The plan was brilliant: By brilliant I mean lazy. And by lazy I mean four stoned 21 year-olds on a couch who decided to buy a goat instead of mowing their overgrown backyard. “All they need to eat is grass and plants and stuff, right?” “Right.”

For once, the bong had brought us wisdom

The next weekend we found ourselves in the bleachers of a Paso Robles rodeo arena scratching our heads with an uncalculated decision: young goat or old? Having no other process to found our purchase upon we let economics drive our decision-making and opted for young. Bidding for a kid started at $10.  An adult began at $25. For reference, a lamb started at $50,–a sheep at $100. “Wool, “ we nodded to one another. We were expecting a petting zoo for some reason. This was animal husbandry.

When the next wave of kids were brought into the ring, we found our dude. His ears were enormous and floppy, and he seemed only slightly less confused than the others. This was a sure sign of intelligence. For ten dollars we had our baby goat, he was named Yoda.

The first 45 minutes back home with Yoda were perfect–just as we had planned. He ate grass, and we all watched him. One big family. When we went inside, Yoda ran to follow and bumped his head into the sliding glass door. He proceeded to cry.
If there is one sound cranked to full volume you hear on repeat in hell, it is the cry of a baby goat. Shrill-toned and tireless for his one big family, Yoda wailed until we came outside–resuming when we went back in. We were trapped.
After six hours our plan had backfired-the goat was now a clickety-clackety inside cat that followed us around everywhere. The first night he slept in my bed, nuzzled between my girlfriend and I.  Pretty damn cute.

The plan continued to backfire on day two. Our roommate Dave was out of town fr the weekend. When he returned he brought his dog, a very mellow, very lazy dog who was instantly reminded of its instincts and chased the goat with canus bloodlust. We tried to reason with the dog, insisting that Yoda was a lawnmower, not lunch.  This too like our plan did not work. We were now stuck with an unhappy outside dog and a happy inside goat. One big family.

***

Curly Chris started out at university studying Business Administration. Four years later he was a dropout living on a beautiful ranch in Atascadero rent-free as its caretaker. Chris spent his days cruising the fenceline, feeding the various animals, shooting skeet, surfing in the mornings, playing with his three massive dogs, tending to his small, but lucrative Marijuana crop, and cruising to town on the weekends to sell it to his former student colleagues.
Curly Chris dropped in on Sunday to meet the goat. We explained to him that even though the goat was “awesome” it wasn’t going to work out with him in the house. “Dude,” he responded, “ bring him up to the ranch.” The bong, again had brought wisdom.

I spent my last night with Yoda and drove him up to Atascadero the next day.  I said goodbye and set him free amongst the cows, dogs, and ponies at Curly Chris’s petting zoo.

Having grown up not amongst goats– instead with Curly Chris’s three massive dogs, who luckily, unlike our dogs, didn’t want to eat him, Yoda naturally figured that he too was a dog. When six months later I returned to the ranch to see how the little guy was doing  I found him running with the three massive dogs-trying to play fetch, making goat sounds when the dogs barked, sleeping with the dogs. We had created a Goatdog. Pretty damn cute–Yoda was happy. Curly Chris was happy. We were happy. The ending-happy.

Last week: a rough one.

As reported in my last blog post, I crashed my motorcycle last Saturday. It hurt, alot. This post isn’t about the crash, I mean it was all fairly straightforward: I was going fast. I undershot a turn, panicked, got on the brakes hoping to stop the bike and went off into the gravel.

Fuck it-I guess this is about the crash.

Gravel, I learned is to a moving motorcycle what ice is to a giraffe or mud is perhaps, to a wrestler. I hit the ground and slid face-down a bumpy twenty feet or so. My inertia being less than that of the 400 pound bike-it caught up with me, and near the end of our slides we rolled several times, together. When we stopped I was stuck  in a pile of what-the-fuck and roadrash, and the bike’s kickstand was  stuck in a pile of bleeding calf muscle (mine).

Coming-to after the tumble, my bottom quarter under a steaming bike, I tried to crawl away, but could not. It was in this moment, the product of  quick sensory trial and error:  the, “why can’t I get the last of my leg out from under the bike??, ah, the kickstand– my jeans must be caught on it,” then the tugging harder, and feeling, discovering in exposed nerves and torn calf that yes, shaan, you unlucky-fuck, you are shish-kebab.

Dr. Bennett would tell me several hours later, as I lay pinned in a cervical collar, cold and semi-conscious on the surgical slab that rather, I was a lucky-fuck: I broke no bones and injured no spines. But in this moment, the discovering one in the dirt,  I felt more than unluck, and pain, I felt terror. So too must have my foreshadowing friend Dharma who, the night prior, expressed his unease and his quease at the sight of blood. I would ask him later how he felt when he came upon his friend there in the dirt, and how he felt when the friend yelled at him to, “just pull it out!” And he did. There, at the side of the road Dharma learned that just pulling a jagged kickstand out of a friend’s leg is not all like a giraffe on ice, or a motorcycle on gravel. “Didn’t really have time to think about it,”  he responded, “I just reacted.” Two lucky-fucks.

Shock quickly began to set in, a kind man named Carl, I think, holding my hand, my legs unable to stop shaking, a dozen hands  strapping me in to uncomfortable things,  a husky-voiced lady-EMT ordering me whisked away to the nearest ICU from under a halo of spinning helicopter blades, and my body somewhere in midair was given its first taste of delicious morphine.

Morphine, I learned, extends the duration of the average eye-blink from an instant to roughly four minutes, but does not, unfortunately turn a trip to the hospital into a trip to the beach, as I had secretly hoped. Over the course of the next six hours on my back, I believe I took roughly 100 miniature naps–not at the beach.

The rest of the hospital: ice cream: weird hospital clothes, waking up from surgery the first words out of my mouth, “can you tell my friends to bring me a cheeseburger,” achy, half-pains, lobotomized nurses (excepting Pat..she was fully-brained) sleeps interrupted by beeps, bad food, a button at my fingertips delivering a  yummy 2mg of morphine into my arm, two slices of pizza, How-tos on crutching, smiling faces on friends, home.

Home for a week.