Getting The Goat

/ Diane Henders

I’m on the road again this week, and one of my stops was my old stomping grounds in Calgary.  I don’t miss the city at all, but I sure have missed my wonderful friends.  We all got together for dinner, and after catching up with the last eight months of everyone’s lives the conversation turned to more general topics.

That is to say, the moral tone of the conversation plummeted like a rock pitched into a cesspool.

I was the unwitting instigator.  But really; it wasn’t my fault.  Much.

“So my friends were looking for a goat…” Jill began.

“Wait, what did you say?” I inquired.

“They were looking for a boat that was big enough to fit everybody into.”

“Oh!  I thought you said ‘goat’!”

Laughter ensued.  Then Mike, the usual shit-disturber, spoke up.  “Now every time you say ‘boat’ I’m going to think ‘goat’.”

Jill went on in the misguided hope that she might be allowed to finish her story.  “…so anyway, they wanted a boat and they were looking for a slip for it…”

The table erupted in bawdy speculation.

“A slip for the goat?  I didn’t know you could buy lingerie for goats.”

“Well, obviously it was a seductive goat if it would let all those people into it.”

“How many people can get into a goat, anyway?”

“Depends on how, um… accommodating… the goat is.”

I can’t remember whether Jill ever actually finished her story.  We were all convulsed with laughter, and the other patrons of the restaurant were eyeing us with expressions ranging from disapproval to envy.  (Or maybe it was all disapproval – I was laughing too hard to be certain.)  Oddly enough, the waiter seemed reluctant to return to our table after that.

We finally settled down, and Judy threw a pointed glance a Mike.  “You can dress him up but you can’t take him anywhere.”

Mike and I exchanged a glance at our T-shirts and jeans, and I countered, “You can’t even dress us up.”

I thought about suggesting that maybe next time Mike could throw on a sport goat over his T-shirt, but I decided it was time to put that topic out to pasture.  After all, people can only stand so many ba-a-a-ad jokes.

I parted from my friends reluctantly, with another warm and funny memory filed away.  And from now on a single word, either spoken or texted, will be capable of inducing paroxysms of laughter:  “Goat!”

Anybody else have a word or phrase that never fails to make your buddies guffaw?

P.S. I’m travelling again today so I’ll be checking in to respond to comments later in the day.  ‘Talk’ to you then!

41 thoughts on “Getting The Goat”

  1. Pingback: Well, I’ll Be Spatchcocked! | Diane Henders

  2. haha, I’ll perhaps mention a few of these jokes when I go out to feed my goats later! They love stories! I’ m always mishearing things and it makes for some funny conversations! Calgary is my hometown, I miss it and my friends I grew up with but I do love farm life in Manitoba!

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  3. Back in the day when I was younger and foolish (as opposed to just foolish now) my friends and I could often be found at Parrothead events (Jimmy Buffet fans). We would hear someone say something innocent but could be interpreted another way – go figure – and look at each other and immediately would say “that’s going on the list”. Someone would then write it down, and at the end of the weekend we’d compile all these statements, and post them out on the AOL group boards. They were hilarious, and I think a few even might be archived in old newsletters.
    I also just finished reading #12, and of course loved it, although I’m torn on the ending. Don’t get me wrong, I’m Team John all the way…but I don’t know if I like where you left it~Grrr.

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    • I thought an example this morning. I’m starting to get arthritis in my knees a bit, and knelt on the floor to scrub the shower. I thought to myself “Man, it really hurts to get on my knees like this”. THAT would have made the list back in the day! Of course when we published them, we never included attributions, so half the fun was trying to remember or figure out who said what.

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    • “The List” is brilliant, Beth – I would have loved to have been part of that! As @SRG points out, it’s remembering the good stuff that’s the problem. If I don’t write it down immediately, it’s gone forever.

      And I’m glad you enjoyed Book 12 – apologies for the ending, but you know I need to mess with your mind just a teeny bit or it wouldn’t be fun (for me, anyway). 😉

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  5. I will never get caught up with all I’ve missed! Waaaay to much to mention here, but, hubby had his heart surgery, it went well, his recuperation…not so swift. Tryin to deal with his therapy my own health took a nose dive. Exhaustion, I found out, is actually painful! Anyway, Celiac disease was part of my culprit and have now gotten that in order, I think. I’m on my way to get this last book, can’t wait to get it started. I’ll be reading again about my all time favorite characters. Ahh, there is good in the world after all!

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  6. I finished kiss and say good spy. It was touch and go if the dreaded was going to let me finish it before it ran out of battery. But I was on a train and it behaved well. I had my medical for work. Train to Edinburgh to pee in a cup and then a train home. But they were on time and comfortable.

    A fab book I tried not to second guess it and just enjoy it. Really well written you get a gold star ⭐from me and go to the top of the class.
    Just try not to do anything too drastic when you start book 13 please. Or we will send you to solitary confinement and the bottom of the class. 😼😜

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  8. Sounds like a fun evening! My sister-in-law and I generally end up breathless with laughter if we’re together more than fifteen minutes. Anything and everything sets us off. And, as you know, once you start laughing, everything else just gets funnier and funnier, and if someone comes in in the middle of it all, it’s impossible to explain just what was so hilarious 🙂

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  10. My first job was working for a large upscale department store. It was probably 1974. I made especially good friends with one coworker as we worked in the far less posh office supplies and greeting card department. She and I had gotten close enough that full sentences were unnecessary. Our normal post was behind a counter near our shared cash register which was near an escalator where people descended from upstairs where the posh women’s goods were sold. One day a woman was descending who had very dark hair in a severe jaw-length haircut that turned her head into a dark helmet, and she was wearing huge round black sunglasses that were mirrored (a very new thing) so all you saw was her very pointed nose and tight lips. I turned to my friend who was also noticing the woman on the escalator and I quietly went Z-z-z-z-z. We both started laughing so hard we had to sit on the floor behind our counter to hide from the customers. From then on, all it took for us to dissolve into giggles was for one of us to say mos-qui-to to the other and we’d both lose it again.

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    • HA! Living in the South we are plagued with mos-qui-toes all the time. Now, each time I hear one I’ll picture it with a human head (i.e. “The Fly”) with a severe jaw-line haircut, the big eyes and pointed nose (the stinger). sheesh.

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  11. I’m sure there are several but I’ll admit to two words that send me to silliness and laughter: “Max” and “brandy”. This is because of a movie my family and I love, and both inevitably conjure phrases by the same actor playing different roles in that movie: Jack Lemmon in The Great Race. We take turns volleying one-liners until we run out of them or can’t breathe, whichever comes first. Fun times.

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    • Love it! It doesn’t take much to set my family off into an ever-increasing spiral of book quotes and hilarity, either. That’s what happens when you have a family of rabid readers who all share the same twisted sense of humour!

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  12. There’s nothing more that gets my goat than when I’m in a restaurant and one of the tables is having a whale of a time with raucous laughter and what not, Diane… unless, I’m on that table and then it doesn’t matter! 😀 Somebody tutting in my direction then makes me laugh even more.
    We had an incident with the word ‘moist’ once, several years back. Oh, and we were, after all the laughing that time… moist and glowing.

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    • Bahahaha!!! ‘Moist’ is one of those fundamentally offensive words that are excruciatingly funny under the right circumstances. And we really did try to contain ourselves, but I suspect nobody was sorry to see us leave.

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  13. I’m with Karen. It depends. Which is a two-fer with some of the loons I hang with. Depends is the name of a brand of adult diapers here in the US. And saying, “I’m with (insert name of friend here, even when it’s merely an indication of agreement) when in mixed company always gets a raised eyebrow from one’s spouse when with said loons.

    Mostly it’s just fun watching an otherwise mundane conversation suddenly veer south…and then nudging it ‘WAY south…and then pushing it completely and irretrievably over the cliff.

    Not that *I’d* be involved in anything so, er, untoward…

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    • LOL! Of course not. You’ve always been a paragon of dignity and circumspection. (And there’s a phrase that never fails to make me snicker, ’cause my brain automatically thinks ‘dignity and circumcision’…)

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      • Dignity always makes me think of those funerals when some pompous jackass or a crooked politician is the guest of honor, so to speak. It’s even funnier when the ‘guest’ embodied both traits. Dignity? Yeah, right. (The trade name for at least one brand of caskets has ‘dignity’ in it somewhere, if memory serves. I’ve also seen several funeral homes that had that word somewhere in its name.) Been to too many that the term was an oxymoron. Which is another word that makes me laugh in, er, certain circumstances. Just sayin’…

        Decorum is another. Sounds like the style used by the Romans in their brothels.

        And circumcision always makes me think of a certain Mel Brooks character.

        I should probably stop here. Something about another conversation going south. Or whatever.

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  14. It really depends on which friends I’m with, it’s more often a phrase rather than a single word. In an old job, one of the girls said innocently to a caller ‘I’ll do your daughter next’ which had me in stitches and unable to breathe for a while. She was doing a security check on former staff to set passwords. But it was the way it was said.

    I still smile and laugh when I think about it. I can’t think of any others right now and I’m sticking to that for now hehe. Before I remember some of the things I have said.

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