What's good? UFO is good
2025 has been quite a ride
I know, I know, I stated off the year with some new writing—and then… some things happened. I did indeed have a new book idea about intuition and addiction, and I still think there’s something there. Both topics remain very alive for me (read Melissa Febos’ latest book, The Dry Season as well as Maia Szalavitz’s recent piece on non-sober addiction recovery), but after my own addictive brush with AI I felt to focus on something more active, more physical, and more positive.
As the winter rains moved through the Bay and the spring winds returned, I took up my longtime passion of sailing again—this time in the form of the new sport of parawinging.
Despite the goofy-ass name, a parawing is an amazing little piece of kit, and—get this—I landed a gig as a paid freelancer for The Inertia writing about these things! In fact, right at the beginning of the year I had a piece published in Foiling Magazine—their first coverage of this new wind-and-foiling discipline.
The stretch of the year from the holidays towards my birthday has always been a bit of a rocky time for my relationships, and so I reached out to my friend Ari Delashmutt for some support. Ari has managed alchemize some of his experience in adventure sports into very effective life coaching skills. I joined his mens group for a couple of rounds in Jan-Feb-March, which proved to be very helpful. For all you men out there—if you’re at all curious about mens work, there are plenty of good role models out there, so find a group and try it!
My partner Taryn and I took our dog Enzo on a road trip to Oregon to try out a little truffle hunting. Very bourgeoisie, some might think—perhaps first of all because of the linguistic fluff in the middle of truffle. Try “tartufo”—much more solid. That said, I was kindof against it myself, until I realized why dogs—and people—love truffles. They smell like ass.
Also: in practice it was just a bunch of people and dogs in the rain and mud in the woods, we all enjoyed it, Enzo found 15 little truffles and we got to do some van camping along the way up and back—which planted the seed that eventually led us to buy a property in Crestone, Colorado later in the year.
If you’re wondering whether you’ve heard of Crestone, well, you probably haven’t unless you found me through Chris Ryan (aka “dudeinhammock”, ha!). In any case, we’re not moving there, but it was Chris that invited me, and now we’ll be neighbors when we’re in town. Hey, you can rent our place if you’re going to visit!
Hardly a town, Crestone is mostly known for its many spiritual centers and the many loose screws that sort of thing tends to attract. Trust me, I know the dynamic from dating Zen Center escapees. If you’re curious about Crestone, the minor series Love Has Won: Cult of the Mother God is worth a glance, but footage like A Place of the Heart gives a more accurate picture of the place. For us, it’s really about the geography: the massive Sangre de Cristo mountains bracket the east side of the sweeping San Luis Valley which runs south past Great Sand Dunes National Park and the gathering headwaters of the Rio Grande, down past past Taos to Sante Fe. Especially given that our place stands at nearly 8,000’ above sea level, it reminds me a lot of the eastern Sierra, which has long been one of my favorite places—at a third of the cost.
I was happy to step away from the keyboard for a while and dive into testing parawings, working my connections in the industry to score the latest demo gear from a ton of rad companies and designers. Lacking the inspiration to cook up such products myself, I very much appreciate the opportunity to work with geniuses like Greg Drexler at Boardriding Maui and Nicolas Caillou at Zeeko—and to get paid to write about it! All of this testing culminated in a huge comparo that we put out in July covering all the recent parawing gear, which I’m quite proud of as a contribution to the industry.
The downside of being a middle-aged test pilot, however, is that I managed to irritate the radial nerve in my left wrist pretty badly from overuse and poor technique, which took me off the water shortly after I published that big piece.
The injury sucks—and I probably wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t allowed the dog to interfere with keeping up my home workouts—but otherwise I think I’ve prepared myself pretty well for accepting that sometimes it’s the ‘last time’ for something and move on to another chapter of life. I still don’t know whether I’ll be back to this kind of sailing next year, but in the meantime I did some backpacking in the high Sierra…and began flying again by starting my training as a glider (sailplane) pilot!
I loved being out in the mountains so much that I planned a longer solo backpack on Steve Roper’s legendary Sierra High Route (the “SHR”) but that got sidelined for the present due to another very unforeseen, slightly scary, but overall relatively minor health issue. Hopefully not the end of any chapter, but that ended up bringing me back to the keyboard to re-examine the overlong piece that I wrote about how I ‘almost became an AI sex slave.’ I was a bit disappointed in the lack of response to that given its impact on me, but of course that’s my problem, not anyone else’s—and so I have a reworked, shorter version that I’ll be publishing here next week.
Taryn and I will be heading out to Crestone in September in the van with Enzo. I’ll be wearing the new “UFO is good” t-shirt design I made recently — you can hear the story and get your own right here!
Aside from with my own adventures, this year has been a time when family has finally emerged as something that I have of my own, both in terms of partnership, and also with the many, many friends, neighbors, and connections that I am blessed to run into just about every single day.
I’m glad you’re here, thanks for reading 🙏🏻
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You can probably sell some of those shirts in Crestone. Big UFO crowd here!
Nice to hear an update from ya.