Entitled and clueless is no way to go through life

Another vacation missive from on the road.

I’m on the road for the remainder of the month. One week from today, I get to play a show in my hometown of Winchester, KY, the night before my 50th high school reunion! My classmates fixed this up, and I’m thrilled for the opportunity. The Disco Inferno is loaded and ready to head east Monday morning. Funchester, here I come.

The fostering journey is going well. My new kiddos have, in a short amount of time, integrated themselves into our home. The first two weeks were rough (really rough), but we’ve all come a long way. The positive changes in these children (and my own) are remarkable. I don’t pretend to know how or why the great wheel in the sky turns as it does, but I’m pretty sure that there’s a reason these two youngsters were delivered to me. It just might be a matter of my own salvation as much as theirs.

Getting the opportunity to fix your karma is huge. I’m glad that I get to pay now.

If I don’t keep running up more debt, that is.

FAFO

I’m getting ornery in my old age. It shows in my lack of patience and bluntness in dealing with bad manners, poor service, incompetence, general idiocy, and the other pleasures of modern life. I’m the wrong guy to approach with a surfeit of any of the above. Trust me.

Earlier this week, it was a FedEx delivery guy who took more time to write out an attempted delivery tag (for a package that needed a signature) and tape it over the Ring doorbell than it would have taken to just ring the doorbell. It’s all on camera, and it would be hilarious except for the fact that I paid extra for expedited delivery. When I called FedEx, they said that was a thing among some delivery drivers: they’d rather come back the next day and retrieve the signature from the tag than ring your doorbell and wait. This guy didn’t get that option because I was waiting for him the next day.

Humiliations galore.

Yesterday, I was working on the Disco Inferno (my KZ Inferno 3710T) getting it ready for my trip when a Subaru came rolling up my private lane at high speed. The car skidded to a halt beside my RV, and out came a middle-aged woman, her countenance supperated with disgust and fury, screaming at me about a goat with its head stuck in the fence.

Many of you know that I live on a small farm in the mountains a few miles outside of town, where we raise goats and llamas. Just on the other side of my eastern fence line is BLM land and a parking lot. I’ve had many odd encounters with city people from that parking lot over the decades, from shooting off firearms and fireworks (both of which are clearly prohibited) to tossing trash over the fence to trespassing to clandestine drug deals. Living right next to public land is not exactly all that it’s cracked up to be.

A few summers ago, I had a really unproductive encounter with a mountain biker and a motorcyclist over a rural issue. I was out cleaning up trash (tossed over the fence) in one of my pastures when a mountain biker came pedaling by and started yelling at me about one of the goats having its head stuck in a panel of the pasture fence (something that happens multiple times every day). I told the guy that it was nothing to worry about and that I'd get it out if the goat didn't figure it out on it's own, which they always do. We are, after all, talking about goats, which, despite having no opposable thumb, can figure a way in and a way out of just about everything.

Now that wasn't good enough for this guy, who insisted that I free the goat right now because it was in panic. That was true, but only because he, a stranger, was standing a few feet away, yelling. Domestic animals will tolerate a lot from humans that bring oats and hay, but not from those they don't know, especially yelling and agitation. Trying to extricate a nervous goat from a fence is a good way to lose a finger. I’m not for that. I told him to have a nice day, but that it was really none of his business and to move on.

I hopped on the tractor to dump the trash in the loader in my dumpster beside the road. When I got there, this guy and another guy, a 30-something adult on a kids dirt bike (in shorts and a tank top smoking a cigarette), were now sitting there, winding the goat completely up. When they saw me get off the tractor, they rolled down the hill and called me an asshole for leaving the goat in distress. I told them, again, that the goat was only in distress because of them, and the sooner they were on their way, the better it would be for the goat. After another round of "you are an asshole and we are calling the authorities, they rolled off, and just as they did, the goat calmed down and removed her head from the fence like she does all of the time.

What is the moral of this story? I know that we live in a time when everyone is an expert on everything, but it would be nice if humility—the ability to acknowledge that someone else may actually know what they are doing—was more en vogue than clueless arrogance. Also, if I were just a goat and llama farmer instead of a goat and llama farmer who once rode two-wheeled vehicles professionally, I'd really hate people on mountain bikes and adults on kid motorcycles who yell at me from the road. Maybe that's why outdoor enthusiasts frequently encounter hostility in encounters with private landowners.

Post-incident assessment. The Jamis mountain bike was kind of cool, even if the rider was a dolt, but it's really, really hard for me to take a 30-year-old man on a motorcycle made for a 9-year-old very seriously. And also, you shouldn't smoke where it's really, really dry.

Fast forward to this week and another clueless dingbat who rolled past a half-dozen no-trespassing signs to yell at me about a goat while I was in the middle of sealing exterior seams in my RV (something that you can’t stop in the middle of). I have only a finite amount of patience with rude and intrusive behavior, and this idiot hit the rev limiter. I don’t know what kind of response she was expecting, but I’m pretty sure that it was not what she ended up getting. I climbed down off the latter, wasting a bunch of silicon as it ran out the end of the tube, and gave her the look.

“Why are you here?”

“Because your goat has its head stuck in the fence out by the road. You need to do something about it.”

“Goats get their heads stuck in fences all of the time. It’s so common that the Internet is filled with memes about it. He’ll figure it out, and if he doesn’t, I’ll get to him shortly.”

“No, you’ll get to him now!”

“Do you see that driveway that you just came down over there?”

“Yes.”

“Turn your car around and go back the other way along it. Don’t stop until you get to the road, which is public property. You have until I can get to that electric cattle prod on the shed over there. If you are still here, when I get back with it, I’m going to show you how it works.”

I am as sure as I can reasonably be that this woman, who had the appearance of an arrogant, chronically pissed-off middle-aged professional who likes hiking in the hills and snobby wine, is enamored of the notion that everyone who lives out in the sticks is both MAGA and a potential threat to all of humanity. Goat abuser was probably down a bit on her list, but you go to war with the army that you have.

So she huffs and puffs, gets in her car, does a doughnut in the pasture, and races back down the lane, veering off to drive across dry grass on a blazing hot day in a hot car to get to the goat. At that point, with dogs and llamas bearing down on her (and the possibility of self-immolation in a wildfire of her own making), it was either save her from her own stupidity or watch her lose an arm, or worse. It wasn’t, in fact, the easiest decision. I took a moment to ponder the possible outcomes.

I have told all of you many times that I don’t care about what you look like, who your mommy and daddy were, how much money you have, whether you are white, black, pink, or purple, your sex, ethnicity, or anything else. I care that you are polite, respectful, helpful, honest, and good in the pocket. That’s it. If you are most of that, we are going to get along just fine. The flip side of that is that I also don’t care who you are the other way; if you are none of the above, you are, dispassionately, going to get introduced to my spirit animal.

“You can’t talk to me like that!”

“Oh yeah? Just watch me.”

Stuff like this is more common up here than it should be. A few years ago, a car came down the steep dirt road off the mountain on the BLM land east of my farm with a flat tire and brakes smoking (not an uncommon occurrence). The woman driving the car stopped in front of my house while I was in the front yard. I invited her to carefully drive her car around back by my shop and told her that I’d fix her flat for her.

So she parks the car in front of the shop, and I find out that she has no working spare. Fortunately, I happened to have an old tire on a wheel that would fit her car. I told her that she could have it. I jacked her car up in front of the shop and used an impact gun to remove the still-red-hot lug nuts. As I went to work on the second lug nut after loosening the first, the lady, who was standing way too close to begin with, reached for the hot, loose nut still on the stud.

“No! Don’t!”

I thought that she was going to smack me. Instead, she showed commendable restraint by merely unleashing a torrent of invective. Edited for brevity.

“You asshole! How dare you yell at me?”

“I’m sorry, I only yelled because it was urgent that you not touch that lug nut. It’s really hot. Second-degree burns hot. I just didn’t want you to get hurt.”

“I don’t need your help or advice. Don’t ever yell at me again, asshole.”

And with that, she got in her car, demanded that I lower the jacks, and drove off with a flat tire and a loose lug nut.

So what’s the short moral of this long tale? Well, it’s that there exists, unfortunately, a cadre of people out there who are the worst possible combination of entitled, ungrateful, and clueless. I don’t know about you, but my charity for keeping them alive is waning. The next person who shows up here and is stupid enough to reach through a farm fence with posted signs every 50 feet, electrified with a 20-mile charger, to free a goat while a pack of farm dogs and llamas bears down on them just might have to face the consequences on their own.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com