I was somewhere around the Oro Valley, on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . . .” I glanced to my right and was shaken back to our world as I suddenly I remembered I was driving alone and then with that same sudden strike, there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like tattooed influencers, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
I had come to the desert on assignment. My own assignment, filed to no one, due never, concerning an Adidas x Satisfy activation that had occurred thirty one days prior. I had questions. The desert had answers. But if this century has taught me anything, it’s that questions and answers are born and die at the feet of God. And lucky for us, dear reader of unwavering resolve, I sat with the Son of God and watched baseball with Him, at a dive bar with year round Christmas lights inside.
My car slowed as I careened off the exit. The sunset was an impossible sheet of all of the oranges and reds known to man. And so it was.
THE PUMP TRACK
She kept the appointment. I’ll give her that. Then again, she had no choice, being an inground pump track. No matter. I’d give her all I could, considering what she’d been through but I am under the dual moral code of journalism and holding a goddamn line so professional, I shall remain.
I found her off the main road, baking through another long Tucson afternoon the way inanimate objects bake when they have something on their inanimate minds. I was impressed by her curves. Impressed by the dignity of a structure that had endured all that was forced upon her. In a century that decreasingly rewards resilience or integrity, the Pump Track and I were, on those grounds alone, mere contemporaneous colleagues.
She asked me for a cigarette. I lit one and passed it along. We stood there letting nicotine fix what nothing else could. Without warning I asked her if she felt used. The desert held its breath. Or maybe I was that high.
She was quiet for a long time.
“I’ve held BMX bikes,” she said finally. “I’ve held children learning to ride for the first time. I’ve held a community that built me with their own hands.” She paused and looked at something I couldn’t see. “I did not expect The Circle Pit to wipe all that innocence away so quickly.”
Neither did any of us.
She continued unprompted and fussy. The heat didn’t help.
“When The Circle Pit started I kept thinking about how each of these people were once children too. And how far a person drifts from the reckless abandon of childhood to the reckless abandon of self.” She shook her wobbled pavement head slowly. “There was a man called Brice that everyone was looking for. Everyone smiled when they found him. The smiles turned off when he walked away. That was my first signal that something was off.”
She took a long drag.
“He banged a gong. And the gaggle of Hot Topic disciples lumbered around a track built for something athletic but not meant for any kind of running. How perfectly apropos for post-Kanye Adidas and the forever pre-runway posturing that Satisfy inhabits.” She paused. “The most heartbreaking part was the gong. And this part I’m about to tell you, this part….nobody saw but me.”
I took a sip from my empty coffee cup, my head going all the way back, none left. My, that is specific kind of disappointment.
“That Brice person tolled the gong. It had nothing to do with anything at this event or on this continent for that matter. The green and purple tattooed people ran in the most uncomfortable way anyone has ever witnessed and the gong unhooked itself and rolled away.” She pointed toward the brown desert hills, heat shimmering in the distance. “She’s out there somewhere. I’ve texted a few times. No reply.”
She looked at me with the suspicion of someone who realized mid-sentence they’d said too much. That this was all futile. That she’d have to do it all again tomorrow. The pumping. The tracking. But, at least some of what plagues her was finally out in the open air.
“The gong is gone.”
“Gone gong , Gone Gong”, I thought. But this was no time for wordplay. The reckoning had a schedule and I always feel behind. Jesus Christ is waiting for me.
THE SATISFY AGENDA
The Satisfy Agenda was already there when I arrived.
He sat at a corner table in a Scottsdale diner, doom scrolling. Tame Impala’s “Let It Happen” played overhead. Best of 2015 Indie playlist, I thought. Then again I was severely high, in desperate need of coffee and prone to finding meaning in alignment that isn’t there. But then again my foolishness found a place: 2015. Same year Satisfy was founded. Same year the Agenda took center stage. Let It Happen, indeed.
The Agenda ordered before I arrived and apologized for it immediately. That told me everything I needed to know.
I recognized him from the early days when Satisfy and this very Satisfy Agenda appeared everywhere. Though aged and worn out, I could still see bits of his design room back-of-napkin audacity that brought actual high fashion into sport. In another, frozen timeline the Satisfy Agenda is a triumph. The rare brand that dared to look at athletic culture and say “we can make this beautiful” and then actually did. I admired it once. Most of us had. That was before the French men who had watched one too many Westerns surround themselves with Oui and Yes people and the compass got left at the ranch.
Our menus sat closed. These kinds of places all serve the same thing anyway. “When did you first know something had gone wrong,” I asked.
Considering the corner seat malaise that greeted me, The Agenda jumped on this faster than expected. This was not a broken thing sitting across from me. I felt energized by his gumption. This was a tired but once plucky Agenda, filled with the late round fury of a boxer who sniffs whatever is put under their nose to get up one more time. Now thats a fucking Agenda I can get behind. Just as fast, however, my heart broke knowing he answered this question alone, in the dark, for a very long time, and was finally ready to answer it out loud.
“When the people who wore us stopped talking about running and started talking about who else was wearing us,” it said. “That’s when I knew.”
I found a half-smoked cigarette with a pink lipstick stain in the ashtray. I fired it up, took a drag and let the silence hang like this smoke.
The Agenda continued with a push of dignity behind his voice, the way I’ve talked about a great lost love, saving the real hurt for the night sky.
“I tried to be a team player. I was the only one. “Protect you at all costs’, Brice said to me!” This may have been the longest pause either of us had to endure. “Protect nothing, but cest la vie”, The Agenda finally said, under his breath. He looked down at the black and white tile floor, amusement waved across his face, proud to find a French phrase they probably shared in those early days. “Then I got piled on. Bullied and left in a corner. The athletes we developed, the ones we lifted, the ones we gave a platform, a moth-riddled jersey and a belief system: all thankless fucks. After The Circle Pit monstrosity, some of those people, the same supposed #RideOrDie internet-born athletes…what did they do when the online run community shoved us?” The Agenda looked off again, simmering. I smashed the cigarette out. Rage arrives in many colors. This one, painted the diner the deep red of regret. He shifted in his seat and continued.
“Some of those people at The Circle Pit responded to the push back by turning up their nose. ‘You should have been there’, back and forth in each others comments. Bad look. One of our biggest names turned off his accounts when things got hard. I said, Whoa Max Jolliffee, what a baby move. He called the people who loved us names I won’t repeat but rhyme with “Ussy” and Etarded.”
He paused. Why The Agenda still speaks in US and WE when he’s been clearly abandoned, I’ll never know. But that level of hurt, I do. I also live in America. Thats what the modern niche cult does. In the end, their sole endurance sport is gaslighting and the more miles of subterfuge, the better you become.
Again, the silence. “Be proud, Agenda. You give someone the language.” I said, “The language of rebellion. These influencers and fake models used the highest form of it to promote their own agenda and the lowest form of it to silence the community they claim to love. That’s not what any of this was supposed to be.” I'll never forget that nod of affirmation. Agenda and Alignment were made for each other, no matter how battered and jaded. And here I was with a real living Agenda in a pure form, being seen for the first time in a while.
I asked if anyone in the organization had said anything. Company wide, internally. Or via socials, externally.
“Brice cut and pasted a sentence we wrote together,” he said finally. “One that we wrote together. He said: “And to all the gatekeepers — I’m here to break down the walls.” That’s what he wrote on Instagram, after The Circle Pit. That chatGPT hypen, it was so rebellious when he dared to leave them in. I used to admire that boldness. ” He stopped, choked up, trying to regain control of his breath.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him the online echo chamber of us vs them was even less self-aware and considerably worse.
Outside, Scottsdale continued being boring, continued to be hell. The Agenda searched the room for the waitress, trying to catch her eye for a refill and failing. “She’s really busy today,” he said meekly. “They do a really good job here.”
I reached across the table and took his hand the way my grandfather used to take mine, steady and without explanation. Like America, this Agenda had once stood for something simple. A wildly creative belief that beauty belonged in athletic culture. Late stage capitalism has a way of finding the things that dare, serving up temptations disguised as new roads. The Agenda had taken every one of them in good faith. That was the tragedy. Good faith living in debt to someone else’s bad decisions.
“The desert activation, The Circle Pit” I said carefully. “Whose idea was it?”
The Agenda smiled for the first time. It was not a happy smile. He ignored my question yet unwittingly answer my question completely.
“That’s the thing about Agendas,” it said. “At some point you stop knowing whose you are.” The waitress came over and topped off our coffee.
I closed my notebook. The Agenda didn’t move to leave. I threw a $20 on the table and slid off my seat. Nothing left to be said.
Somewhere outside, the gong was still not answering its texts, rolling away into a self imposed, deeper silence.
Some things roll away and don’t come back. I felt the envy burn as I revved the engine, darting back on to the freeway. Jesus was waiting and I don’t want to be late.
JESUS CHRIST
“Jesus,” I said. “Thanks for making time. I know you must be busy with all that not being real at all.”
And there he was. The Son of God. Screwed down on a bar stool in a Tucson sports bar on a Tuesday evening, drinking a Modelo and watching the Diamondbacks protect a three-run lead.
No halo or heavenly choir or sandals, which, to tap in the vein of whatever it is I’m out here chasing, upset me as a deliberate branding error. Points for the whole sweeping-robe-in-public though.
The poor soul next to me was explaining a transmission problem to another poor soul. The bartender heard the story before and would hear it another six hundred times from every bastard this side of sin.
Surprisingly, nobody recognized Him. Which struck me as either reassuring and deeply concerning. Like when a one night stand knows more moves than you.
Jesus tapped the bar and a beer just appeared. Totally unrelated: peyote, hash and weed are my best friends. I took a sip and looked over at Jesus swiping left and right on people and places. He really adapts well to the modern world. I could tell our time together was going to last as long as this beer.
I took a deep breath and got straight to it.
“Did you hear the outcry?”
“What outcry?”
“The Circle Pit.”
He stared at me.
“The what?”
“The Circle Pit. Adidas. Satisfy. Tucson. The Pump Track. The runners. The backlash. I searched his face. Nothing. “The gong.”
I watched the realization arrive.
“Oh.” He winced. “That.”
He took a long drink.
“Yeah. We got some traffic on that one.”
“Traffic?”
“The JFC department tracks major spikes.”
“You have a JFC department?”
“Of course.”
“Who runs it?”
“Mostly dead grandmothers.”
That tracked.
I asked him about the phrase. The specific phrase.
The one that echoed across running culture when we opened our Instagram to see the insanity.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
Not once. Thousands of times. Across continents. Across time zones. Across social classes. Across Instagram stories. Across group texts. And most importantly, across Substack comment sections.
“The unison,” he said.
“What?”
“The unison.”
He pointed at me with the neck of the bottle.
“That’s what gets our attention.”
“You hear all of it?”
“Are you kidding? Individual mentions are useless. People invoke me every twelve seconds. Traffic accidents. Golf. Fantasy football. Air fryers. Divorce lawyers. Most of the time they’re not even talking to me.”
He shook his head.
“A synchronized JESUS FUCKING CHRIST from several thousand runners? Now that’s data.”
The Diamondbacks grounded into a double play.
Jesus stood halfway off the stool.
“No. No. No!”
The throw beat the runner by three steps. “See, I almost did it myself.”
He sat back down.
“Sorry. Continue.”
I told him about the desert. The Pump Track. The Agenda. The neck tattoos. The endless digital bloodletting that followed. I wish I took that blood part back the moment I said it. And the gong. That poor, poor gong.
At the mention of the gong, Jesus covered his eyes.
“Messing with a gong is always a mistake,” he muttered.
“A big mistake?”
“There are no small gong mistakes.”
I wrote that down immediately. We both took a long sip of beer. I asked what he thought had gone wrong. He considered this carefully. For a long moment all we heard was baseball and the release of the ice machine.
Finally he shrugged.
“The same thing that always goes wrong.”
“Which is?”
“People start with a feeling.” He took a sip. “They build a community around the feeling.” Another sip. “Then somebody notices money.” He pointed toward the television. “Then somebody notices status.” He pointed toward the parking lot. “Then somebody notices themselves noticing status.” He sighed. “After that it’s mostly metrics and paperwork.”
Outside the desert sky softened to night. Twinkles in purple.
I asked if any of it mattered. The outrage. The brands. The endless arguments. The Circle Pit. The whole ridiculous business.
Jesus finished his beer.
“All of it matters.”
He sipped again, I waited.
“That’s the problem.”
Then he slid off the stool. The game was over. The Diamondbacks won. I turned my head at the sound of a few fans cheering from the booth across from the pool table.
When I turned back, I saw Jesus heading for the door. Before leaving he turned back.
“One more thing.”
“Yeah?”
“The people who still care enough to get angry…..”
He nodded toward the horizon.
“They’re not angry about the event.”
“What are they angry about?” I said.
He smiled. I got that he got that I got it.
“They’re angry at the memory of what it could have been. Which is true for both sides.” And with that, Jesus gave a small salute and disappeared into the night.
Fuck, he is the golden messenger.
The Son of God was gone. The Diamondbacks won. The bartender cleared my empty bottles.
The gong remained missing.
EPILOGUE
“Should I close you out?”
I lifted my head off the bar, the day was as exhausting as I thought it would be.
“Hey Buddy, last one is on me. You’ve been here, alone all day, scribbling in that notebook, it’s the least I can do.”
A FEW FAVORITES FROM THE WHOLE ADIDAS x SATISFY GHOST OF ACTIVATION PAST
Chris Z : The Satisfy x Addidas Subculture Heist
Notes from JL. : The Internet Had A Fit
Salty: Runners turned into Mean Girls: Satisfy x Adidas (the other side speaks)
Running Supply with Cole Townsend : When A Niche Brand Goes Mainstream
What a totally awesome piece! You should make a theatre play from it and let it perform on broadway. I love it!
Dude. This was fucking art.