Headbutt

It started with goats. The day the rain was supposed to come and wash away this hard cracked ground. 

Did you know the mother hens still know where to go and find spots in the shade, spots where leaves have dropped, spots where there is still life just beneath the surface. They know how to kick up life for their children.

The goats? They know how to jump atop benches. The bigger of the two knows how to pull a hanging sticker of the musician Maurice Ruffin from my bumper and gobble this up. They know how to lick coffee grounds after eating all the eggshells inside the compost. They know how to pull at the keys that hang from my jeans.

I want to make a living from writing. I want to find ways that I might take what I have to say and be paid to offer this to the masses. The other day I prayed and asked how I might make a living by writing.

The answer came clearly, “By writing.”

I signed up for a website today where jobs are posted. You pay forty-seven bucks in order to have a profile. Most of these jobs lead to other sites where you sign up to do more writing, like and endless journey of a snake eating its tail.

I will not say that I have been scammed, for every act is a lesson, and this life is the journey. Each turn. Every twist. You know what these sites want? Content!

What exactly is content,I wonder. Articles that will make people click. Maybe that will make people think what the writers intend them to think. And so where do I fit in? I don’t know that I have any intentions.

Maybe I should manifest the necessary content. Maybe I could google goats and learn more about the way that these guys jump and how they always want to be somewhere else and why they’re able to eat Virginia Creeper. I want to see what kind of leash I might use to lead them to my house and let them eat what I no longer want growing.

Now that would be a story. An investigative matter. One to determine whether cat’s claw, passed through the ass of a goat would still grow. Whether the goat would even eat the cat’s claw.

To prepare for my debut, I put a search in, “Why do goats ______.” Google offers me this:

Why do goats headbutt?  

Why do goats faint?  

Why do goats scream? 

Why do goats headbutt me? 

Why do goats eat everything? 

Why do goats headbutt trees?

(Actually, this sounds a bit like a Dr. Seuss poem) 

Why do goats wag their tails? 

Why do goats have beards? 

Why do goats poop pellets? 

Why do goats spit?

I wonder whether these responses were chosen solely for me based on my past searches. I wonder how they were determined. I especially like the implied sadness that comes with the question of why goats headbutt me. I imagine a preteen somewhere in Kansas whose sister never gets attacked by the same goats, who hides in the closet with a flashlight at night to ask why. 

I would rather ask children these questions than go and try to find the response offered by this search engine. 

I would like to ask the same children what has happened to the rain, why there was a short tease of ten minutes late in the morning and then nothing. I would like to work with whatever the temperature is, to have molokhia growing in full sun for months on end without rain and to have mint and sissoo spinach in the wet recesses of shade. And I would like to see the way the roots of gulf coast penstemon stretch down deep

And I would like to see the goats eat everything!