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.