Anonymous
KeyPlanet
Jul 21 2006, 12:15 AM EDT | Post edited: Jul 21 2006, 12:15 AM EDT
Victoria is a Terminal City, in more ways than one. It used to represent the brief end of one's life - retirement and death - and still does, but now, people have an extended semi-retirement (at socially acceptable earlier ages) and, lingering seniorhood, well subsidized.

But it also The End for many other aspirations and endevours, especially in the arts, acutely because of the perpetual small population.

It's the end of style, of grace, of form, including bodily form. Think of a body type and universal "dress code" for the City. I apologize for causing that thought. Is there ever a place where the rule of grump and frump still reigns.

Even provincial governments are borne and formed elsewhere in the ridings of the province, but die here in the Legislature.

Career professionals find themselves lying in the Velvet Rut, that soft swale in the their local lawns that prevents them from getting up and re-establishing - even a few kms to Vancouver - to successfully ply their talents. They're half-way into a grave.

Many in the City live on inheritances, the repitive legacy of terminality.

Don't dare begin to skip travel to other urbs, because the that terminal grip pulls you like a bony hand. And you find yourself not leaving for an entire year.

If it weren't for the gardens, the little City would've turned into a suicide capital like Venezia. In Victoria, it's the end, but a pleasant one. Spring is five months long, and winters are cool monsoons. It's a soft landing, the end, real soft. But it is, terminal.

Terminal City.
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Yule
Yule
1. RE: KeyPlanet
Jul 21 2006, 11:29 AM EDT | Post edited: Jul 21 2006, 11:29 AM EDT
This a great and poetic (if somewhat depressing!) observation, KeyPlanet... Certainly when I and my other high school friends were at Vic High & OB High in the 70s, we couldn't wait to get away because options seemed to end here, while they seemed to begin elsewhere.

So, have I come back here to die, or (worse?) to grow soft? What an uncomfortable thought! Granted, those who "got away" and stayed that way still regard Victoria as a place for "losers," and Victoria continues to suffer from this schizophrenic attitude that on the one hand one is "better" or superior simply by dint of having made it all the way to here (notice how even newcomers often enough adopt this mantle of fabricated "uniqueness" and "Englishness"), while at the same time one must be a "loser" because one didn't manage to get out or stay away (the old "Victoria is only for retirees" story, so unless you're a rich retiree, you must be a real lost cause...)

But (and maybe I'm deluded), I like to think that we're potentially on the cutting edge of something new insofar as the internet is a sort of End of Ends: it reaches into even this "garden," this final (ends, again) colonial outpost of former (ended) empire, bringing new beginnings for conversation, polity, and (gasp!) economic activity. Perhaps those new beginnings will also all end in the same place (we all gotta die eventually), but perhaps Terminal City will grow fibreoptic connections that link us to the rest of the world after all, and show even the craniosclerotic (is that a word?) that the world doesn't end where you are. Let's say it's just beginning...? ;-)
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