I'm going to become a goat farmer. This is perfect for me. I have all this land that needs to be cleared, and goats clear stuff by eating everything.

My friend, Tommy, came to see me today. He is the redneck Renaissance man. Another friend said one time that if you dropped Tommy into the Sahara Desert with a tire iron and some turnip greens that he could build a city, and he could. He has three or four masters degrees as does his wife, Lisa. They do everything from throwing pots to making a hammered dulcimer from scratch to interior decorating all the rich people's houses to rebuilding the antique 35 mm film projectors at the historic cinema. Tommy has seen Jimmy Martin play! They all paint and play instruments. Their kids are amazing. One of them has played classical guitar in Paris, another has put out fires in Yosemite, and another is an architect in Chicago. Over the years (they live right down the road from me) I have gone to visit them and even in their poorest days (and they have had bad times) their home was elegance even it it was found-object elegance. Elegance and art everywhere. They light their kitchen with hot pepper Christmas lights and have their antique four poster bed in the living room. Even when they got a snake in the house and Tommy had to get out of the shower naked cause Lisa was banging on the door "There's a snake in the Brookie's room" he just went outside and got a stick bigger than the snake and held it up to snake (wrapped around the lace curtains) and the snake just crawled onto the stick, which he then carried outside. Brilliant, right?

Then there's the time years ago that Lisa was alone in the house with two of her babies and a bad man came down the road feeling in all the rural mailboxes to get the old folks' social security checks and then he saw their house way back in the trees and came up to it and tried the doors then pushed on the screens. Lisa took the babies to the bathroom and told them to be quiet and wait for Mama and then got Tommy's broken pistol (no insides to it at all), put her hands over the missing parts and held it up in the window and said, "You better get back to where you came from right now" which was very effective.

NOW they are raising goats. Tommy was in the chicken of the month club for awhile and would get a wild card (a black chick with a wild tuft of white feather on its head) with every order. (I shot my one and only film on their farm.) There was the time that their two teenage sons caught all the fireworks on fire at once on New Year's Eve. There was the time YEARS ago that Lisa bought a pig unbeknownst to Tommy and called him at band practice and said, "Tell Tommy to come home. We have a pig." So Tommy went home (this is when they lived in a nice neighborhood in town) and there was this HUGE pig. He somehow carried it up the stairs to the bathroom where there was one of those big, old-fashioned, clawed-footed deep tubs and set the pig in it for the night.

Anyway, they have goats now. They bought two and the first thing one of them did was have a baby. Tommy says the baby goat never walks anywhere. It boings everywhere. It boing boing boing boings everywhere, always searching for higher ground. It boings to the highest point always. He said they move the pen around and the goats eat everything. They never butt or bite or do anything except boing and eat. He said they swallow whole branches of shrubs with their lips first (not their teeth) and then burp it back up and chew. They have a shed and a tent. It was funny because he said that two of them had picked out a tin shed and the others sort of had to take a lean-to tarp-type thing. Can't you see them when they first divied (sp?) this up?

(Oh yeah, Tommy comes from a long line of preachers. He told me once, "You can't throw a pine cone into our family gathering without hitting a preacher.")

This is what I have to have. Hog wire. And the ability to move the fence around. A portable shelter or small shed. Some 10 percent sweet feed (horse feed). I'm going to meet the goats this weekend.

Oh yeah, and Tommy says they had a male mallard who would come INTO their house.

What do y'all think?