I (Blank) Regina

This is my first blog post ever.

I’m the sort of person who quickly tires of the sound of my own voice (or the look of my own typing, as the case may be), so I can make you exactly one promise right off the bat – I won’t over-blog.

Two quick thoughts about blogs:

1.) Are you familiar with the term “sophomore slump”? This is the phenomenon in which an artist pours a lifetime of ideas and experiences into their first major work, and then chokes on the second because they already used up all their good stuff and now have to start from scratch. I could so easily start rambling here, riffing on all my thoughts and feelings and ideas and opinions... and then burn myself out and wonder what to talk about next time. Not gonna do it.

2.) When your editor asks you to contribute to a blog, and you already make part of your living as a freelance writer, isn’t that kind of like asking your buddy the massage therapist for a free foot rub? Well, maybe. But I don’t mean for this forum to replace my regular writing. I’ll just think of it as... sort of an open letter to a friend. Or a bunch of friends, most of whom I haven’t yet met.

My topic, for the first several posts anyway, will be the city I live in: Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. City Hall has been promoting an “I Love Regina” campaign for a while now (or maybe it’s called “I heart Regina”) which is a nice enough thought, but it’s really not specific enough for me. I want the gory details of what people love about Regina, and I want other people to know what I love about it too. It’s becoming too easy for a city to become homogenized and lose its identity – all the quirks and eccentricities and diamonds (in the rough or otherwise) that make it unique and, ultimately, liveable.

One of my pet peeves is people who wander around saying things like, “This town fuckin’ sucks,” and then don’t do anything about it. So even on a lousy day when I look around the city and don’t much like what I see, I force myself to look harder. I might look for gargoyles on the tops of old buildings downtown, or buy fresh marzipan squares at Oskar’s Deli and think about how no one else on the planet is eating anything quite like that at that particular moment.

And before I start rambling on that topic, I’m going to call it a day. See you next time.