Seven Year Bitch

Today marks the seventh anniversary of this page officially taking residence in Vancouver. Given the dearth of trick-or-treaters in my budget-priced condo, I have time to reflect on the past seven years in "The Best Place on Earth" tm. First of all, it's not - Vancouver is a city that puts to rest the notion that there's a better place for you out there, because for every positive there's a negative lurking to cancel it out. Much is made about the beautiful ocean and mountain scenery, which is pleasant until one notices the traffic snarled in the middle of it because of a woefully misplaced sense of vehicle entitlement. A false sense of superiority is also fuelled by the Canwest-dominated local media, who regularly indoctrinate the locals to wage class warfare on the behalf of the elites against the homeless, union members, and anyone else who refuses to take a "Golden Decade" tm shower.

If Vancouver had a Facebook profile, it would be in a multitude of groups and have a lot of fun applications, but very few, if any friends. There's no sense of homegrown identity like an Edmonton or a Minneapolis, and we don't have a tangible product identity like Starbucks, Boeing, and Microsoft give Seattle - It's like we're still working through the aftershocks of the Hong Kong migration of the 1980's & 90's, the fascist electoral temper tantrum of 2001, and we're scared of more rumblings as 2010 approaches. The Liberal wars on unions and social housing have dashed any notion of people who work in Vancouver being able to afford living here, and driven any real sense of community to this city's underrated East Side.

We are a collection of NIMBYist old money neighbourhoods, politicized ethnic groups, indifferent urban hipsters, and hordes of background extras for B-movie shoots and oblivious cruise ship patrons. We go to hockey games to be seen rather than to see hockey. We treat the windblown trees in Stanley Park with the same concern as we do the beaten down homeless radiating from Oppenheimer Park to the Carnegie Centre. We complain about the insanity of the real estate market, and label garbagemen crazy and unrealistic when they try to bargain for a raise.

Is it worse than anyplace else? No, it just isn't any better, and accepting that makes it that much easy for this page to call Vancouver home.