This is the rather random bit of mail that just made my day. You see, about a week ago I was doing some reading at VRF on Adam Durand, the activist who was recently sentenced for the part he played in filming undercover footage of a Wegman’s warehouse in upstate New York. Adam’s not only an active vegan with a conscience, he’s also a graphic designer who once contributed comics to the now defunct vegan zine, The Green Goat.
You’ll notice, if you clicked on that last link, that the front page doesn’t go anywhere. You simply get a nice picture of a green goat and a web address. So I asked around at VRF as to whatever happened to the zine. The answer shouldn’t have suprised me: like many zines, it burst onto the scene and folded not that long thereafter. Such is the way of the zine.
But Dave Dandelion, the wuvvable webmaster at VRF, just happened to have an old directory of a back issue which he posted as a PDF file. I spent a happy 20 minutes ogling some old stories written by a collective of vegans with whom I share the kind of tenuous, here-now-gone connection this worldwideweb easily affords.
I suppose that’s something that intrigues me. As easy as a web page, a username, a blog, a flckr account, or a zine are to produce, they’re just as easily abondoned. Many of them remain obscure and when they become relics they exist as the shell of a need which has transformed, evolved into something else, drifted elsewhere.
It’s easy to see the internet as a disembodied space of pure possibility. I suppose that’s why it feels like such a magic trick when it produces something. A relationship built of little more than text and shared ideas can sometimes result in something tangible, and when that’s happened, when I’ve recieved snail mail from my ether based friends, it always feels as though someon’s just pulled a coin or two from behind my ear.
Which is why I was delighted when I found Dave had decided to spontaneously send me a couple of old copies of The Green Goat he happened to have lying around. Just because.
The articles in the back issues of The Green Goat speak of possibilities — what might have been and what could be. They’re full of ideas, not just about how I can change my diet, recreate a cheeseless cheese, or redecorate my apartment compassionately. They showcase possibilities in how we can communicate, with humor or spleen, openly or satiricly, with polish and poise, or sometimes, just straight off the cuff.
I was intrigued by the conceit of Mike the Vegan’s Dog Farming story. I can’t promise you I won’t borrow the basic idea, someday. I wish I had an ongoing resource for The Thrust Reports. I wish Dave Dandelion DandyLion Dandy wrote more, busy as he is with websites and meetups and EarthSave and his dayjob.
But most of all, I was simply intrigued and delighted with this snapshot and the tenuous bubble of discovery that came along with it, as though the forest breaks, and suddenly a clearing…
