The Root

Mmm. Went to Gorilla Food yesterday, a raw food vegan restaurant in downtown Vancouver. Amazing. One of the dishes we ordered was the zucchini fettucini and cashew cream sauce. Amazing. The salad had an avocado dressing, and guess what? Amazing. Overall, we were quite amazed.

Earlier in the previous day, we were honked and cursed at by some grumpy driver. To think about how quickly that one elderly man turned our day sour is itself upsetting. I wondered how long a man like that can live his life with such hostility, addressing even the most harmless circumstance with aggression. All stereotypes aside, I wondered what his diet was like, if he ate animals. It occurred to me how difficult it must be to live in harmony when you've consumed death your entire life.

At the vegan restaurant, our table was near a loud woman. She bored through a conversation with a gentleman, lauding her magnificence in spirituality. Their voices became hostile towards one another. She attacked him with accusations and he defended himself until she huffed out of the restaurant.

All stereotypes aside, I suppose the root of hostility isn't completely in one's stomach.

Trimming and Watering

There's a plant on my desk at work. It's not mine. Nobody really knows whose it is, but it's right next to my computer, right next to two other plants. None of them are mine. Today, I decided to take care of it. I trimmed the dying bits, moved its stems closer together, gave it water. I wonder how it will do.

Year One

As midnight struck, I found myself looking through last year's calendar. It's been a year and a day since I moved to Vancouver, and in this time, my feelings have gone from certain to shaken and back again. I am without question a more defined person now, both in my values and in my focus. I'm not sure it could have happened another way. So regardless of the conditions and reasons in the past, I look at this anniversary with fondness for the present and hope for the future.

After nearly three years and countless scribbled-on pages, I've finished a complete overall outline of the graphic novel that I'm working on with Eric Gravel. (Incidentally, happy birthday Eric!) This has finally allowed me time for other projects, such as the redesign of thetrigger.net (which currently only redirects to here) and a veganism information package. Then I'd like to record some songs. I'm dying to have some audio out in the world.

Finally, as I mentioned in an earlier entry, I was involved in a music video a few months ago. Well, it finally premiered last Thursday! Check out Neon Jesus by Drohan.

The Artist on the Eve of his Death

Nathaniel went to the artist, an ancient man in his last days, one of the few who remembered life before the government. The man didn’t like to talk about that for fear of being arrested, but in his last days he had become more open, especially to the boy assigned to care for him. Everyone over sixty had a caretaker. These days, people lived happily well into their nineties. The State provided for everyone.

The artist opened his eyes as Nathaniel came into the room and asked for the good news.

“Nothing you’d want to hear, I’m sure,” Nathaniel answered.

“Oh, there must be something somewhere! A war, a deadly storm, maybe a recession!”

“No, nothing at all, sir.” The boy sighed, and like he did every day, explained how nothing bad had happened in thirty years. Nathaniel loved his work, of course, but some days were better than others.

“How old are you now, twenty?”

“Twenty-six, sir.” Nathaniel put a spoon into the artist’s nutritious soup. Everybody at the center loved it except him. Most days, he would spit it out; today, he just didn’t resist. Nathaniel asked him, “Why is it that you want something bad to happen? Life is perfect. There’s no violence, there’s no poverty…”

“And there’s no beauty!” The artist smashed the tray, surprising the caretaker who dropped the spoon. “Have you even read a book lately?”

“Of course, sir. Knowledge is essential to the proper function of society.”

“Not like that,” he shouted, “I mean literature! Not a book of facts and charts and diagrams, a book with emotions, that makes you feel alive! With heroes, and conflict!”

Nathaniel hadn’t read anything like that. The question was absurd. But he let the artist speak, he doubted the Police would come all the way here for a Level Three Infraction.

“Of course you haven’t, there hasn’t been a story written in thirty years! All feeling is gone! All purpose is gone!”

“But surely you don’t believe that, that we don’t have purpose any more. The State has fixed all of society’s old problems. The world is perfect.”

“My boy, that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard, a perfect world,” the artist said to him, eyes closed, waiting. “In a perfect world, there’s no struggle. No reason to die. And if there’s no reason to die, well, there’s no reason to live.”

The artist would not eat any more. Not today, not the next. In his dreams, he saw fantastic art that the world had forgotten, that no one would see again. Things with meaning and humanity. For a moment, he wondered if he might come back in another form after he died; and then, longer than a moment, he hoped he wouldn’t.

Twice On My List

I played a new song at Open Mic this past Friday. It went reasonably well. I still get nervous before I play though and this causes me to throw in a few flubs even when I've practiced the song dozens of times without any flubbery. I'm very appreciative when people tell me they enjoyed it, but nobody seems to understand why I'm so hard on myself. I don't really understand it either but I sincerely appreciate the support even when I'm brooding like a childish artist. In any case, these are the lyrics that I wrote for it.

Twice On My List
By Michael Lagace

No matter how long you sit out, the pain will set in
It might only seem blanket-thin now, but you're suffocating

Find a home for your softening ground
Sink in alone and never, never be found

And all the times I've been let down
Enough to really get me down
Well, I counted you twice
Twice on my list

I watched you solemnly flip out through tears so flippant
The road you didn't know had washed out but you walked upon it

Find a home for your wandering doubt
Throw me a stone from your fragile house

And all the times I've been let down
Enough to really get me down
Well, I counted you twice
Twice on my list

Why Bother?

It's been fiercely frustrating having conversations about animal rights lately. I have been offering myself to answer questions that friends might have, expecting to be asked about protein sources and such. But what I've found is that most of my otherwise rational and compassionate friends simply do not get it. While there are some genuine questions, the most frequent are ridiculous. What about insects, are they animals? What about plants, aren't they alive? What's wrong with eggs, and cheese, and milk, animals aren't killed for that?

Vegans are scary. We must be, people treat us with such hostility. I believe this is because vegans expose society's bad habits... and people don't want to feel badly about their bad habits.

I do not practice veganism to be perfect, I do it to be a better person. For me, it's to be a better person than I was; if you think I do it to be a better person than you, that's a reflection of you, not me.

Someone said, "I'm not going to stop eating meat. You're wasting your time, so why bother?" This person has not given animal consumption any thought. They are settled into a habit that they have never questioned. They don't want to be reminded of the suffering caused for their pleasure, the health problems they are creating. For whatever reason, they don't want to break the cycle of ignorance. They don't even want to bend it. And to the question, why bother, I give this answer: because it absolutely breaks my heart.

Opera and Dancing

This morning, laying in bed, we heard a man outside singing opera. The unusual local celebrity had been mentioned the previous night in passing, so it was only perfectly coincidental that the very next day we heard him.

And on a completely different note, who could have guessed that the first song we would dance our asses off to would be Spirit in the Sky?

Poor Ahab

Tomorrow, my friend Kim is getting married. Randy and his main squeeze are currently en route to Vancouver while I impatiently wait for the workday to end. I'm looking forward to a fantastic weekend of wine and dance with my good friends, their main squeezes, and my own.

The rest of the weekend is going to be put to work with a bullwhip. I stayed up well past my bedtime last night working on the Great Big Project, and with several more hours of work I should have a completed draft of the outline. When it's out of the way, my first priority will be to re-design thetrigger.net, then focus on writing and recording music. With that finished, I'll focus on more writing, such as the novel that's been brooding in my mind longer than the Great Big Project. I'd make a poor Ahab with all these whales swimming about.

On two final notes, the music video I was in will be premiering on August 20th at The Anza Club, and I started a blog dedicated to my dirty fridge magnet poetry called Crass Language. It updates every other day, so check it out and have a chuckle!

All Apologies

It is a very infrequent instance when I delete an entry. In fact, I can't think of a single time I've ever done that. This is why I've kept the last entry up. But edited. I posted it in lieu of having something meaningful to write, in trying out new types of content. However. Over the last few days, I've felt a whole bunch of guilt regarding this. The content wasn't mine and that's what this site is about. So I've removed the embedded video from the entry and added links to the videos themselves.

I received a text message last night. Somewhere back in March, a friend asked me to be in a music video she was directing. Having no formal acting training, I was surprised when I showed up to the set that I was portraying a main character in the story. Afterwards, the cast and crew gave me very positive feedback regarding my performance and most were stunned to hear that I'd never taken acting and had no film background. Perhaps this was all a calling missed? In any event, she has been working tirelessly for months editing the video and sent me a short clip last night. When it's available, I'll be sure to share it with you. And it will be embedded. Because it is at least in small part my own content.

I am at work today in my interrupted long weekend. We went far from the city on Friday, slept by a river, swam in a crystal clear lake on a hot summer day, and came back Saturday. It is such a natural feeling to be this close to someone.