And For All The Edmontonians Out There

Holy Fuck.

Just read Karen (She of the endless wit) Chow’s blog and heard about the fire on Whyte Ave.

For me personally, the only rational response is:

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OH GOD, WHY DIDN’ T YOU TAKE ME INSTEAD?!?

Edmonton friends can click off now for the next paragraph.

Asian readers can know this: Whyte Avenue is the designated Old Quarter of Edmonton where you’ll find all your 19th and early 20th century style buildings that still has the “old town thoroughfare” sort of feel to it. Littered with Mom n’ Pop establishments where the owners actually man the cash register and know their products (Assuming they don’t make them, or don’t have them made by friends) Whyte Ave has always been the traditional home of folksiness, artsiness (It’s a true Bohemian enclave, unlike the artificial ones that Singapore is trying to create) and its proximity to the university campus guarantees a certain minimum amount of hipness and attitude. This is where my beloved Princess Theatre (The local art house cinema, something Singapore is, again, UTTERLY devoid of) used to be, Greenewoods, the bookshop, Warp One, the geek comic store (Which I’ve been told is slowly degenrating into a pool of greedy, commercial insanity) and more bars and cafes than you can swing a dead cat at. I spent a good number of years unsuccessfully trying to finish the macho nacho platter at Squire’s Taven, home of free food on Friday nights. Played pool at the 24 hours pool hall just down the street. Went down for the Fringe Festival to take in many bad amateur plays and a suprisingly large number of good ones, and basically have invested the entire street with being a significant part of my formative years in university, which is when I actually consider myself to have become interesting and more or less human.

Having Whyte Ave go up in flames like that is kind of like finding out the playground I used to love as a kid has been paved over to make way for a bordello. That’s just wrong.

Man, they weren’t kidding when they said you can’t go home again.

Now I feel like I have to try and include Whyte Ave into the Jen story I’m writing, since it takes place during roughly the same period that I was going to university anyway. If I can’t have the real thing, I may as well try and at least preserve the nostalgia of it…