Becoming Goatfury

I’ve had a few nicknames in my life, and they’ve ranged the spectrum all the way from cruel to clever.

By the time I was wrestling in high school, I was called Gumby at first due to my flexibility. That didn’t quite stick, so my teammate Andrew (great name!) dubbed me Noodle one day when he was unable to pin me. He said it was like trying to pin a wet noodle, and the name stuck for the rest of the season.

I also never gave up back points for my entire senior season, some 25 matches including postseason (regional and state championships). I was proud of this accomplishment—I had only set out not to get pinned, but nobody had even managed to put me on my back since I could just noodle out every time.

I embraced the Noodle.

After high school, I wrestled a bit more, but moving to Richmond meant taking roughly two years away from combat sports. At the same time, I was deeply immersed in punk culture, living on my own for the first time and just generally enjoying spreading my wings a little bit.

When I got back into college, the internet was still relatively new, but they offered service through the university at a very reasonable discount for students. I forget the specifics, but since I was poor and broke, I suspect dial-up cost about $10 a month at the time. Much more than that would have seemed like a luxury during the 90s, crazy as that might seem today.

Now, I’ve made much of the early obsession with goats my friends and I had. I’ve also written about more than my fair share of goat-centric puzzles, goats helping to discover coffee, and plenty more. I even once asked the Misfits if they were fans of goat cheese.

Why goats in particular? I think it represented a strong pushback against the absurdity of the Satanic Panic. Dear reader, I’m sorry for cannibalizing so much of something I wrote earlier, but it goes straight to the heart of what I want to say today:

I experienced this era through the lens of someone who played Dungeons and Dragons, and this scene was precisely where a lot of this societal unease and paranoia landed the hardest. D&D showcased monsters and demons you could fight, and it gave you the opportunity to play a character—to envision how they would see the world, and to choose how your adventure went.

This role-playing aspect, where kids would sometimes modify their voices so they could act out what their character was saying, certainly amplified this fear. This game had monsters and demons, and the kids would talk in crazy voices like from The Exorcist? Not for my kid, thought most of America.

If you liked heavy metal music, too? Forget about it—you were going to be a target of the Satanic Panic. You might as well embrace the role of the heel, because that’s exactly how mainstream society is going to view you for the next decade or so.

Naturally, as lovers of both D&D and metal music (though our tastes were certainly more diverse), we thought this was an assault on our freedom. So dramatic!

The funny thing is that we were right, and I don’t regret embracing this mindset one bit.

When we read books in the high school library about how goats were connected to the occult, we naturally wanted to embrace the very idea of goats. We wanted to push this all the way to the edge, maybe to provoke a conversation that turned into a confrontation. We were pissed and we felt righteous.

This was a bit like the time when Jay and I, who were completely straight-edge as kids, wanted his parents to suspect he had smoked weed, so we rolled up a fake joint with oregano and hid it in his desk drawer. Why did we plant this false flag? Because we were innocent, and because fuck them for thinking otherwise.

I’m not saying our ideas were all fully thought out, mind you! We were clever but clumsy kids thinking about heady stuff for the very first times in our lives.

Anyway, the goat thing became a trope or meme with my friends and me. It certainly stuck any time we were around one another, and my love for goats as a provocative image stuck with me and spilled over into daily life from time to time.

One day, Tim decided to create an email address, using the handle firefury. I thought it was funny that Tim was obsessed with being a volunteer fireman, so I simply stole the second half of his name and goatified it. Goatfury at VCU dot org it would be.

This was a really quick quip, definitely not designed to follow me around for the next thirty years, but here I am today, and I am probably best known by the goatfury moniker, even here on Substack!