When I tell people about the King’s gym, I am typically confronted with one of two reactions. Either utter bafflement, complete mystification at the very idea that the University of King’s College could have a gym; or with a harrowing personal story of the time someone found themselves hopelessly lost while trying to locate one single treadmill in the maze of nondescript yellow hallways, all while weaving through a throng of sweat-licked senior citizens in karate gis stretching in the hallways and dodging wayward projectiles from the seemingly perpetual women’s basketball tournament taking place.

Usually, the latter is conveyed in a way that very clearly invites my commiseration. I am meant to say that the King’s gym is a terrible place, and I am so sorry you had to go through that, and why don’t we just retreat to the cool sterility of the Dalplex, with its sleek, rubbery smell — like a new car, like a doctor’s office. Wouldn’t that be so much nicer? Wouldn’t you feel so much more at ease? Wouldn’t you rather go to a real gym, than someone’s musty, roach-filled garage? Wouldn’t you rather use a machine, than a rack of free weights that stain your hands a mysterious brown, the scent of which will linger long after you’ve washed away the remnants of your workout? Wouldn’t you rather watch porn than get fucked? 

I know what I’d choose. Because yes, the King’s gym is probably the worst university gym in the entire country — there’s no argument there. It’s just also, probably, one of the best places on the planet. Maybe one of the last real places in this arid, neutered world.

Let me try to explain. This summer, Halifax saw two weeks of terrible, sticky heat. It was the kind of heat that feels massive and oppressive, that makes you feel like a fish fried in oil.  You know the feeling, surely — the way it cooks you, lying stretched out lethargic in the sun, your skin slowly crisping under its golden-hot glow. The way you lose all sense of anything but hot and now. You’re in your body, but it’s not your body anymore: it’s just you — or maybe you’re just a body. You wear as little clothing as possible and think nothing of it, feel nothing but relief, like you’re bursting out of your clothes and your skin and the very fabric of the world, shame fallen by the wayside in favour of the two-sided bipolarity of comfort-discomfort, pleasure-pain, the pure eroticism of thoughtless embodiment. 

Two summers ago, I was living and working in very rural Northern Ontario. This is mostly relevant. The cabin me and the ten other student workers were staying in had no AC, a terrible mouse problem, and an old, rickety bench press sitting alone on the back porch. 

There’s not much to do in the middle of the woods. The majority of us were freshly 20, subsisting almost entirely on cans of Busch Ice, campfire scorched hot dogs, and the occasional caught whitefish — in other words, we were hungry, and young, and terminally bored. In between bouts of working and drinking, we would venture out onto the back porch, into that blazing wall of summer heat, where we would smoke darts with our shirts off and take turns benching maybe half our body weight, as The Cars played from someone’s Bluetooth speaker. We’d become dizzy with dripping sweat, until the world was spinning and we finally gave up on pretending to pump iron in a prison yard in favour of running whooping into the crystal, glacial bliss of the nearby lake. 

In Halifax, during the heat wave, I found myself on more than one occasion thrown back to that Ontario summer — that body feeling, the heat, the raw, sensual experience of doing something until you drop down panting with exertion, entirely spent. A type of sweat that rushes straight past sticky and right to slick, your pores so open that you’re no longer capable of distinguishing your inside from your outside, skin melting slowly into the squishy wet pulsing of your organs. This summer, I got heat exhaustion twice — both in the King’s gym. Both my fault. I just wasn’t willing to leave. 

There are some things so ecstatically sensual that writing about them will border on the pornographic. It’s just the way of things. It’s how I feel about the city, the ocean and more or less everything I’ve ever loved; it’s how I feel about the King’s gym in the summertime. The sweltering, AC-less stagnancy. It’s so hot. So hot that the single dusty fan propped up by the door becomes something holy; it’s 32 degrees outside and you feel like you have eaten the sun. You feel crazy, obscene, like you’re burning up from the inside and the rattling wheeze of that spinning blade is nothing short of the orgasmic breath of life flowing into you. Ecstatic, deep pleasure; your body returning to you. Your body falling away. Two more sets. You start drinking coconut water. You do yoga. You feel like you understand everything in the entire world — the Buddha, God, Mark Carney. Enough rounds of decline sit-ups and we’re all the same. Just salt and water, just meat liquifying in a room.  

But working out can’t be hedonism, no — that’s disgusting, that’s perverse. It’s about perfecting your body. It’s about calories in vs. calories out, it’s about the macros, it’s about cutting out sugar, fat and carbs — sorry not carbs, carbs are good, carbs are what’s gonna get you to your bench PR — because otherwise what’s the point? Otherwise you’re just like those poor people in WALL-E, sitting bloated and beached on their feats of modern technology, letting the world happen to you, outsourcing effort to ChatGPT and hoping for it to call you a good boy while you burn to char on a beach towel. 

There’s no room for places like the King’s gym — not in this brave new world. Not when the Dalplex is just a couple blocks around the corner; brighter, bolder, better. Not when the South East Corner project means the whole thing’ll soon enough be torn down anyway, replaced, annexed to the steel and glass bowels of modernity. King’s says the SEC project will bring together “philosophers who ask essential questions about what it means to be human in the age of AI.” I’d like to propose an alternate question — one that means the same thing, maybe, but I know how you people agonize over semantics — which is: what does it mean to be a body?