Falling in love is hard on the knees.

Well, it is.
Hard on the knees, I mean.
At my high school graduation, for example, I smiled for photos wearing that ridiculously unflattering mortar board with the tassel on the side that said "Holy fuck! I finally slept through enough classes to merit a diploma!" and beneath my red mini skirt, my knees were noticeably scabby.
Scabby due to love.
(Or, due to the reverse cowgirl position executed on cheap carpeting, which I often confuse with love. You say potato, I say french fries drenched in vinegar. That's just how I roll).

Anyhow.
This post isn't actually about that kind of love, or even about sex, for that matter.
Shocking, I know.
This post isn't about a boy.
It's not even about a girl, although there's nothing like an impending divorce to bring out your inner lesbian.

This post is about a goat.

Now, I know what you're thinking, and yes, Canada is quite progressive, but we're not there yet.

If you kissed a goat you and you liked it, you'd still better keep it in the closet.

For quite a long time, I had an intense love affair with the goat (and I hope by now you realize I am referring to this very blog, Kill the Goat).
Starting a blog made me look at my world differently.
I noticed things. I reacted to things. I thought about things.
And then I went home and wrote about those things. I found out which of my friends were "quotable", which events in my life were "blog-worthy", and which of my incendiary opinions garnered the most outraged comments. I loved seeing bits of myself reflected through the Goat. Every once in a while, I'd get it right: I'd write something that not only lit a spark of my own, but earned insightful comments from you as well, and soon that post was inspiring stories and articles that went on to become published, or gave birth to new chapters, or put the itch in my fingers to write for 17 hours straight.

Lately, however, I spank the Goat a little less often.
It isn't because I have nothing to say. In fact, now more than ever my life is bursting at the seems with juiciness that I've been keeping to myself (and by "keeping to myself", I obviously mean "drunk-dialling Robbie at 2am and yelling disjointed details to him despite the fact I've left the bar and the loud music I'm hearing is only in my head".) The point is, I haven't been telling my secrets to the Goat.

This makes Jamie sad.
(Oh god, she's referring to herself in the third person.)

But the separation has felt necessary because when I ventured a post about the wealth of adventure and excitement I've been privy to, I felt a bit inundated with mostly well-meaning people who chastised me for my forwardness, or worried about my safety, or turned me into a cautionary tale. I started to feel less like a newly liberated grown woman and more like a teenaged Goat with 53 overbearing parents. Somebody felt it important to (anonymously) tell me that my "naughty nymph blather" was boring him.


Sorrrrrrry.

So instead of asking everyone's permission to go about my life and enjoy myself, I just stopped writing. And that is a shame. Because once upon a time, this was one of my favourite hang-outs. This was the place where everybody knew my name, where the gossip was good and the martinis well-shook (and fucking dirty, just the way I like em, with 3 olives, not 2, 3).

Fair warning, Goat readers: I am reclaiming my space.
If you don't like it, you can get the hell out.
If you don't like it, you can blame Petite Anglaise.
You probably don't know her. I don't know her, either. But I read her book, after having read her blog (thoughts on this will be coming shortly to a book review site near you!). The net result is that she's made me fall in love with blogging again. Actually, she reminded me of why I loved it in the first place.
I like sharing. I like entertaining. I like documenting little snippets of life, and then re-reading them 2 years later with fresh, delighted eyes. I like meeting someone for the first time like we're old friends because they remember better than I do the day Janie was born. I like visiting other blogs to see what everyone else is up to. I like getting emails out of the blue that say "I get you." I like having hunky french men fall in love with me via my blog and then feeling the air around us sizzle when we finally meet face to face.

(Okay, that last one happened to Petite Anglaise, and not to me, but a girl can dream, right? Right? Several eligible bachelors have secretly been lurking for months just waiting to breathe some romance into my life, right?)

In summary: The goat is being rejuvenated. If I had the html skills, I'd send my site to the goat spa and get a total goat makeover, but since the only thing I can do is write, then writing is what will have to do.

I just hope these old goat knees can handle it.

Goat Hits Milestone, Celebrates with Tin Can.

Today I drank 500ml of water about 12 different times.

I sat in the sun and brought out at least 500 new freckles.

I sent about 500 thank-you texts to a boy who drove 500km to bring me presents last night.

I cranked the music up and purred with contentment a good 500 times.

I checked my crazy, impractical bathing suit at least 500 times to see if I was "boobing out", and thanks to the halter gods, I almost always was.

And right now, right this very minute, I am writing my 500th post here at Kill the Goat.

Amazing, isn't it, how the time flies?

500. Kill the Goat is an old geezer now. It should be collecting a pension and complaining to its kids that they never call anymore and watching Wheel of Fortune with the volume turned up absurdly loud.

It's amazing to me that I've stuck with it this long. It's outlasted 6 apartments, 1 husband, a dozen boyfriends and dozens more who never got that designation, thousands of bottles of whiskey, at least 9 hair colours (and that bald phase), an imaginary dog named Toby, several new year's resolutions, and what I thought was the limit of my blogging endurance.

And if I've managed to surpass my own expectations, it's only because of you guys - the people who come, who click, who read, and especially those who leave comments. I've met some incredible people, been offered some wonderful opportunities, and Kill the Goat has even played matchmaker a couple of times (with success, I might add).

I've been a bad blogger lately. I've been too busy, too sunburnt, too tired, too sore, too sticky, too full of convenient and\or unlikely excuses, but the truth is, I still get a little thrill everytime I hit PUBLISH, and an even bigger thrill each and every time someone hits the goat with a hickory stick.

This is the one place that's always home to me, no matter where I'm living, or how I'm earning money, or who I'm kissing. It's the one place that's always mine, just mine. I've told it some secrets, I've been vulnerable, I've shared elation and history and victories and heartbreak.

It's been a pleasure.

Ford Tough

Rory was my new bff about 7 seconds after I met her: we locked eyes, I smiled, she noticed my shoes. It doesn't take much.

A few months later and there's not much left to explore on the friend frontier; we've exchanged gifts and exchanged spit, we have a theme song, we have a "place" where everybody knows our name and the bartender mixes our martinis before our bums hit the stools - Mango Magic for her, Clear Skies for me (doesn't blue curacao make everything better?).

Rory and I are probably more than enough trouble just the two of us, but it's almost never just the two of us. We're a threesome.

Lucille is everything that I am not - big and black and fast, fast, fast. Lucille is Rory's truck.

Lucille is not just a vehicle, though. She gets us where we want to go - has taken us to the corner store for energy drinks, and to Jack's house for post-work debriefing, and last weekend on a 5-hour road trip. But she's also where we sit and have our chats, and where we hide our purses while we're dancing at the bar (clever, no?), and where we make our costume changes and store brownies and discover new parts of town and lose lots and lots of small change.

Lucille is where we eat chicken fingers when we suddenly realize we've just had too many martinis on empty bellies.

Lucille is where we throw our groceries when we suddenly get a craving for nachos, which we then forget about when we decide to follow a fire truck instead.

Lucille is where I sit quite comfortably in the back of the cab when Jack is riding with us, and where Luke sits rather uncomfortably (knees to chin) because whereas I am built for backseats, he is not.

Lucille is where we tell our secrets when it is raining outside.

Lucille where we've taken naughty pictures and practically overdosed on cough drops and compared ex-husbands. We've dug her out of snowbanks and gasped at how much it costs to fill her and taken her down "secret passageways" while being followed by less worthy cars.

When Lucille accidentally parked in front of a No Parking sign, I had her back. I karate-chopped that thing to the ground and stashed the evidence in my basement.

And now Lucille is putting some junk in her trunk. Her bed is piling up with boxes labelled 'kitchen' and 'linens' and 'pictures of Jamie'. Lucille is about to drive away to new and exciting horizons, and I find myself amazed at just how attached I've become and how sad I'll be to say goodbye. We've had some good times, the three of us. Lucille is some truck.

xo