sigh.  well, i was actually pretty surprised at the beating i've received over my recent blog post about my home town, edmonton.  i thought that having lived there for over the best 30 years of my life would have earned me some right to be critical of it in sort of the same way that i'm critical of myself.  it seems that i really went too far, expressed myself too ambiguously and seriously upset people who i'm very interested in not upsetting.  so, in spite of the risk that i run of further exacerbating the situation, i feel that i need to write something to clarify what it was that i was trying to express.

one more prefacing caveat:  i believe that i mentioned in that entry that "i love my home town. i love the city that taught me the lessons that i've learned about life and how to live it," but that may have been too little a caveat and too late in the post to exonerate me from the overblown generalizations that i seemed to be making.  i'll come back to this point (much) later.

empirically, edmonton is a beautiful city.  it has what i believe to be the greatest municipal asset of all the cities i've ever been to - a massive and uninterrupted ribbon of green in its river valley that is breathtakingly beautiful three of the four seasons of the year and is a cherished and thoroughly enjoyed and well-utilized resource for all the citizens of edmonton.  it has a robust festival scene that seems to operate year round, giving its residents access to cultural influences and world-class events and attractions that rival any other city in the world.  it has a vibrant and variegated night-life on par with any other city in the very trendy and vital old strathcona area, south side, west end, and yes, downtown. 

with only very transient and temporary exceptions, i have chosen to live almost my entire adult life within a 10 block radius of the downtown core because i felt that it was the very best part of the city in which to live. i enjoyed an environmentally-friendly lifestyle, not needing to purchase a car until the age of 29, walking, riding my bike, or taking ample public transportation wherever i needed to go right in the heart of the city.  i am proud of the very best teachers that i've ever met who worked with me at my high school and university and taught me the very best lessons i've ever learned.  i worked in one of the very best buildings in edmonton, manulife place, for many many years with an incredible sense of pride and joy, and lived the very very best years of my life scant meters from the very places that i took pictures in my "deadmonton" post.

i remember, at the tender age of 19, dragging my single bed mattress along jasper avenue to a bus stop.  pulling the mattress into an ETS bus so that i could move my bed to my new apartment on jasper avenue and 111th street.  i remember the cars and the people and the panhandlers and professionals walking along the street that very night - even though it was more than half-a-lifetime ago - and thinking, this was a city and i was so thrilled to be a part of it.

i remember spending nearly two years of my life building the city of edmonton's municipal website (yup the one that's still online today) and the great people with whom i worked and the great times that i had facing those professional challenges.  i remember the russian tea room on 104th street or cafe select off jasper and visiting so many of my friends there.  i remember the gourmet cup where i would go five or seven or ten times a day to hang out and meet with people and enjoy my youth.  i remember waiting outside the paramout theatre for half a day so that i could watch the empire strikes back for the tenth time.  i remember going to A&W on 101st street and jasper avenue where EPCOR's head office is now when i was six years old, eating something bad, and then throwing up from food poisoning at the woodward's at edmonton centre and being taken to its nursing station with my mother to lie down. and of course, i remember flashbacks - to which there are no reliable links on the internet - you had to have lived it in order to understand it.

when i say that i love edmonton and what it has given me, i mean it soulfully and don't say it casually.

and when i say that "i hate what it has become and i (almost) never want to come here again," it comes from a place of terrible, visceral regret and longing for things to be better than the way that i left them.

edmonton is beset by a unique set of challenges.  there is so much money flowing into alberta, and there are so many people flowing into it to chase that money, and so little experience or expertise at how to manage so much change.  edmonton is growing so fast that it can barely BARELY maintain any sort of equilibrium, and i expected that and understand it.  there is talk of creating an entirely new suburbian city near edmonton to house some 200,000 expected new residents to the GEA ("greater edmonton area"), even though there has been incredible expansion in sherwood park, st. albert, leduc, and edmonton itself.  but it seems to me that there are other parts of the world where similar phenomena are occuring - dubai, china, russia, southeast asia - and i seem to be constantly reminded of the marvels that are occurring at these centres and have clearly had my expectations improperly raised.

during my earlier visit to edmonton earlier in the summer, i observed very very many positive changes... a grocery store smack dab in the middle of the downtown core.  housing builds all over the city.  improvements in infrastructure and a track for the light rapid transit system to connect the south side to the downtown.  i found an incredibly quaint but sexy wine bar on 104th street called TZIN that i highly recommend visiting.  the positive changes were manifest and obvious to me, and it lifted my spirit to see.  the astonishment that i felt a couple of weeks ago at how that trajectory had been interrupted was surprising, jarring, quite disappointing, and i reacted in the only way i could - with a scathing blog post.

i dislike the thought of having to "retract" or "revise" my position on something that is a personal opinion based on a particular and admittedly emotional experience.  i don't work for edmonton tourism and don't need to feel obliged to be unequivocally supportive of edmonton when i feel that it has fallen short of its potential.  i'm not a newspaper or source of truth and justice - i'm just a person with an opinion and a human with a sense of history and emotion that i feel entitled to express in my own blog.  however, i dislike the thought of offending people who live in edmonton and embody a very different type of life than the one that i hot-headedly proclaimed in my that post.

the other thing that surprises me is that i didn't offend as many people with my post on the large hadron collider - i mean... come on!!

i'm sorry, edmonton.  i didn't mean to offend you.  but you have to know, if i didn't care, i wouldn't have bothered to write at all.

- g

song of the day for trying to say "sorry": you can say baby, tracy chapman.