NOW They Tell Me...

Have you ever had one of those days? You know, one of those days where everything you thought you knew about the world was turned upside down, inside out, and then kicked in the shins. Hard. Well, yesterday was one of those days.

It came as I was doing a little research for the greatest contribution to world literature to come from a Melville since Moby Dick. You know, what’s known as "field studies" - where I visited my subjects in their natural setting to observe them as unobtrusively as a human in an evil hoard of evil goats can be and took notes on everything from how they prepare their food to their initiation ceremonies to their mating rituals. And let me tell you, contrary to popular belief, watching goats figure out how to mate is not how you want to spend your Thursday afternoon.

So I’m observing these evil goats, trying my best to blend into the background so that the goats go about their daily evil business as naturally as possible - to get that streak of authenticity for my story. One of them comes up to me. It appears that the invisible cloak that dude in Sandaga sold me doesn’t, in fact, make you invisible. As an invisible observer, this is exactly what you don’t want to happen - because if the goats see me they start acting differently. So not only am I crushed by the fact that the guy in Sandaga told me it was a genuine invisible cloak (I believed him too! After all I couldn’t see the cloak on the coat hanger - and that’s what invisible means right?), but I start to get supremely confused when the goat starts talking to me. At first I just chalk my confusion up to the Larium I’m taking so I don’t get the malaria. But gradually, the goat starts making sense.

"What are you doing here?" he asked me.
"Just chilling," I responded.
He noticed my notepad. "Whatcha writing?"
"Oh just doing some research for my goat story."
"Goat story? That so eh?"
"Yeah, that’s so." I respond, irritated.
"How’s it coming along?" he asked.
"Splendidly," I said (note - I have never use the word ‘splendidly’ before this very moment).
"Even though you’re watching sheep?"

I was stunned. Sheep? I thought this was an evil herd of evil goats. They looked like every other evil goat I had ever seen in Dakar.

"Every other goat you see in Dakar must just be a sheep too," he said. It was then that I realized that I was thinking out loud.

"A sheep?" I said. "So I’ve been mis-naming these goats the whole time? They’re not really goats? They’re just lame old sheep?"
"Hey man, watch who you calling lame!" The sheep shouts. "You’re the one with the unhealthy obsession with goats, sitting here on a perfectly good Thursday afternoon watching sheep eat cardboard!"

I barely heard a word he said. The world was spinning. All this time I thought that the animals I was passing everyday on my way to school were goats, and this one is telling me they’re sheep? Then what have I been obsessing over for the past four months?

If goats are no longer goats, but sheep, then am I really who I think I am? Am I really Jake, or am I some kid by the name of Chad or Louis? Is up really up or is it now down? And if so does that make down up? And if gravity makes things go from up to down, then have I been heading the wrong way for my life? I had to sit down before gravity realized that it was heading the wrong way and I flew up, up and away.

I was getting dizzy. I began to doubt everything else (I thought) I knew. Was the American Declaration of Independence really written in 1776? Does a spoonful of sugar really make the medicine go down? Is "embouteillage" really French for "bottleneck?" Does Meatloaf really say what he won’t do for love in the epic "I Would do Anything for Love (but I Won’t Do That)"???

"Seriously man, what were you thinking?" the sheep said, suddenly.

That was a good question. What was I thinking? I mean I had seen goats in Africa, certainly. Those 10 animals that the sept places driver threw up on top of our car with the four other suitcases and the bike really were goats. Of that I was sure. They looked like goats from back home in American petting zoos. And there were others too, who climbed on walls precariously, who climbed on cliffs of the Great African Escaprment, who made goat cheese. And they ate cardboard.

But so did these animals…whatever they were. I was sure I had seen them eating from a pile of garbage, and to my (former) knowledge - goats were the only animals that ate cardboard, that must have been where it came from.

"Come on man, you start thinking like that, then every 3rd grader that tries to eat a piece of paper to impress the girl sitting across from him is a goat," my sheep friend said, sleepily. It was kind of annoying how I kept thinking out loud without meaning to. But he did have a point.

"OK Mr. Sheep, if you’re not, in fact a goat like I thought you were, how can I tell next time? I need a foolproof way of avoiding sheep/goat confusion."

"On sheep, everything goes down towards the ground: hair, ears, eyes, faces, horns, tail. On a goat, everything goes the opposite way, up towards the sky. Sheep have curly horns, goats have straight horns. That and goats are smaller. And they possess a superior intellect. And they are evil."

"That’s quite a repertoire. I can’t believe I never noticed it before," I said. "But if sheep aren’t evil, what are they?" I asked.

"We’re what we like to call morally ambiguous," he said.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"It means were too scared to pick a side in the battle between good or evil. We don’t want to be on the losing side."
"Sounds pretty cowardly to me," I said.
"We prefer the term courageously challenged," he said.

Whatever, I thought. They’re all goats to me.

"I heard that!" he said.

Man, I really, really have to stop doing that.

Love,
Jake

PS - for your learning pleasure, I have included a handy-dandy guide for differentiating the goat-sheep difference. Notice that my goat friend was right, and in fact things on goats do go up towards the sky, in marked contrast to their evil nature. Ironic isn’t it?

Sheep:

Baby Goat: