I have earned the obsession honestly. I wrote about pride and going back, and then about partnership and perception, and somewhere across the first three seasons my entire character started being refreshed and renewed by a detective show. I am learning so much that is moral and ethical from this program that I went looking for the literature the way a man who has had a religious experience goes looking for the seminary. There is no seminary. There is just me, up to season 4 now, taking notes, and the fourth season is where the gospel gets messy enough to need writing down.

Here is the mess, and it is a beautiful one. Years ago, before the agency, before Angie, Shade blew into a woman's life for one summer and had an affair with her, and then the summer ended the way summers do. She went back to an old boyfriend. Life went on, hers and his, and nobody—not then, not in four seasons of television since—has ever gotten a paternity test. So when a young woman comes out of the woodwork saying she might be his daughter, she is working from the same evidence the rest of us are: one hot summer and a resemblance. Then her mother shows up in person, and the mother is, and I say this as a man taking notes, extremely hot, and she is kissing on Shade like the intervening decades were a commercial break. Everything is unresolved. Nobody knows whose kid anybody is. It is the messiest this breezy little show has ever allowed itself to be, and I could not look away if you paid me. I am obsessed and I love this TV show too much and I don't even know who I am anymore.

And Angie. Angie Everett has a sexy new bobbed haircut this season, and I am obsessed, and she still cannot close the deal with Shade, and I need to be honest about how much of that I don't like, because a gospel should record the heresies too. Angie is the license, the agency, the professional; her name is the one on the door. But too much of this season writes her as the one who pines—reacting to Shade, spite-dating lesser men as a coping strategy, carrying a chip on her shoulder where her plan ought to be. We don't like it when our strong women characters pine for a boy. It doesn't make her look smart or full of agency; it makes her a response monster, a reaction monster, a spite monster, and Angie Everett as written in this show's best hours is none of those things. Shade, meanwhile, sails through the same episodes unbothered, which brings me to the doctrine at the center of the gospel.

Here is my conceit, and I will defend it at parties: on Private Eyes, Jason Priestley's Matt Shade is the Christ figure. Not the suffering part—nobody's nailing Shade to anything—but the grace part, the part where people keep bringing him their worst moments and he refuses to charge them for it. Watch what happens every time somebody comes to Shade to apologize. An ex, a friend, a screw-up with a confession about some sexual or emotional mess, standing there braced for judgment, and Shade waves the apology off before it is even finished. Everybody's been a piece of shit. Everybody's blown up their life at least once. Everybody has done the thing they are confessing, or something adjacent to it, in the dark, at their worst. He who is without sin can cast the first stone, and Shade—the man with the affair, the maybe-daughter, and the wreckage of a hockey career behind him—knows exactly how many stones he's qualified to throw, which is none. Turn the other cheek is not a sermon with him. It's a reflex. And before anybody calls the casting a coincidence, we have to focus on Jason Priestley's last name, which is priestly. The most forgiving man on television is played by a man named Priestley. I did not arrange that. I am simply the first scholar to report it.

Now, a question the gospel has to ask, because I genuinely don't know the answer: is this just Canada? This is a country whose founding bargain was peace, order, and good government rather than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and its television has a whole blue-sky tradition—Murdoch Mysteries, Rookie Blue, this show—where the point of catching the bad guy is almost never the cage. It's restorative where American television is retributive. It's community healing where the American version wants a body count and a gavel. Maybe a Christ figure could only hold a series together in a country that never fully bought the punishment part of justice. Or maybe I'm a man three and a half seasons into a comfort show, building a theology out of weather. The gospel records the question. The gospel does not have to settle it.

What the gospel does settle is why the whole messy solar system of this show holds together. The daughter can come out of the woodwork because Shade won't greet the possibility with a lawyer. The mother can come back because she knows the summer won't be held against her. Ex-wives and old boyfriends and con artists and clients all orbit this man because he is the one place in their lives where the bill never arrives. Family rules, friends rule, loyalty rules, and you don't judge people for doing sexual or emotional things—not because those things don't matter, but because everybody at the table has done them and the only honest response is the one Shade gives: that's happened. It's done. What do you need?

One more entry for the record, filed under mysteries the gospel cannot explain and doesn't need to. Google tells me that Priestley himself—British, Scottish, Northern Irish, French-Canadian stock, about as layered as this country gets—has described himself as an atheist. An atheist named Priestley playing the most forgiving man on television. I have not verified this beyond my own late-night research, and I have decided I don't care to, because if it isn't true it ought to be.

It doesn't matter if anybody is an atheist. If they walk in the footsteps of Jesus, then they are christly and they are priestly. Belief is a résumé line; the footsteps are the work.

So an update on the student, who is still, somehow, enrolled, and has now apparently founded a field. I came to this show for a breezy procedural and stayed for lessons in pride, partnership, and perception, and season 4 has moved me on to graduate work: forgiveness, handed out wholesale, before it's earned, by a man who knows his own file is too thick to throw stones. I'm still behind him in the coursework. The difference is that now I know nobody else is teaching the course. Some of us get a therapist, some of us get a sponsor, and some of us get Jason Priestley playing a detective who forgives like it's his job—because on Private Eyes, it turns out, it is.

And since a gospel should end with a resurrection, here is the show's own. For five years after it ended, Private Eyes sat in exactly one obscure American streaming home, Hallmark+, written off by an industry that had decided a gentle Canadian procedural was a closed file. Then, in a single week this month, the file reopened. The sequel, Private Eyes West Coast, premiered in Canada on September 30 and on The CW on October 5, and the very next day, October 6, the original series landed on Hulu, as if the one licensor behind it all, Lionsgate, had decided to roll the whole franchise back out at once. The sequel had been renewed for a second season back in December, before a single episode had aired. In it, Shade and Angie are married, living in Victoria, raising a baby son named Declan, and Priestley himself says the new show finally gives closure to the kiss the old one ended on. A marriage, a baby, a renewal, a homecoming. The show got the Matt Shade treatment: written off, then forgiven, renewed, and resurrected. The student remains enrolled.

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Pity is the one emotion that requires its object to be helpless. You cannot pity a strategist. You cannot pity a negotiator, or a man running curfew arithmetic with his dinner still warm in him. I know those men. For ten years I worked at Miriam's Kitchen in Foggy Bottom, two blocks from the State Department, most of it cooking, and I will tell you what the dining hall taught me: agency means the choice is real, which means it can be spent badly. Shelters, kitchens, and subsidized housing are strict: curfews, sobriety, lights out, intake by a fixed hour. At Miriam's Kitchen our guests ate fast and crossed town early—not because they were rushed, but because they had a favorite shelter and meant to make its door in time. A man outside at 1 a.m. is not always a man the system failed. He is a man who declined its terms. Curfew is the price; agency is deciding not to pay it tonight.

Let me give you the numbers, because I owe you better than the one I invented in Ward's comment section, where I announced there were eighty social workers for every homeless person in DC. I made that up, and the truth is more interesting anyway. Washington has more tax-exempt nonprofits per capita than any state in America; nonprofits employ a quarter of its private workforce; and it pays its social and community-service workers more than anywhere else in the country. In the February 2026 count, 5,363 people were homeless in the District—and 87 percent of them were sheltered, against roughly 60 percent nationally. DC has the highest homelessness rate of any state, 73 people per 10,000 residents, and simultaneously the most complete apparatus in America for not sleeping outside. A third of the single adults in its system arrived from Maryland and Virginia, where the offer doesn't exist. They migrate toward the services, and then they choose, nightly, whether to use them.

I put the question to the machine itself—how many Americans live outside by choice—and it did what institutions do: first it refused the premise. There is no official data, it said; homelessness is not a choice; the causes are structural. Pressed, it produced its own table, and the table is my whole argument wearing a lab coat: theft and safety, rules and curfews, filth and disease, belongings and pets, paranoia and distrust. And two numbers that sit side by side without any embarrassment at all: up to 90 percent of the unsheltered say they want permanent housing, and 60 to 65 percent of shelter offers are declined. Both. At the same time. By the same people. Housing, yes. Terms, no. The count cannot see a choice because the count was never built to; it tallies bodies on a night in January. But a declined offer is a datum too, if you're willing to read it as one.

And here is the part my own side gets wrong, so let me correct it before Ward's side does. The classic price of the DC bed—sobriety, ID, compliance—has largely been repealed by the city itself. DC's front door is low-barrier shelter: no identification required, no sobriety demanded, open around the clock, all year, and backed by a legal right to shelter whenever the wind chill falls below freezing. The strict world survives one rung up, in the transitional programs and the faith-based houses with their curfews and their programming, and it survives in the schedule itself: breakfast is 6:30 to 8, dinner is 4:45 to 6, and a man who wants both, and a particular bed across town, has had his day organized for him as surely as any rule could do it. So the price of the bed in 2026 is not obedience. It is autonomy: the dorm, the theft, the lights, the loss of your spot, your partner, your dog, your stuff. Which makes the refusal more honest, not less. A man declining a rule is a rebel. A man declining a trade—his freedom for their mattress, eyes open, in January—is something else. He is a customer who read the contract.

The proof that the refusal is of terms and not of roofs is that when the terms come off, the refusal mostly evaporates. Pathways to Housing was founded in this city in 2004 on exactly that heresy: the rules-first agencies—curfews, mandated sobriety, medication compliance—kept the most disabled people on the street permanently, so Pathways offered the apartment first and asked for almost nothing, a share of income and two meetings a month, and it has ended chronic homelessness for hundreds of DC residents since. In Seattle, outreach workers found the most common reason a man refused a shelter bed was that he was holding out for a tiny home—a private box with a locking door—and when the tiny homes are offered, acceptance skyrockets. Understand what that means: the man's agency was so real it could be bought out for the price of a door lock. He was never refusing shelter. He was refusing to be processed. And the fraction who decline even the unlocked door, even the key with no contract behind it—that fraction is the hard core this essay is actually about, and everything the city and then the federal government threw at the problem has failed to make it zero, because it is not a housing statistic. It is a position.

I should know. Google thinks I signed it from the other side. Ask the world's largest answer engine what Chris says about homelessness and Miriam's Kitchen, and it will tell you, at length and with total confidence, about a man named Christopher Hines: unhoused in DC for twenty years after both his parents died suddenly, his days spent writing at the MLK Library, prison in his past, housed at last in 2025 in Adams Morgan with his wife, who was expecting their first child. Mr. Hines is real, and his story, told by District Bridges, deserves better than to be worn by me. I am the other Chris. I grew up in Hawaii; he says, in the line Google keeps handing me as mine, "I can't travel, I can't go to Hawaii, you know, I can't escape what I see every day." I escaped Hawaii at six and have the resentment to prove it. He cooked nothing at Miriam's Kitchen; I cooked there for a decade. The machine merged us because we share a first name and a dining hall, and then it decorated him with phrases from my own questions—social workers like bees on flowers, asset inventories—that appear in no story ever published about him. Remember that the next time an AI summarizes a man for you. But here is why Mr. Hines belongs in this essay and not just in a correction: after twenty years outside, the space he now wants to build for homeless artists runs on, in his own words, "a nice behavior contract, no drugs, no playing around, and you have to have something to do." The man who lived it longest does not dream of a fold without terms. He dreams of terms he'd sign. Everyone has a price; his is a contract he wrote himself.

The old Washington understood the transaction and policed the optics. In the early 1980s the visible face of DC homelessness was people sleeping on the steam grates near the White House and the State Department, and Mitch Snyder of the Community for Creative Non-Violence turned those grates into a national argument: a tent city called Reaganville in Lafayette Park, fasts that ended with a president promising money, and, on November 6, 1984, Initiative 17—passed with 72 percent of the vote, the first time voters anywhere in America created a legal right to shelter. The city spent six years in court, a judge called its shelters virtual hell-holes, and in 1990 the Council gutted the right rather than fund it. Snyder died that July, in a room at the shelter he had forced into being. I will not claim the police disappeared people for the tourists in those years, because I can't prove it, and on this subject I have decided to be careful. What I can prove is the modern sequel. On March 5, 2025, the President posted that the Mayor "must clean up all of the unsightly homeless encampments," specifically the ones outside the State Department, and two days later the camp near the E Street Expressway—on the same federal-core ground as the grates—was cleared ahead of the city's own schedule. In August came the emergency declaration, the federalized police, the National Guard swelling from 800 troops to more than 4,600, bulldozers on Constitution Avenue, and a press secretary explaining that residents would be offered shelter or services and that those who refused could face fines or jail time. Roughly forty sites were cleared in the first weeks, by the District's own housing agency's records; the White House claimed more and never produced its lists. No promised federal places to stay ever materialized. Two months later the reporting found the cleared men exactly where you'd expect: still outside, minus their tents. In February 2026 the total count of DC homeless had risen 4.4 percent, and the unsheltered count had fallen by about a tenth, an estimate modeled rather than counted, because the city kept clearing camps all year—one site by the MLK Library eleven times in 2025 alone—because the camps kept coming back.

Sit with that. The full faith and credit of the United States, its Guard, its bulldozers, and its jail cells were brought to bear on the proposition that these people must come in from the cold, and the proposition lost. Not because the beds weren't there—87 percent of their neighbors took one—but because the remaining fraction ran the oldest arithmetic in the republic and declined. This is the dynamic tension I actually live in, and it is not a comfortable one: the sadness of it, genuinely; and our Puritan inheritance that says structure is a form of love; and the fact that the rules also keep women and children safe behind the shelter door; and the scarcity underneath, because there is not enough inventory and terms are how a short supply is rationed; and the hard observation that what a person is simply given, he often does not respect—that DC is full of kept apartments used as storage lockers by men who still sleep outside; and the veterans whose distrust of the men in charge was not paranoia but experience, earned at full price; and the women who will not enter a shelter because their things were stolen the last time, and whose stories about the street would curdle your blood, and who have decided that a known danger they control beats a promised safety they don't. You can lead a horse to water. The horse has his reasons. Some of them are receipts.

So paint them properly, Ward, or don't paint them at all: not as a grief exhibit under a streetlight, but with freedom and liberty and power and choice and agency and control and responsibility, and with addiction and the pursuit of pleasure and plain libertinism and the decisions they remake every single day, while an army of the best-paid social workers in America stands at the gate of the fold, desperate to bring them in. Because being homeless in Washington, DC, where persistence genuinely would get you fed, bedded, case-managed, and halfway housed, where the government of the most powerful nation on Earth eventually sent soldiers to insist—is the ultimate fuck you. Not a man who failed to reach the ladder. A man who read the terms, all of them, including the ones written by men with guns, and chose the bridge. He pays for it in cold and hunger, nightly, in full. That is not a man without a price. That is a man who knows his.

I'm twenty-nine episodes in now, the whole first two seasons behind me and the third just opened, and I'm still learning all of my life lessons from this show. I'm still becoming a better man, still exploring the depths of perception, still working out the relationships between fathers and daughters, ex-husbands and ex-wives, business partners, friends, and employers and employees. I said in the first piece that Private Eyes is 80 percent psychology and 20 percent entertainment, and two more seasons have only made me more sure of the ratio. The cases keep solving themselves in the background while the real curriculum runs up front.

Start with the job itself, because I missed it the first time through. Shade doesn't begin as Angie's partner; he begins as her problem, then her hire. She is the professional, the license, the agency with her dead father's name on the door, and he is the ex-hockey player working for her, studying for an exam he keeps dodging. The second season opens with her naming him her equal partner, and the show earns that promotion the slow way, episode by episode, the way real partnerships actually get built: not by announcement, but by accumulation. I have been the employee who wanted the title before the trust, and I have been the partner who withheld it, and watching the two of them negotiate their way to equals—out loud, in the open, without either one keeping score in secret—taught me more about my own working life than the pride lesson I started with.

Then the second season ends with Angie behind bars, conned into stealing government intelligence, and the third opens with her in a cell. Everything I wrote in October gets tested in that premiere, because Shade does the thing I said I don't do: he comes back, at cost, at risk, without being asked twice and without keeping a receipt. He works the case from outside while she holds her own inside, and neither of them treats her trouble as a reason to renegotiate the relationship. I have left people over so much less than a felony. The show keeps handing me the same examination and I keep not quite passing it, which is presumably why I keep watching.

The longer I sit with it, the more I think the show is secretly about perception, which is a private investigator's whole trade and, it turns out, mine. Shade's gift is that he notices things; Angie's is that she doesn't believe the first thing she notices. Jules, who can't see at all, routinely perceives the room more accurately than either of them. A blind teenager in a detective show is not a gimmick here; she is the thesis. The people who trust their eyes fastest get fooled, and the person who has to build the world out of other evidence gets it right. I have SDAM and aphantasia, so I build people out of evidence too, out of the words in front of me, and this show is the first one I've found that treats that way of knowing as a discipline instead of a deficit.

I went looking for what other people have made of all this, and the chorus surprised me. The professional critics mostly file Private Eyes as comfort food, a breezy Castle-in-Toronto that leans on the chemistry of its leads, with a few national critics grumbling that the whole enterprise exists to keep a Canadian icon employed. The family writers and the mommy blogs could not care less about any of that; for them the show is Shade raising Jules in a three-generation house with his father, co-parenting with his ex-wife without turning it into a war, and letting a blind daughter be competent instead of tragic. The therapist bloggers, meanwhile, have found their own show inside the show: a retired athlete grieving the identity that ended, learning to trade the man-child performance for an actual partnership, two people with opposite attachment styles building security the slow way. Everyone is watching a different program, and every one of them is right, because the case of the week is just the table the real meal gets served on.

So, an update on the student: I am still practicing the small moves, the second call, the same-day apology, the door left standing. Season 3 has twenty more episodes ahead of me, and a whole sequel after that, and I expect to still be learning my life lessons at the finale. Some men get a therapist, some men get a sponsor, and some of us get a Canadian detective show with a Hall & Oates theme and a leading man who makes decency look like strength. I'm not embarrassed by any of it. Decency, practiced daily and on purpose, is the whole curriculum—and Matt Shade is still ahead of me in the coursework.

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By the time I walked back from Starbucks, the car was gone. Whoever came for it, the owner or a tow truck or the insurance company, I never found out. That was the end of my part in the car's story and the beginning of my part in Reddit's. The post passed 228,000 views on r/nova, and when I shared it with the owners on r/rav4club it picked up another 175,000. The r/nova thread alone drew 199 comments.

The comment sections were a better show than anything I've recorded. Thieves who won't spring for cinder blocks anymore proved the economy is in shambles, and someone pointed out that two-by-fours are like eight dollars now. People recommended curb rash as theft prevention, a claymore on every wheel, and carrying your wheels upstairs every night, which would at least make the car itself harder to steal. One person keeps a realistic rubber snake on the front tire and carries "a snake or two" in each car, having once chased off a gang with a small dried one kept inside a coat. When somebody asked how you even lift a car off its belly, I suggested a spatula, and the thread sent me to Spatula City. I meant it. On the show I made the case for a fish spatula, the long, thin, flexible stainless kind that slides under a flaky fillet without breaking it, scaled up and slipped under a RAV4 and onto a flatbed. I'd picture the rescue if I could, but I have aphantasia, so it exists only as a description. One commenter decided the owner had pulled the wheels on purpose so the repo man couldn't take the car, and I told them they'd come in at an angle I never anticipated. I was having a wonderful time.

Then came the comments that stopped me. "Intentional or unintentional? What the fuck is that supposed to mean," one person wrote. Another asked why the post was tagged as funny and cursed anyone who thought it was, and a third answered in the voice of everybody else in the thread: "Tee hee, look at the victim of a crime whose day is now ruined!" They had a point about my title. I meant it as a real question, and I told the thread I was asking whether the owner had taken the wheels off on purpose, but it read as a wink, and the wink was at the expense of somebody I've never met.

That somebody is the reason the post traveled. Somewhere in or near my building lived a person who had owned a new RAV4 for a matter of days, judging by the temp tag, and who came outside to find it amputated. Every one of those four hundred thousand views was a look at that person's very bad morning. A RAV4 owner said it better than I did: "I can't even imagine how I'd feel if my new car—so new to me it has temporary tags on it—was violated this way."

Violated is the right word, and it's close to the one I reached for on the show. In S11E3: Broken Windows, Missing Wheels, I was arguing with what I heard as Malcolm Gladwell's argument on The Oprah Podcast, that Americans ought to tolerate a certain amount of crime the way many Europeans roll their eyes at a pickpocket and move on. My answer was that having your things taken feels like being defiled. Insurance can pay for four wheels and tires. What it can't pay for is the audacity of a stranger coming into the place where you live and putting their hands on what's yours. I said that into a microphone, and two weeks before that episode came out I had turned exactly that kind of violation into content.

The neighbors told me what the photo couldn't. People who knew the lot on sight said it had been losing wheels for close to a decade, almost always off Toyotas and Hondas, and that the complexes around it had never added cameras or security. Others had seen RAV4s stripped in Old Town Alexandria, at an apartment complex in Courthouse, and in an Arlington parking garage. One explained the economics: Toyota and Honda bolt patterns fit most of the cars on the road, so the wheels are easy to sell. The RAV4 owners identified the car as a Limited and guessed it had lost the 20-inch wheels. Someone in r/rav4club told me a post like mine shows up in the Toyota groups every week, and I had to admit I don't frequent Toyota subreddits.

By the end, both threads had turned into a public service announcement. Buy wheel locks. Keep the key somewhere other than the glove box. If you drive a new RAV4 in Northern Virginia, think about locking lug nuts on all twenty studs, so a thief would need a different socket for every one. That advice is the best thing my post did, and none of it came from me. It came from people who had lost their own wheels, or watched it happen to a neighbor, and who answered a stranger's bad morning with instructions for keeping the next one from happening.

I still don't know whose car it was. If they ever find the photo, I hope they read past the jokes to the wheel-lock threads, because that part of the attention belongs to them. The fish spatula is available to any tow company in Arlington that wants it.

For years it didn't take. The people who wandered in wanted to talk about slow running, Couch to 5K, MAF heart-rate training, anything with a number attached to it. I kept explaining that slow jogging is its own gait: a stride about the length of your own foot, a soft landing on the front of it, a quick cadence that aims for 180 steps a minute, and a pace easy enough to smile and hold a conversation the whole way. Tanaka called that pace niko niko, the Japanese sound of a smile. A walker can pass you, and that's the idea.

The cover says "with Magdalena Jackowska" in small type, and she deserves far more credit than that line gives her. She's a linguist and translator from Poland who became a slow jogging instructor and a research assistant at Tanaka's institute at Fukuoka University, and she joined his team to carry the method abroad. She's the one in green beside him on the beach at the top of this page. Together they wrote the first English-language book on slow jogging, published in 2016, and she has trained slow jogging instructors in Poland. The book I've pointed every newcomer to for nine years exists in English because of her.

Then Korea found it. Over the summer the Korea Herald reported that the country's running craze had a new pace, and the pace was slow. Korean slow joggers do it in synchronized groups, on gym treadmills, up stairs, and in place in their living rooms. The videos jumped to TikTok, and from TikTok to my sub. A month ago I posted "The Koreans have adopted Slow Jogging so it's going to become super popular! Welcome new visitors!" and it drew more than 30,000 views. "Slow Jogging is NOT normal!" did 124,000 and more than a thousand upvotes. Over the past year the sub has had 409,000 views, 300,000 more than the year before, and 9,400 people joined. It has 17,100 members now and about 12,000 visitors a week.

A crowd that size brings its own weather. The folks at r/RunningCirclejerk, the sub that exists to roast serious runners, came over sure we were a parody of them, so I went over and posted that we were "super duper earnest AF." One of them decided I had to have a commercial angle. I told them they'd made my day, since it made me sound so savvy and together, when the truth is I'd just been running the place for nine years. I also admitted their sub is more entertaining than mine; I was already a member and am now completely obsessed with it. At home I keep order. Under my post marking the sub's nine years, I explained that nobody's running in the first place, since this is a no running zone, and that any running spotted on the subreddit should be reported to the mods. In a thread about form and cadence, I told one commenter that the sub has been jumping the shark for at least nine years.

Answering all those newcomers has made me say out loud what I believe about the thing. Slow jogging is a practice measured in time, and distance hardly matters. You can do it in place in front of the television, back and forth on a patio, around your apartment the way people did all through Covid, or up and down the Seine, which is how I saw Paris, slow enough to stop for a photo and not be the jerk weaving through tourists. When one commenter answered a video of a woman slow jogging on her patio with a resounding no, I wrote back that the patio is the floor and the sky is the ceiling, and that the patio is the reason you never have to miss a day. I don't want slow jogging gatekept at exactly 180 beats per minute, either. I want room in it for slow running, the Cliff Young shuffle, the Airborne shuffle I did in the eighties while singing Jodies, and MAF. I want a big tent.

I'm not the only one holding the poles up anymore. The sub has ten moderators now, and I have a standing policy for recruiting them: anyone who comes onto the sub breathing fire gets invited to be a mod. The invitation stands for the Slow Jogging Association, too. In nine years, nobody from it has posted on the sub or reached out to me. Not once. In February I wrote the eulogy for Jeff Galloway, the Olympian whose run-walk-run method told a generation of slow, scared, late-starting runners that they belonged, and it drew 107 upvotes. Tanaka died in 2018, so he missed all of this: the Koreans, the TikToks, the treadmill gyms full of people smiling at a pace a walker could beat.

I'm still the one posting the slow jogger of the day, and I'll confess how. Korean slow jogging lives on TikTok, and TikTok lets you download a video right in the app, so I steal them. I save the video, upload it to the sub from my own machine, and put a link back to the creator's TikTok post on every one. When I found one woman on day 8 of her slow jogging, she had no viewers and no comments, so I told the sub to go visit her. There's a woman on day 58 of slow jogging around her local track, an Italian teaching his mamma, a Hawaiian on a treadmill to whom I said e komo mai. I've also confessed to the sub that I fell for a TikTok gimmick, an acupressure mat for slow jogging in place, and promised a full report when it arrives from wherever it's coming from around October 20. Nine years in, r/slowjogging is finally doing exactly what it said it would, and I'm still out front at a smile pace, waving people in.

In Memory

Professor Hiroaki Tanaka of Fukuoka University was an exercise physiologist who spent his career proving that running did not have to hurt to work. He built slow jogging out of that research: the short stride, the soft landing, the quick cadence, and the niko niko pace, slow enough to smile through. After reversing his own Type 2 diabetes, he ran a 2:38 marathon past the age of fifty on the same gentle principles he taught to beginners, the elderly, and people coming back from illness, and he never asked anyone to suffer to earn their health. He wrote the English book with Magdalena Jackowska, and together they gave the rest of the world a way in. He died in 2018. Every smiling slow jogger on a Seoul treadmill or a Paris riverbank is moving the way he taught.

John Franks "Jeff" Galloway died on February 25, 2026, in Pensacola, Florida, at eighty. He ran the 10,000 meters for the United States at the 1972 Munich Olympics and won the first Peachtree Road Race in 1970, and then he spent the rest of his life on people who would never be fast. His Run-Walk-Run method made walk breaks a plan instead of a failure, and through more than twenty books, his Runner's World column, and his years as runDisney's official training consultant, starting in 2010, he carried generations of beginners to finish lines they had written off. He measured success by who showed up and kept going. He leaves his wife, Barbara, his family, and a sport that is far kinder to slow people because of him. His memorial page is on Keeper.

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Private Eyes ran on Global from 2016 to 2021, filmed and set in Toronto, and a sequel, Private Eyes West Coast, started this fall. Jason Priestley plays Matt Shade, a former pro hockey player who becomes a private investigator alongside Angie Everett, played by Cindy Sampson. There's a case every week, and the case is the least important thing on the screen. I'd put the show at 80 percent psychology and 20 percent entertainment. Episode after episode, it shows how people should deal with each other when they disagree, when they've hurt each other, and when they need each other.

I'm also a complete smush about it. I watch it on Hulu here in Arlington, and I never skip the opening, because "Private Eyes" plays over the credits and I love Hall & Oates. Jason Priestley is a wonderful actor, funny and charming, and he makes decency look like the most attractive thing a man can have. Cindy Sampson matches him scene for scene, and I love the whole cast. I'm happy to say all of that out loud.

Shade and Angie run the agency as partners. They argue, push back, and cover for each other, and the partnership survives every fight. I have never kept a partnership intact through a real fight. For seasons they're friends before they're anything else, two equals who respect each other's competence and like each other's company, and everything that comes later rests on that friendship.

Shade's daughter, Jules, played by Jordyn Negri, is visually impaired, and the writers let her be a whole person with her own plans and her own judgment. Her father's job is to let her have them, and he learns to do it. Shade is divorced from Becca, played by Nicole de Boer, and she is still family. They raise their daughter together, they both show up, and neither of them keeps the war going. Shade stays close to his father, Don, who runs a diner. Angie runs the agency she inherited from her late father and keeps her mother, Nora, a former gambler and small time con, in her life anyway. People on this show take the sword for each other and then stay to help heal the wound. They make mistakes, get forgiven, and are allowed to come back, and that is the part I'm worst at.

When someone says "I hate you, don't let the door hit you," I take it as an instruction, even when what they wanted was for me to fight for them. I don't want to override anyone's agency, and I don't play games, so I go.

Part of that is how I'm built. I have SDAM, severely deficient autobiographical memory, so I don't get the felt replay of a relationship that most people use to read a moment like that, the memory that the last time she said it she called back in tears, which means it really means "come find me." The words in front of me carry their full weight. Aphantasia means I can't picture the face behind them. ADHD brings rejection sensitivity, and leaving is the fastest way to stop that pain. And I grew up learning that when someone says go, you go before it becomes a fight.

Taking people at their word is a form of respect, and I'm keeping it. The cost is that anyone who says "go away" in a flooded moment, or as a test, loses me over one bad hour, because I've been making two decisions at once: to leave, and to never come back. When I'm the one who leaves, I burn the bridge on the way out. Talking it through with Claude, I got the distinction I'd been missing. Self respect says, "I won't stay where I'm not wanted." Pride says, "I won't let you see that I wanted to stay." Leaving can come from self respect. Burning the bridge comes from pride, and its whole job is to make sure nobody ever sees me wanting anything. I didn't know I carried that pride until I heard it put that way.

I had filed the ordinary moves of caring about someone under groveling and chasing: calling twice, saying "I miss you," saying "I was out of line," asking whether we can talk. Those are what people do when someone matters to them, and pride renamed them so that skipping them would feel like dignity. I don't make any of those moves, and that is a bigger flaw than the leaving. Matt Shade makes them without embarrassment, and the show treats that as his strength.

So I'm practicing where nothing is broken. I tell people I like that I've been thinking about them. I make the second call when a friend doesn't pick up. When I'm out of line about something small, I say so the same day. For the next time someone tells me to go, I have a sentence ready: "I'm taking you at your word and giving you space. If that's not what you meant, you know where to find me." Then I go, and I leave the door standing.

I want to reach the people on the other side of the bridges I burned, and I'm not ready. A message I only half mean would land as one more push. I'll be ready when I can send it without needing any particular answer back, and until then I'm watching Jason Priestley play a man who keeps coming back.

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I found The Executioner when I was nine or ten, living in Salt Lake, the neighborhood by the Honolulu airport. Don Pendleton launched Mack Bolan in 1969 with War Against the Mafia. Bolan is a Green Beret sniper who comes home from Vietnam after Mafia loan sharks destroy his family, and he declares war on the mob. Pendleton wrote the early books himself. After he sold the character to Gold Eagle in 1980, a stable of ghostwriters kept a new one on the rack every month, which meant that for a boy in Honolulu there was always another Bolan waiting.

In 1985 my mom flew me from Honolulu to San Francisco for the first Mack Bolan convention. Pendleton arrived at the Presidio by helicopter for the press conference. Doug Lennox, a Canadian actor, played Bolan for the fans. Gil Cohen, who painted the covers I'd been staring at for years, was there too, and Pendleton and his ghostwriters took me to dinner. Linda Pendleton's photos from that weekend are still online, and one of them is Don standing with me, captioned as the kid "who traveled from Honolulu to meet Don."

Bolan killed a great many men, and Pendleton was careful about who he was anyway: "Mack Bolan was not born to kill, as many of his comrades and superiors secretly believed. He was not a mechanically functioning killer-robot." That sentence is the reason a ten-year-old could love him. Bolan had a code and a reason, and he carried his grief into every book. He fought his war alone, and he never took any pleasure in it.

Lee Child published Killing Floor in 1997, and the series now runs to thirty books. Reacher is a former Army military police major, six foot five, with no address, no car, no luggage, and a folding toothbrush in his pocket. He drifts into his wars. He gets off a bus in the wrong town, notices what nobody else noticed, and stays exactly as long as it takes to settle it. Most of Child's readers turn out to be women, which I wrote about on Substack, and I'm delighted to be in that club.

Most of my Reacher has come through my ears, and the voice in my ears belongs to Dick Hill, who read the series for American listeners for years. He is the best thing about these books, at least the way I take them in. Rumor has it that Lee Child called him his favorite narrator, and I believe it. His Reacher is slow and dry, so calm that the violence lands like weather. Hill narrated more than a thousand audiobooks and won three Audie Awards, and before he was an actor he was a Marine in Vietnam, a soldier who came home. I hear that in his Reacher, a man who has already seen the worst and has decided to stay polite about it. Hill died in October 2022, and every Reacher he recorded is still on the shelf, waiting for me.

To me they're the same animal, forty years apart. Each is a soldier who came home and kept soldiering, a man whose skills the civilian world has no use for, living by a code that sits outside the law and holds tighter than it does. Each does the arithmetic before the violence, the angles and the distances and who moves first, and each stays polite right up until the moment he isn't. They're both alone, and I've always read their solitude as freedom.

Where they differ is the shape of the war. Bolan's war was personal and it never ended. He turned it into a profession, with a rolling arsenal and a body count that ran across hundreds of books. Reacher's wars are incidental and short, fought with his hands, his head, and whatever happens to be lying around, and when the job is finished he walks to the edge of town and sticks out his thumb.

I loved Bolan as a boy because he never quit. I love Reacher as a grown man because he knows exactly when to leave, and because, like Bolan, there's always another one waiting.

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