Shades of Intimacy, Heber City, UT (2026)

09/03/2026

RAGNAR — PART FIVE: WHAT WE BROUGHT HOME

I thought we were signing up for a trail race. I don't think that's what happened. After Ragnar, eight destroyed humans came back to our house — wet gear everywhere, mud everywhere, bodies wrecked, food everywhere — and underneath it all, this enormous feeling: we fu***ng did that together.

There were individual victories tucked inside the bigger one. One teammate confronted an old story about not being athletic — a kid who'd grown up on the sidelines with asthma, told he was bad at sports, now standing at the finish line having proven that story wrong. Another discovered something quieter but just as important: belonging. He told me afterward that saying yes to everything had become its own kind of armor for him, a way to avoid the vulnerability of actually showing up for something — saying no had been his power move for years. But when the call came only days before the race and his calendar happened to be empty, saying yes was the power move instead. He showed up, matched paces he had no business matching with zero training, and found himself part of something he hadn't expected to need.

Jade trained hard for this all summer, injured his knee four days before the race, and had to watch instead of run — probably one of the harder experiences of the whole weekend for him. It wasn't just missing the race. It was watching his brother step in and run in his place, watching Amethyst and the rest of us head out onto trails he'd been dreaming about for months. He showed up anyway, cheered us on, came for dinner Saturday night, and was there in spirit through every loop. But the sting was real, and it deserved to be named.

Riley sent a mountain in the wrong shoes. Amethyst was amazing. Eli decided hailstorms were shirtless occasions. And Aubrey finished the whole thing carrying something the rest of us didn't have to carry quite the same way — she doesn't get the runner's high everyone else gets afterward. She did the hard thing, felt the same fear and effort as anyone, and never got the chemical reward on the other side. She's still turning that over, wondering what she's protecting in her own body. But she crossed the finish line anyway, gathered us all together, and instituted an immediate twenty-four-hour moratorium: nobody is allowed to talk about doing this again next year. The following morning we're all standing around the kitchen, and Aubrey starts a sentence — "well, I'm thinking for next year—" — and stops cold, realizing what she's just done. Eight people stare at her. Busted.

And then there's Jennie. This entire thing existed because she imagined it. She assembled the team, organized the whole operation, and insisted we send every runner out and welcome every runner home. She created something, and I've been thinking a lot about what that something actually was.

I've spent a good chunk of my life thinking about tribe, belonging, love, and what happens when someone you trust leaves you or hurts you. Some of those experiences quietly taught me to build armor. Ragnar reminded me I don't need it. Someone can leave. Someone can hurt me. I'll hurt — that's okay, I know how to hurt — and then I'll keep walking, because look around: this is my tribe.

And strangely, the mountain taught me the other half of that same truth at exactly the same time. My tribe can't walk my trail for me. They can scream for me when I leave and scream for me when I return, but between those two points, that's mine. Deeply together and completely sovereign — both, at once.

Maybe that's part of why Monday morning surprised me. I was sad. Not depressed — sad. It was over. For weeks there'd always been someone heading into the mountain or coming home from it, and then suddenly everyone left and the house went quiet. Saturday night, before any of that quiet set in, we'd all gathered for one last meal together — a big pot of something with some Louisiana touches, wine, games, torrential rain outside, hurting units laughing at the whole absurd beauty of it. Sunday morning we did roses and thorns around the table before everyone trickled back to their own homes, and later that evening an old friend called out of nowhere just to say congratulations and pulled us over for dinner and far too much good wine. By the time Monday actually arrived and the house was truly empty, I sat with the sadness honestly instead of rushing past it — and somewhere in sitting with it, it turned back into gratitude. Because something happened up there that can't unhappen now.

Ragnar became part of our tribe's mythology. Years from now somebody will say "remember Riley's shoes," or "remember the headlamps," or "remember Jennie coming back from Red covered in mud," and we'll all be there again, instantly.

I also brought home one more unexpected thing. I think I'm a trail runner. I'm slow. My body has a lot of adapting left to do, and I have an enormous amount to learn. Perfect — because I'm not interested in discovering only the things I'm already good at. I want to discover the things that make me feel alive. Put me on dirt, put me on a mountain, hand me weather and elevation and a problem to solve. Apparently something in me already knows that place.

So Ragnar is over. But this story isn't. Jennie runs her marathon at the end of September, and some of us are going with her. I'm deciding between the 10K and the half marathon — which means, hilariously, after spending this entire week telling you that pavement isn't where my soul belongs, I'm now in training. For pavement.

09/03/2026

RAGNAR — PART FOUR: FIREFLIES

There's an image from Ragnar I don't think I'll ever lose. Night fell over Soldier Hollow, and from camp you could see huge sections of all three trails climbing across the mountain in the dark. Then the little lights began appearing — one, ten, fifty, hundreds of headlamps, runners spread across the mountainside like fireflies. Every tiny light was a human being out there doing their own hard thing. It was magical.

Then the mountain got angry. Rain, mud, wind, hail. Eli — because apparently shirts are optional when you're a lunatic — ended up storming the mountain shirtless in a hailstorm. Jennie drew Red during the worst of the deluge. Remember that freshly cut trail from the test run weeks earlier? In the rain it turned to mud, and she slipped and fell, reinjuring the same knee she'd already had surgery on once. She kept moving anyway, and eventually came back to camp caked in mud after one of the hardest runs of her whole weekend.

Meanwhile, because we'd doubled our runners, my final loop arrived after only about four hours of recovery: Green, four miles, in the middle of the night. This is where the strange arithmetic of Ragnar kicked in. Twenty-four hours earlier I wasn't sure I could finish one loop. Now I'd already finished Red and Yellow, and there wasn't much drama left in Green. My body hurt — fine. I was exhausted — fine. I'd also developed some gastrointestinal issues along the way that had made me intimately acquainted with basically every porta-potty at Soldier Hollow — fine. Move. So I moved, and sometime in the darkness, I finished my third loop. All three, done.

Then came Riley, waiting at transition for his final loop, Yellow. As I came in, he was getting ready to go, and suddenly he looked down and realized he'd forgotten to change out of the shoes he'd been walking around camp in all day. His running shoes were back at the tent. Two options: run back and get them, or go. He looked at the mountain and said, f**k it, send it — then ran the entire Yellow loop in his walking shoes. He came back with a sore ankle and hip, which seems like the appropriate tax for that decision, and a giant smile on his face. There's a Rush lyric I love: we're only immortal for a limited time. Riley is still very much in that limited time.

Aubrey became our final runner. Twenty-five hours after Eli had started us off, she came home, and we'd finished every required loop. Nobody had to take ours for us. Shortly afterward, the storm turned severe enough that Ragnar finally shut the event down because of lightning on the ridges. We had raced the mountain, we had raced the storm, and somehow, we got everybody home.

09/02/2026

RAGNAR — PART THREE: GOD ON THE YELLOW TRAIL

I almost don't know how to explain Yellow. I started my second loop late Friday afternoon, stiff and limping, having discovered a new complaint in the same knee I'd torn an MCL in two years earlier. I'd already spent two hours climbing and descending Red that morning. And yet, somewhere on that yellow mountain, I became ridiculously happy — not "proud of myself" happy, not "I'm accomplishing my goal" happy. Something else entirely.

The sun was getting low, the valley stretched out beneath me, my body hurt, my tribe was somewhere down there waiting, and I was alone on the trail — running, hiking, laughing, just fu***ng delighted to be alive. There are experiences where the line between spirituality and ordinary life seems to disappear. This was one of them. No temple, no meditation cushion, no psychedelic, no teacher. Just dirt, sky, mountain, breath, pain, and this absurd human body carrying me across all of it. If you want my metaphysics: God was having one hell of an experience being Jason Smith that afternoon.

When I came down the final hill, my team could see it all over me — limping and laughing at the same time, like someone had handed a hurting man a bottle of happy drugs. Yellow became my favorite loop of the entire race, and it changed something in me. Before the race: just finish Red. After Red: maybe I can do Yellow. After Yellow: there wasn't a question left. I'm finishing this thing. If someone had told me to go run Green immediately, I think I would have tried.

Fortunately, I had about eight hours before my final loop — time to sleep, eat, recover. Then the weather report came in. A major storm was moving toward Soldier Hollow: rain, wind, hail, lightning, bad enough that Ragnar warned they might have to shut the whole race down on Saturday. So they gave every team an option — double your runners, put two teammates on the trail at once, and race the storm to the finish. We looked at each other. There wasn't much discussion. F**k it. We're doubling.

Which meant my eight hours of recovery evaporated. My final run would now start in about four — in the middle of the night. And while we were still figuring out the logistics, the first rain started falling.

With Elijah Henager, Aubree Snyder, Amethyst, Jennie, Riley Smith, Caleb Lake, Porter.

09/01/2026

THE STORYTELLER’S THUMB ON THE SCALE

I watched Sicario last night.

Good movie. Maybe.

But I didn't love it.

And trying to figure out why sent me down a rabbit hole about storytelling, Dune, Sergio Leone, Frank Herbert, Tolkien—and eventually something much bigger than movies.

Here's what I think:

I don't want a story to prove the storyteller right.

I want the storyteller to find out what's true by telling the story.

A great story starts with people.

They want things. They love things. They're afraid of things. They make choices. Those choices have consequences. Those consequences narrow the choices that come next. Things may happen to them. Things they have to deal with. And things start happening.

And eventually you arrive at the ending and think:

Of course.

It couldn't have ended any other way.

Not literally. The writer could have typed anything they wanted.

But given these people, and these choices, and everything that has happened—

this is where we had to end up.

Sergio Leone was a fu***ng master at this.

At the end of For a Few Dollars More, the watch comes out one last time and suddenly things you've been watching for two hours CLICK into place.

Not because Leone stops the movie to tell you what revenge means.

He tells the story.

And the story tells you.

That's different from beginning with a conclusion.

Power corrupts.

Religion is dangerous.

Charismatic leaders are dangerous.

The CIA is evil.

Capitalism is evil.

Socialism is evil.

Trump is evil.

Trump is wonderful.

Whatever.

Once the storyteller already knows the answer, something dangerous or just plain bad for the story starts to happen.

The characters stop being people and start becoming evidence, devices to grind an axe with.

Of course the powerful man becomes corrupt. He has to. Otherwise my thesis doesn't work.

Of course the religious movement becomes murderous. It has to.

Of course my political enemy does something terrible and my political ally does something noble.

I've already decided what's true.

Now I'm just arranging fictional furniture to prove it.

And eventually, if you're paying attention, you can feel it.

You can feel the storyteller's thumb on the scale.

That's what finally helped me understand my complicated relationship with Dune.

Frank Herbert wasn't merely telling the story of Paul Atreides and discovering, Holy s**t, look what happened to this guy.

Herbert had something he wanted to say about charismatic leaders, messiahs, power, religion and our willingness to surrender our judgment to heroes.

And he deliberately made Paul incredibly compelling.

His father is murdered.

His family is destroyed.

He flees into the desert.

He joins the Fremen.

He falls in love.

He learns their ways.

He rides the fu***ng worm.

He becomes their leader.

He defeats his enemies.

The Emperor kneels.

And I'm sitting there going:

F**K YEAH, PAUL!

Then Herbert's larger story essentially says:

Interesting that you trusted him.

And I went:

Oh.

Well, f**k you too, Frank. 😂

And here's the thing:

Herbert's warning isn't stupid.

Charismatic leadership can be incredibly dangerous.

Religion can become monstrous.

Power can corrupt.

Governments can become tyrannical.

All true.

But none of those things is inevitable.

Charismatic leaders can also do extraordinary good.

Religion has produced horrors and extraordinary acts of love, service, beauty and sacrifice.

Power can corrupt—and power can be used responsibly.

Reality is complicated.

Which means the more interesting question isn't:

How do I construct a story proving what I already believe?

It's:

What actually happens if I follow these people honestly? And what do I ‘discover’ along the way? (Isn’t that more LIFE like? More scientific: We follow the story and we don’t impose our belief on it!)

Maybe Paul becomes a tyrant.

Fine.

Show me.

Let him make one understandable decision.

Then another.

Let victory create a problem he didn't anticipate.

Let solving that problem require a compromise.

Let that compromise create another problem.

Let his followers begin doing things in his name that horrify him.

Let him compromise again.

Keep going.

And maybe someday we look up and the young hero we loved has become responsible for the deaths of billions.

And we think:

Holy f**k.

Of course.

That's tragedy.

And now you've actually shown me something about power.

Maybe something neither of us knew when we started.

This might also explain why The Lord of the Rings works so beautifully for me.

Tolkien certainly believed things.

But when Frodo finally reaches Mount Doom...

Frodo fails.

He doesn't nobly throw the Ring into the fire.

He claims it.

Because after everything Tolkien has shown us about the Ring, Frodo simply tossing it away might actually have been the dishonest ending.

And then Gollum matters.

And Bilbo's mercy matters.

And Frodo's mercy matters.

And something planted much earlier suddenly becomes necessary to the ending.

CLICK.

Tolkien doesn't have to write:

MERCY IS IMPORTANT.

The story DISCOVERED it.

And that's the distinction I've been trying to articulate.

I'm not interested in stories that don't mean anything.

Quite the opposite.

I want stories to mean something so deeply that the author didn't have to force them to mean it.

Have a hypothesis.

Have beliefs.

Have something you're curious about.

But then create real characters and let them fu***ng live.

Let them contradict you.

Let the good guy occasionally be wrong.

Let the bad guy occasionally be right.

Let power save somebody.

Let love destroy somebody.

Let the religious man be a hypocrite—or a saint.

Let reality inside your story resist you.

And then follow it all the way to the end.

Maybe that's what the greatest storytellers do.

They don't use a story to tell us what they already know.

They tell the story to discover something they didn't.

And when they really nail it, we discover it with them.

And now I should return to Sicario… since this started the whole thing. While I think what I said above sums where I discovered things well enough, Sicario felt a little like the creators had something to say, and used the characters in the story to say it, instead of just following the line for one character. It could have been a simple revenge story. It could have been the story of a good cop asked to compromise her principles. But it never fully got behind the characters, and instead was a vehicle to say what the creators wanted to say… and that felt hollow to me.

09/01/2026

RAGNAR — PART TWO: YOU AND THE MOUNTAIN

Hey I I learned about myself: I am not currently a fast runner. So I slowed down. Jogged when I could, hiked when I needed to, stopped more than once just to point my feet downhill, stretch my calves, and take in the view while my body recovered. My first mile took seventeen minutes. The second — the killer, with nearly a thousand feet of climb — took forty.

But along they way…. something happened I hadn't anticipated. Within minutes of starting, people began passing me. Lots of them. Happy people, sweating just as hard as I was, calling out "You've got this! Keep going! You're doing great!" — possibly all lies, since I was not doing great, but encouraging lies from happy strangers all the same. What a tribe. Everyone was suffering, everyone had another mountain ahead of them, and everybody was cheering for everybody else anyway. I started cheering back.

Something occurred to me up there on that long, painful climb. I love the rave community, and one of its beautiful ideas is PLUR — Peace, Love, Unity, Respect. But on that mountain I met another version of the same thing, this one with dirt under its fingernails. Nobody could posture very effectively up there. The mountain doesn't care who you think you are, what your hair looks like, or how your outfit reads in a selfie. The Ragna community has PLURFG. Peace. Love. Unity. Respect. And F**king Grit. No entitlement allowed. No victims allowed.

Eventually I reached the section that had beaten me a month earlier. And I kept climbing past it, until I was above the exact place where I'd once quit. That alone gave me a boost. The view opened beneath me — Soldier Hollow, Heber Valley, mountains in every direction… and then the pillar of rocks at the very top. I had arrived… and it was all (almost) downhill from there. And the last question in my mind was answered. 3 weeks before I had bushwacked down this mountain… but Ragnar had delivered. A freshly cut, very easy to find, trail down for 3 miles was waiting for me. Yes! And down I went, making some friends along the way (thank you lady from Sacramento for whom this was her 5th Trail Ragnar) — and five miles after leaving my tribe, I came down the final hill and heard them waiting, screaming, cheering. I crossed the line. Red was done. It took me about two hours. Fast? Absolutely not. But I had done it.

And somewhere in those two hours, Ragnar showed me something I haven't stopped turning over since. Before every loop, our whole team went to the transition tent together. We sent every runner out, and every time someone came back, we were there to welcome them home. But there's a moment right after your people send you off, when you round the corner and they disappear, and now it's just you. Nobody can climb for you. Nobody can breathe for you or move your legs or make you keep going. Your tribe sends you out, your tribe welcomes you home — but in between, it's you and the mountain.

I love that. Maybe because that's life. We need each other, deeply — I don't buy the mythology of the fully self-sufficient human — but ultimately nobody can walk our particular trail for us.

I finished Red hurting. My glute was strained, my calves were wrecked. I got some bodywork done, stumbled back to camp, and collapsed onto a cot. I had another loop coming in about eight hours: Yellow. I closed my eyes and genuinely wondered — was Red all I had? A few hours later I stood up. Everything hurt. And I started getting ready again.

Photo is from near the top of Red Loop!

08/31/2026

RAGNAR — PART ONE: I DIDN'T KNOW IF I COULD FINISH

Six months ago, give or take, my wife Jennie sent an invite out to our tribal chat group. She wanted to form a team of eight to run the Ragnar Trail Race at Soldier Hollow in Midway, Utah. Strangely, I was one of the first to respond. Yes. I'll do it. I don't even remember typing it. Which seems on-brand.

That's unusual in our marriage, by the way. I'm normally the guy who says "Hey, I have an idea, let's get everyone together and do this insane thing," and Jennie is the extraordinarily competent human who turns my ridiculous ideas into reality. This one was hers, start to finish. She asked the tribe who wanted in, and the first person to say yes was, apparently, me. She still can't quite believe it.

Eventually we had eight runners: Eli, Jennie, me, Aubrey, Riley, Amethyst, Jade, Porter. Then, four days before the race, Jade tweaked his knee hard on a downhill training run. Out. His brother Caleb got the call — "Can you run Ragnar in four days?" — looked at his calendar, and said yes. And we had eight again.

There was one slight problem. I couldn't really run. Ten years ago I could do the one-mile hill loop by my house in about eight minutes. Now it's sixteen. My lungs complain, my hips hurt, and uphill running absolutely murders me. I'd "trained" through most of the summer in the loosest sense of the word — life kept interrupting — and I didn't get serious until about four weeks out.

And somewhere in that final stretch, something else showed up that neither of us expected. About a week before the race, Jennie and I both went quietly, unexplainably low. Not anxious about the race itself — there was no logical thread connecting the dread to anything specific. Just a flatness, a heaviness, the kind of low you can't argue your way out of because it isn't attached to a reason. We'd later name it what it was: some kind of pre-race depression, chemical and strange, that lifted the moment the race actually began. But in the week leading in, it was real, and it was confusing, and we just had to sit in it.

Which is how I found myself, four weeks before Ragnar, halfway up the infamous Red Loop on a test run, climbing nearly a thousand feet in about two miles, thinking: there is no way. So I turned around. Not dramatically. My body simply said you cannot do this, and it was right — at least that day.

Instead of treating that failure as proof I shouldn't do Ragnar, I treated it as information. I'd been training with a man named Jesse Elder around this exact idea — that failure isn't a verdict, it's data — and for the first time, I actually rewrote the program running in my head. I started training differently. More hills, more dirt, more time outside instead of my treadmill.

A couple of weeks later, six of us went back. This time we finished Red. It took Jennie and me four hours to cover about seven miles, partly because the final stretch of trail hadn't actually been built yet — we were bushwhacking through scrub oak, following GPS coordinates for a trail that didn't exist. But I finished. Then Ragnar's new ownership finally cut the real trail and shortened Red to about five miles, and suddenly I knew something I hadn't known before: I can do Red.

That became my entire strategy. Not "I'm going to crush this." Not "I'm finishing all three loops." Just — I know I can do Red. If that's all I've got, fine. We'd find out the rest afterward.

Thursday afternoon we built camp beneath a huge pine tree in an aspen grove. Friday morning our team ate breakfast together. At seven, Eli took off and absolutely smoked Green — for about seventeen glorious seconds, Team Trail Wubs may have been in first place. Then Jennie went out on Yellow. She'd broken in brand-new, wildly expensive racing shoes just days earlier — after a nineteen-mile training run the previous Sunday, five days before the race, in the same shoes. Not the wisest sequencing, and her calves let her know it; her Yellow loop turned into a real fight with pain she hadn't planned for.

Then they called me. I stepped into the transition tent wearing a ridiculous tie-dye shirt I'd made myself, my whole team screaming behind the fence. The announcer released me. I bolted around the first corner and almost immediately my hips seized up and I couldn't breathe. Five miles of mountain ahead of me — including the exact climb that had already beaten me once.

Well. Here we fu***ng go.

08/20/2026

REFUTATION! OBJECTION! ORDER IN THE COURT!

I've been watching a rash of anti-AI posts lately.

And I'm noticing something that bothers me more than disagreement about AI.

It's the certainty.

Actually, it's more specific than that.

It's moral certainty attached to disagreement.

AI makes you dumb.

AI makes you lazy.

If you use AI, you're part of the problem.

Sometimes it goes even further—not merely disagreement about a technology, but judgment about the character of the person using it.

Objection.

I have evidence.

I'm taking a course on Black Holes and Relativity through Peterson Academy. Pretty advanced physics, my friends.

Each lecture is about an hour.

And lately, for every hour of lecture, I've probably spent another **three hours talking through it with ChatGPT.

I'm not skipping the fu***ng lecture.

I'm doing MORE lecture.

I stop. I question. I make predictions. I get things wrong. I argue. I ask why. I explain what I think is happening and see if I've actually understood it. We follow connections into photons, nuclear physics, gravity, relativity, fusion and quantum mechanics.

Then I return to the course knowing considerably more than I would have otherwise.

Could somebody use AI to skip the lecture and have ChatGPT take the test for them?

Of course.

That would be using AI to avoid thinking.

I'm using it to think more.

And that's the distinction getting murdered by all this black-and-white certainty.

AI has dangers. AI has limitations. AI can absolutely be used lazily.

But complicated things deserve complicated thinking.

And no.

You don't get to define my character because I've chosen to work with this technology.

You don't get to tell me that my lived experience didn't happen.

I'll stand here and tell you exactly what happened.

AI didn't replace my curiosity.

It gave my curiosity somewhere to go.

So when someone tells me with absolute certainty that AI makes people stupid, lazy, or somehow morally deficient?

OBJECTION.

Evidence not admitted.

I have a witness.

Me.

08/18/2026

My son Riley has been a little slow to the AI game.
Today he sent me this:
“Spent a silly amount of time trying to get a Windows-only game to work on Mac.
Finally said screw it, asked Gemini how to do it. 10 minutes later, it works.
Minor issue: mouse input was too slow even on max settings. Googled it. Searched Reddit. No one had ever asked about this.
Asked Gemini.
It knew exactly what was happening, why a Logitech mouse would have that problem, and the exact place in the files to find a specific folder with garbled code data in it, search for a value, and change a 1.5 to a 1.
Like magic, works perfectly.
Unreal. How does it know stuff if even I can't find it anywhere on Google?
Useful for something at least. 😁”
That last line made me laugh.
But his question is a good one.
How does it know something if you can't find the answer anywhere?
Because AI isn't just search.
Sometimes it has enough pieces of the puzzle to reason toward an answer that nobody has ever bothered to write down.
And sometimes that answer is buried in some obscure folder full of gobbledygook where changing a 1.5 to a 1 somehow fixes your mouse.
Ten minutes.
Problem solved.
Useful for something, at least. 😁

08/18/2026

**Journal Entry — August 18th, 2026**

I calibrate most mornings, aiming up, with a series of practices, breaths, and journal entries. It’s a good time to get square. To settle into my incarnation.

One of the key elements that has improved my alignment practice is learning to start each morning from where I’m actually at.

Living by the code:

**Stop fu***ng lying.**

How do I feel in my body, spirit, heart, and mind?

How do I feel about my relationships? My finances? My work? My life?

We don’t run from these things. We don’t immediately try to change them. We start with where we are.

What are the facts?

And how do I feel about those facts?

No judgment. No worry. No story about where I *should* be.

**This is where I am.**

THEN we change our focus.

Then we aim up.

Because you can’t really calibrate until you know what you’re calibrating *from*.

We are where we are.

And from there, we begin to move. We calibrate up. We aim up.

And we begin the journey of satisfaction.

08/17/2026

# I'm About to Spoil a Movie You've Already Seen

*[This essay contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. But probably not the kind you think. If you haven't seen the movie, stop reading. If you have seen it — and you really liked it — you might want to stop reading too. Because I may be about to spoil a movie you've already seen.]*

The other night I saw *Spider-Man: Brand New Day*. And I loved it. Spider-Man was one of my favorite characters when I was a kid. I collected the comics. I eventually owned a comic-book store. Peter Parker has been slinging his way through my imagination for something like fifty years.

So I went into the movie ready to have fun. I did. There were moments that surprised the hell out of me. Moments that moved me. Moments that made me laugh. At least one moment that brought tears to my eyes. I walked out having really liked the movie, but also itching about something.

Then I woke up at three in the morning. Something was bothering me. Eventually I realized what it was. The movie had manipulated the s**t out of me.

---

I've written before about something I call the line — the artifact buried under a story, the thing you dig for and follow instead of forcing. Sergio Leone found it twice, back to back, two completely different ways. *For a Few Dollars More* slowly puts pieces on the board that don't seem to belong together — two bounty hunters, an outlaw, a bank robbery, a strange musical watch, then another watch, a woman from the past — until one line makes it all snap into place: *She was my sister.* Suddenly you understand what story you've actually been watching. Mortimer has to face Indio. Not because Leone wants a good gunfight, but because everything the movie has uncovered about these men makes that confrontation inevitable. When Mortimer's gun is taken from him, Eastwood's character doesn't finish Mortimer's story for him. He gives him his gun. *Finish your story.*

That's the line. *Spider-Man: Brand New Day* showed me what the opposite looks like.

---

There's a surprise in *Brand New Day* I somehow managed not to have spoiled. Jean Grey is in the movie. When I realized who she was, I actually said "Holy s**t" out loud in the theater — because her actions before the reveal aren't congruent with the Jean Grey I knew. This Jean is angry. Her sister has been captured by Damage Control, and Jean is willing to do increasingly terrible things to find out what happened to her.

Fine. I can lay aside the Jean Grey I grew up with and deal fairly with this one. A storyteller is allowed to surprise me — that's the job. Maybe this Jean is darker. Maybe she crosses a line nobody expected her to cross.

She does. She kills people. She takes control of a traffic officer's mind, walks him into oncoming traffic, and leaves him there. Then she reaches into MJ — who, because of the last movie, doesn't remember Peter at all — and makes MJ remember him. Peter can't believe it. Neither could I. For one glorious moment, something impossibly painful has been restored. Peter starts crying. I started crying.

Except it isn't restoration. It's a performance of restoration. Jean is inside MJ's head, and she understands exactly what a real reunion would mean to Peter — which is precisely why she's willing to fake one. She lets him have the moment on purpose, so taking it back does more damage than never giving it at all. Then she sends MJ falling from the building and leaves her there. Peter catches her. Of course he does — he's Spider-Man. But Jean didn't know he would. If he misses, MJ dies.

That's not a woman flirting with darkness. That's a woman who understands intimacy well enough to use it as a weapon, and does.

---

Now — I want to be fair here, because it would be too easy to call this bad writing and move on. There's a version of what happens next that isn't dumb.

Later we learn Damage Control has been torturing Jean's sister to exploit her powers, and killed her doing it. Peter doesn't know that yet when he finally captures Jean. He turns her in — believing, reasonably, that this is what you do with someone who's done what she's done. It's only afterward that he learns what Damage Control actually is, and goes back in to free her.

By the time he gets there, she's already freed herself. She's got the director cornered, shards of glass floating around him, and she's about to kill him. And that's the moment Peter says it: *You're not a killer.*

Which means — if you follow what he's actually asking for — he's not telling her to let the man go. He's telling her to do to the director exactly what Peter already did to her: hand him over, let the system deal with him. The same system Peter now knows tortures people to death. He's asking her to trust a process he's just spent the whole movie learning not to trust, using the same words that would've applied to what he already did to *her*.

That's a genuinely hard position to be in. What do you do with someone who's committed real, unforgivable violence when the system that would judge them is also monstrous — and you've already made that mistake once yourself? I'd have followed that movie anywhere.

But that's not the movie they made. Peter never seems to notice the contradiction he's standing inside — that he's asking Jean to do the very thing he now regrets doing to her. The line just gets said. The glass stops floating. The music swells. That's Peter caught inside his own contradiction and the movie not noticing — which is more interesting than what actually plays, because at least it would mean something was true. Instead: *"You're not a killer."*

She is. I watched her do it. He watched her do it.

---

That's the actual cheat, and it isn't a moral one — it's a storytelling one. The movie built two things that cannot both be honestly true about the same person twenty minutes apart. It needed Jean terrifying enough that the MJ scene would land — someone who can fake intimacy itself, cold enough to weaponize the one memory Peter would die for. And it needed Jean redeemable enough that "you're not a killer" would land too, ten minutes later, with strings swelling. It wanted both checks to clear. It never balanced the account.

They had a harder, better version sitting right there — a Peter who chooses her anyway, who has to carry the weight of choosing her anyway, and never gets the relief of a clean line telling him he was right to. Instead the movie reached for the clean line, because a clean line feels better in the moment than an unresolved one. That's spectacle. Effect first, truth wherever it lands after.

Every scene in that stretch works toward a feeling. And the feelings work — that's the maddening part. I cried when they wanted me to cry. I was shocked when they wanted me shocked. I was moved when they wanted me moved. I really liked the movie. But somewhere underneath all of it, I couldn't find the line, because the story wasn't following Jean anymore. Jean was following the story's beats. And those are not the same thing.

---

There's a temptation here to just bitch about bad storytelling — Marvel f**ked it up, Hollywood sucks, movies used to be better. That's not interesting to me. What's interesting is the question underneath it: where do I do that to myself? Where do I decide what I want people to feel about me — wise, spiritual, profound, good — and then quietly bend the truth of my own story until I get it?

There's a line of authenticity running through a life the same way there's one running through a story — not some predetermined version of who I'm supposed to be, but what's actually here before I start bending it toward the effect I want. And spectacle isn't just a Hollywood problem. It's what happens when I perform the feeling instead of following what's actually true and letting the feeling come from that — the same trade the writers made with Jean Grey, just run on myself instead of a character.

I'm actually pretty good at creating experiences. I've spent years facilitating retreats, intimacy work, men's work, meditation — what I'd call peak experience. A great teacher can build a crucible where something becomes possible that wasn't possible before. But there's an important distinction I see more clearly now.

Creating an experience isn't the problem. Leone created the hell out of an experience — that final duel is constructed down to the second: the music, the silence, the watches, the faces. But he doesn't bend the truth of his characters to produce it. The effect emerges from the truth. It isn't manufactured ahead of the truth and imposed on top of it.

That's the distinction worth carrying into my own life. Because I'm going to lose the line sometimes. Of course I am. I'm going to perform. I'm going to want applause. I'm going to tell myself stories about who I am that make me feel better. And maybe the answer isn't to condemn myself when I catch it, and it isn't to pretend it's not there either. Maybe it's just: keep digging.

If I acted selfishly, don't rewrite the scene. If I manipulated someone, don't tell myself I'm not manipulative. If I was afraid, don't manufacture courage after the fact. If I was magnificent, don't shrink that either. See what's actually there. Authenticity doesn't mean discovering you're good — it means being willing to discover what's true. And truth isn't where the story ends. It's where transformation actually gets to begin.

---

Maybe that's what people mean when they say they "found themselves." Not that there's a perfect little authentic person waiting underneath everything to be uncovered — just a line. One we lose, and find, and lose again. We build spectacle versions of ourselves designed to get the applause, the followers, the approval, the likes. And sometimes those versions work.

Maybe the spectacle version gets a thousand likes. Maybe the true one gets one. So what? Liking it isn't a requirement for it to be true. Apparently that applies to stories. Apparently it applies to Jean Grey. And apparently it applies to me.

So thank you, *Spider-Man: Brand New Day*. I really enjoyed you. And then you pi**ed me off enough to teach me something. When you find something inconvenient in the story, don't rewrite what already happened just to get the ending you wanted. Follow it. Own it. Let it change what comes next.

And when you realize you've lost the line —

find it again.

Shades of Intimacy

09/03/2026

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