Goat Not Gotten

Sorry, some technical issues have interrupted the flow here a bit lately. But I'm not angry. It takes a lot more than that to get my goat. In fact, as far as I know, my life has been pretty goat-free. I'm sure somewhere along the line I've had some goat cheese, but I don't think I've ever eaten any goat or even ever consumed any goat milk. The closest I've ever gotten to a goat was at a friend's house years ago. He raised all sorts of animals. When I asked him if his little kids got attached to the rabbits he raised, therefore making killing them and eating them a difficult proposition, he said no, the kids loved picking out the ones they'd eat next. I'm experienced, what can I say? I've visited many different worlds.

But I've been thinking about goats a lot, or at least more than I ever had, these last couple of weeks. It started with bin Laden's death. Among all the reports coming out of his death, the one that intrigued me the most was the one about how a goat would be delivered to his compound every week. The image has staying power with me for some reason. Naturally, I searched in vain for at least one wise ass headline writer's work along the lines of "U.S. Really Gets bin Laden's Goat." Never found one, though. But sure enough, within days, I came across the "get his goat" line in some reading I was doing, then, apropos of nothing connected to any of this, a co-worker used the phrase. Now how in the world, I wondered, did the phrase "get his goat" get its "to annoy or make angry" meaning? Turns out it has something to do with horse racing. I guess a goat's presence in a horse's stable supposedly has a calming effect on the horse. If you wanted to mess with your rival's horse the night before a big race, you'd literally "get his goat." Fascinating.

Thank God I had learned all this and meditated properly on it before the events of a few days ago; I believe it helped me keep my cool, and probably my job too. Long story short, and believe me, the details are so innocuous and irrelevant that they don't even warrant a parenthetical mention. Suffice it to say, a customer told me I was going to hell and that I had better repent. Thankfully I'm a Gemini who's familiar with the whole negative capability thing: One of my minds reeled with exquisite possible retorts to the customer, while the other mind calmly and coolly envisioned a peaceful goat, bucolically munching on some grass, with nary a nefarious "getter" in sight. I bit my tongue, not as severely as I would have had to sans goat image, and silently kept my doomed ass and mouth in check. Now I'm not saying there aren't a few several a ton of things I probably need to repent for, but I'll bet my butt against damnation that the way I treated the customer isn't one of them.

So now I'm making a concerted effort to take a few minutes each day to breathe deeply, close my eyes, and conjure up peaceful images of a placid, wholly unthreatened goat; I believe my blood pressure has improved and my general regard for the world and its inhabitants has brightened. The repentance project might take a little more effort. BTW, I have gone the extra step to name, appropriately I think, my mental ungotten goat: Dander.