feels like a promo, but could it be a final offering? At the time of writing, Gustav has posted a blank board, the internationally accepted language for quitting your board sponsor. But wasn’t his board sponsor his company? I don’t get it. I don’t want this breaking news to taint my feelings about this video, which is that it was very fun to watch. A true-to-form SOUR production-more of a Jante perhaps—but that’s fine. The HD 4:3 is an upgrade, in my opinion, and the vibes remain. I hope this is not the end of the SOUR, but if it is, I get it. Boards are a tough biz.

1. Element “Search”

I was fortunate to attend the world premiere for this video, and there’s something special about experiencing a video for the first time in a movie theater. Especially one that took such care with the sound production. Not to mention an actual cinematic direction, a quality rarely found in skate video full lengths these days. Phil Zwijsen did a hell of a job with this one. Unique spots, beautiful nature, and a fantastic line up. Vincent Milou and Vinicius Costa were the two standouts for me, but I’ll always geek out on new Jaakko footage.

Video Parts

10. Wilson Chavez “Glass Bottle”

Best current impossibler in the game?

9. David Loy “XX”

I wouldn’t call myself the biggest David Loy fan, but I love seeing someone my age continue to push themselves on an extremely high level.

8. Max Geronzi “No Fixed Address”

Hyped to see Max back on the board, even if it is on an oddly shaped one. If you’ve ever tried to actually get tech on a noseless board, it’s terrifying. Ankle roll city. As a guy who apparently has been dealing with lots of ankle injuries, the shaped board intro is extra impressive. One of the best styles in skateboarding.

7. Deedz “Whimsical”

Deedz continues to offer the unusual balance of ride-on sus behavior—tricks that don’t seem to require much skill—combined with the most insane technical finesse, which effectively cancel any suspicions that he might not actually be that good. He’s also a master spot hunter. His third eye is WIDE open. Deedz remains one of the most exciting pros to watch.

6. Matt Militano “MM”

Bit of a slow-roller, but I don’t mind, considering that’s how a lot of people seem to think of my skating lately. His tech brain makes up for any offense on that front, in my opinion. This dude is really fun to watch ride.

5. Donta Hill “Mortaddicere”

I really enjoyed this part. Height is a funny thing in skateboarding. Fisheyes and other filming tactics often obscure a skater’s actual height. It’s hard to know if a skater is 5’5’’, 5,8” or maybe 6’1’’. But there’s no questioning that Donta is tall, and he leans into it in a way that I really admire. Between the picnic table work, and finding ollies and routes an otherwise average-height dude might not see, he’s using his powers for good.

4. Josh Douglas “Seed of Doubt”

This part really surprised me. Dope song, impeccable trick selection. One of the most well-rounded skaters I’ve seen in a while. I hope someone is paying this dude.

3. Daan Van Linden “Daan Canaria”

We all know Daan is the best. He’s got potential SOTY written all over him. But his parts feel more like casual jaunts, which happen to have really good skating. Is it the effort, injuries or a general lack of caring that prevents Daan from becoming a full SOTY run guy? Either way, it doesn’t matter, because he’s a joy to watch and this part rules.

2. Ronnie Kessner “April”

He might be the perfect skater. Cool fits. Skates fast, gets tech. Stays classy. Seems like a thinker. Spot selection is excellent, considering he’s mostly filming in LA. Song feels ABD but otherwise, this is a masterclass in how to put out a video part.

1. Dashawn Jordan “SB Dunk Low”

It’s bold skating to your own music, especially R&B or anything where the singing is clear and easy to understand. Rap, punk or metal could obscure the lyrics, or disguise the artist. But, somehow, this pairing didn’t bother me. All I can think about is how hyped Dashawn must be to lay his best skating to date to his best song to date. I’ve been following both his music and his skating since he’s been putting them out, and there’s no question that this part showcases his strongest work. The song even features a well-established R&B singer/rapper, Blxst, who fortunately carries the outro. Skating wise, Dashawn couldn’t be more on top of his game, and I hope he ends up in the SOTY running this fall.

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With the best two parts coming from the April camp, does that make April the best board brand in 2026? Coupled with Shane’s compilation edit, I think April is.

Speaking of that edit, I’ve been thinking about how proud I am of my peers in skateboarding who’ve held down sponsors for the last fifteen to twenty years. The guys (and Alexis) who have pushed the limits for two decades, changed what it means to be a professional skateboarder, and somehow in their late thirties continue to produce high level skateboarding. Skaters who are “Middle Children,” in the J. Cole sense, people who’ve slipped into veteran status, yet are still sons to so many skate legends. Two of these skaters released compilation edits last quarter, and I really love them. No telling how long Chima and Shane will continue to produce great skateboarding, and I pray Vans and Nike keep supporting their efforts.

Thank you for reading! To support me, please consider reading my books.

In skateboarding, this is usually the moment when a person goes from being someone who has dreamed of being pro to . . . being pro! A skater might be making money from brands, but in the eyes of the industry, they haven’t made it until their name is on a board. So why did this party at FTC, complete with a wall of boards for fans and friends to purchase, not feel like the moment of triumph that in many ways it was? Is it a sign of the times? Does being pro mean something different in 2025 than it did in, say, 2011, the year I turned pro at a party in San Francisco? And who is Nico in the context of professional skateboarding?

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Nico is the rare case of someone who, even without the pro board, has long been pro, but has also already transcended professional skateboarding. Over the course of the last decade, he’s racked up the proper accolades as a skater. Nico has consistently appeared in videos big and small, local and branded. He’s had solo parts and montage clips. Viral IG edits. Nico’s even had the cover of Thrasher Magazine, a feat many other perhaps more traditional pro skateboarders will never accomplish. Most important, he’s really good at skateboarding. He’s a lifer.

Amazingly, while doing all of this, Nico has been building a solid career in Hollywood, landing a handful of leading roles in major motion pictures, along with numerous supporting roles in movies and TV Shows alike. Check his IMDb, it’s wild. He’s a working actor who skateboards on the side. And not in the sense that most people skate on the side, like in the evening after work or on the weekends. His work contractually prevents him from skateboarding while he’s on a shoot. Months off the board is not easy. So it’s only in between projects that Nico can really push himself. Which makes what he films and produces all the more impressive.

So no, the Chico Stix event didn’t “turn” Nico pro. But it celebrated something we already knew about Nico and cemented his status. Moving forward, I think that we as a culture should evolve from using the pro board as the trivial stamp of approval. The barriers that once made it mean something are gone. It’s never been easier to print off a few boards, make a website or consign them to a skate shop, and call someone pro. Hell, I haven’t had a pro board in years, but I have all the resources to print off some graphics, add a new product page on the Old Friends Shopify account, and boom! I’m pro again. I don’t know what the new metric should be, but we should come up with something. It’s time.

Another interesting thing about Nico is that he’s one of the few contemporary skaters to make a name for himself while growing up in San Francisco. I can only think of three professional skateboarders in the last twenty years who can say they were born and raised in San Francisco: Lil Dre, Jonathan Perez, and Nico. Where you’re born and raised is, of course, not up to you, so it’s not necessarily something to claim as an accomplishment. But I would think being a skateboarder from one of the industry’s most important hubs would make it easier. So why does it happen so rarely? There must be an added challenge. All that’s to say, it’s pretty cool that Nico is one of those guys. Working on this episode, I was also stoked to find that he is the same humble skate rat I met over a decade ago. He’s a kind soul who remains rooted in his local skate community. Wishing him nothing but continued success.

San Francisco is a city that has made countless careers over the last twenty years, not to mention the decades preceding it. But the majority of the more recent skaters were transplants. More interesting to me are the skaters who migrate to San Francisco to make careers, whether they intend to or not. The ones who film the locals and the transplants and make videos for the San Francisco brands. Working on this Skate Tales shoot, I was reminded of some writing I did for Red Bull a couple years ago that I haven’t shared here yet. Here is that piece:

Filming Skateboarding in the Streets of San Francisco

San Francisco is one of the most enticing and aesthetically pleasing cities to film skateboarding. From the Bones Brigade videos of the ‘80s, the technical progression at EMB and Pier 7 during the '90s, the hill bombing insanity of the 2000’s, and all the way to the 2023 showstopper, “City to City,” which crowned Miles Silvas Thrasher Magazine’s Skater of the Year; moments captured in San Francisco have made a permanent impact on the culture.

But what’s it like for the unsung heroes behind the lens? Filmers standing in the wind and cold, for hours on end, waiting patiently for the right shot. Skating bent over and angling their fisheye just right as they soar down hills alongside their subjects. They need to get their shot right 100% of the time, while the skater only has to land their trick once. What challenges come with filming in one of the most storied and dangerous cities for skateboarding?

We sat down with two filmers who contributed to this installment of ‘Greetings From’ to see what it’s like to be behind the lens documenting the magic. Otto Ray and Mack Scharff help shed some insight into the process.

Otto is from San Diego and moved to San Francisco in 2015, drawn to The City by the GX1000 videos, Static IV, and projects by Zach Chamberlain. Today, he works for Thrasher and GX1000 and is in the streets every day. The name of the game, for his crew, is patience and persistence. “In San Francisco, the process is definitely harder. The spots that we get clips on, it usually takes us a bunch of times going back. But I feel like the size of The City makes it perfect for doing that. You search around and keep tabs on all these spots, waiting for a car to move or something.”

Mack grew up in Boise, Idaho and moved to San Francisco around the same time as Otto. “I didn't want to live in a place where it's 100 degrees in the summer and zero degrees in the winter,” Mack says. “I just packed up my truck and put a mattress in the back. I lived in that for the first six months. I just wanted to skate and film.” Today, Mack works for Deluxe distribution as one of their videographers and editors. But like most skaters who make the move to The City, in the beginning, the hills took some getting used to. “Right when I first moved, I was bombing this hill in North Beach and a car was in the intersection and kind of slowed down. So I was dragging my foot at first and then had to jump and slide over the hood. And then my camera bag kind of flipped me around and I just landed on my ass. I was fine, but I'm sure it looked super crazy.”

The threat of a car rolling into an intersection at the wrong time makes filming on the big hills all the more nerve-racking. Otto’s approach to filming his friends on hills includes bringing a group to allow for spotters at every intersection. “Sometimes there's not enough people spotting and then some pedestrians will help us out. We definitely try to make it as safe as possible.” For Otto and his crew, it helps having multiple filmers on the session. “There’s definitely been a couple of times where I had to decide, do I spot right now or do I film it? I'll be nervous that I have to jump out and stop a car while I’m filming. So it's nice when there's another cameraman there, so I'm not the only one.”

Mack agrees that it can be intense being behind the lens. “For the most part, it’s always freaky. People are flying, but you get used to it. The guys I film with are top notch, though. They know what they’re doing. I’ve gotten a little desensitized to it.”

Stationary filming at the top (or bottom) of a hill is one thing, but taking the hill with the skater, as they weave together lines down streets and sidewalks, is another skill entirely. Mack has a few tips he’s learned over the years for downhill filming. “I try to have a dedicated pair of shoes in the van, because I’ve gone through a whole shoe in an entire day from dragging my foot. Also, it definitely helps to bomb the whole hill first. A few months ago I was at a spot and it was a hill I’ve bombed a bunch before, but that day I didn’t bomb it and it was starting to rain. I was like, we gotta get this right here! The skater tried it once and did it and I started pushing downhill, trying to keep up with him and then rode off this curb and fell and exploded my elbow into two different pieces. Had surgery the next day.”

Another unique challenge in San Francisco is theft. Both Otto and Mack have been robbed at gunpoint for their cameras while filming. “People are looking out for targets,” Mack muses. “Just like skaters are looking for spots. People see skaters and they know we have cameras.” Though these are extreme cases, and somewhat rare, “bipping”, or stealing bags from parked cars is practically an epidemic. If you visit San Francisco, Mack advises the following: “Bring everything with you everywhere you go. Lock your car like it’s Fort Knox. Don’t even try to hide your bag under the seat. They’re going to take it. People hear all about the crazy stuff that happens in San Francisco, and they think they’re going to be fine. They think they can just leave their gear in the van for five minutes, midday. But it’s going to get taken.”

Despite the risks and challenges, there are days that make it all worth it. “When you do figure out something new,” Otto says, “it’s the most rewarding feeling. You’re in this tiny little city that’s been skated by all the best people for the past 30 years, and you find something new. It’s just the coolest thing. I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing in life. It’s definitely a dream come true.”

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Thank you for reading! If you’d like to check out some more of my writing for Red Bull, you can find it here:

https://www.redbull.com/us-en/iconic-san-francisco-skate-spots

https://www.redbull.com/us-en/red-bull-sky-line-twin-peaks-san-francisco

https://www.redbull.com/us-en/red-bull-sky-line-behind-the-build

If you’d like to read a skateboarding adventure novel set in San Francisco, consider Top of Mason.

Or read a sample chapter here:

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Top Five Tricks

1. Bob Burnquist : Switch Front Foot Impossible to Lipslide

   

   On paper, there is nothing appealing about this trick. But when you see it, and think about the lifetime of groundbreaking tricks this forty-nine-year-old man has already accomplished, it’s just so fucking cool. The scale, the wild style, the switch ride out. Tom Schaar is an amazing vert and mega ramp skater, but it is unlikely that there will ever be anyone as great as Bob.
   

2. Yuri Facchini : Hardflip to Frontside Nosegrind

   

   Over the last fourteen years, as I became a peer and sometimes real friend to some of the world’s best skateboarders, there are two tricks I’ve requested from certain skaters with a particular set of talents. Both of those tricks went down in 2025. One is a backside noseblunt at three-up-three-down in SF. We have yet to see the footy, but it will certainly be a contender for 2026 TOTY.

   I started asking for the second trick in 2012 after figuring out the front shove to frontside nosegrind. I thought the same subtle movement shift could easily happen with the hardflip. I can’t do hardflips, especially not with the power and precision needed to land in a frontside nosegrind. But I’ve lived with hardflippers (Kelly Hart), I’ve had hardflippers crash on my couch (Wade Desarmo), I’ve traveled with hardflippers (Boo Johnson, Ryan Gallant), I’ve remained close friends with ledge savants who became SOTYs who can hardflip (Mark Suciu, Miles Silvas), and I’ve even DM requested the move from hardflipping acquaintances (Sewa Kroetkrov). Hell, I was even once a groomsmen for a hardflipper (Sebo Walker) who has done many hardflip backside nosegrind and frontside noseslide variations. No one accepted my challenge.

   And then, Yuri did one. Someone I once gave an Old Friends PT Pack to and didn’t even think to ask. And he did it on a fucking picnic table! It blew my mind. I would say it’s the first, but a homie in Boston told me that Will Mazzari did one too. I haven’t seen the clip, but I believe him.

3. Antonio Durao : Switch Tre over the Brooklyn Banks 10 Rail

   

   We all knew Antonio would hit us with a bangin switch tre in 2025, but most of us expected it to be on the ‘berg. He was the man I wanted to see win SOTY, and there was a moment there at the end of November when I thought, man, if Antonio would just go do that shit for Instagram or something, he could win! But alas, he did not switch 360 flip Wallenberg. Instead, he did it on a much cooler spot, though perhaps not as gnar. It’s a popped switch tre, the most elusive sort. A dope one, but not a groundbreaking one. While I was rooting for him ‘til the bitter end, his parts just didn’t really do it for me this year. None of them felt complete and they were littered with too many one-foots, half-flips, and other tom-foolery. A wise man once said, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” For the editors of Antonio’s footage next run; please, just leave out the silliness.

4. Chris Joslin : Tre Flip El Toro

   

   Objectively speaking, this is the best trick of the year. Unbelievable perfection and the only skate trick from the last few years with a celebration hug that brought actual tears to my eyes.

   

   But the problem is, I’ve already sort of seen it. There’s a lying version and an almost version. After so many rewatches in wonder, when the real thing arrived it no longer hit with the proper impact. Eight years ago, it almost happened. Three years ago, I watched a spliced (pre AI) cut and it was almost completely convincing. Then later, Instagram fed me the near-perfect ride away so many times, by the time I watched the real one, I’m not sure that I cared anymore. I don’t want to take anything away from Chris Joslin’s well-deserved SOTY trophy and his trick of the year. Both should be his. But I don’t know. The internet ruined the magic for me.

5. Eetu Toropainen : Backside Bigspin

   

   I love when a trick shocks me and leaves me thinking, HOW!!??

   This one really blew my mind. And I still don’t quite believe it happened. Actually . . . how?

   Thanks for reading Stick to Skating! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

   Video Parts:

1. Ryan Lay - Endless Beauty

   There have been a few moments in skateboarding when a skater is presented to hip-hop, creating pure magic. These moments either create a new impression or alter a preexisting one. Antwuan as an arrival. Chris Cole as a rebrand alongside an introduction of Tom Asta. Jamie Thomas in Chomp on This. Maybe even Mark Suciu in Sabotage 3.
   Now I won’t say that I have necessarily disliked the music Ryan Lay has skated to in the past, but it’s not for me. So when the sultry sounds of Young Thug arrived, stomping new excitement into the nollie-noseblunting career twilight of a skater I greatly admire, I was hyped. And the hype kept building!

   

   This is easily the part I watched most this year to get hyped to skate, which is hopefully what we’re all here for. It’s fun when skating looks fun, even when we know it probably wasn’t. This is Ryan’s best part to date, and as a stand-alone piece, one of the great parts of the century. Yeah, you read that right. The century.

2. Bobby Dekeyzer - BOBCBC

   I already wrote about it for my mid-year recap. As incredible as this piece is, I still would love to see all the makes as one part. The easy rewatch factor just isn’t there.

3. Daniel Lutheran - A Pound of Flesh

   I love to see a homie come out of the woodwork and bang us over the head with some powerful skating. Bravo Daniel!

4. Lil Dre - Girl

   Dre is already someone I wrote about in my mid-year recap, so I don’t want to be redundant. But aside from the intro, which felt just a tad long and somewhat off, the skateboarding in this video part is his best yet. I also like that it makes me enjoy a song I would otherwise never listen to.

5. Griffin Gas - Pearl

   My new favorite BALS (Best American Ledge Skater). Long been a fan, his parts are always a treat. But there’s something special about this one. Just when I thought I was sick of the VX, a part like this comes out to totally bring out the magic.

Full length Videos:

1. Melodi - Wasting Time

   In a few years, I’m probably going to look at this and wonder what the hell I was thinking. But when I think about 2025’s full length videos, nothing moved me as much as this one. I can barely name a skater in it, or the guy who made it. I don’t even really remember the tricks! But I remember the feeling. A rare essence, both scary, exciting, and inspiring.

2. Real : Oval

   Zion peaking, Mason ripping, Toby Ryan being the absolute gnarliest, and Kyle Walker proving he’s still goes huge. Oh yeah, and Ishod! A great skate video from start to finish.

3. Tim Savage: Free Game

   When putting out a skate video, the best thing you can hope for is that it’s a quiet week on the interweb. Well, I was not so lucky this year. I’d been sitting on Siesta for almost a year, and the week it hit the internet, Free Game came out the next day. And then a day later, the Hockey video arrived. Both videos are amazing, but I like this one more. Underground ledge gods and some of New England’s finest. Nothing like a good homie video made by a homie.

4. Sci-Fi Fantasy : Endless Beauty

   Some of the music hit, some of it didn’t. But this is a great skate video. I’m forever a Corey Glick fan, but a point deducted from its potential ranking due to Ryan not getting the closer. Also, would have loved to see Jerry with his own part.

5. Chris Mulhern: Untitled 007

   A surprise Bobby Worrest part and mind-blowing pop madness from Quel? Not much more you can ask for.

BOOKS

I finish every year wishing I read more. But how does anyone find the time? For the last two years, I’ve been the primary caregiver for our son while my wife works nine to five. If anyone out there has raised a toddler, you’ll agree that there’s not much time for leisurely reading. And when there is free time, there are house projects, the phone, my own writing, the reading of my own writing, dozens of other miscellaneous computer projects. Bills and emails. Going skateboarding, editing said skateboarding. But somehow I was still able to squeak out thirty-eight books in 2025. Nineteen novels, ten short story collections, and nine nonfiction books. Nonfiction audiobooks, I will admit, which I use to ease away from long-form podcast consumption.

My novel selection comes from a mix of recommendations (Train Dreams, North Woods, American Pastoral), gifts from my mom (Kindred), Kindle copies my wife purchased (Carrie Soto is Back), trailers of new movie/tv adaptations (Project Hail Mary, Department Q : Keeper of Lost Causes), classics I feel obligated to read (The Talented Mr. Ripley), and sometimes spontaneous purchases based on a book’s physical size (The Little Liar, Everything I Never Told You). This year I finally completed Tom Perrotta’s oeuvre (I’d somehow missed his first, The Wishbones). I’ve also decided to read all of the Pulitzer Prize Winning novels awarded in my lifetime. I’m aiming for two a year.

Since I’m new to enjoying short story collections, I’m starting with the novelists I like who’ve published collections (In Our Time), collections I’ve already read (Nine Stories, Do The Windows Open?) and others I find lying around (Best of 2012). Nonfiction selections are totally random. Charlie Wilson’s War, for example, struck my eye at the dump and my favorite of the year came from a Ta-Nehisi Coates interview (yes, I do still listen to podcasts).

Novels:

1. So Far Gone by Jess Walter

   

   Jess Walter brought me out of a serious reading slump. The last few months of the year, I’d been picking up and putting down a handful of books. I rarely give up on novels, but I was stuck with a handful that I just wasn’t that into. And then I read the first two pages of So Far Gone, which happened to be sitting on a my Aunt Tracey’s coffee table, and I was hooked. I finished it in two days, a reading experience I haven’t had in years. The characters jump off the page and the story is that perfect blend of comedy, tragic stupidity and beautiful humanity. A book for our time, but one I’ll be recommending for years to come.

2. Citizen Vince by Jess Walter

3. Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

4. Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler

5. Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

   Nonfiction:

1. The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer

   

   This couldn’t be a more relevant book to dive into in January 2026. The Brothers covers the insane reign of the Dulles Brothers over the CIA and the State Department when the USA began testing its regime change muscles. Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, Congo, Indonesia, Cuba. Kinzer details how the CIA waged complicated propaganda campaigns and orchestrated violent overthrows aimed to satisfy US corporate interests and to “combat” any potentially communist or anti-US developing nation state. Most of the time, these countries weren’t even communist or anti-USA, but we just didn’t want them getting close to the Soviet Union. It’s tragic how many countries are still affected to this day by actions taken sixty or seventy years ago by these two men. Shockingly, those regime change efforts pale in comparison to the brazen kidnapping of the Venezuelan president last week. And while it may not be a “regime” change, it has all the workings of a plan the Dulles brothers would only have dreamed of executing.

2. Tomorrow is Yesterday by Hussein Agha, Robert Malley

3. Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile

4. Abundance by Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

5. Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber

   Short Story Collections:

   1. We Live in Water by Jess Walter

   2. Nine Inches by Tom Perrotta

   3. Haunting of Hajji Hotak by Jamil Jan Kochai

   4. Diamond As Big as the Ritz by F. Scott Fitzgerald

   5. When the Nines Roll Over in by David Benioff

   Newsletters

Simple Magic

Cole Nowicki is the best writer and ‘sletterer in skateboarding. His output and consistency is nothing short of amazing. Great takes on the culture, excellent investigations into dubious figures and businesses in the industry, and great collaborations with other writers. I’m sure if you’re reading this you already sub, but if not, sub it!

Looking at Picture Books

As a new father and nightly reader of picture books, sometimes you wonder . . . what exactly the hell is going on here? This newsletter asks similar questions, but through the lens of two seasoned picture book authors, and they’re hilarious. If you grew up reading Goodnight Moon or Go Dog Go, please read their deep dives. So funny.

Amuse Bouche

If you’re a dude, this might be more of a rec for your female better half or family member. Michele is an accomplished model and founder of Lorenza Wine, and her newsletter focuses on wine, food, travel, shopping and new parenthood. Michele is also one of my oldest friends and I love what she’s doing.

Robin Sloan

One of my favorite contemporary novelists, Robin Sloan offers a monthly newsletter filled with all the things he’s interested in—books, blogs, tech writing, gift guides, olive oil and more. He’s funny, sharp, and I always find something interesting to dig into from his reading suggestions.

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There’s a question I like to ask skaters of my generation:

“What was the first part you saw on YouTube?”

This question is not interesting for skaters under thirty, I’d imagine, because YouTube is likely where they first watched any video of skateboarding. But for the old folks, times were different. We absorbed the skate video medium through full lengths purchased (or ripped) on VHS tapes or DVD’s. Kazaa and Limewire moved things to the computer, but we were still downloading and watching longer videos. Same with iTunes.

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The first individual video part that I watched on YouTube was Brian Anderson’s bonus part from Fourstar’s Super Champion Funzone. I think the year was 2005, and I remember the day vividly. I was in high school, visiting Kyle Brown in his dorm, and the video quality was terrible. You could barely make out some of the tricks. We watched it and then went skating around his campus. The effect was pure HYPE.

The individual video part (skate short?), uploaded to YouTube, was soon the norm. People dabbled with other players and hosts, but YouTube quickly became king. My formal introduction to the skate industry as an “am” was with a solo part for Organika, released in 2008 without any warning or build up, even for me. Before it hit the net, I hadn’t watched it or even heard the song. And there it was: A video of only me, for a brand. The feeling was strange.

It’s almost impossible to keep up with all the videos that come out online. The magazine sites prioritize advertisers and regional biases, and if one mag publishes a video, there isn’t a chance in hell that the others will acknowledge or promote it. Sifting through it all and finding videos to rewatch has never been more challenging. Skatefolio is doing a good job. Some YouTube accounts try to make playlists. But it’s a daunting task just keeping up with it all.

And what is a skate video today? There are tour videos, full length brand features, full length homie videos. There are two or three man brand vids, woman and man brand vids, Instagram parts, YouTuber parts. There are magazine parts, brand/mag collab parts, magazine parts uploaded to different players and channels at different times. Full lengths, parts that are full lengths, vlogs that function as both full lengths and parts. Docs that feel like parts, parts that feel like tour vids. It’s madness!

In 2013, with hopes of curbing some of this impending madness, if only for my own poor memory, I started a blog called Under Saturation. This was an effort to not only catalog the videos I liked, but also a way to practice writing. A daily exercise, since the content was already hitting the sites at an overwhelming pace. I stayed on it for a few years, but my writing habits veered toward fiction, and essays, and by 2018 I had pretty much stopped writing anything for the blog. UnSat became a watered down favorites tab and now feels like a homework assignment I’ve been putting off for over a year.

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Today, I would like to look at the first half of the year and share my favorite parts: My favorite individual-solo-skate-short-video-part-pieces. Blog a little how I used to blog.

The solo part is a special form of video output, one that feels true to YouTube, and I would like to preserve the good ones. There’s also a certain humility to putting out a video in the first half of the year. SOTY season is far away, and there’s an acceptance that whatever comes out will likely be forgotten. So let’s look at some videos from the first half of the year. This selection, much like the vids I used to blog about, comes with complete personal biases.

Top 10: Q1 & Q2 2025

1. Bobby Dekeyzer : BOBCBC

I can’t overstate how impressed I was with this video when I first watched it. I delayed watching it for a few days because of the time stamp, but once I committed, the twenty-four minutes flew by like I’d just watched a bizarre but straight forward concept part. One skater, one spot. The video sucked me in, capturing the agony that goes into filming ledge lines better than any rough cut or documentary ever could. The pain of never being able to use a powerful first trick because you missed the last one. The suffering that goes into return attempts. The compromises. “BOBCBC” does something special for the form, from its conception to its scoring and everything in between. I still wish there was a finale edit of all the makes, with a song, but that’s just because I don’t have twenty-four minutes to spare if I want to get hyped to skate. This is clearly what Bobby wanted to show us. He’s the best of the best in his realm and I hope his sponsors’ paychecks reflect it.

2. Lil Dre : For Drew

I think Dre was thirteen when he went on his first skate trip, and I was lucky to be there for it. The kid was a sponge. A true phenom with unbelievable board control who we all knew he was destined for greatness. Though he landed the sponsors shortly thereafter and progressed rapidly on social media, it’s only been the last few years that we’ve seen what Dre (the man) can do in the streets in video part form. This is his greatest output yet, but far from the heights he will reach. His GIRL part (which should come out soon) is going to be GOOD.

3. Cyrus Bennet : Blackout Try

I love a single city part, and there is no one better to pull it off than Cyrus. He’s gotta be one of the hardest working pros in skateboarding. Aside from a few suspect switch flicks, every trick in this video is powerful and proper. Proper in the sketchy sort of way Cyrus has mastered.

4. Jaakko Ojanen : It’s Better

Another master of the sloppy smooth, Jaakko footage is pure magic. This part proves that you don’t need “good” skate spots to make a good part. Most of the what he skates in this would be largely ignored by the majority of professional skateboarders. I’d still like to see Jaakko jump here and there, because we know he’s still got it. But for now I’m happy with the high IQ approach to what looks like mostly uninspiring terrain.

5. Marius Syvanen : Aalto

I’ve known Marius to close to twenty years, and he’s always been one of the best. But his journey has been turbulent, and there was a period of time where I worried we wouldn’t get another full part from the man. Marius is a true skate rat, and it’s refreshing to see him out there getting it in Europe, at some of the most incredible spots suited for his skill set. Good on ya Govs.

6. Shawn Hale : VX Birdhouse

Shawn has to be one of the most underrated skateboarders who ever lived. I normally hate to use the word underrated, because I don’t think it is quite descriptive enough. In the case of Shawn, he’s not only highly skilled, he’s got a high IQ for spots and a unique transition-centric approach to non transition spots. Wall ride manuals? Switch wallie nosegrind reverts? While I don’t love the song or some of the apache fades, there’s a lot to unpack and study in this part and Shane Auckland, of the Sk8rats franchise, does a superb job filming and editing. Now let’s see those avos next to a pro model New Balance shoe. Or get the man a contract, at least.

7. John Dilo : Choking The Bat

Dilo continues to prove that he is in a league of his own with his manual tech prowess and the ability to huck. A rare combo. I love his approach to The Manny at The Library. Considering the bust and bum factor involved with that spot, the idea of committing to a manny concept there fills me with dread. He also deserves big props for the Busenitz to fakie flip at Pier 7 and unlocking one of the last basic flat ground tricks over the block. Dilo rules.

8. Vincent Milou : Welcome to Element

Amazing style and finesse, I love to see the Olympians clocking in on the streets. The way the music, filming and tricks come together at 1:55 is the reason we watch video parts.

9. Romel Torres : Welcome to CONS

I sometimes wonder if kids like Romel are the new norm or the new exception. There is something familiar about his versatility and style, but something completely unique as well. Perhaps it’s the fog of the well-rounded skater on the internet that has seeped into contemporary skateboarding the last few years. The unnamed GX guy, or the bro in the homie video who skates like all the other bros. Fast, big, and gnar. It might be easy to let a video like this pass by and be forgotten, but it shouldn’t! There is something special about Romel.

10. Jamie Foy : Aftermath

Unless Foy is gunning for the NBD two-peat SOTY, there is no reason to put out this gnarly of a video part right AFTER winning the most prestigious award in skateboarding. Why not save it? I like to think he’s just out there doing it for the love. Otherwise this part, plus his SOTY tour vid, plus his summer tour vids, plus his casual destruction of everything in his path approach to skateboarding might land this dude another trophy. In which case, this was a masterstroke campaign move.

Ten More

Chris Colbourn : York and Fig

Curren Caples : CURREN

Tom Schaar : Vert’s Not Dead

Jonathan Perez : Excelsior

Barney Page : Pixie

Kenny Stanley : A1

Simon Bannerot : Spitfire

Gabriel Fortuna : King

Dougie George : Chocolate

Hermann Stene : A Thousand Suns

Please share your favorite part from the first half of the year if you think I’ve missed something important.

High Street Lows is set in my hometown of St. Helena in the Napa Valley and follows a successful professional skateboarder whose girlfriend has unexpectedly died. David, rudderless and grief-stricken, embroils himself in seemingly harmless small-town drama while navigating the spoils of his pro model shoe's financial success.

This is book three in what I’m calling The Streets of Lissé, a collection of standalone stories that can be read in any order. Each book is connected to a fictional shoe company, Lissé, and some characters appear in all the story lines.

I’m not sure how other authors begin writing a novel, but my new one started with three questions.

1. What if there was someone who altruistically (and then, perhaps, spitefully) paid other people’s property taxes?

2. What if I’d been a witness to the murder that took place across the street from my childhood home in St. Helena?

3. What would it be like to win the shoe lottery as a pro skater?

The initial question struck me years ago while I was paying property taxes online. The website didn’t require any sign-in or verification that I owned the property. I basically just typed in the address and then paid the bill. What if I’d paid the wrong house? Could I easily get a refund? Would I confront the owners? What if I was rich enough and didn’t care? Could paying other people’s taxes become a compulsion? Could it get me into trouble?

The second question has haunted me for over twenty years. It was a miserably hot summer day and I had just purchased my first video camera (Canon GL2 for the camera nerds out there) with some hard-earned cash from my job at the Cameo Cinema. I was relieved it arrived the day before my pilgrimage to Visalia Skate Camp, but also immediately bored because none of my friends were around to skate with me that day. So I sat around, messing with the settings and then started packing for camp. I needed toothpaste, so I walked down the street to Safeway where I decided I was hungry. I bought a sandwich and ate it outside the grocery store. When I returned home, there was a crowd gathered across the street and a few police officers blocking traffic.

“Cool,” I thought. “Something I can film.”

With my new camera up against my face, I recorded the crowd and as I moved through it I asked what happened.

“Someone got shot,” a neighbor said. “They’re saying he’s dead.”

I immediately dropped the camera and stared in the direction of the corpse. Someone got shot across the street from my house? In St. Helena? What if I’d been home? I doubt I would have recognized the sound of gunshots, but would I have just walked out with my camera and filmed the killer? Would I have become entangled in the investigation? He escaped that afternoon and to my knowledge was never apprehended.

So began the slow, story development. First in my head, then on the pages of various moleskins, and eventually in an offline-accessible Google doc, where I tapped away for thirty minutes to an hour every day for about a year. In the end, the story evolved into something much different than I’d initially mapped out. It’s less about property taxes, and more about searching for answers after a loved one’s tragic death. The novel is a love letter to my hometown and a place to vent some of my frustrations with the skateboarding industry.

This is how it begins:

“I always assumed I would die young. Bleeding out from a gunshot wound, on a road in a small wine-country town, while lying next to a dead body, however, is not what I imagined.

I had pictured my early death being far more heroic. Like diving in front of a bus to save a small child, or defending my girlfriend’s honor in some bold but tragically foolish act. Or if not heroic, at least dramatic and altruistic in some way that you might want to tell your friends about. Like veering off the side of a Pacific Coast cliff to avoid hitting a struggling cyclist who was making the torturous climb. I would have just turned the corner, climbing the same mountain in my car, only to startle at seeing the seal-like human pumping at a near-standstill in the center of the road. After jerking my wheel to avoid killing the cyclist and a head-on collision with an oncoming car, I would then drift into the air, soaring until I met the rocks along the Pacific Ocean. Poor David, they’d say. He always hated cyclists, too.

But now here I lie, in too much pain to even scream, accepting as the blood seeps from me that I’ll be just another American gun-violence stat. There’s almost nothing more boring. Twenty-eight years old, survived by no children. The end of an inconsequential family line. And in the few moments I have left to live—surely it’s only moments, as the bullet seems to have ruptured some crucial artery in my leg—I can’t help but wonder if it’s all my own fault. This strange season that landed me here, bleeding out in a town I don’t much like, staring at the lifeless body of another person. Did this all unfold because of a silly accident? Worse than an accident, really. A typo caused by a mild case of dyslexia. It would seem too cruel a fate, too frustrating a failure, for it all to end this way.”

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It was fun to write about my hometown from the perspective of a transplant. St. Helena is an interesting and complicated town. Like many tourist destinations, the town struggles between catering to the day-trippers and vacationers who allow most of the businesses to thrive, and being a livable place for the year-round residents. Growing up there, I hated the tourism, the tourists, and the boredom I felt as a skateboarder trapped in an amusement park for the wealthy. As a grown-up no longer living there, there’s a lot to love about what the tourists are offered. David, the protagonist, is neither a wine enthusiast nor a small-town dreamer. He grew up in Arizona, dedicated his life to skateboarding and only moves there because of his devotion to his girlfriend and her love of the wine industry. But when she tragically dies, he feels stuck.

The third question is one that every pro skater has fantasized about, including myself. What if my shoe makes me millions of dollars? I had the opportunity to design two pro model shoes, one for C1rca and one for DVS, but in each instance the shoe company fell apart just before the release. I never made a penny from a pro model shoe. So I loved imagining a guy who stumbled into a shoe that actually worked. Really worked.

David McClain is entirely fictional and not based on anyone in particular. He’s a skater plagued with injuries, and he’s lost the love of simply skating. His shoe situation draws from a few guys—Dennis Busenitz, Steve Caballero, Adrian Lopez—but is more a composite of the success of the Janoski and the D3, leaning into the lore, in some cases, more than the facts.

I appreciate everyone out there who reads these books! They’re a lot of fun to write and I hope they’re fun to read. Currently writing some short stories, which I hope to share soon.

Thank you to my insightful readers: Whitney Ryan, Ann Mitchell Ryan Nash, Nic Henry, Mark Suciu, Tracey Dewart, Patrik Wallner, and JP Mulligan Hawkins. Special thank you to Amy Medeiros for copy-editing and Chris Collins for the cover art and design.

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“It’s not over yet!” shouts the delusional half of my brain as my new video hits Thrasher Magazine’s YouTube channel. The other half quietly reminds myself that I’m a thirty-seven year-old skateboarder who should probably stop caring so much about being in skate videos on the internet.

But you know what? I do care. I’ve been utterly obsessed with the medium since I was seven years old. The act of skating was the real hook of course, and continues to produce the most joy. But the videos opened my world in ways that I have a hard time describing. I’ve tried, I guess, through my first three novels. But it will take another few to even scratch the surface. Simply put, I adore the process of filming and producing these videos and I have a hard time giving it up. Currently, my wife works full time and I take care of our son, sneaking in skate sessions between childcare and computer work. So when it comes to filming, there are no expectations other than the ones I put on myself. And there is some freedom in that. I’m not doing it for anyone but myself. These days, I’m just grateful that outlets like Thrasher still want to publish the videos I do manage to finish, and my friends still want to make them with me.

For this project, I was fortunate to be able to work with Patrik Wallner and Matt Schleyer, two great friends who happen to be two of the best filmers in the skateboarding industry. The New York clips were filmed with Matt during my last month of living in New York City, just before my son Huey was born.

Patrik Wallner edited the piece, generously donating his time in-between more serious film and commercial work. I’ve been skating in Patrik’s video projects for over fifteen years and I wouldn’t have done half the traveling I did in my career if it wasn’t for him. A few clips for “Siesta” were snuck in during shoots for a longer documentary project that we’re working on together, one that we hope to release in 2027. The rest of the clips Patrik and I filmed were during family vacations in Menorca and Sardinia while our babies napped and our wives relaxed.

This is my seventeenth video part, and while it’s admittedly on the chiller side of parts I’ve put out, I’m proud of it. Lately, though, I’ve been struggling with calling a project like this a “video part,” since it’s not actually a “part” of a longer video. But what then should we call it? Is it simply a “video?” No, that’s not specific enough. How about a “short?” No, too pretentious. Is it a “short piece?” A “piece?” A “skate short?” Hmm, almost. Until we evolve or someone comes up with something clever, I’ll stick with what it is: A video part. Thank you to everyone who watched it.

Some Short Fiction

I’ve never been into reading short stories. I used to feel cheated when I didn’t like one, like I’d wasted an hour or two of reading time. For shorts I did like, I also felt cheated, because they left me wanting a longer, more developed story. But something changed last year. I started to like reading shorts. Really like them! I’m still frustrated with boring ones, but I feel less cheated. Instead I’m thankful, I suppose, that they weren’t novels I would have probably forced myself to finish. For the shorts I do like, I feel completely satisfied with them. I’m not sure what changed, but I’m happy about it. A new world of reading has been revealed.

Here are some short story collections I read recently that I recommend. Not all shorts within said collection are perfect, but each of these books have at least one or more that moved me in some way. I would also like to formally apologize to anyone I may have disparaged or ridiculed for liking shorts. Particularly one of my very close family members . . .

Apertures by Rosalie Ryan
Unlike me, my sister has always been a reader of short stories, and a writer of them as well! She published her first collection this year, an incredible little book that was hand-bound, with prints of the beautiful accompanying illustrations she embroidered herself. The stories are dark and funny and touching, a collection that she describes as “urban fairytales.” And if you’re in NYC late July, Rosalie will be having a book release/art showing on July 26th starting starting at 5pm at Dear Friend Books on Tompkins Street in Brooklyn. Go for the wine and art, buy a book, and make some friends!

Nine Inches by Tom Perrotta
When asked, I always say that Tom Perrotta is my favorite author, and every now and then I test the claim by rereading one of his books to see if he holds up. Each time I’m surprised by just how much I love his writing. In my recent quest to read more short stories, I thought it’d be good to see how Tom’s short stories held up, since it’s been probably ten years since I read this collection. And wow. They’re so good. Every single story left me smiling, whether with tears, actual laughter, or a deep aching sadness that is somehow also kind of funny. He’s the best. If I had to pick, my favorite story is “Back Rub.”

Do The Windows Open? by Julie Hecht
Another reread, Julie Hecht is hilarious and this was initially recommended to me by my mother when I first started dating my now wife Whitney and visiting her home of Martha’s Vineyard. It turned out Julie’s stories do not take place on the Vineyard, Nantucket and the Hamptons, rather, but many of them still capture the peculiar lifestyle of the New England summer person. Julie’s stories remind me of the best parts of Seinfeld, as not much happens aside from the over-analysis of often uncomfortable human interactions. I didn’t enjoy these stories quite as much as I did the first time, but I still highly recommend them. This time around my favorites were the ones that took place in New York City. The title story is so funny.

Corpus Christi by Bret Anthony Johnston
This collection, written by a fellow skateboarder, is terrific. Many of them are heavy, heart-wrenching tales of grief and loss, but there is a certain beauty and humor to every one of them, even the sad ones. I’ve since gone on to read his novels, which are equally amazing. Remember Me Like This still haunts me and stands as my new favorite skate-related novel. His newest, We Burn Daylight, is incredible.

Diamond As Big as the Ritz and Other Stories by Scott F. Fitzgerald
I’ve never been a big Scott F. fan, but that might be because before reading this collection I’d never read any of his short stories. The edition I read, found in an Airbnb in Kefalonia, includes five stories, each one funny, strange and surprising. The title story is totally out there and bizarre, but my favorite is, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.”

When the Nine Roll Over by David Benioff
David Benioff’s novel City of Thieves is my go-to suggestion for anyone who hasn’t read a novel in a while, or for someone who is trying to get into fiction for the first time. Not because it’s easy, but because it does everything I look for in a novel. Makes me laugh, makes me cry, makes me feel like I learned something, and takes me on a wild adventure. His short story collection doesn’t hit like City of Thieves, but they have the same readability, complexity and anxiety-inducing fun. Until the end, when gears shift for the finale, presenting one of the most beautiful but heartbreaking stories of the early AIDS epidemic I’ve ever read.

Best American Short Stories 2011, 2012, and 2024

The B.A.S.S. collections were the perfect gateway to get into shorts, and I started with 2011 and 2012, which I happened to have lying around. Standouts from the collections: “Soldier of Fortune” by Bret Anthony Johnston and “Free Fruit for Young Widows” by Nathan Englander from 2011. “Miracle Polish” by Steven Millhauser and "The Sex Lives of African Girls" by Taiye Selasi from 2012. "Mall of America" by Suzanne Wang and “Democracy in America" by Allegra Hyde from 2024.

If you have any short story collection recs, please leave them in the comments. I will add that after a year of reading so many short stories, I feel a little dazed. Like someone who just binged hundreds of unrelated television episodes, flipping channel to channel, mixing pilots with mid-season bangers. From now on, I think I’ll be a bit more scattered with my short story collection consumption. Regardless, let me know about some good ones. I need a new stack.

Amsterdam

It was important for Whitney that we have a summer baby, which meant we had to get pregnant by October. So in September, as she began watching her alcohol consumption in anticipation of a pregnancy, she remembered that I had, in passing, suggested I would stop drinking with her if we ever got pregnant. A bold claim, one I had thrown out in passing that I didn’t think she would actually hold me to. Nine months of not drinking? Yikes. How would anyone do that?

Toward the end of that month, my Old Friends™, David Cole and Kyle Brown, came to stay with us in New York City. Knowing a possible pregnancy was imminent, and this moratorium on drinking would soon begin, I was excited for a final send off to the party. David was, after all, one of the first people I ever had beers with in High School and Kyle took the two of us on our first international skate trip, which (sorry mom) involved a lot of beers. There was no better crew for a last hurrah.

Dave, Kyle, and I camped out in our small, one bedroom apartment, a six-floor walk up in SoHo, and made the most of our little space. Whitney bailed for the Vineyard, since we could really only handle three people in that living room at one time. Four pushed her sanity. Especially since she would have been working remotely in the same small space where my friends were sleeping. Factor in Dave being on a good one, we were dealing with some seriously tight quarters. It was Dave’s first time in New York City, and as anyone who has ever had a first time in New York City knows, it’s pretty hard not to be on a good one. And as said person’s tour guide, the good one becomes contagious. Bars on every corner, damn-near legal drinking in the streets, and endless skate spots? A fitting final week of boozing for a soon-to-be father. Here is the rough cut of our time in New York, with Dave offering some essential commentary.

A few nights after my Old Friends™ left the city, I was perusing the dollar stands at Strand and grabbed this short Ian McEwan novel. It’s about two old friends who make a euthanasia pact and then fall into a disagreement. It’s dark and funny and I recommend it.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Two weeks into October, Whit’s pregnancy was confirmed and for the first time since I was fifteen, I quit the booze. I was surprised to find that not drinking was pretty easy. My evening IPAs were replaced with non-alcoholic ones. I found the Athletic Brewery near beers to be pretty delicious. It’s not the alcohol, so much as the bitterness that I like. I have a burnt pallet and have historically always liked heavy red wines, bitter IPAs, and dark, black coffee.

I skated a lot, checking off the last few tricks needed for two different video parts. Not having a beer after successful missions in the streets was challenging. The only day I cheated was the day I landed a switch blizzard down the brick nine. I made a video about that too.

For Whit, the “morning-sickness” months were terrible. She didn’t encounter any morning-specific vomiting—she didn’t even throw up once, actually—but she suffered constant nausea and extreme fatigue. This went on for most of the first trimester. It’s truly awful to watch your partner go through this. It’s compounded, of course, by a feeling of helplessness and blame. There’s nothing you can do to ease or remedy the problem and worse, you know, and she knows, that the pain is your doing. Aside from tending to all her dietary and comfort needs, the best I could offer was an effort in preparation in the form of reading. The first book I dove into was The Expectant Father by Armin A. Brott and Jennifer Ash. Didn’t love it, but there was a lot of insightful information in there. I felt a lot of anxiety about the coming responsibilities and it was nice to hear a father’s breakdown of what was to come.

As a non-gamer I was surprised to find that a book about gaming was such a delight to read. The story is about two friends who develop a video game in the early days of video games, one that’s a wild success. While it’s not quite a love story, it feels like one. One of the best contemporary novels I’ve come across in a while.

Infatuations and Colonel Chabert

We arrived in California for Christmas. Throughout the pregnancy, I felt very uncomfortable telling people about it, even my closest friends. I guess by thirty-five, I’d seen so many announcements happen in different ways, and my own personal reactions over the years had shifted from, “Oh my god, that’s insane!” to, “Yeah, seems about that time.” For us, it felt like it was about that time. So I tried to be casual, like calling my best friend to talk about something trivial, and then slipping in at the end, “Oh yeah, by the way, we’re pregnant.”

When it came to our booze pact, I was anxious about the holidays. How bad would the booze FOMO be at parties? Christmas went smoothly. The New Year’s party was trickier, as we were hosting ten or so people and the whole ringing-in-the-new-year-thing imposes more of an all night commitment to staying awake. Always easier when you’re drinking. That said, I found it remarkable how fun it was to let my friends’ drunkenness be a contagion. I danced like an idiot at the bar. I stayed up playing dice until well past three in the morning. And never once did I find myself envious of or annoyed with my wasted friends. Then in the morning, while tired, I felt fine. It was fantastic. Do other people know about this whole sobriety thing?

I’m from a family of book gifters, so January usually arrives with a plentiful stack to sift through. I started with The Infatuations by Javier Marias, given to me by my mom. She gave me the book accompanied by a novella called Colonel Chabert by Honore de Balzac. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t crazy about The Infatuations. Just not really my style. Long, meandering passages about what the main character imagines other characters are thinking. Many pages pass for very little to actually happen. I admire the work, just didn’t tear through it. Colonel Chabert is referenced and summarized in The Infatuations, making me regret saving the Balzac for later. I really loved this novella. The story is about a soldier who is presumed dead, but by the time he returns from war, his estate has been distributed, his wife remarried, and he is unable to prove that he is actually himself. Amazing that for a book written almost two hundred years ago, not a lot has changed when it comes to dealing with unusual legal and bureaucratic dilemmas. And it’s wild to think that something as simple as your own identity could be one of those bureaucratic dilemmas.

Pregnancy reading included The Mama Natural Week by Week Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth, a great book gifted to us by Sebo and Elle Walker. This is a more manageable pregnancy book to read, as there’s no pressure to read more than one chapter per week. Also includes recipes which we mostly didn’t try, but they looked good.

Devil House

We returned to NYC in March, only to leave again for Chicago. The trip to Chicago was for Whitney’s work, but it was convenient for me, as I got to really skate through the city where I based my second novel, Off Clark. My first, Top of Mason, took place in a city I feel fairly intimate with. I know San Francisco, not inside and out, but enough to envision exactly where the characters moved, spoke and skated. I’ve lived there, both my parents were born there, and I grew up an hour and a half away. I could feel the spaces, I could smell them—the good and the bad—and it was a joy to write. For Off Clark, I’d only visited/skated Chicago twice. Once when I was nineteen, though the visit was more of an attempt to connect with a love interest at the time. The second time was a brief visit a few months before putting out the book, only I got sick and wasn’t well enough to skate. I pulled from that first trip to write much of the story, but the city itself was something I really had to imagine. That second visit helped fine-tune the scenery, fact check some on-the-ground skate-nerdery, and improve subtle details of the story. It even helped me come up with a title, one I’m not crazy about but it helped me to settle on a theme for the collection of novels I am writing. My third novel (and third street), High Street Lows, will be out soon.

For the pregnancy, we read Expecting Better by Emily Oster. She’s really good, and this book is super informative.

Silo

In April, I experienced one of the most productive months of skating I’ve ever had. Even Matt Schleyer, the man who generously carves out time to film me without the prospect of any significant financial reward, was a little weirded out. We only got out a couple times per week, but I took a different approach to filming than I usually do. Rather than banging my head against the wall with tricks and line ideas I could maybe do, I simply settled or moved on. If something wasn’t working, I readjusted. I changed strategy or gave up entirely, but always continued skating until a clip was captured. I tried to shed the stubbornness that I’ve long convinced myself is necessary to get clips. Or perhaps it was our imminent move from NYC that spurred the sudden jolt of excitement to film. Knowing that new fatherhood on the island of Martha’s Vineyard would make skating with a cameraman like Matt difficult, if not all out impossible, I felt determined to make every day count. This footage formed the backbone of a video part that will come out any day now.

We packed up and moved out of the city on April 30th, my 35th birthday. In the pouring rain, we filled a U-haul and drove to the Vineyard, where the belongings that filled our little one bedroom disappeared into my mother-in-law’s house. Before leaving, I started a book called Wool, the first in the Silo trilogy by Hugh Howey. I’d never heard of the trilogy, but a trailer for the Apple TV adaptation found me on Youtube, and I was pleased to learn the book series is one of the rare success stories of a “self-published” author. Whitney and I tore through the books, a wild saga about a society living in an underground silo stretching over a hundred stories deep. There are screens projecting the dead, toxic outside world, and if you mention a curiosity about going outside, you are sent up and out of the silo, where your former community watches you stumble to your death. It’s good. Book 2 was actually my favorite.

For the pregnancy, we started the online course Shebirth. Whit read Cribsheet by Emily Oster and I read selected chapters. Again, Emily Oster rules.

The World And All it Holds

May was a strange month of waiting. We nested, to an extent. It’s weird nesting in a home that you know you’ll soon leave. We set up the bassinet, the changing table. We folded and organized the baby clothes. There’s something bizarre about building a life for a human that has not yet arrived. And though the due date was June 8, babies arrive whenever they feel like it. So each day I felt a certain dread and excitement about the impending labor, made only more intense by the online birthing class we took. The class was designed to help mothers and couples prepare for a vaginal birth. Specifically, one without an epidural. But I couldn’t help thinking, if I were the mother, how much all that preparation would just make me want a C-section. It was terrifying. But Whit was calm, which made me calm . . . ish?

I read The World and All It Holds, by Aleksander Hemon, and I really enjoyed it. A nice companion to a book called Sovietstan, gifted to me for my birthday by Patrik Wallner. Back in 2013, we traveled to Kazakhstan for a skate trip, and I left before he and the rest of our crew made their way through the rest of “The Stans;” Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan. They didn’t make it into Turkmenistan, a country Patrik thinks might make a good setting for a future novel. Hence the suggested research material. The World and All It Holds starts in Sarajevo, just before the first World War, and follows a touching love story as the war ravages the Eurasian continent. The story moves across several decades, an on-foot journey through the same region covered in Sovietstan, ending in China. If you’re in the market for an amazing historical novel, let The World and All It Holds be your next read.

For the pregnancy, I tried reading and listening to two different Ina May books, but they weren’t for me. A little too woo-woo, yet totally anxiety-inducing. Reading anecdotal birthing experiences might be nice for some people, but it just made me all the more freaked out about the million different things that can potentially go wrong during childbirth.

Baby Huey and the Midwife From Hell

When the day did arrive, when there appeared to be some water breaking, we went to the hospital but we were told there wasn’t any amniotic fluid. So we went home and continued waiting. Two nights later, around two in the morning, the actual labor began, meaning her contractions woke her up and were too strong to sleep through. The hospital told us not to show up until the contractions were four minutes apart and lasted over a minute. So we started timing them, and I tried my best to use the tips the classes suggested to help ease the pain of her contractions. This was mostly pressing and squeezing on her hips when the contractions started, which did seem to work and was the only useful thing I got out of the Shebirth class. The “correct” contraction timing never happened, and we ended up rushing to an empty maternity ward. A part of me wants to go into the full play-by-play of the worst day of my life, but I think I’m still recovering, so I’d rather not. But to watch your partner suffer through thirty hours of painful contractions, followed by almost five hours of pushing, only to result in a C-section that seemed to take way too long, was truly a terrible experience. The nurses and doctors were wonderful, but I hope the midwife who was in charge of our delivery gets fired or retires.

In the end, our baby arrived, and all the misery evaporated. What felt like the worst day of my life became the best. We could finally hold our impossibly tiny human, and weep with relief.

Welcome to the world Huey Desmond Ryan. Born June 11, 2023.

I should also note, that a week or so after Huey’s birth, those first few real beers were delicious.

My favorite book of the year was The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Just a phenomenal science fiction novel about a highly intelligent species of octopus, and a doctor determined to understand their language and culture. Put this at the top of your stack if you’re into literary sci-fi and good old fashion thriller reads.

Other books I enjoyed:

The Guest by Emma Cline

Open Throat by Henry Hoke

Eat the Buddha by Barbara Demick

The Librarianist by Patrick Dewitt

Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews

A Man Called Ove by Fedrick Backman

Ocean Greene by Evan Schiefelbine

Call for the Dead by John le Carré

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Harrow by Joy Williams

This audiobook has been a dream long before I even finished writing the novel, and I almost can’t believe it actually exists! Rudy, who is one of my childhood best friends, narrated the bulk of the novel. Liz, Rudy’s wife, played the podcaster who is searching for Mo, the missing pro skater in the story. If you haven’t read the book, each chapter begins with a podcast transcript, so there are two connected stories playing out simultaneously. I’d always envisioned the interstitial chapters coming to life as a real, investigative podcast and thankfully, Rudy and Liz shared the vision. They took on the producer/director roles, tapping some actor friends to play the other characters featured in the transcript. I then edited it all together and I’m so psyched on the end result. I hope you enjoy listening to it!

OK, back to what happened last year.

SKATE VIDEOS

For the last decade or so, I’ve found it to be pretty frustrating how bad our media ecosystem is at highlighting the year’s best skateboarders and videos. We have Thrasher’s Skater of the Year, a contest we all love and loathe for different reasons. It’s the pinnacle of skateboarding success, with its storied history and overall solid track record at recognizing a true boundary-pusher of any given year since 1990. But it’s also a little exhausting. I do love taking a side, betting on “your guy.” I love the fiery debates spurred from the November and December deluge of content. I even admire the utter shamelessness of the “campaign” we see the world’s best pro skaters reluctantly (or proudly?) jump into. Though I don’t think my admiration is shared by most. But ultimately, it’s one award. One magazine’s opinion, with all sorts of politics at play. One skater celebrated, usually due to one great video. What about the hundreds of others?

We have the Quartersnacks Readers Poll, which for the most part I think is great. But, no offense to democracy, I don’t really trust the readers. It’s cool to see what fans of a rad NYC-based blog/brand are into, but is that really representative of what the “Best” skateboarding videos were of a given year? Also, the timing of the voting is infuriatingly flawed. December is the month we are assaulted with the year’s gnarliest videos (via the SOTY contenders), and the polling usually closes before the heaviest parts even release. Miles Silvas, 2023’s SOTY, released arguably the best part of that year, but it wasn’t included in the 2023 or the 2024 best video parts. In the QS “best of,” universe, it’s as if that part never even existed.

For the nerdier blog fans, we have Boil the Ocean’s Top 10. Whoever the boiler is, he (or she?) is the best writer who writes about skate videos. Every year he (or she) compiles his (or her) top ten video parts. But lately . . . I don’t know. I don’t really think he (or she) is hitting the mark with the top 10. (Like, really? Andy Anderson?) But regardless, he (or she) is but one man (or woman) with an opinion. They’re allowed to have it.

Personally, I’d love to see a proper Oscars or Golden Globes equivalent in skateboarding. A panel of voters who are actually making the stuff, deciding who put out the best stuff of any given year. Pros, ams, filmers, industry heads, I want to hear what THEY think. No offense to the readers or other non industry people. Your opinion matters. You obviously dictate sales and trends. But you’re also influenced more heavily by the marketing. I like some personal biases thrown into the mix. I like knowing which skateboarding professional skateboarders think is good skateboarding.

I’ll put it like this. On December 31, if I’m chilling at the skatepark with a crew of skaters—one of them former a SOTY, another a random skater who might have just started skating—and we’re discussing who put out the best video part or full length of the year, whose opinion do I most want to hear? Sorry, bro. I wanna hear what the SOTY thinks.

Now, who is poised to do this? Not me. I am but one opinionated skater who has his own tastes and biases. But I hate to know, with each passing year, how much hard work will simply disappear into the algorithm. The odd titles forgotten, the agonizing battles for Never-Been-Done tricks disregarded as advertisements for shoes or other meaningless products. There should be some recognition preserved for those efforts, something beyond view counts and follow bumps.

I do think Skatefolio is onto something with what Josh and his crew are up to. I could see them conducting a survey that taps the pros, ams, filmers and industry folks. I would love to see it. But until then, I will quit my whinging and offer my own flawed take on the year’s skate video output, based purely on which videos and video parts I enjoyed watching repeatedly, or which I thought were simply shockingly impressive.

1. Ishod Wair - Max Freestyle

   I know it’s random, because it doesn’t really feel like a true Ishod part. More of a trip edit than a video part. And the release was odd. Nike put out a raw edit at the same time Ishod posted it with music. But as a short and sweet Ishod part, I love it. He truly is the G.O.A.T.

2. Jamie Foy - Intervals

   As I alluded to before, I love the SOTY shit, and I love seeing my SOTY pick win. I usually base my SOTY picks off rumors and vibe. And . . . yeah, I heard a lot of insane rumors and I like his vibes. This part exceeded expectations.

3. Marcos Montoya - Chapel

   This skater—along with this video part—is heavily slept on. Style, finesse, trick selection. He’s got it all.

4. Shane O’neill - Shane Goes 2

   I love a hard worker. And I love an innovator. I also love knowing my contemporaries are still out there, working hard and innovating in their mid-thirties. This part does indeed go, too.

5. Frankie Spears - Honeymoon

   First off, Frankie is the homie. Known him forever, watched a lot of these tricks go down, or talked with him about them before and after them going down. I was still blown away when I finally watched the part. He’s one of the hardest working skaters I’ve ever met. This part is outstanding, easily his best work to date.

6. Antonio Durao - Quickstrike

   Do I love the one-footers? No. Do I think his one footers hold him back? Yes. Do I still this he’s one of the greatest skateboarders alive, and this is one of his best parts to date. Absolutely. In the wise words of a friend who will remain nameless, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” But hell yeah, Antonio. Please continue to let us watch your super powers on a skateboard.

7. Tiago Lemos - Intervals

   Speaking of super powers, Good God! The TOTY is another award I highly approve of, and his SSBSNB in SF was much deserved. Beyond that trick, this part almost has it all. I sometimes worry that we as an audience have become desensitized to the singular power and talent that is Tiago. Either way, we’re lucky to have him.

8. Shay Sandiford - Day in the Night

   Another heavily slept on skater, in my opinion. I love a concept part, and I love tasteful NBD’s. He thinks outside the box, and it’s dope. Please give it a few rewatches, if you haven’t already.

9. Alexis Ramirez - Sk8mafia 2024

   I have a special allegiance to the savants the county of San Diego produces and the pro skaters Sk8mafia exalts. Alexis is keeping that particular torch brilliantly lit. So chill, but so gnarly. Innovative, but makes it seem accidental. If he doesn’t end 2025 with a Nike contract or something better, I will lose the last remaining hope I have for this industry rewarding real talent and work ethic.

10. Tanner Burzinski - The Professional

    Never thought I would see the day someone skates to Macy Gray. Somehow, it works. I watched this part a lot.

11. Tyler Surrey - Indy

12. Joe Campos - Shocking Moments Caught On Video

13. Karim Callendar - Quickstrike

14. Jamie Foy - Baker Has A Deathwish 2

15. Flo Mirtain - Thirty Something

16. Brandon Westgate - Intervals

17. Braden Hoban - Real Life Sucks

18. Elijah Berle - Vans

19. Chris Joslin - Joyce

20. Jacopo Carozzi - Nike

    There are at least 20 others who easily would have made my top 20. Making lists for skate parts is so hard, props to all the nerds out there who try to make a list.

Full Lengths:

1. Nike - Quickstrike

2. New Balance - Intervals

3. Baker Has A Deathwish 2

4. Primitive : DayDream

5. Dickies : Honeymoon

6. GX1000 : Favorite Things

7. Polar : I Don’t Even Know How to F****** Airwalk

8. Toy Machine : Real Life Sucks

9. Freeskate : Wake Up Massi

10. Converse : Evergreen

BOOKS

I consider myself a reader, but I’m nowhere near as voracious as I’d like to be. This year I read 42, but I’d really prefer that count to be closer to 60 or 70. And unlike the skate videos I consume, I’m not gobbling up too many new releases. Of the books I read that came out this year, most were excellent! So here is a list, though I’m not sure it would qualify as a “year’s best.” It is simply the ten novels and five non-fiction books I most enjoyed reading this year.

Fiction

1. We Burn Daylight by Bret Anthony Johnston (2024)

   

2. KiteRunner by Khaled Hosseini (2003)

3. James by Percival Everett (2024)

4. Moonbound by Robin Sloan (2024)

5. Normal People by Sally Rooney (2018)

6. Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston (2014)

7. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (2023)

8. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864)

9. Erasure by Percival Everett (2001)

10. Libra by Don DeLillo (1988)

Non-fiction

1. Chipped by José Vadi (2024)

   

2. The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2024)

3. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (2017)

4. Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty (2020)

5. Wine and War by Don Kladstrup & Petie Kladstrup (2001)

TV SHOWS

I’m a big TV SHOW guy. I still watch movies, and love some movies, but I find that I tend to enjoy contemporary shows more. I also failed to track to the movies I watched, and feel that any list would be even more flawed than the rest of these I’ve composed. So here are my five favorite shows that came out (or concluded) this year.

1. Fargo (Season 5)

2. Hacks (Season 3)

3. Slow Horses (Season 4)

4. The Diplomat (Season 2)

5. Baby Reindeer (Season 1)

All right, that’s enough for now.

Happy new year!

I decided to try writing hill-bombing fiction while reading The Rise of Superman by Steven Kotler. In the book, Kotler investigates how top action and adventure sports athletes continuously tap into the “flow” state because of the life-threatening nature of their sports, and how they use it to fuel progression. I recognized the feeling described in the book from skateboarding, most specifically from riding through traffic or bombing hills. The world slows down, fleeting moments become drawn out, and it’s an invigorating high unlike much else I've experienced. I wondered if strands of that feeling could be captured in writing.

I picked Mason Street because at the time of writing, no one had bombed the entire hill and it was one of the scariest I could find. I did my research, too. I texted Ryan Garshell, who told me Pablo Ramirez was claiming it. He wanted to skate the street gap Brian Delatorre ollied and then ride it out. He passed away before going for it. The other locals I spoke with hadn’t heard of anyone doing it, at least not on film. Eventually it was reported that Shogo Tanaka had taken it from the top with a significant amount of power slides. No disrespect to Shogo, but after reviewing the footage, it wasn’t what anyone would call a bomb.

Another reason I picked Mason Street was because of the rail in front of the Mark Hopkins hotel. Frank Gerwer famously front boarded it for the cover of Skateboarder, and if anyone would have ridden the hill after landing a trick, it would have been Frank. I texted him to ask if he’d bombed the sidewalk after the rail. He instantly called me.

“So, if you want to take the sidewalk at that spot, you’re going to have to—”

“No, no,” I said, interrupting him. “I’m not trying to skate the hill. I was just wondering if you’d bombed it.”

He admitted that he’d run out towards the bottom, bruising both his heels. He hadn’t heard of anyone skating the whole thing and suggested I ask Ryan and the GX dudes. Naturally, I already had. I asked other skaters who’d had photos or clips skating the rail, and everyone owned up to running out. There was no shame in it back then. A photo was a photo. If you landed a trick over that rail, or down it, no one expected you to ride down the mountain.

Not anymore.

Today, the rail and the hill have become a new sort of proving ground. The GX1000 video Right Here for Pablo ends with a session on the rail, with Jeff Carlyle taking the whole hill after backside lipsliding it. Miles won SOTY after getting a cover and ending his video part with two bangers on the spot. Elijah Berle just ended his SOTY campaign with an NBD on the rail, landing switch and nearly taking it backwards, but deciding (wisely) to revert midway. It’s the sort of sidewalk hill that’s too steep to take switch. For now. Interestingly, I still haven’t seen footage of anyone taking the hill without a power slide.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to share my fictional take on this particular hill bomb, which became a chapter in my first novel, Top of Mason. In some ways, writing this was the main motivation for putting together the story in the first place. I was so excited to write it, but the hill had to be earned. What would bring an otherwise mostly rational person to bomb Mason from the top? And what happens after?

Seconds into the ride, Henry realized that he should have looked at the stoplight at the oncoming intersection. He had to be light on his feet because of all the cracks, so he only thought to look up when he was nearly at the light. The distance between California and Pine was an average street length, but at the speed he was going, he would fly through it in seconds. The thought of being the first person to bomb Mason from the top thrilled him. Glancing up from his feet with only about a hundred feet before the intersection, the light was still red. Fuck, he thought. This is it.

With only one second to spare, the light turned green as Henry Philip raced through both crosswalks. He hadn’t gone this fast in years and the rush was coming back. It was like a reunion with a friend, or a sexual brush with an old fling. Only on the hill, while everything felt familiar, it was terrifying. He continued down Mason, picking up more velocity, flying down at a speed that was so fast he really couldn’t see what he should watch out for on the ground. He’d never ridden this hill, never even considered it, so he wasn’t sure what kind of terrain lay in his path. He was like a freight train barreling down a hillside track with no brakes. He was going too fast to turn, too fast to put his foot down, and way too fast to jump off his board. At what was probably thirty miles per hour, jumping off of his board and onto his feet would be catastrophic, similar to jumping out of a car going the same speed. But Henry wasn’t considering an exit strategy. He felt elated, wanting only to stay on his board and go faster. At the following intersection, another green light blessed his path, and he blazed through Bush Street at a speed that would have gotten him pulled over if he’d been driving a car. He was aware of the crowds of people staring. He loved knowing that they probably thought he was a raving lunatic. They’re right, he thought. What he was doing was stupid. It was psychotic. Bombing one of the scariest hills in the city straight into downtown, with commuting cars, buses, and pedestrians. A hill bomb adventure usually aimed for a quiet part of town, ending on a smooth, flat street where one’s speed could teeter off. Or they were executed with spotters at the major intersections. Or in the middle of the night. But at any time of day or night, with or without spotters, the hills sloping toward downtown were always messier and more unpredictable.

Suddenly, a piece of fabric blinded him. He forgot that he was still wearing his untied maid’s apron. Pushing it from his face, he shoved the apron behind him. He could feel it lift off his back and he imagined how funny it must look to the gawkers who had stopped to watch, his new cape caught in the wind as he soared down the hill. While Mason Street’s slant was lessening, Henry’s speed was not. As the road got smoother, his speed increased. The serrated concrete and heavy cracks had presented some resistance to his wheels, enough to slow him down some in the initial descent, but once he was gliding on recently paved asphalt, the intensity of his ride was reaching new heights. With every second he maintained the hill bomb, he felt a release from Ellen and all of their failings as a couple. In the short ride down the mountain, a deep clarity emerged, practically slapping him across the face. This wasn’t an act of infidelity. She wasn’t his! She hadn’t been for months. And now—for the first time in years—he realized he was happy without her. If she could fuck some other dude, why would I want to have anything to do with her? As he continued down the street, creating a louder racket the faster he went, he was losing her. The good kind of losing her, of course. The letting-go kind. It was as if his love for her, his obsession with Ellen and his deranged idea of the couple they once had been, was sitting back in room 212. As he raced down the street, with every passing foot he felt more and more removed from her. She’s not mine, he thought, happily. His love for her could shrivel up and die in that nasty hotel room.

Barreling down the mountain, Henry was coming closer to the flatland, but he was not slowing down. At the Sutter intersection, the light turned red just as he entered the crosswalk. Cars at the adjacent light lurched forward, fortunately unable to accelerate in time to interfere with his ride. It was like being unstrapped on a roller coaster, his eyes now watery from the rush of wind hitting his face. Every sense heightened, aware not only of the danger of what he was doing but of the miraculous impossibility of it. His feet were trembling, his weight sitting back and his knees bent, like they were locked in place. Maintain, maintain, he told himself, knowing a fall at this speed could be deadly.

Making it safely through the intersection at Sutter, he looked up from his feet and saw traffic ahead with their brake lights on, the cars stopped at a red light on Post. Henry knew he wouldn’t be able to stop, but he might manage a power slide. Thus far it had been a straight-shot hill bomb, his speed having picked up so dramatically that a power slide might not work. All of a sudden, a car turned onto the road from a driveway to his right. Just as he caught the dark gray blob in the corner of his periphery, he opened his shoulders and slid on his wheels just enough to slow down so he could swerve and avoid the moving car. The adrenaline that arrived with that near collision was exhilarating. Everything was instinctual. He couldn’t have choreographed a smoother escape. He laughed out loud as he looked up to see what he would have to do with the stopped cars ahead. He quickly assessed the space of the cars and decided it would be possible to make it in between the two lanes of cars in the middle of the road. Permitting no car made a sudden lane change, he should be fine.

Henry lifted his arms above his head to make his figure skinnier, his legs as straight as poles. Keeping his body parallel with his board, the whole time thinking, Thread the needle, thread the needle, THREAD THE NEEDLE as he narrowly slipped through three rows of stopped cars. Getting through the cars was only his first problem. Next he needed to make it through the intersection. Seeing which direction the one-way arrow was pointing, he quickly glanced accordingly. Luckily, only one car was cruising down Post. Unable to judge the speed of the oncoming car, he closed his eyes, bent his knees, and flexed his body as he flew through the intersection. The car slammed on its brakes and released a loud honk, just barely missing Henry as it passed through the intersection. After the Post intersection, Mason Street was almost flat and although Henry was still cruising at a speed faster than he’d gone in years, he would soon begin slowing down significantly. He regained some control of his board and intentionally wobbled his trucks, moving through the empty street like a falling leaf. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this alive. He didn’t care about Ellen. He didn’t want her back. That unpleasant shadow of regret lurking behind his every move disappeared. He no longer had the sinking feeling in the back of his mind that he needed to fix things about himself. Gone was the idea that his life would only be right when he got her back. No. He was done with her.

Laughing out loud again, Henry pushed to maintain his speed, slipping into a momentary speed wobble that almost caused him to lose his balance. He regained his composure and looked around, feeling a new sense of confidence. The hill bomb had changed him, he knew that. He didn’t give a shit about anything anymore. He was going to go skating again, to push himself like he had when he was younger, before Ellen. No more being so scared of everything.

Henry glanced at the pedestrians as he passed them, removing his eyes from the road where every little detail mattered. He felt like a conqueror. He had made it down the mountain and now he knew it would be smooth sailing. Should I skate straight to the SoMa park? He thought. Or maybe I should hike up a few more hills back in Potrero Hill and bomb down them, like the old days. He imagined that an attractive woman might be walking down Mason Street, watching him. Does she think I’m sexy? Maybe she’s never seen, really taken in the magic of watching someone skate. Does she know that this is the coolest thing that the human body can do?

He turned his head to look behind him and see if any cars were coming. There were a few, but Henry was still going faster than the speed of traffic, so they wouldn’t catch up to him for a while. He drifted through the road, switching lanes like a drunk driver might, swerving back and forth. “Fuck it!” he shouted, continuing to laugh. Fuck. Ellen.

He saw it in the same instant he felt it and he knew it wasn’t good. While he’d been glancing around the street, Henry had stopped paying such close attention to what deterrents lay in his path. While paved with asphalt, the roadwork on the flat part of Mason had scattered cracks and divots that were a hazard for any skateboarder. As a sudden shock jolted his feet from his board, the memory from the prior second was fresh, the memory of that large hole in the ground, a hole he should have been watching out for. As Henry flew through the air, his apron fluttering onto the top of his head, he knew the impact of the ground would hurt, and somehow, in midair, time slowed again. Self-preservation kicked in and he calculated how the fall would go and which side of his body would be best to use. Take the impact on the left, he thought. He planned not to use his hands, if possible, as the asphalt would surely shred his palms like a cheese grater. In his descent toward Mason Street, as he determined that he would roll on the ground after hitting the dark pavement, a separate comfort struck him. The fall would hurt, mostly likely a shitload, but that was OK. Maybe he needed it. He didn’t care. For the first time in a long time, he was free.

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Or you can listen here and here.

Enjoy this sample audio chapter (with another Mason Street reference)

I was standing on the side of the highway with a fifteen-year old Miles Silvas when Andy MacDonald finally waved down a car. It was two in the morning and we were in the middle of the woods about thirty miles outside of Philadelphia. As the car crept up behind ours, its headlights blinding us, I suddenly felt very responsible for the young prodigy. Who just pulled over? What were their intentions? And if push came to shove, how was I going to protect Miles?

I initially spotted him during our flight from San Diego to Philly. He wasn’t wearing his signature yellow helmet, but I could picture it on his head as he walked down the aisle.

“Check it out,” I whispered to Eric and Miles, seated next to me. “It’s Andy Mac!”

The next time we saw the X-Games super star was at our gate in Philadelphia, where we waited for a connecting to flight to State College, PA. The wait lasted hours, and we eventually established some contact with the vert-skating legend.

“You going to Woodward?” I asked.

“Yup,” he said.

“We are too.”

Andy Mac was frustrated with the delay, and we were bored.

“Want some Red Vines?” he asked, whipping out a fresh pack from his pocket.

“No thanks,” I said. Miles and Eric also declined his offer.

“I love Red Vines,” Andy Mac said.

It was almost midnight when they announced that the flight was cancelled. Andy Mac told us he was going to rent a car and drive to camp, and said that we could catch a ride with him. We were down, since we had no idea where to stay or what to do until the next flight in the morning. Eric went with Andy Mac to retrieve the rental car, and Miles and I waited outside the airport. After about twenty minutes of standing on the curb, we heard some yelling from a car. Andy Mac was pissed, and it seemed his airport confusion was somehow our fault. In the car we thanked him for giving us a ride, and then sat in an awkward silence as we left the airport. It felt like we were in trouble with someone else’s dad. When we hit the first tollbooth, Andy Mac demanded Miles use the money his parents had given him for food. I could tell Miles didn’t want to, but he was the only one of us who had cash.

“I rented the car,” he said. “One of you should pay the toll.”

To stave off the tension, I tried making small talk with Andy Mac. I asked him about where he grew up—Massachusetts. He told me how he’d been going to Woodward since he was a teenager, that he’d been a counselor. I was relieved to find we had a mutual acquaintance, the photographer named Rhino. They’d lived together when Andy Mac first moved to San Diego. Thirty minutes into our conversation, on some dark and empty highway, the car started making weird noises. He drifted across the lanes as it puttered to a stop. We had run out of gas. As it turned out, I was partly responsible for this.

“You were distracting me,” Andy Mac barked, as we sat in the car on the side of the highway. “If you hadn’t been asking those questions about San Diego, I would have noticed the gas gauge was empty.” 

Andy Mac was angry and didn’t know what to do. He started waving down cars. He blamed the car rental place, and called them to express his vitriol, but there was nothing they could do. I offered to use one of my free AAA pickups, though I hoped my offer would simply remind him to use his own. Despite him blaming everyone but himself, this was his fault. We’d been driving for a while. He could have checked the gas meter. Instead, Andy Mac asked me to call AAA and use one of my own precious pickups.

It was during my call with AAA that the car pulled over. After a few seconds, the roof illuminated with flashing red and blue lights, and I sighed with relief. The young state police officer got out and walked toward us, and Andy Mac frantically explained the situation.

“Can you believe the rental car place would do this?”

The cop appeared suspicious after asking our ages and relations to one another. Eric and I were twenty-three, Andy was pushing forty, and Miles was visibly a teenager. 

“No, we’re not related,” I said. “We’re . . . friends, driving to skate camp.” After the cop seemed convinced that we hadn’t abducted little Miles, he drove Andy to get some gas and then we continued on our way. Later, when we stopped for a proper fill up, Andy Mac asked Miles if he wanted some Red Vines.

“They’re the best,” he added.

“I’m good,” Miles said, politely. After Andy Mac walked away, Miles asked me, “What’s this dude’s deal with the Red Vines?” 

“I don’t know, man,” I said. “But it’s freaking me out.” 

Back on the road, Eric and Miles passed out in the backseat. Sitting passenger, I was tasked with giving Andy Mac directions to skate camp. It was a long drive, and although Andy Mac was a professed Woodward East veteran, he didn’t know the route from Philadelphia. With my iPhone in hand, the maps app open so I could direct him when needed, I guided our path.  

I continued to pepper Andy Mac with questions, mostly to make sure we both stayed awake, as I told him where to go and when to turn. His was an interesting life. I was newly pro, and I found it unfathomable that someone could still be making a living as a professional skateboarder at nearly forty years old. Andy Mac wasn’t much interested in me, so the conversation was more like a three-hour long interview.

“You have a turn coming up,” I told him at one point. He was telling me about the Boom Boom Huck Jam demos he used to do with Tony Hawk. Synchronized routines in front of thousands, Tony Hawk’s credibility and safety in his hands (and feet). A traveling circus of sorts for skateboarders and BMXers. I could never imagine performing like that. Most skaters never will. It was invigorating stuff.

“OK, this is the turn,” I said, waiting for him change lanes for the exit. “OK, take this.” 

I watched the exit pass. 

“Um, that was the turn back there,” I said. 

“What?” Andy Mac yelled, glaring at me. “How’d you let me miss that turn?” 

The tension in the small car returned. I didn’t know what else to say besides reminding that I had, indeed, just told him about the turn. He didn’t want to hear it.

“You have a map, in your hand, with a blinking blue light that tells you exactly where we are! How could you let this happen?” 

I bit my tongue as the map in my hand readjusted our route. I kept my eyes on the blue dot, and we found our way back to the intended exit. It’s strange, being unjustly scolded by someone you don’t really know. Even more strange when it’s someone you thought you had once looked up to. Had I looked up to this guy? I wondered, seething with frustration. As much as I wanted to argue, to defend myself, I knew it wasn’t worth it.

“Sorry,” I submitted. “It won’t happen again.”     

We made it safely to skate camp as the sun came up. It felt like we’d really been through something significant on that drive. A journey. There was drama, there was confusion, there was victory. We talked the entire time. By the morning, I knew so much about his life. Had I become friends with the one and only Andy Mac? I couldn’t wait to tell my friends back home.  

Andy Mac isn’t what you’d call a skater’s skater. At this point in my life, he had come to exist outside of the world of skateboarding I paid attention to. I didn’t watch X-Games or World Cup Skateboarding. I was fully enraptured in the anti-contest, “core” world that operated more like a diasporic high school than the multi-billion dollar industry it was. Throughout that drive with Andy Mac, I couldn’t help comparing him to his street skating contemporaries. Who from his generation were still out there getting paid to do their thing? Not many. Andrew Reynolds kept coming to mind. Though a few years younger, he was beginning to age, but was aging with relevance. Reynolds was a skater’s skater, still filming video parts and influencing the culture. Andy Mac didn’t seem to care about that culture. It wasn’t where his money came from. And wasn’t that, somehow, even more admirable? While Reynolds made the drug and booze infused Baker videos, Andy Mac partnered with Drug Free America and promoted sobriety at the White House. While Reynolds put out street parts for his skate shoe sponsor, Emerica, Andy had secured corporate sponsorships and developed a line of boards sold in Walmarts and Targets across America.

Much like his demo-mate, Tony Hawk, Andy Mac had found a mainstream audience and was more of a bonafide, “professional athlete” than most pro skaters I’d met. And by that point in my life, I felt like I’d met most of them. While my initial instinct was to write him off, by the end of that drive I found myself begrudgingly respecting him as a pro. His sponsor list was vast, filled with multinational corporations I didn’t know sponsored skateboarders. One of them, not surprisingly, was Red Vines. How can you knock a guy in his late thirties, supporting his family by doing the thing that he loves? Would I be in my late thirties, I wondered then, still getting paid to film street parts and appear in magazines? Would any street skater be able to do that? The brutal terrain and padless nature, the exponential level of progression, the lack of a mainstream market—made that prospect seem highly unlikely. 

That week at skate camp I learned a lot about Miles Silvas. How gracious he could be with other kids, how calm he acted in strange situations, and how destined to be a professional skateboarder he was. Despite being a visiting “pro,” who are generally exempt from the strict helmet rules of Woodward, as a minor Miles still had to wear one. But unlike any other teenager put in that position, Miles didn’t complain once. He wore no ego, demonstrated no self-importance. He was just one of the kids that week. Skating with them, joking with them, cheering them on. Showing them what a once in a generation talent looks like, all with a friendly smile.

That week I also learned that Andy Mac and I had not, in fact, become friends. We were not colleagues, fellow pros visiting camp. He was on the mega ramp and we were on the street course. We watched his one-man demo on the ramp, in awe as he flew across the impossibly long gap and soared ten-foot high benihanas above the enormous quarter pipe. He did not watch us skate the three-block or the 13 inch concrete ledge. When I tried to say hello after his show, he looked at me like he’d never seen me before. 

The other times I saw him that week involved the most bizarre brand promotion I’d ever seen with—you guessed it—Red Vines. It must have been some sort of test run endorsement, part of a pitch to the candy manufacturer. Carrying huge boxes of branded T-shirts and candy packages, Andy Mac went around handing the shirts to kids, telling them that if he saw them wearing the shirt throughout the rest of the week, he’d give them candy. Now it’s not my place to judge a man’s sponsorship hustle, but I don’t know. I found it weird. Not weirder, though, than rounding up a bunch of kids in said shirts to make them crab walk backwards up a grassy knoll, where in their path they stumbled on more shirts or Red Vines candy, all while filming them with a GoPro. By the end of the week, I no longer envied his prolonged skateboarding career. Making kids crab walk for candy was not something I wanted for my future.

.

Looking back on that week, some thirteen years later, I was correct in my assumption that I would not maintain skate sponsors at his age. At thirty-six, two years shy of Andy that summer, I do not have a paying sponsor to my name. But that is not to say that’s what the industry and market demands. Andrew Reynolds, for example, still maintains a hold on the culture through his street skating, as do many of his contemporaries. It’s not unusual for forty-plus-year-olds to keep their names on boards and contracts with corporate shoe companies like Nike, Converse, Adidas Vans, and New Balance. Some of them aren’t even really expected to skate!

 In December, 2023, Miles Silvas was anointed Thrasher Magazine’s “Skater of the Year,” arguably the highest honor one can achieve in skateboarding. Miles is sponsored by Adidas and Primitive, two of the biggest brands in the industry, and he’s one of the small handful of skaters his age making a solid living from street skating. As I wrote for his Thrasher feature, “He is the embodiment of a professional. And unlike so many other talented phenoms we’ve watched come and go in this strange industry, he has not wandered into other, some might say, easier pursuits. He’s not influencing; he’s not training for contests; he’s not entrepreneuring. Miles is in the streets doing the hard shit—pushing himself to his limits while giving us groundbreaking video parts.”

They say that getting SOTY adds a decade to your career, but even without the coveted trophy, Miles Silvas is no doubt going to be one of the few skateboarders holding down a big shoe deal into his late thirties, still humble and down to earth, still fakie tre flipping enormous sets of stairs. And who knows? Maybe by then he’ll get that Red Vines deal.

Andy Mac, on the other hand . . .

Well, Andy Mac is pretty much killing it, too! His Instagram page boasts of over ten sponsors, some of which I assume are paying him. Red Vines, I should mention, was not listed. The videos on his page show continued progression, which is astounding for a fifty-one-year-old. In August, 2024, Andy Mac even competed in the Paris Olympics, and while he didn’t make the finals, his runs were flawless and impressive. I’m not talking, “Impressive for a fifty-year-old,” either. He’s still objectively better than most competitive pros skating bowls and vert.

Andy Mac continues to exist in this adjacent pro skateboarding world, one that has grown in the last decade thanks to YouTube and social media. And now, years removed from Woodward, there’s still something I really admire about his career. He’s still doing his thing, on his own terms. Not starving for approval from the cool guys or cool brands. While I still feel a bit slighted from our intimate drive and subsequent week at camp together, I’m happy for the guy. Kooky candy endorsements aside, I find his path even more admirable than, say, the aging street skater who has clearly lost the passion, but holds onto sponsors because it’s the only thing they have. Do we really need to keep advertising and giving money to the guys who were big in the eighties and nineties, but today no longer seem to try? Are their contracts, however bloated or not, holding back opportunities for up-and-coming younger skaters? Shouldn’t “Aging well” mean honorably stepping aside when the juice dries up?

There’s something amazing about Andy Mac working his ass off at fifty-plus to make it into the Olympics. He’s still got some juice. He’s out there trying. And I love that. As Hansel from Zoolander said when discussing his heroes: “Sting . . . the music that he’s created over the years, I don’t really listen to it, but the fact that he’s making it. I respect that.” I wouldn’t go so far as to call Andy Mac a hero, but it gets me hyped to know he’s still out there doing it. I respect that.

First, I’d like to start with why I started writing these books in the first place. I’m from a family of serious readers, and my obsession with skateboarding arrived at the same time I began to branch off and read books of my own choosing. Every now and then I would come across a book about skateboarding, but they were never fictional—biographies, memoirs, photo books, and dated tutorials. The first novel I read with a skateboarder as a main protagonist was Nick Hornby’s Slam, which wasn’t published until I was in college. I’m a huge Nick Hornby fan, High Fidelity is one of my all time favorite novels, but Slam seemed targeted for a younger audience. I wanted a novel that bridged the more interesting and funny life situations of a book like High Fidelity, but within the skateboarding world. The best skate writing I had come across was usually found in skate magazines, particularly travel pieces in Thrasher written by Michael Burnett. His writing is funny, straight forward, and usually captures the best part of the experience of skateboarding: the characters. Not just the characters who are skateboarders, but the people you encounter while skateboarding. His articles bring to life the goofy, weird situations we get into that are unique to skateboarders, but relatable to the masses. I wanted that in a novel. 

Another deep void in the skate media landscape were fictional depictions of skateboarders in film and television. I wanted to see the industry and professional skateboarding represented accurately. Again, what I found were documentaries, bio-pic dramas, and movies that seemed aimed at a youth audience. When they do include the industry, the movies are coming-of-age stories following a more traditional teenage, sports-story narrative. They also tend to be unbearably corny. That’s not what I wanted to watch.  

So in collaboration with my friend Nic Henry, we set out to write the first, good TV show about skateboarding. We called it Kooks, and we wrote a pilot for a show that we thought would begin to capture the silliness of the skateboarding industry. Our protagonist was a soon-to-be sponsored young man in college navigating the weird world of professional skateboarding in San Diego. At this point I was a rookie pro and working on this project allowed me to observe the bizarre subculture I was a part of through a new lens. Nic, a lifelong skateboarder who was equally curious about the inner workings of this world, was working in production and getting into writing scripts. After we finished writing the pilot and a rough second episode, our plan was to self fund it, find skaters to act, and barge the filming of it DIY style. Unfortunately, piecing this together proved much trickier than we anticipated, and the project fell to the wayside. My traveling picked up for skateboarding, Nic got a more serious job, and scheduling so much as a read-through never happened. 

Fortunately, the exercise of inventing characters, developing plot, and writing dialogue was irreversibly switched on in my imagination, and a new story idea formed that I couldn’t kick. It was  about a skater who never made it, living in San Francisco and working as a hotel maid. I wanted to write about how floundering it can feel to wake up at twenty-nine years old, having dedicated your life to an athletic endeavor that gives you nothing in return. I hoped to capture how close to the brink of homelessness many skaters often live, and what dire situations can result from a few wrong decisions. I also wanted to explore the fame and glory side of the world of professional skateboarding, but from the perspective of the not so famous or glorified. After picking away at it in secret for almost four years, by mid 2018 I had a finished manuscript that I was ready to share with people. I sent it to friends and family, and began what would become a near three-year revision process. 

People often ask me if there are any parallels between skateboarding and writing, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that there are many. But the number one connection between the work of writing and professional skateboarding is the sense of delayed gratification. As a skateboarder, I have put the majority of my energy into filming videos. From middle school and into my mid thirties, if I’m healthy enough to skate, my goal is to connect with a videographer and film something that could be used in a video part. That means a trick or combination of tricks that is as difficult as my body and mind will allow me to perform. A single trick might take years of repeated attempts. These tricks consume my mind at every waking (and sometimes dreaming) hour. The number of tricks that comprise a video part varies, but the projects I’m most proud of are usually filmed over the course of several years. One such project, which I worked on during the revision process of my first novel, is called Wilshire Wonderland. This was my first concept video, meaning that I gave myself parameters for filming. I wore only one outfit, which after a year and a new shoe sponsor turned into a second outfit, and I only skated spots on or within a block radius of the Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles. In the company of Ewan Bowman, who filmed and edited the piece, we might spend thirty minutes or a ten-hour day working together, Ewan patiently pointing his camera at me as I repeatedly fail. If I land something, we rejoice, and then hold onto it in secret until the final project is complete. A trick I might be eager to share with the world immediately must stay on a hard drive until the forty or fifty other tricks are completed. Once it’s done, the video is released onto the internet and all I can do is hope that people enjoy the experience of watching it. 

The novel is similar. It’s a slow and steady practice that happens mostly in my mind. The times I actually work on it are done sporadically, sometimes in short bouts and sometimes in long ones. The ideas take time to develop and see to completion, and nothing can be shared until every piece is finished and it all fits together nicely. And just like the skate video, once it’s finished you try to find someone to publish it for you. In skateboarding, the optimal publisher is the media channel with the best credibility, the farthest reach, and the most subscribers. In the past, the only way to do this was through brands and magazines who would fund and produce the videos themselves. Today, if you can’t find a brand, magazine or media platform, you can do it yourself on YouTube. For the novel, it’s a bit more complicated.  

While I mentioned that I’m from a family of serious readers, many of those readers are also writers. My father was a writer and lover of poetry and my mother spent the first twelve years of my life as a dedicated writer, finishing three novels and a number of short stories. In addition, just about everyone on my mother’s side has written at least one novel or book of some kind. The matriarch, our beloved Grummy (Susan Trott to the rest of the world), has written dozens of novels, fourteen of which were published in the traditional manner, meaning pitched by an agent and picked up by a big New York publishing house. Through Grummy, I learned the discipline of sticking with one’s craft, as she essentially wrote to completion a new novel every year or two. Her steadfast dedication, along with my mother’s, inspired not only my own writing, but my approach to skateboarding. I also learned about the pitfalls of the publishing world and the increased difficulty of finding agents and publishers to put out her work. Though she tried, my mother had been unable to find an agent and a publisher for her novels. Knowing this, I assumed it would be incredibly unlikely that I, an unproven novelist or fiction writer, would find anyone to publish my novel. But I held out hope, and while I revised the novel, taking in the helpful notes and critiques of my trusted readers, I sent out agent queries. 

The Query. Ugh. Just looking at that word brings me to a dark place. The query, as I learned through countless (and very kind) advice blogs and websites, is the letter you send to prospective literary agents, selling them on yourself and your work. I sent out close to ninety agent queries, only receiving about ten human responses, which was pretty demoralizing. Of those rejections, I have no idea if the selected chapters I attached were even read. For months I constructed carefully worded emails, explaining why I thought I was worthy of each particular agent’s consideration. I used the website “query tracker” to research specific agents who would be suitable for my style and genre. Every email felt like a disingenuous brag. The only thing I could compare it to would be if, when I was a kid trying to get sponsored, I had sent around my two minutes of video footage with a letter attached, explaining in words why the brand should sponsor me. “My style is like a new Tony Hawk meets Tyrone Olson, with a twist of Rodney Mullen.” If a kid sent something like that to a brand, the letter would be framed in the company’s office for its legendary kookiness and haunt the skater for the rest of their days. Even though I mostly avoided boldly comparing Top of Mason to other great works of fiction (which I read is what you should do), the emails I wrote were so cringey and unnatural I wish I could retroactively delete every blind query I sent out. 

So after a couple years of rejections, I moved to my plan B, which in the back of my mind had always been my plan A. I would put it out myself. After locking in a copy-editor, hiring my friends to illustrate and design the cover and title accents, and figuring out the right company for print-on-demand production and shipping, on December 1, 2020, I made Top of Mason available in the Old Friends webstore, announcing it via a mass email and an Instagram post.  

While T.O.M. is not a memoir, this book was the most vulnerable piece of writing I’d put out into the world. Sure, I’d maintained a blog, published some travel writing, and occasionally got a little loose in the comments section on Instagram, but this story packed in a lot of me that I was nervous about sharing. Thoughts and musings on the fragility of my own skateboarding career, failed romantic relationships, drug and alcohol abuse I’ve watched my friends go through, and negative takes on the skateboarding industry at large. More than the vulnerability displayed openly on the page, I was nervous about the product itself being sold. I’ve put thousands of hours into this project, but will people even buy it? And if they buy it, will they read it? 

Professional skateboarders have long dabbled in the arts. From the inception of the “job,” skateboarders with big names have used their notoriety to enter many different creative fields. Stacy Peralta as a filmmaker, Mark Gonzalez and Brian Lotti as artists, Mike Vallely and Tommy Guerrero as musicians, Jason Lee as an actor, Ed Templeton as a photographer. These were some of the pioneering “video stars” of skateboarding, and while I’m sure their talents would have landed them with success in their second act pursuits regardless of their skateboarding careers, their existing notoriety surely helped.

Professional skateboarders continue to juggle passions, and today you see plenty of models, actors, TV Personalities, and an abundance of photographers, painters, designers and musicians. But from my landscape, I still couldn’t find any active professional skateboarders who were aspiring authors. There are a couple notable skateboarders who published books after stepping out of the limelight. Scott Bourne, Evan Schiefelbine, and my new favorite “skater/writer,” Michael Christie. So the void made it difficult to gauge how a novelist in the space might be welcomed or perceived. 

The result was . . . pretty surprising. A lot of people bought the book! And judging by the amount of dms and messages I continue to receive, a lot of people are reading it. In the first year, I sold almost 2000 physical books, which far exceeded my expectations. A number of skate shops around the country stocked it and I released it on Kindle as well. I hired one of my best friends to record an audio version, which I then published on Audible. In the end, I was able to do nearly every single aspect of the “publishing” process myself.

All of this encouraged me to move forward with the second novel I’d started working on, which by early 2021 I was already half way done with. The idea for this one started on a skate trip in Japan back in 2017. My friend Michael Mackrodt had just come back from the States with an incredible story of being confronted by a CIA agent in Chicago who interrogated him on suspicion of being more than just a professional skateboarder. He writes about it in a Free Skate article here. Drawing from this unusual encounter, along with my experiences traveling the world for many years as a professional skateboarder, I assembled another skateboarding adventure story, with a new cast of characters. 

Off Clark is about Mo, a professional skateboarder who goes missing. Determined to find him, a budding podcaster, Nina, sets out on a mission to figure out what happened. Set in Chicago and the Middle East, the story dives into the relationship between professional skateboarders and videographers, while offering a critique of the modern skateboarding industry. Most of all, like Top of Mason, Off Clark is meant to be a fun read. 

I found I already had an incredible team of people to make it all come together through my experience with Top of Mason. First are the first draft readers who I like to think of as one, thorough editor. These are friends and family members who don’t just read early drafts and pat me on the back and say, “Good for you!” These are novelists and novel enthusiasts who pick apart my writing honestly and critically. Then, my dear friends Sebo Walker and Chris Collins, seasoned artists who make the cover art, design and inside accents become a reality. Next is my copy-editor, Amy Medieros, who each time I deliver a manuscript I consider near immaculate she returns it with literally thousands of comments and corrections. She’s amazing. Rudy Behrens, one of my best friends from St. Helena (also my longest running friend who still skates), is the voice actor for the Top of Mason audiobook. He is currently working on the Off Clark audiobook, which I hope to have out by the end of summer. Finally, through the company Lulu, I am able to print one-off copies of the book to test interior and cover appearance. The final stage is integrating the finalized PDFs of the interior and exterior on Lulu with the Shopify integration and boom! I click publish, someone buys it, and it ships to nearly anywhere in the world. 

As of writing this, I’m about halfway finished with a third novel that continues to expand the fictional skateboarding world established in my first two novels. My goal is to create a collection of novels which loosely revolve around a fictional shoe company, with eclectic characters inspired by the many interesting personalities I’ve encountered through my skateboarding career. 

If you have read or supported these books in any way along this journey, I thank you dearly. I find the process of writing them deeply fulfilling, and putting them out in this DIY fashion is a fun way to connect with the international skateboarding and reading community in a new way. 

I encourage anyone out there who’s toying with book ideas to stick with it and if all else fails, do it yourself!

If you’ve read my books and enjoyed them, please consider leaving a review on Goodreads. This is super helpful for discovery.

Photos were taken by me and Whitney on a Minolta SRT101 and an Olympus PEN-FT.

Sa Tuna, Spain

Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said

Philip K. Dick

I decided to try out Twitter, which I guess speaks to my age. Or my aging, I should say, of which I’ve been feeling lately. Shortly before leaving New York for Europe, I was at a bar with some friends and Mark Suciu said that he read somewhere that thirty-four marks the end of youth. I had just turned this age and I will attest that this statement felt true. “Youth,” meaning, as I interpreted it anyhow, a body that bounces back from injury quickly. 

Upon this day, my thirty-fourth birthday, a beautiful spring Saturday in Midtown Manhattan, I tried to give myself a gift I have no business gifting. I went out skating and attempted a trick I’d been dreaming about for decades. Within a few tries I pretty much had it, and jumped into a battle that lasted four hours, and ended only after I’d broken two decks and a truck. Not to mention my entire self worth, along with a major tweak in my back, which made my subway hobble home exceptionally miserable. Arriving home, I got straight in bed, somehow physically ill from the strange torment I’d just put my body through. I canceled the small birthday party I’d been planning and wallowed for the next few days.   

After a few weeks of at-home low back rehab I went out skating, only to pull my hamstring. Two weeks later, after feeling like my hamstring was properly healed, I strained my calf. This latest injury happened on my first day in Europe, a trip I had been scheming to make wildly productive. And while I know this sounds like a whole lot of complaining, I’m really here to share that I just finished reading the first of what will hopefully be many books this summer, and I enjoyed it very much. Thanks to someone on Twitter, who recommended Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said, by Philip K Dick.

I liked being transported to a dystopian future that is now in the past. A dismal 1988, (the year I was born) when a Second Civil War is fizzling out, and conquered students live in underground university bunkers and a police state controls the world. The protagonist, a famous TV personality named Jason, wakes up one day and finds he no longer exists. No one recognizes him, no one cares. He remembers his life, nothing has changed for him, but the world has. It’s easy to self-indulge this feeling as an aging professional skateboarder. Weeks pass like years when you’re not skating, and the Internet offers a constant reminder of how irrelevant you are, or will soon become. Nothing matters. Which is fine. Who said it had to? 

Copenhagen, Denmark

The Glass Hotel

Emily St. John Mandel

It’s been a while since I found a novel that I couldn’t put down, one that I felt like reading over doing anything else. After a few days in Spain, we arrived in Copenhagen at 4pm, with moments to spare before Whitney had to hop on a zoom call. We’re doing the remote thing again. Mornings and afternoons in Europe, evenings and nights online in New York. I haven’t been to Copenhagen since 2012, and I remembered the city being one of the most fantastic places I’d ever visited. That trip was spontaneous, an add-on after a demo tour in Germany. The photographer traveling with the C1rca team was bailing early to drive to Copenhagen for the big contest. “Can I come?” I asked Gentsch, a charismatic German with bleached hair and an endless bag of stories from his decades as the Flip photographer. “Of course,” he said, and I hopped in his car. I walked away from that weekend with over $3000 in cash. The only time in my professional career I made top ten in a contest, “beating” Busenitz, Wes, and a number of other skaters I have no business “competing” against. Chris Cole won it. Nyjah, Ishod, Shane and Ryan Decenzo were in the top five as well. It was fun. 

Ten years later, the end of my youth continues to rear its ugly head and my calf is still in pain, so I won’t be skating the event. The first day, instead, I wandered around and finished the book I started in Spain. It’s called The Glass Hotel and it’s a pleasure and an absolute page turner. The only thing that bothered me is the author seems to have entirely lifted the Bernie Madoff story. I realize this is acceptable in fiction, only in this case it seems a bit too exact, lacking in the artful adjustment that good fiction does well. Hedge fund manager who’s running a Ponzi scheme until it all comes crashing down. There’s more to her story of course. But I don’t know, the similarities bothered me. Mainly because HBO recently released a popular series about the whole thing starring Robert Dinero. Seems like rehashing such a recent cultural phenomenon would be something to avoid. In her defense, the show came out a few years before the book was released, so it’s possible she’d already finished her book and it was caught in publishing limbo. But still. Isn’t it already the most covered Ponzi scheme in history? It seems like she should have picked something else.  

I didn’t do any reading the rest of the time in Copenhagen. Too many events, too many people. I bought a copy of Wuthering Heights at a bookstore one morning, just to have something in my bag at all times. While I love using a Kindle while traveling, it just feels wrong not having a single physical book on me.

I swore off shitty beer this trip, as I never find any pleasure in the lame lagers everywhere in Europe. Buuuuut it’s Copenhagen and I ended up drinking a lot of shitty beers. The event was phenomenal, the perfect sort of skate party to not have to skate in. In the end, I’m just a fan of what these crazy skaters can do. Heitor, Louie and Ishod won the event for me, but I think Nyjah took home the actual trophies.    

Sifnos, Greece

Sea of Tranquility 

Emily St. John Mandel

We’ve committed a cardinal sin of traveling and returned to the same exact location, two years in a row. Only fitting that I would start and finish a novel about time traveling. I’m not into time traveling books. They lose me. The whole, travel back to change the past that changes the future that is determined by the past that seems to have already changed before it’s changed in the first place. It hurts my brain. Despite my inability to grasp these things, I really loved Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. It reads almost like a sequel to The Glass Hotel, with characters continuing on in satisfying ways. I tore through it quickly and would maybe even read it again. You know, to better grasp the time traveling parts. Or to pretend like I have.

There were no regrets for our return to the island of Sifnos, which felt sort of like time traveling to last summer. The Airbnb we rented was just as we left it, in a delightful little cove with a perfect diving spot twenty steps from our room. There are only two restaurants in town, so we’d rotate. Eggs in the apartment in the morning, and then we’d dine out in the afternoon before Whitney’s first zoom call, which usually fell between nine and ten a.m. in New York. The portions in Greece are so big we would always take something home for dinner. And as a rule, we’d strive to spend at least fifty euros every meal but could never quite do it. The only downside this year were the hundreds of jellyfish lurking in the cove, which made swimming for long bouts or distances pretty nerve-racking. Before arriving, Whitney and I vowed to swim across the cove every day for exercise, but after the first attempt we decided once was enough.

Following that single effort, I somehow emerged from the water with an injured back. Which was only right, seeing as my calf had finally started feeling better. Instead of swimming, I committed to figuring out jump roping, only to realize it hurt my back even more and made me terribly frustrated. It’s like, if I can’t skateboard, I have to find some other random physical activity to hate myself for not being good at. I eventually watched a couple YouTube videos and resolved my issues. This back thing is aggravating, though. Almost three weeks into this trip and I still haven’t touched my skateboard. What is happening? 

Hydra, Greece

Deacon King Kong 

James McBride

I’m pretty sick of religion this week, what with the end of Roe. I can’t seem to resist the urge to debate random religious kooks who attack me on the Internet if I post my feelings about the decision. It never gets me anywhere. I just get riled up and frustrated with our country and the minority who have worked their way into positions of such consequential power and influence. I live with the arguments in my head, distracting me from wherever I am physically, which this week was the beautiful island of Hydra. Anyway, the book I decided to read wasn’t necessarily religious, but most of the characters were, and they just annoyed me. They were, for the most part, perfectly nice characters, but it’s really hard for me to read about or converse with the hyper-religious and not feel bothered. C’mon people! Live in the now! Not sure why I was surprised, seeing as the word “Deacon” was in the title. But it’s about an alcoholic deacon who shoots a drug dealer, so I was hoping it would move quickly away from the church, but it didn’t. I still enjoyed reading it. I love the 1960’s New York City lore that’s packed in, like rumors of alligators living in the sewers and pythons roaming the bridges. And imagining life in the projects at that time, and all the ethnic and racial tension at play in city politics. Mob stuff is always fun to throw into a novel when done well. And I thought this one did it pretty well. 

In short, I liked the novel. It’s possible my grievances come from the bitterness I’m feeling because I’m still unable to skate due to this back problem. A week out from the initial incident and it’s only getting worse. Not that there are too many worthy spots on Hydra. Hardly any really, but I could have scraped something together. The port town is cool, no cars or wheeled anything is allowed. Not even bicycles. Donkeys are the only form of transportation, which might sound magical, but I actually just find it pretty sad. 

Istanbul and Antalya, Turkey

The Lola Quartet 

Emily St. John Mandel

This is the first time in a while that I’ve felt the need to pour through an author’s entire oeuvre. The third book I picked up by Emily St. John Mandel is the Lola Quartet, which I enjoyed, not as much as the other two, but enough to still recommend it. The only thing I could not get over while reading it is that this time she seems to have completely lifted another HBO series subplot, which unlike the Bernie Madoff one, I find almost unforgivable. 

Anyone who’s ever spoken to me in person has probably heard me talk about The Wire. I’m utterly obsessed. I was first introduced to the series in college, some sociology professor showed a courtroom clip, and I decided to try it out. The first two episodes didn’t grab me, but by mid-season I was hooked. Since that initial binge I’ve rewatched the entire series—season one through five—over six times. Please resist the urge to do this math, because I have and it’s an embarrassing amount of hours to dedicate to a television show. In my defense, one time I used the show to rehab back from a knee surgery. Exercising is so boring, you know? I needed a distraction. And even though Whitney had already watched it before we met, I wasn’t about to marry her without watching it with her! During the pandemic, I even listened to a podcast breaking down every single episode. Pathetic? Yes, but worth every second. 

Anyway, this all goes to say that I was deeply disturbed when The Lola Quartet introduced a character and subplot closely resembling reporter Scott Templeton from season five. A reporter who starts twisting facts, fibbing quotes, and toying with the truth so it better fits his story. Now I’m sure even David Simon and Ed Burns, the creators, pulled this from real life. Thus is fiction. So it could be argued that Emily did as well. But I don’t know, there’s something that just feels wrong about using the same scandal ten years after the greatest television show in the history of the world already used it. Anyway, don’t let this stop you from reading The Lola Quartet. That was really the only part that bothered me, and it’s a small part of her story.  

Turkey was a last minute addition to the itinerary. Whit had never been to a country in the Middle East, so we thought Istanbul and the eastern waters of the Mediterranean would be worth trying. I had been to Turkey a number of times before and thought it would be the easiest in terms of culture shock. But I had never traveled with a woman and quickly found that even in a city like Istanbul, there are still some customs that made Whitney pretty uncomfortable. At restaurants and in service situations, it was like she didn’t exist. She’d offer a credit card and they wouldn’t take it. Waiters would take our order with their back to her. We would ask for wine glasses, and men would refuse to hand them to her. It was bizarre, and pretty infuriating. This may have been because we were in some of the more touristy, conservative neighborhoods. Or maybe this was a way of being polite? Who knows. We were only there for a few days so it may have just been a handful of unlucky, random encounters. By the time we made our way south to Antalya, everyone seemed way more laid back. The waters were beautiful, the old town was fun to wander through, and we did a lot of reading. My back was still in pain, but I did some serious spot cataloging. I’d love to see some Antalya spots show up in a video sometime. 

Zurich, Switzerland 

Station Eleven 

Emily St. John Mandel

Zurich was another last minute destination. While trying to figure out our flight from Turkey to Sicily, we kept running into routes with a layover in Zurich. And then it hit me. Wait! One of my best friends lives there! Davis, my oldest friend, had been nagging me to come visit for ages. I called him up to make sure he would be around and a few days later we arrived in Switzerland. 

Neither of us had ever been to Switzerland and our expectations were low. That’s not to say we expected anything bad, we just didn’t anticipate being completely blown away by what a seemingly perfect city Zurich is. It’s clean, easy to get around, and if I had encountered this place in my twenties like Davis had, I would probably be living there too. Our biggest shock was finding Zurich to be the most “swimmable” city we’ve ever been to. On the edge of downtown there’s an enormous lake, with clear, clean water that—considering it flows from the alps—wasn’t even very cold. A public transit ferry drops you off at various beaches or suburb communities. The lake flows into a river that snakes through the city, into sections that are filtered and clean, with free swimming areas and diving spots. I know I’ve used the word clean three times by now, but that’s the word that sticks out the most when I think of Zurich. You could probably drink the river water we were swimming in. I’m not kidding. It was like being in some sci-fi utopian novel where the future . . . works out. Not that I’ve ever read one of those novels, but Zurich is what I imagine the backdrop for one would be like. In short, being there gave me hope for humanity. 

So it was only fitting that I would read a book about a dystopian future, where a plague has wiped out almost all of humanity. It’s funny, I’m really curious how I would have felt about Station Eleven if I hadn’t seen the HBO mini series first. There is no doubt that the novel is excellent, a creative twist on the slightly overdone pandemic nightmare. I love the traveling symphony, and the way the various character arcs come together. But I honestly feel like the show-runners or TV writers who adapted it really improved the story. They managed to bring the two best characters together into a touching story about friendship, which was entirely absent in the novel. So like I said, this novel is great, but it’s rare to come across an adaptation that doesn’t just mess with the story, but adds an ingredient that greatly improves it. I highly recommend both, but if you haven’t watched/read either, read it first and then let me know.   

Catania, Sicily, Italy

Borne

Jeff VanderMeer

Sicily was the last stop of our summer tour, and it had the most riding on it. I’d yet to step on my board, and was hoping for a miracle. The previous summer, when we ended our three-month Euro jaunt with Patrik Wallner and his wife Phoebe in Greece, we made a silly short 16mm film, in which I play a naive tourist who picks up some hitchhikers. It doesn’t end well for me. For round two, in Sicily, Patrik and I had scripted a slightly more serious short, one that would be the introduction to my next video part. Naturally, it would require some skating.

The bulk of the short was to be handled in Catania, where we figured the best skate spots would be found. This was also where we hoped to shoot the “acting” bits, which our wives grudgingly agreed to perform. Neither Whit nor Phoebe were particularly eager to spend the early days of their vacation acting in a satirical-turned-sort-of-serious skit. Tobi, the fifth wheel of the crew who was cast without his knowledge or permission as my “filmer,” was not too thrilled about dedicating the start of the trip to our film either. Best to get it over with as soon as possible.

Tobi and our wives were great sports, and we managed to get through the shoot with some success. My back only allowed me to skate at fifty percent, and the antique shop where we’d hoped to film the first few shots was closed. So by the time we left Catania we still needed the girls to act, and I really needed to perform. Without any skate clips, there was no way it would all fit together.

I did finish a novel called Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy. I’m a fan. This book is also part of a series of sorts, with a book #1.5 and #2, which I plan on reading. This felt like a truly Sci-Fi Fantasy novel, and it made me wonder how many of the skateboarders who rep Jerry Hsu’s brand actually read books like these. As an infrequent dabbler in Sci-Fi and Fantasy books, I think I would feel like a poser sporting the Sci-Fi brand. If asked on the street, who would I say my favorite authors are? I haven’t read nearly enough to know.

Anyway, back to Borne. It’s awesome. There’s a mystical creature, in a dystopian future, created by an evil biotech company. I like the characters. The story moves smoothly and Jeff’s imagination is incredible. I’m curious how it might be adapted for television, it seems ripe for it, but somehow . . . too fantastical at the same time? The creature, Borne, seems like it would be too difficult to create on screen. Either way, I’d watch it.

Salina, Panarea and Scopello, Sicily, Italy

The Singer’s Gun

Emily St. John Mandel

By some miracle, despite the many hiccups, we got all the shots we needed for the video. I struggled through a couple skate clips, and on the day my back finally felt healed, I took one of the worst slams of my life. I fell directly into a metal gate, my quad bruising so horribly I could barely walk for the remainder of the trip. Whitney and Phoebe strolled through a proper antique shop, despite a forced mid-trip isolation from a terrible case of covid. Tobi went along with it all, despite feeling tricked into a traditional Patrik Wallner production (see Visualtraveling) by way of a “ friends vacation.” The final shot was filmed with only twenty minutes to spare before Whitney and I flew back to the U.S. and Phoebe and Patrik returned to Hong Kong. You can watch the finished product here.

I’m very proud of this piece. Patrik killed it, as did Matt Schleyer and all the filmers who helped me along the way. Maybe I’ll write more about the process of filming the video part in a following Substack. One possibly connected to the publication of my new novel, Off Clark. We’ll see.

Now back to reading. Look, I love her writing, and I’ve once again been swept up into another gripping, enjoyable read by Emily St. John Mandel. Whitney even started to get jealous about all this time I’m spending with another woman. But Emily! What are you doing taking another subplot from The Wire?

This time it’s the infamous season two, which I will admit I may have skipped during one of my rewatch binges. It’s the only season that introduces characters who pretty much disappear in the following seasons. But over time, I’ve come to appreciate season two as one of the great seasons of the greatest show ever made. And so, because of this widely accepted greatness, I don’t understand why Emily would include a story that deals with investigating dead girls that show up in shipping containers, when that is the foundation of the season two plot. Again, it’s different, but there are enough similarities for me to find it difficult to read. 

Otherwise, I liked the story. Much of it takes place in Italy, which was a funny coincidence. It’s always nice to read a novel about a place you're visiting. That used to be my rule back when I was traveling more for skateboarding. If I was going to an interesting, new country, I’d find a novel or two, along with a couple nonfiction books about the place. In the early days, fresh out of college, I was extra diligent and would take notes like I might later have to write a pop quiz essay on the place. As if at any moment, a police officer might arrive at a skate spot and take me into a spotlit corner and hand me a prompt, a pencil and a piece of paper. “Five hundred words on your country’s clandestine methods of influence—go!” 

Back in the states, I read Emily’s debut novel Last Night in Montreal, which I have to say was my least favorite. There was something very satisfying about finishing an author’s entire body of work. Despite my petty issues, she’s definitely become one of my favorites.

If you got through this long meandering blog post, I appreciate you. Some of the photos in the Sicily batch were taken by these two lovely people, Patrik and Phoebe. Tobi (seen fumbling with his backpack) took the picture of the front blunt, though a water bottle spilled on his film and I don’t think he’s too happy with the way it came out. There was one photo of his from the shoot that made it into an exhibition and sold for a good amount of money. So in the end, Tobi was the only one who actually profited from our silly skit. He deserves it. No one likes being a fifth wheel.

Until next summer, happy reading!

Oh, and I still haven’t read Wuthering Heights.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the current situation in Iran lately, and how strange and scary it must be for the people living there. With the protests, the internet restrictions, and the general oppressive rule of a theocratic, authoritarian regime, I wonder how it’s looking from the inside. I hope through this round of resistance, change will come and at the very least women are granted some of the basic freedoms they don’t have today.

This piece was written for Thrasher Magazine after a skate trip in 2013. It doesn’t seem like a whole lot has changed from the time we were there, if anything life inside the country has only gotten harder. I feel lucky to have met so many wonderful Iranians on that trip, and to have seen so much of the country. While it didn’t end up being much of a skate trip, it’s an experience I’m very grateful for. The video Patrik made is called The Persian Version and is embedded in this page but can also be found on YouTube and Vimeo.

     We arrived at the Tehran Khomeini International airport a little after four a.m. By five our group had happily found each other, all relieved to have made it through customs and into the Islamic Republic of Iran. This Visualtraveling trip, orchestrated by Patrik Wallner for another one of his “skate-umentary” films, had been a long time in the making. But only minutes after a brief introduction with the Iranian skaters who had invited us, Kenny Reed and I—the only two Americans in the group—were intercepted by a short, older Iranian man named Ahmad. With a thick accent and a serious tone, Ahmad told us that he was our guide and we needed to leave with him. Immediately. 

     "We have to get to the city center by six."

     Confused, Kenny and I were shuffled out of the airport and onto a bus. It was there that he explained the complications of our situation. As Americans, Kenny and I were not going to be doing what the rest of our group would be doing. In fact, Ahmad hadn't even known that we were traveling with anyone else. To him, we were two “cultural tourists,” and we were now his responsibility. Anything we did had to be planned and authorized by the travel agency he worked for. Out of the bus and into his car, Ahmad raced us through the empty early morning streets of Tehran, the only time we would see that enormous city not completely congested with traffic. Apparently there was a checkpoint of sorts that he needed to cross by six a.m. After making it through and dropping us off at our hotel, Ahmad told us that we were not, under any circumstances, allowed to leave the hotel without his escort. Bewildered but exhausted, Kenny and I stopped trying to explain why we had actually come to Iran and settled into our shared room to try and get some sleep.

     Later that day, Ahmad returned to take us out for our first day as cultural tourists.

      "No, no, we're here with our friends," we tried, again. "We're here to go skateboarding."

      Ahmad didn't understand. He had our itinerary ready and we needed to get going. While Ahmad's English was superb, there were some concepts he just wasn't quite grasping. Skateboarding, as far as he was concerned, was not allowed. It was one of the many forbidden activities and was certainly not included in our “itinerary,” a word he overused and pronounced with an emphasis on every vowel in a way that would come to drive me and Kenny insane. Eventually our friends turned up at our hotel with MJ Rahimi, the local Iranian skater who had invited us and coordinated our visas. MJ is the dedicated ambassador for skateboarding in Iran and has created an amazing community through the skate camps he’s organized at a park he helped build. He even presses his own decks in his basement, as it is difficult and extremely expensive to import them. He was thrilled to be the first to host professional skateboarders from the West, but Ahmad was throwing a kink in the plan. After MJ and Ahmad argued back and forth in Farsi for a while, we learned what the problem was. As it turned out, the only visas available to Americans were ones that came with a guide and a government-approved travel plan. That extra $1100 Kenny and I had each been told we had to pay for our visas only a few days before arriving was not the cost of bureaucratic processing, as we’d thought. Without realizing it, we had simply paid for Ahmad and his services. 

     There wasn't any getting around it. Ahmad would not deviate from his itinerary and go along with our intended skate trip. We said goodbye to the Visualtraveling crew and hopped in Ahmad's car. For the remaining ten days, we may as well have been in North Korea for all the restrictions we had, while the Euro bros were pretty much in Barcelona. They crashed with the locals, ate home-cooked meals, and drove around freely, skating wherever they wanted to with ease and enjoyment. Meanwhile, Kenny and I reluctantly admired ruins and museums, dragging our feet from fire temples to mosques and ancient bridges. I felt like a bratty kid on vacation with my parents, the whole time imagining what my friends were doing back home. There we were in the mysterious land of Persia, a beautiful country few Americans ever have a chance to visit, imprisoned in nice hotels and pleasantly chauffeured around to breathtaking sites, all the while wishing desperately that we were goofing around on our skateboards on the other side of town.

     Despite stripping us of our freedom, Ahmad turned out to be a wonderful guy who was actually pretty understanding of our predicament. He was simply providing the service we'd accidentally paid for and he did not want to do anything to jeopardize his job. As we traveled from Tehran to Shiraz and on to Isfahan, Ahmad was instructed by his agency to give the local police a play-by-play of what we were doing each day, so they could have an idea of where we were at all times. If we had left Ahmad and snuck off to go skate with our friends and then, say, got into a situation with the cops—as is usually what happens when you skate in public places anywhere in the world—we would be putting Ahmad in a position that could get him into trouble. “Getting into trouble,” as we learned, has a very different meaning in Iran.

     Alcohol is outlawed in the Islamic Republic, which we had heard before arriving, but it wasn't until we were there that we learned what that really meant. Was it outlawed like weed is outlawed in some states, I’d wondered, where getting caught could result in anything from community service to felony charges? At one point I asked Ahmad what happens if you get busted boozing. Ahmad answered casually, as if it was as normal as a traffic violation.

      “Sixty lashes. Maybe eighty.”

     Women in Iran are required by law to wear some form of a hijab anytime they are in public and we never once saw an adult woman with her hair exposed. One night at a fancy restaurant with Ahmad we were joined by two of his friends, a married couple in their forties. At one point the wife's hijab slipped, revealing some of her hair, and the waiter rushed over to our table and ordered her to fix it. It was sickening to watch her follow those orders, her husband unable to say anything, like she was a child in class being reprimanded for bad behavior.

     Our separation from our friends revealed the tumultuous relationship between the USA and Iran that we so often hear about in the news. To understand why there is currently no formal diplomatic relationship between these two nations, it’s best to start with the Islamic Republic’s Revolution in 1979. Oppressed by the US-supported monarchy that had ruled Iran for much of the 20th century, Iranian revolutionaries revolted and overthrew the government, kicking out the Shah—the king at the time—and establishing the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran. During this movement, revolutionaries stormed the American Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Since then, the United States has completely cut their diplomatic relationship with Iran. The American Embassy in Tehran remains vacant to this day, its outer walls adorned with intense anti American murals. The most vivid of this hateful sentiment that we saw was a painting of the Statue of Liberty with Lady Liberty’s face replaced with a death skull.

     Shortly after the Revolution of 1979, a gruesome war between Iran and Iraq broke out. This war lasted eight years, during which the US supported Iraq. Driving around the country, you can see that this war is still very fresh in the memories of the Iranian people. For example, throughout the city of Tehran we saw hundreds of giant, colorful murals honoring the martyrs from that war. It was beautiful but strange, as I've never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world.

     In the last couple of decades, with every attempt to resolve their issues, the USA’s suspicion of Iran’s affiliation with known terrorist groups and Iran’s potentially non-peaceful uranium enrichment program has hindered any formal diplomatic resolutions. Because of this suspicion and mistrust, the USA and the EU have imposed harsh sanctions on Iran that prevent the trade of many goods and services between them and much of the rest of the world. These sanctions have, to say the least, devastated Iran’s economy. While we were there, the first news story broke about the possibility of President Obama and Iran's President Rouhani having a face-to-face meeting. It was amazing to see the positive reception of this news from the Iranians we'd meet in passing. I never would have expected to see so many smiles and thumbs up once they'd learn that we were Americans. But included in this diplomatic dispute, as we learned first hand, is a visa restriction that requires a guide for all US citizens visiting Iran. Taking all of this into consideration, our lack of freedom to do whatever we wanted in Iran was really not all that surprising.

     Kenny and I were released from the tight grip of control by Ahmad at the border of Azerbaijan. We didn’t see our companions once we crossed into freedom but we did find a Mafioso-looking Azerbaijani who was willing to drive us the four hours to Baku for pretty cheap. During that drive our he spent most of his time texting on his flip phone in the oncoming traffic’s lane, narrowly avoiding head on collisions at eighty or ninety miles per hour. It was terrifying. Gearing up for this trip I’d been so worried about something horrible and dramatic happening to me in Iran—like imprisonment, kidnap, or death by crude torture—that I’d pretty much accepted that what would happen in Iran was out of my control. But in that car, after making it through Iran with out a single threatening or nervous moment, it didn’t seem fair to me that I was going to die in a regular old car accident in a country I knew next to nothing about. Dying in Iran could seem epic, or at least somewhat interesting, but Azerbaijan? Would anyone even care? By some stroke of luck we survived and arrived in Baku by midnight. We found a hostel and in the morning finally linked up with Patrik Wallner and the rest of the Visualtraveling crew. You can watch the documentary Patrik made here:

     Even in Iran, it was remarkable to see that skateboarding was thriving in the cities we visited. The Iranian government may not like to see their youth adopt cultural ideologies of the West, but I’m sure that skateboarding will be one subculture that will persevere. Although Kenny Reed and I may not have gotten the skate trip we had wanted, it was fascinating to actually see the country of Iran that sadly, so few Americans ever will. I'm so grateful to MJ for providing this unique opportunity and to Ahmad for so passionately sharing his country with us. Since I first wrote this story, we have seen the completion of a nuclear deal which aimed to limit Iran's nuclear activity and allow foreign inspections in exchange for sanctions relief, which seemed to show promising signs for peace and reconciliation. But as the USA has now removed itself from the agreement, it seems we are moving back in time. I hope things move in a more positive direction soon. I’d really like to make a skateboarding return to Iran, free from the restrictions of a guided tour. No offense to Ahmad, he can still come and hang out if he wants to.

A version of this story was published in the April 2014 issue of Thrasher Magazine.

    I hopped into a taxi at the Queen Alia International Airport in Jordan, alone for the first time since arriving in the Middle East. My driver, unable to read the address I had written down, attempted a few phrases with me, but his minimal English and my nonexistent Arabic eventually left us in silence. Shrugging his shoulders, he simply lifted his open palms in the air and turned onto the freeway. As he drove, my driver, a big guy with a short, trimmed beard who was probably in his thirties, tried the phone number of my hotel on his cellphone, but neither a person nor a voicemail picked up the call. His lack of concern for this major problem left me unsettled. As our stalemate continued, he took an exit and turned onto a frontage road. He slowed down and then stopped in front of a dilapidated building with a shady looking convenience store on the bottom floor. Suddenly all of those Western media-fed fears I had been pushing away came flooding back.

     A man walked out of the convenience store and up to the passenger window. My driver rifled off something to him in Arabic. The man, an older, more heavy set guy, then turned his head to look at me. 

     “Great,” I thought to myself. “It’s actually happening. I’m getting kidnapped.” 

     My driver looked back at me as well.

     “Uh,” he muttered, as he used his hands again. The man in the window stared at me with a much more serious expression than the driver. I was scared.   

      After a long pause, the driver finally asked, "Coffee?”

     As our coffees were handed to us, my cab driver insisted that it was his treat and wouldn’t accept my money. A few minutes later he spoke with someone on his phone and then, using some more hand motions, assured me that he knew where my hotel was located. About twenty minutes later I was delivered to my hotel in downtown Amman, intact and as un-kidnapped as could be. 

     I spent the next few days skating with the locals and getting a feel for the skate scene. Amman has a young but fast-growing skateboarding community thanks to a newly completed DIY skatepark right in the heart of downtown. Relaxed and at ease in what is really a very Western-friendly city, I never again felt the discomfort and suspicion I let myself feel in that taxi. I did begin to feel anxious though, not for myself, but for a handful of my closest friends who I was no longer traveling with. They were in Yemen and after about five days I still hadn’t heard from them. That anxiety was sprinkled with guilt because I should have been with them. I’d abandoned them.

     The plan had been to visit all of the countries in the Arabian Peninsula that we could get into and skateboard in the main cities. These were cities that, up until that point, had had very little, if any, skateboarding media coverage. Beginning with Oman, the itinerary included Yemen, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon. Despite the relative calm in these countries leading up to our trip, by the time we arrived in the Middle East, Yemen, the region’s poorest country, was on the verge of slipping into complete chaos.

(Backside noseblunt by Patrik Wallner)

     The purpose of visiting Yemen had been to retreat to the unusual, tropical island off the coast called Socotra. Why would we go to this virtually uninhabited, un-skateable island on a skate trip, you might ask? To put it simply, we wanted to see some trees. But not just any trees. Dragon Blood trees, trees unseen almost anywhere else on this planet! In some ways, for Patrik Wallner who had planned the trip, these trees were the main reason we’d come to this part of the world. On top of being a major check mark on Patrik’s bucket list, the island visit would also be an excuse to have a mini vacation in the middle of a month-long skate trip.

     The problem was that by the time we were set to fly into Yemen, a Shia militia group called the Houthis had successfully overthrown the capital, taking the President’s chief of staff hostage and then ousting the President himself from his palace. Embassies in Sana’a were emptying out and travel advisories were pretty much saying, “Go anywhere besides Yemen.” After I learned that the Houthi’s party slogan goes something like, “God is great…Death to America,” as the only American citizen in the group, I was spooked.

     Now I’m not the most adventurous traveler out there, but I’m not always the most cautious either. I like visiting off-the-beaten path countries that Western media might scare you away from, but I don’t like going simply for the sake of doing something crazy. I’m not a thrill seeking, wannabe war correspondent. I’m just a skateboarder. As the day of our flight to Sana’a approached, visiting Yemen during its turbulent political climate was seeming far more foolish than bold. I pictured myself alongside my friends in international headlines, “Skateboarding Tourists Captured in Yemen.” 

     “Why were they there?” people would ask, interested in the story for its plain peculiarity. 

     “While initial reports said the Visualtraveling group were skateboarding in Yemen,” the article might read, “it turns out their main objective in the country was to see some trees.”

     I just couldn’t convince myself that it was worth it. Personally, I didn’t even care about those trees! With my mind made up to bail on the flight, I talked it over with everyone. While for Patrik, not going wasn’t even an option to consider, a nuclear attack would hardly have deterred him, the others were hesitant and nervous about the situation. In the end, they all went to Yemen to see those trees. 

     Before I left, I promised Patrik that I'd do some research in Amman and scout out the best skate spots before the group arrived, so as to make the filming in the capital more productive. I also made up the excuse that I wanted to write a story on the DIY skatepark that I'd heard was underway.

     "Who do you think you are?" Patrik had asked, laughing. "Some kind of skateboarding Tintin?"

     "Yeah," I responded. "Maybe I do!"

    I had always loved Tintin. With my board as Snowy and my own tail between my legs, I flew to Jordan.

     What follows is my best attempt at Tintin-inspired travel journalism, skater style.   

     When you think of the Middle East, what comes to mind? If you’re coming from an American perspective, of all the possible subjects you might think of (terrorism, war, hummus), it’s very unlikely that “skateboarding” is one of them. Despite this, skateboarding is staking its claim in this region by way of small, skatepark movements, the most recent of which is happening today in Jordan. This has been home-grown and cultivated by local Jordanian skateboarders, completed in a collaborative effort with the government, the community, and volunteers from all around the world.     

     Mohammed Zakaria moved to Amman, the capital city of Jordan, when he was in the fourth grade. For his tenth birthday, Mo (as he’s known to his friends) received a skateboard and he’s been completely hooked ever since. As one of the first skateboarders in Amman, Mo is proud to have stuck with skateboarding despite the general lack of support and understanding he had from within his community growing up. For a quick geography review, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a country that sits in the epicenter of pretty much all of the major fighting and turmoil that has plagued this region for the last several decades. With Iraq to the East, Syria to the North, Israel and Palestine to the West, and Saudi Arabia to the South, Jordan is forever in danger of being caught in the crossfires of what is usually someone else’s war. While Western influences do make their way to this part of the world, the constant conflict surrounding this region is an obvious reason why skateboarding has not made a permanent footprint in Jordan. Until now. 

     As of February, 2015, one of the best, flow-friendly Do-It-Yourself skateparks I’ve ever skated sits in the heart of downtown Amman, a bustling and hectic city with very few spaces reserved for public parks. On any given day the 7Hills skatepark will be packed with young locals, each taking turns with the ten or eleven donated skateboards that remain locked in a shed after the park closes. Unafraid to take the slams necessary to learn the basics, these kids are pushing themselves to progress every time they step on a board. During my visit to Amman, I was fortunate to witness firsthand how skateboarding is becoming an all consuming passion for them. Skateboarding is a much needed outlet for these kids, as many of them are displaced youths from Syria and Iraq with few other activities offered to them. 

       In discussing how the 7Hills skatepark came to be, Mo explains, “The idea of 7hills skatepark came about when Kali, an Iraqi-American working in Amman with displaced children saw an opportunity in skateboarding for these kids. She got in touch with her friend Jon Chaconas, an American engineer and skateboarder, who in turn got in touch with Arne Hillerns from ‘Make Life Skate Life’ to suggest the idea.”

    Arne had completed similar skatepark projects in India and Bolivia and was excited about the opportunity to get a build going in Jordan. Once these four were all on the same page, they got the ball rolling! From there, everything from gaining the city’s approval, fundraising, and building happened fairly rapidly, for a skatepark at least. As someone who worked for ten years to get a skatepark in my hometown in California, I know how long and tiring a process it can be. For Mo and his partners, it pretty much happened over night. 

      “It didn’t really take much to convince the city to let us build the park. We presented it as a favor to them. We took a dead space in the center of the city, a public park that pretty much had nothing in it and was not being used by anyone, and turned it into a skatepark that will be used by a lot of kids from all around Amman for free, as a donation to the city. Once we had the land, the planning phase was about two months. The crowd-funding campaign lasted about a month and a half, during which we raised $28,000. The actual building was about 23 days.”

    Now that this colorful, concrete skatepark is sitting permanently in the heart of downtown Amman, Mo can reflect on what is truly a dream come true. “Building this skatepark has been the single most rewarding experience of my entire life. First of all, it’s overwhelming to see skateboarders from all around the world donate money, effort and time to make this skatepark come to life. To me, the 7Hills Skatepark is the manifestation of the brotherly love that skateboarding is about. Secondly, seeing how these kids embraced skateboarding, and the speed at which they are progressing, is just mind-blowing. Three months ago was the first time these kids had even seen a skateboard, now shredding hard is all they do the minute they leave school. They even started hitting up street spots now. It’s amazing to see how hyped and motivated they get after we show them a skateboarding clip on Instagram or Youtube.” 

     Looking forward, Mo says, “Right now we’re partnering with NGOs operating in Amman to work with more displaced youths. We're throwing competitions for the kids and the skaters, we're also doing a screening of a skate video for the local kids to get them hyped up even more. 7Hills is also becoming a play area for the graffiti artists in Amman, as well as a cool venue for concerts and festivals.”

    In the time that I was there, I watched the newly finished, white concrete park become transformed into one giant, colorful mural. Aptart, a nonprofit whose goal is to use art to empower marginalized children, designed and outlined the mural and then invited the local community to paint it. Watching the kids who’d been skating the park all week excitedly paint the banks and transitions was an amazing way to see them take ownership of the park and make it truly theirs. 

     The accomplishment of the 7Hills skatepark in Jordan is a testament to just how far skateboarding and the DIY skatepark movement have spread. As Mo puts it, “It really warms my heart to think that I maybe contributed positively to the lives of these kids by introducing skateboarding to them. I hope that skateboarding will change their lives the way it changed mine.” Judging by the dozens of smiles I saw on the faces of the kids who skate the 7hills skatepark everyday, it already has. 

     Well there you have it. With my Tintin-ing completed, I was still in Jordan, waiting to hear back from my friends. On the sixth day, I woke up and checked my Facebook and Email, disappointed to find that still, none of my friends had responded. They were supposed to fly out of Yemen and into Amman later that day. 

     “Had I done the right thing?” I wondered. Was it better to play it safe for my own self interest than stick with my friends, whatever the outcome meant? How would I be able to face their parents and all of our mutual friends if something terrible had happened to them?

    Fortunately, I didn’t have to ponder the possible bad outcomes long. Soon enough my Instagram feed answered all my questions about their whereabouts. They were OK. As I scrolled through the pictures posted by Patrik, Laurence, Gosha, Tobi and Michi, their photos also answered other the question I’d been having. Yes, I should have just gone with them. Those trees looked amazing.

     Sadly, what began in Yemen during our trip has spiraled into a devastating civil war, with no end in sight. Beyond the bombings that have killed thousands of civilians, there have been blockades resulting in food and water shortages that continue to kill many thousands more. The famine that is underway is a humanitarian crisis that the international community, particularly the US, should be doing everything they can to end. Millions are on the brink of starvation and one of the worst cholera outbreaks has threatened the lives of over a million more. If you’re interested to learn more about the crisis in Yemen and efforts being made to help, click here.  

(Frontside Boardslide pop out by Patrik Wallner)

Video and edit by Patrik Wallner

A KIM JUNG-IL PRODUCTION 

I’m not one for chasing bizarre customs around the world, but I’m disappointed we landed in Corfu after they broke all the pots. There are scattered bits of red ceramic littered about the ancient stone plaza outside our apartment, and it feels like walking into someone’s house the morning after a rager. You know, the kind of party where in a drunken fit of excitement (or . . . rage?), the owner decides to break all the plates and glasses he owns. Haven’t been to one of those parties? Lucky you. They’re actually pretty scary. 

Corfu, a Greek island on the northwestern side of the country, is quiet when we arrive—a ghost town really—and I’m mystified by the broken pottery. Yesterday was Orthodox Easter, maybe it had something to do with that? Can’t see how. Tomorrow will be shuttered as well, we heard from our cab driver, for May Day. Something about the workers. Still, it seems like someone should have cleaned up after the party. From our Airbnb, there’s a tiny balcony looking down on a plaza and up to the grand, tucked away Orthodox church. The red and brown pieces are visible all the way up to the church’s entrance, these wide, long steps that might be skateable. Fortunately, our little European apartment is very clean, and Whitney and I crash land on the bed practically the moment we step inside. Even though it’s only 9 in the morning, I can’t keep my eyes open, happy to welcome the most glorious, nap of my life.

Our trip started in San Francisco on April 30th (my 33rd birthday—woohoo!) when we arrived at the SFO Hyatt that sits directly at the terminal. I’m not sure if it’s our old age (I mean, I am fucking 33 already!) or just practical planning by my wife, but spending the night at the airport—comfortably—felt like entering a new adult chapter of preparedness. In the morning, we rolled out of bed and into the airport. No cars, no buses, no stress. It was wonderful. 

Less wonderful were the 49 hours it took to arrive on Corfu. A sleepless twenty-eight of those hours were spent wearing a mask in a series of unfortunate connections, by far the longest bout of smelling my own disgusting breath I will (hopefully!) ever be forced to endure. The only break was another wonderful airport hotel. The second was in Athens, exactly fifty steps away from the baggage claim. We’d already tried sleeping overnight in that airport a couple years back and it wasn’t fun. Who knew these hotels existed? And why didn’t anyone ever tell me about them?

I broke one of the cardinal rules of traveling, which is to succumb to the exhaustion. Morning arrivals are tricky that way. The delirium from 50 hours of traveling is something I usually find thrilling, like a rare vacation indulgence akin to a drug. I don’t like drugs, but if this one came in a pill I’d partake on special occasions. My goal is usually to ride it out until an acceptable bedtime to adjust right away and dispel the myth that is “jet lag.” But this time, sleep was just far too inviting. We awoke six hours later and took a quick stroll through town to find some groceries. The walk through the narrow, stone streets of shuttered shops and closed down-cafes felt like we were following breadcrumbs of broken pottery. Where is it taking us? And what sort of violent, ceramic-hating maniac wreaked havoc last night? Paired with the town’s emptiness, it was almost creepy. 

It turns out, as I had suspected, that the red pots are thrown from windows for Easter. An old tradition, possibly dating back to the 14th century when the island was under Venetian control. It must be deafening, the pots smashing on the ground like that. It’s a good sign for skateboarding, as what sort of raucous can compare to thousands of pots being thrown onto stone. Far less dangerous too, I’d imagine. I wonder if there are accepted casualties every year, like the running of bulls in Spain. People sometimes die, I’ve heard, not from the bull but from being trampled by other people running. Does the hospital fill up for Easter? Slashed heads and shoulders from pots thrown amiss. I wonder. 

If you’re interested in North Korea, I highly recommend this book:

It was a gift from Patrik Wallner. Funny story, my mom sent him a copy of a novel (The Orphan Master's Son) that pulled from this exact situation. Patrik devoured it until he grew suspicious of the plot and certain coincidences. When he discovered it was fiction, he got so mad he refused to finish it. The novel is very good if you're interested. Another novel about North Korea that I enjoyed is Star of the North . If you're like Patrik and only read Non Fiction, Nothing to Envy is fantastic.  

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

Did I really just say, “Calimari,” to the nice old Greek Lady at the grocery story? Yup, pretty sure I did. To hide my shame, I turn my attention to the vast shelf of wine next to the tomatoes. I don’t plan on buying any of the enormous, plastic bottles filled with plainly labeled red and white wine, though a part of me wishes they sold it like this back home in Napa. Even Carlo Rossi comes in a glass jug. There are the boxes, with the plastic bag inside, but you just don't see it in water bottles. And three euros for 1.5 liters? What a deal.

It hits me much too late. Calimera, that’s how you say it. Right? Or is it Calispera? Fuck. A full week here and I’m still not sure how to say, "Hello" or "Thank you." I mumble something like, “Ef-aristo,” but I know that too is wrong. God dammit. We love it here. Why can’t we figure out the language?

I prefer to blame English before I blame myself. How typically American. Not THE English, but the language itself. Although I hear on Corfu, during the regular season, THE English can be pretty annoying. And the Germans. But when it comes to the language, everyone here speaks it! It’s almost irritating. There becomes no need to even try any Greek, as the locals jump so quickly to my natural tongue before my brain even starts to strain. It begins to feel rude to even try. Especially if I'm going to butcher it, anyway.

We spent our first week in sleepy Old Town. Sleepy only because the season is not yet in full swing and it's still technically on covid restrictions. The water is cold, but all the right kinds of clear and blue and beautiful. It’s amazing the way these port towns, with cruise liners and freight boats flowing in and out, have water you could never dream of seeing on even the cleanest beach in California. The first water we jumped in was off a beach on the former estate of the last Greek Royal family. There was a placard on the entrance saying, “Birthplace of Prince Henry, 1921-2021." Efficient placard placement. Didn’t he die like a month ago? As we walked through the estate, I was pleased to recognize a location from The Durells in Corfu. That show is, after all, a big part of the reason we’re on this particular island. We heard it was a party island most of the time, so we never really considered it. But, hey! Next time a pandemic hits, and for whatever reason you end up as some of the first to be vaccinated, consider Corfu. It's quite a large island, but from what we've seen so far it’s a gem. The town feels like you’re in another era. Wild cats, clanging bells of churches. And to my pleasant surprise, skate spots! Good ones too. 

This was a birthday gift from my uncle. I wasn't crazy about it, but it kept my attention. I've liked other Graham Greene and I would recommend Our Man in Havana. Or The Quiet American before this one. 

ANANSI BOYS 

We ditched the big city and headed for the hills. As of May 14, the island of Corfu is officially open! On our last day in the Old Town, it was as if everyone living there received notice via text that tourists were coming and the place came alive with preparation. Garden pots weeded. Stone steps fixed. Water sprayed on every tile. Even the final little bits of pottery were swept into bins. Perfect day to bounce. 

Our next stop was a tiny village on the other side of the island called Liapades, to which we were driven by our Airbnb host. Just like every other Greek person in existence, he was overly kind and for someone who only started speaking English in the last couple years, he spoke it well, chatting up a storm throughout the forty-minute drive to his hometown. We were the first guests for the season, and he was thrilled. 

Liapades made us feel transported to a real Greek town, one absent of tourists, with old women in traditional garb hanging on ancient stone steps, accompanied by lounging cats and dogs. There was also lots of construction, as if every other local suddenly realized (as our host has), that with a little renovation the Airbnb game could kick off. Either that or there’s been a flood of new vacation homes, rich folks who want their own Greek island getaway. In other words, the people Whit and I hope to be someday. Only I’m not sure if we’d pick Liapades. The beaches were rocky and private and lovely, but the hike to get there was more effort filled than we're normally up for.  

Next we moved to Kassiopi, a small port town with a few more restaurant options than a single kebab spot. I don’t believe we’ve ever paid so little for a bottle of wine as we did in Liapades. One euro ninety, I think it was. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t very good either. In contrast to the lovely apartment we left behind in Liapades, our Kassiopi spot was dingy and cold, but had a balcony and looked out over the harbor. We caught a windy week, but on our third day we discovered what might be the ultimate private beach experience we’ve ever encountered. It was like our own personal cave, tucked away in the rocks, with an entry to the water and the perfect stone/sand that is comfortable and doesn’t stick for long. Most importantly, inside you get the sun but are protected from the wind. It was magical. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Whitney so pleased. It was a week of delightful beach mornings and productive computer evenings. The internet has been barely sufficient for our little "Work From Home" experiment, but it's working. No disasters yet. I wasn’t able to skate, but I edited a ton of Old Friends Fitness videos and did some writing. Rudy is nearing completion of the audio version of Top of Mason and I had a lot of proof listening to do. He’s doing a great job. I'm excited to release it. 

I finally read a Neil Gaiman book, which I enjoyed and found to be quite funny. It’s like a children’s book for grownups. I hadn’t read one of those in a while. 

Thank you for reading!

I didn’t keep up with this book blog idea that summer, but I did film a bunch skate clips on my Iphone with Whitney and friends along the way. Enjoy : )

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