I can count on two fingers how many times I’ve played Golf. I don’t know anything about Golf. Every year we have an auction at work and I win Golf balls. A friend once told me that he thought Golf was as boring as watching planes land. I like to watch planes land. But I don’t like Golf. So you won’t find me using Golf analogies. I couldn’t do it without being cliché. I’d have to use the word par. Everyone knows what par is. Actually par is pretty good, I know that much, but to me it would mean average, or mediocre, to shoot par in my life. So, you can tell I’m not a Golfer. If someone used a less cliché Golf analogy, something without par, I wouldn’t understand it, so I certainly can’t come up with one. Why I ever think of using Golf analogies, I can’t fathom. But I do. It’s probably all those damned Golf balls.

So now that you’ve read this, without looking back up to the top of it, here’s my question: How many times have I played Golf?

Now some poetry.  I haven't written a poem in a couple of years.  I put a smiley face in this one.  That might be a first.

She is genderless, my genius

Smart

Talented

Pretty J

Relaxed

Free

Introverted

But easy

She looks you in the eye

Fearlessly

I want her

To come out

Since you asked (didn't you?), below are my entries in the first round of NYC Midnight's flash fiction contest.  The first entry, Nothing Here But Us Goats, was my romance genre entry that had to have a smart phone in it, for which I earned 13th place out of 24 and 3 points.  The second was my near come from behind win Up Above Juniper Street, an open genre piece that had to have something to do with a protest, which came in 3rd our of 24 for 20 points, just shy of the 5th place overall that I would have needed to continue to round 2.

Nobody Here But Us Goats

At first Sarah would head back down into the valley every couple of weeks to recharge her phone, and to look for an app that would translate Goat to English.  “There has to be an app for this," she’d say.  “There’s an app for everything."  But she would always return disappointed, both with her smart phone and with her own kind, to the cliff where she and Bahry had made a home, alone as outcasts from their respective communities. 

You see it more the other way, where the man is the human and that goat is the female, so this was unusual. 

When Sarah first hiked up into the mountains after yet another failed relationship, she swore then that she was done with men, and that she would never return.  One after another they would lead her to believe that they loved her when they only really loved themselves.  Her parents were no help.  “Why don’t you just marry Josh.  Why don’t you just marry Stephen.  He’s perfectly fine, what are you looking for?" they’d ask. 

“He left me!" she’d yell back to them.  “They all left me." 

“Well, what’s wrong with you?" her mother would say.  Her own mother. 

But she had a dream then, a dream to live in the mountains just like it was in the Sound of Music.  The Austrian’s with their lederhosen would dance and fall in love and then the goats would dance and fall in love and have little goat babies.  She loved that scene. 

So she left humans and went on into the mountains to live with goats. 

What she hadn’t anticipated was that a good goat was also hard to find.  The first herd of goats she encountered outright rejected her.  The second herd had heard, pardon the pun, but were still quite weary.  She climbed higher up, then, partly to prove to them that she could, and partly because she was following a highland herd that had been friendly enough.  They tolerated her anyway, but they didn’t exactly welcome her, except for Bahry.  He was different.  He had always been the one pulling up the rear until she had come along, and so he related to her and also welcomed her inadequacy. 

Then one day he was faced with a choice.  He stayed behind with her when the rest of the herd ascended a cliff that was just too difficult for Sarah.  He abandoned his herd for her,and she would always love him for that. He was loyal, like no man had ever been.  Almost like a pet.   Bahry taught her to climb to the best of her abilities, and they soon found themselves living on a cliff that was easy enough for her, and still offered the requisite protection from the Cats.  He brought her food she could eat, berries, and nuts, carried in his cheeks, and sometimes some animal remains, even though it grossed him out, and other junk he would find on the path that he thought she might like, human garbage and the like, a cigarette butt, a McDonalds wrapper, an old beer can.  He was thoughtful enough to try to make her feel at home on their cliff. 

She would look into his eyes when they were alone and his large black pupils would seem to flow and wiggle like they were water worlds somewhere out in space, a deep, dark and soothing place where they could live in peace. Lost in his eyes she felt like she really knew what he was thinking,that he loved her.  She couldn’t stop smiling.  She had never been so happy.  And then they would kiss.  “Baahhh,” he would say. 

Bahry was soon shunned by his brothers and sisters and cousins, and half brothers and half sisters and half cousins for his relationship with the human.  And when Sarah first told her family about Bahry, they said she was crazy too.  But Bahry and Sarah didn’t care.  They loved each other enough to put aside all of their differences.  He was a most noble and helpful mate, and more attentive than any she had ever had. He did more for her than any good goat could be expected to do.  And as time went on, her visits to the valley became less frequent, until she stopped going altogether.  She gave up on anyone ever making an app for her, forgot all about her family and presumed they had forgotten about her.  She never even told them about their grandchildren.

She had a long married life that spanned 15 years until Bahry’s death, of old age, at 17.  He died in the arms of his still beautiful cliff dwelling busty forty year old, surrounded by their Satyr children, all twenty-five of them.  She outlived him, as humans often outlive goats, though she had almost died many times during childbirth.  Fortunately, her goatchildren had came out small, though often in quick succession and their hoofs were soft.  Bahry was always by her side through it all, cheek to cheek whispering, “baaah.”  She returned the favor in his final days, laying by him, still cheek to cheek, sweetly singing, “such a good goat you are.”

When he died she wailed.  The kids were all there, and they were surprised to hear her finally speak goat.

They were their own herd, and she was not alone, though they were all much more adept at cliffclimbing than their mother would ever be. They were self sufficient, but they wouldn’t abandon her, and they could translate, better than any app could hope to do.  In the end, all of the goats of the mountainside accepted Sarah, and her half breed children.  And though she briefly considered returning to a life in the valley among the humans, she had no desire for it.  She was home.  

Up Above Juniper Street

It just figured that I would go to the wrong protest.  There were two on opposite sides of town on the same day.  So I kept asking,"where's the protest?" and got directed further and further uptown.  Soon I found myself with my "End water fluoridation" placard around my neck, the odd man out among a group of green men and women advocating against fossil fuels.  Literally a great many of them were actually green.  You'd think it was a green Halloween costume party.  And many of those who weren't actually green were wearing other kinds of costumes,windmills, and waterfalls, and there was a group of four holding up a solar panel, that was connected to a monitor which scrolled messages like, "StopGas."

"Are you at the wrong protest?" a passerby asked me, laughing. 

"Yes," I said.

"Oh, you are?" she said, as if she hadn't been sure of herself.  She took a closer look at my placard. 

"When's the water fluoridation protest?"

"Do you mean where?" I said.

"No, I mean, 'when'. I might like to go to that one too."

I told the serial protester that she and I were missing it.  "That's why I dressed up this way today," I said.  "  But I'm not sure exactly where it is."

"Well," she said, "we throw a nice protest.  I think you'll be happy here."

Maybe there's a reason for everything, I thought.  I'd never actually been to a protest before.  I had gotten interested in Fluoride after I found out I had an underactive thyroid.  I was reading about it and found that Fluoride inhibits the thyroid.  And not only that, but green tea has naturally occurring levels of Fluoride.  And I had been drinking five cups of green tea, green again, for years, because everyone told me it was so healthy, and to add insult, I brewed it in fluoridated water. It made me mad.

But I suppose I breath in pollution too, and that can't be good.   So what the hell.  Maybe I could be happy here, I thought.

"Who are we actually protesting," I asked the lady.

"Well we thought we would protest Exxon-Mobile, but they don't have offices here.  So we were going to protest at city hall, but they wouldn't give us a permit.  So we're just up here, cause its where we're allowed.  We have to stay above Juniper street."

"These protests are hard to find."

"I know, right?" she said.  

I thought I would ask her what she thought the protest could do way up here where no one cared, nor could find us, unless they happened to be looking for a different protest, but she seemed happy.  And I didn't want to ruin that.

I said, "see you later," to the lady, without exchanging phone numbers, and mingled.  I was able to borrow a green sharpie from a green dude, who had used it to cover his face.  He would have to go to work on Monday, still green, because those sharpies don't wash off easily.  I used it to write, "...and gas" at the end of my sign, after "End water fluoridation," said,"thanks," and sauntered away to meander among this rather docile crowd.  At some point they brought in sandwiches and bottled spring water, which doesn't have any added fluoride.  I ate a sandwich and drank a water, and struck up a conversation with the solar panel group about how happy I was to have natural spring water. 

"You know about plastics, right?" one said.

"No, what?" I asked.

"Chemicals," another said.

"And petroleum in the plastic," another said.

"Then why are we drinking it?" I asked.

"It's free," they said.

I soon bored of all this and my placard was getting heavy.  But I stayed because I had made an investment and I was still looking for a reason for being there.  I secretly hoped that someone would get radical and force us into a confrontation with the police.  But there were no police. 

About four o-clock the sun was casting a nice golden hue on things, and I began to realize that I had wasted my day.  I desperately wanted more, a cosmic purpose, if there was one for everything, my hypothyroidism, coming to the wrong protest.  There had to be some meaning in it.  Maybe, somewhere here was the woman I would marry.  Maybe I would find that "Stopping Gas" was the bigger cause I was really destined to be into.  But mostly people just stood around, and I really couldn't get too motivated.  The only exciting part of the day happened just as I was wondering when this thing was going to end.  The solar panel people electrocuted themselves and an ambulance was called.  A crowd huddled around and watched the four of them loaded on stretchers into one ambulance.  No one talked to them.  Nobody went with them.  The possibility occurred to me no one here knew each other.  After the ambulance left,the rest of the protesters left.  I was the last one.  I outlasted them all. 

I tried to find meaning in that.  But there wasn't any.