Category Archives: laughter

Do you ever want to pack it all in?  Shed these mortal coils?  Have an out of body experience?  Do you get so bored that you fantasize foreign travel, hanging out with a group of friends who won’t pester you with questions, eating a steady diet of fresh picked food, and drinking water from a mountain stream?

My inability to do that for a whole host of reasons, well, it really gets my goat.

But I think I can honestly say that when I consider having out of body experiences, when I think of packing it in, and when I contemplate shedding these mortal coils, I can’t even approach, neigh, fathom what Thomas Thwaite did.

Part of me sees the attraction.  After all, remember, I spent five years living in Switzerland.  And when you climb those mountains, your heart and soul expand.  You have what I dubbed Julie Andrews Moments where you want to sing with joy.  I can honestly say that I’d love to go back and spend some time there in those mountains.

But there are limits to how I’d like to go.  With whom I’d like to spend time.  And what I would like to wear when I get there.

For example, I do not want to imitate Thomas Thwaites.  He became a goat hung out on a mountainside.  With a herd of goats.  Eating grass.

There’s an article in the Washington Post about Thomas the Goat Man.  How he developed a prosthesis that enabled him to walk like a goat.  The challenges he faced.  The cold.  How he felt that human kind was progressing towards robotics, and he wanted to go a different way.  So he became a goat.

This video, read by a robo-caller, tells the rest of the story.  You can watch it and hear the story for yourself.  Or you can mute it, and watch a man in weird costume eat grass.  Your choice.

I can’t help wondering if the little goats used to laugh and call him names.  Did they let poor Thomas play in any goatherd games?