Saturday night at The Splattered Cat, Fecal Creek’s only pub.  A cathedral of bad decisions and worse lighting, the kind of place where the jukebox only plays songs that make you want to punch your own reflection.  And there he was, this tragic, bloated oracle of poor life choices, perched on a stool that groaned under the weight of his sins.  His face was a roadmap of bad nights and worse mornings, and his eyes…those bloodshot, watery orbs…were like two tiny windows into a soul that had been evicted long ago.
Though he couldn’t focus on anything worth focusing on, he clearly wanted – needed – to be heard.  The kind of want that turns saliva metallic.  He took another magnificent swallow of the piss-warm domestic, the bottle neck gleaming under the bar’s hepatitis lighting like some low-rent Excalibur, and prepared to speak.
Then came the pronouncement, delivered with the grave gravitas of a man delivering a eulogy for his own shattered existence:
“You fuck one goat in this town…one fucking goat!  And you’re a goat fucker for life.”
He slammed his fist on the bar with the righteous indignation of a man who has been wronged by both God and Yelp, to properly punctuate the brutal, immutable State of Things.
The bar collectively winced, like a single organism recoiling from the sheer weight of his unsolicited confession.  A guy in the corner coughed into his beer, trying to stifle a laugh, but it came out as a wet snort.  The bartender, a woman with man-hands that looked like she could bench-press a Harley, just shook her head and went back to wiping down the counter with a rag that had seen more horrors than a war correspondent.  It was difficult not to notice that multiple patrons had pulled their phones out and were recording this man’s absurd breakdown.  He was doomed.
His words, those grotesque, utterly indefensible words, hung in the stagnant air like a weightless turd, defying gravity, defying decorum, defying the very notion of polite society.
I couldn’t take it anymore.  The sheer pathos of the moment was too much, like watching a dog try to hump a parked car.  I, a man not unaccustomed to such theatrical declarations, but nonetheless compelled by some archaic, deeply buried instinct for human connection (or perhaps just morbid curiosity), grabbed him by the sides of his head with both hands.  My fingers, accustomed to the tactile sensuality of a well-worn keyboard or the cold, indifferent smoothness of a whiskey glass, pressed firm against his temples, forcing his gaze to meet mine.  This rather aggressive, entirely unconventional act of forced interpersonal engagement seemed to penetrate the impenetrable fog of his stupor, sparking some faint, flickering ember of attention in the depths of his rheumy eyes.  I stared, really stared, deep into those bloodshot orbs, attempting to peer into the very marrow of his soul.  I try, you understand, dear reader, not to engage in such brazen acts of public psychoanalysis too often, as it completely freaks the normies out.  But sometimes certain circumstances demand you look straight through the corneal fog to whatever flickering pilot light is still burning behind the meat.  Besides, if a man is going to drop a nuclear-grade confession about livestock intimacy, you owe him at least one moment of genuine human attention.
And there it was: the human.  Small, panicked, blinking back at me from inside the cirrhotic wreck.  One of those poor bastards who still believes apologies might reactively unhappen a thing.  I could feel it radiating off him – the brutal, unforgiving physics of our current arrangement, where every anguished moment gets timestamped, reblogged, ratio’d, and preserved in cybernetic amber for future archaeologists to gawk at.  Where a single lapse, a solitary goat-related lapse, enters the permanent record at roughly the speed of light and exits only when the heat death claims the servers.
Every mistake nowadays is over-amplified to the point of absurdity.  One error dropped into the piranha tank of the internet becomes an instant life sentence served in reposts.  Several hundred million peers convene a drumhead court-martial in thirty-seven seconds flat and hand down the verdict: Goat Fucker.  Capital G, capital F. No parole.  No statute of limitations.  One goat.  One time.  I kept staring.  He kept blinking.  Somewhere behind us the jukebox had moved on to a song about trucks and broken hearts, which felt both cruelly appropriate and cosmically indifferent.
“Alright, listen to me,” I said finally, loosening my grip but not letting go, my voice low and steady, the way you’d talk to a feral animal or a toddler holding a loaded gun. “You’re not a goat fucker because you fucked a got.  You’re a goat fucker because you can’t seem to shut the fuck up about it.  You’re out here, broadcasting your shame like it’s a goddamn TED Talk, and for what?  Sympathy? Redemption?  Look around…do you think you’re going to get any of that in a sleazy place like this?”
His eyes widened, and for a moment, I thought I’d gotten through to him.  But then, he blinked, slow and deliberate, like a cow chewing its cud, and said, “But it wasn’t even a good-looking goat.”
Jesus Christ.
I let go of his head and leaned back, suddenly exhausted.  The weight of his stupidity was like a physical thing, pressing down on me, making it hard to breathe.  I glanced around the bar, hoping for some kind of divine intervention – a lightning bolt, a sinkhole, anything to put us all out of our misery.  But no, the universe is a cruel and indifferent place, and we were all stuck here, marinating in this man’s Capra-loving trauma.  That this man was able to discern levels of attractiveness from one goat to another was not something I was capable of artfully handling this night.
“Never mind what the goat looked like.  It doesn’t matter.  Just know this: you’re not the first idiot to trip over his own dick in public.  You won’t be the last.  But here’s the part nobody tells you while they’re screenshotting your obituary: the internet doesn’t forget, but it also doesn’t give a flying fuck.  Not really.  It’s just a mirror held up to a species that loves nothing more than watching itself bleed.  You gave it blood.  Congratulations.  Now it’s bored and scrolling to the next carotid.”
His eyes slid sideways, hunting for an exit that didn’t exist.  Ever since I’d let go of his head, it had been lolling about like a busted marionette.
“So what now?” he croaked.
“Now,” I said, “you either let them pin the goat-fucker badge on your lapel for the next forty years, or you wear it ironically until the irony itself becomes the new shame, or – here’s the dark-horse option…the one that I’d choose – you fucking own it.  Walk around with a T-shirt that says ONE GOAT ONE TIME in Comic Sans.  Lean in.  Make it performance art.  Turn the scarlet letter into a brand.  Because the only thing more terrifying to a mob than a sinner is a sinner who refuses to grovel.”  Which was true.
He laughed once – a short, ugly bark that died halfway out.
“You’re insane.”
“Oh, brother…you don’t know the half of it,” I said, draining the last of my snakebite.  “But I’m not the one getting doxxed over livestock.”
He began to sob, pitifully.
“Listen…you’re not a goat fucker.”
He blinked.  Twice.  Hope flickered.
“You’re a man who fucked a goat.”
The distinction mattered.  Philosophically.  Spiritually.  Semantically.  It was the difference between identity and incident, between destiny and detour, between a life sentence and a regrettable footnote.
But before he could respond, before he could process the liberation I was offering, the bartender leaned over, still wiping the counter, and said:
“Actually, it was two goats.”
My friend’s face collapsed like a dying star.
And I realized, with the clarity of a prophet in a blackout:
Some reputations aren’t injustices.
Some reputations are earned.
And some reputations are simply the universe saying,
“My man, you need to make better choices.”
I ordered another round.  He needed it.  I needed it.  The whole bar needed it.
Because in that moment…in that sacred, stupid, tragic tableaux…we were all goat-fuckers in one way or another.  Just trying to survive our own worst decisions in a world that never forgets a damn thing.
And the night rolled on.

N.P.: “GOING PLACES” – SICK PUPPIES