schmo in june

That last post was terrible. Don't read it. It's wrong. It's dumb.

I ran today, in the river valley. I think it might have been almost forty minutes. I couldn't begin to estimate the distance, but it had to have been over three miles, maybe even four. I'm not sure how it compares to my time on the treadmill - I have a feeling I go a lot faster on the treadmill for some reason, possibly because I'm watching my speed on the readout. But I went quite a bit farther today than I ever have outside. I'm only a serious dietary correction away from marathon training.

Whoa. Nearly fell asleep just there. Time to take a hint.

piece for solo car alarm

Saturday night - grad party season - Oilers advance to finals. Perfect storm. Whyte Avenue is ablaze with assholes again, no doubt, and good on them. Tear the fucking place apart.

The previous night we were in attendance at a friend's birthday party, at which like pretty much ninety percent of the people worked retail jobs on the Ave. The apartment was at ground zero - one block away from the maelstrom, where all the traffic gets routed once they close off the main drag. So, I guess understandably, the partygoers' prevailing opinions were that the Oilers are going to lose, deserve to lose, have shitheads for fans, and so on. The birthday boy's brother, who must have been a Calgary boy, was particularly vehement that the Oilers are done.

They've just finished off Anaheim, so fuck that anyways. They're in the Stanley Cup finals.

Earlier the birthday boy, a nice guy who I like, but who apparently is under the influence of a certain kind of mentality in this company, was not five minutes earlier bragging about how he had sold a six hundred dollar pair of runners to a fifteen year old girl.

He does not see the connection between this and the throngs of meatheads hurling bottles onto the sidewalk in front of his building every second night while the Oilers are winning.

Here in Alberta, all of the money is trickling down from the greedy maws of Big Oil into the pockets of high school dropouts. No wonder they don't know how to behave.

You know what? I don't give a fuck whether the Oilers are nice guys or not. In fact, I have no problem believing they're probably a bunch of dickheads. Not that I know. But whatever personal anecdotes you've managed to collect about, say, Ryan Smyth are a) probably hyper-inflated due to his level of name-recognition value, b) paling like primer in comparison to the daily screwings that prime real estate shops on the main thoroughfare are giving to tchotchke-obsessed parents and their spoiled-out-of-control kids.

You live where you live because it's four blocks from work, where you make hot commission on serious markup goods, and two blocks from the Black Dog, where you drink the half that's not spent on rent. I'm not judging. In fact, there's nothing wrong with it at all. But the whole thing works because there's a crowd of suckers keeping it all afloat and the money just keeps swirling around like in a radio station wind tunnel.

So when the whole goddamn town collides in joy over the performance of a sports team, and it spills into the residential neighborhood that's filled with people who chose the inflated rents and ballooning property values in order to stay close to the party, the anhomie looks kinda screwy. In fact, it's a bad faith move. It's cheap. It's ungainly.

People are looking for something bigger than themselves. Or they want a stage for tit-showing or guy-wire-hanging escapades. But you're muttering with the townies from the third floor balconies because you know how to party with class.

Yes, it's just hockey. But they're also just shoes. And you know what? No frathead dillweed's gonna be clinking glasses with newly transplanted immigrants over a bitchin' pair of Campers anytime soon. Stop looking at the negative and get over yourself. Go Oil!

who that guy was

There was this shot of a ten-year old kid all painted up in whiteface in the stands of tonight's Oilers-Sharks game, s/he was jiggling and weaving like mad, obviously overcome with the sound of the crowd, and Raffi Torres' late-3rd period goal breaking down the left side still rippling through everything, and I heard it before I saw it but even when I heard it I knew it was satanic; this guy bloated and straining and drunkenly red in the face stands right up and sticks his whole face perfectly in the shot, and bellows:

OILERRRRRSSSS.

The game is in OT. The game is not over. The Underworld is taking bets.

way to go, solomon

The number one job of a government is to pave roads. I mean that both literally and metaphorically. The number two job of a government is to create policy to address systemic social inequities and create a safety net for the disadvantaged.

There is no job number three.

When you give a hundred bucks a month to families for each child under six, you're helping them out - to be sure. When you do so instead of ensuring that the choice of adequate day care is there for every family regardless of whether they need it or not, that there is what you call social engineering, pard'ner. And we got governments out of that business. Or thought we did. When we, you know, triumphed over fascism.

the male Leah McLaren

Look at where the first exclamation point lands. After that, you don't really need to read the rest, except for context.


Every week Fish lets us know. The continuing reign of the CGE (or the "Seege", if you will), has its roadmap, with its obstructions and with its triumphs, and it is rich with opportunities to let just the right mix of a potty-mouthed mot-juste and snide, sniggling snark drop like lint from one's pocket to a warmly reserved space below the coffee rings of arts-following Edmontonians everywhere.

Flourishes of cop-hatred aside, the Seege's articles have followed an ever-tightening concentric pattern in the past couple of years towards the nexus of what he's been writing about all along: I'd do me. That has been the underlying point for many years, dating back to his time at the campus paper, but lately it's been rather more nakedly upfront. More accurately, in the absence of his columns having an actual point, the subtext has now to stand in for the text. It's true, there is very little else worth writing about in this city besides blowjobs the Seege witnessed (or perhaps received? Ah, so sexy - it must be so) in the Rutherford library a dozen years ago, but at least one thing hasn't fallen by the wayside:

The Lettin' of the Other People for to Have Theirs.

This week it's "Running Room retards", who dress in clothes that will let their muscles breathe without constriction while keeping them warm in the sometimes unforgivingly chilly airs of our town, and who dare to run in groups and make friends with similar interests via a free-to-join club led by employees of a thriving business that started in a living room not far from where the Seege tried his first hookah.

Ah, yes, the river valley trails are for biking only, it must be asserted. If you must travel them on foot, it should only be to stagger home drunk from the show, in the dark, with a hip flask of Becherovka.

We should not let our inward gazes drift over the concept of the pursuit of fitness being a noble one no matter which methods are employed. It's more important to salute the Seege on his ingenuously "victimless" crime - sitting in a few times on a postmodern art class. Consider all you want that the dude is probably trawling for girls of a, well, different generation. It's still cooler than finding solidarity with people in what has to be the angst-iest sport ever invented.

We shouldn't be temtped to fantasize what these running clubs would look like if their membership swelled tenfold, a hundredfold - whole intersections suddenly overwhelmed with people running in clothes that don't match very well, clogging up whole neighborhoods of Vice-reading assholes. We shouldn't permit ourselves that smiling thought.

And we should not, under any circumstances, allow ourselves to reflect that a dude started the Running Room from a living room right here in Edmonton to serve the needs of people like himself - runners who live in colder climates - and turned it into a pretty thriving enterprise, not to mention fostering its own damn subculture, all of which might - from a different, less slobbering perspective - put him in the running for the title of the Seege.

I wouldn't wear the clothes either. Not only are they ugly, they're also overpriced. But if I were someone who was considering joining a running club, I might read the Seege's little righteousness-of-God putdown and feel as though I should get back on the couch with the Jos. Louis and the Barq's.

Because I sure wouldn't want to get in the way of the true, the one, the only - the Coolest Guy in Edmonton.