Mount Pleasant, flipping "le coin"

(In French le coin means the neighbourhood, or the friendly and shortened the hood.  In the context of Mount Pleasant and what's happening here, I couldn't think of a more apt play on words - especially since today is the St Jean, a big celebratory holiday in Quebec, where I lived in French for many years.)

I live in Mount Pleasant, Vancouver.  Technically, I'm on the eastern-most edge of the neighbourhood--an important distinction when talking about place in real estate terms, something Vancouver is all sexed up about.  This is an edge area, one that's developing, to use the same neutered vernacular laid over other places such as Fuzhou, Chittagong, Dar es Salaam, Logos, and even Kabul, though likely here the term flows with less bite and more verve than for those on the ground in those places.  Ah, but not here.

The lived experience here is a mixed bag of ambivalence and profit, all depending on which bag you hold onto.

Like everywhere and everything these days it seems, the Mount Pleasant that matters - ie: the one that counts, literally -  is a consensus in the throes of unharnessed transformation, giddy about the promise of change like that offered by plastic surgery, smoothing the surface and sucking out the substance. 

So, here's a bit of what I notice as I peddle myself around the hood.  And by peddle, I mean spinning the wheels of my bike with the muscles in my body.

I live here and so do a whole bunch of other people ...

... people who make it the place that it is - unique, non-corporate, fun - for all of us living here ... 

... not the place that some see as a place to rip apart and to sell ... 

Can't breathe?
Me neither.