Category Archives: Louisville Stories

2026, article, Day Book, Louisville Stories, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, the no-scape

Daybook 2026 // Winter 2.6.26

Goat Knowing

The GOAT (The Greatest of All Time). Not the goats in question.

No one asked the question that needed to be asked. 

I suspect they thought it would sound too aggressive, or make it sound too political, or detract from the specific issue. So reasonable. So patient with the powers that be and the insistence on reasonable petition. 

That sort of mewling behavior is the most ungoatlike I’ve ever seen. I went expecting passionate, granola, dark hippies: the kind who home school their kids, grow their own kale but secretly hate it,  and are staunchly anti-vax based on three YouTube videos and a misquote from someone’s granddaddy; but what I ended up finding were sort of mainline libertarians and a few religious democrats.

Goats. I mean goats. not GOAT, which is an acronym, but we’re not talking about Ali here either, and unless you’re talking about Muhammad Ali, there is no one else in the history of sport or culture that has earned the title Greatest of All Time. Yes, we’re in Louisville and yes this Ali’s hometown. But the town hall meeting in the Southwest Branch of the library was about goats. 

We goats are not alone.

Now I know a little about goats. It was the pandemic year and Amanda wanted to borrow these four goats for a few weeks from a local woman who was 46 weeks pregnant and her goats had eaten her property down to dirt. She used the wool to create her own thread to sew some really very lovely textiles. She showed up with the goats in the back seat of a grocery getter, a mini van like the one my friend George couldn’t get stolen from the heart of Hell’s Kitchen (before Hell’s Kitchen got all gentrified, back when it had grit and teeth and even the NYPD was scared to go in after dark). Goats will eat pretty much anything, including poison ivy, which is great. But the only other thing they do with rapid frequency besides eat is shit, little tiny bullets seeds of everything they eat, so they spread poison ivy at approximately  the same rate that they eat it unless you keep up with the shit shoveling. We managed to keep them for about a week and a half before they had to go home. The four goats — Boone, Betty, Merlin, and Wally — used to live on the back porch and would stare at us through the windows, like they were watching TV. Chew, watch, and shit: like someone watching America’s Got Talent. They got out once when our housemate was taking out the garbage and didn’t close the gate completely. They stood at the end of the driveway like they were waiting on an Uber until my wife shook a coffee can of goat treats and they hustled straight back in. 

So the town hall meeting went the way you’d expect. The metro council member, Jennifer Chappell (D-15) made it clear she did not write the updated ordinance that would make it impossible for anyone to keep goats because the new ordinance increased the minimum lot size. Clearly, it was written by someone whose experience with livestock was limited to a petting zoo, and Ms. Chappell struck the perfect tone of being slightly out of her depth but focused and interested in learning more. It’s only fair; either you know goats or you don’t know goats. The learning curve isn’t too steep, but you can definitely tell you’re on a rocky incline. The Best speakers were a man from an animal rescue, which is God’s Good Work as far as I’m concerned, and a woman who grew up on a farm in Western Kentucky who knew exactly the acreage required to be considered an urban farm by the USDA. There was one speaker who spoke quite articulately about his wife’s spiritual experience with sheep, which brought to mind the only quote I know from Thunder and The Moon, a maybe not real book once referenced in the British sitcom As Time Goes By:

“I am alone with my sheep. But my sheep are not alone with me.”1

But once the guy showed up talking about emotional support cockatiels and tanks of fish, Amanda and I left to go eat dinner at the Applebee’s on Preston Highway (we had a gift card), where the waiter tried to sell us Spectrum internet before taking our order. Gotta hustle, I suppose. I almost wanted to stay, but I got the feeling no one would ask the question that needed asking, nor would they ask the necessary follow up question:

“Who wrote the ordinance amendment? And who’s goat shit in their corn flakes?”

  1. As Time Goes By. Series 5, Episode 5. 1996. ↩︎
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2025, Louisville Stories, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose

held deep in the crevices of their hands

You’ve been here before. Pause to light your pipe — today, an odd combination of Hap O’ the Wynd and Orlick Flat Cut, both wakeful and soothing as well as peppery and strongly aromatic — take a sip of coffee and breathe. Tell the dog to quit eating cat shit out of the litter box under the basement stairs. It’s never a question of an absence of language. This has not ever been the problem. If it’s anything, the problem is that there’s too many words rushing and the process is mostly catching every third and fifth word to string something like cohesive thoughts together.

Whether you’re certain or not, believe that the desk forgives you and understands. You’ve been writing on the fly, living in the moments, staying with the current. squeezing minutes into seconds into milliseconds into quantum time along a never-ending event horizon. The desk understands. It’s a rooted and solid thing, as if it grew out of the ground here centuries ago, as if the desk grew into itself and the house was simply built around it. Trust in the wisdom of heavy things. Trust in the wisdom of the air. Trust in the swirl of tobacco smoke and coffee and words and the heart of her that sleeps upstairs.

Sing, John Prine, sing of this old Kentucky home. We’ve been here before. River pebbles get shook loose by the current. After enough years, we become sand. This is the truth that old river captains, old men on the mountains, and the crones hold in the deep crevices in their hands. Jobs and lives ride currents few people bother to understand. At least you bother to try and understand.

The coffee cup is empty and the pipe bowl is full of tobacco ash. These are not permanent states of being, even in this economy. Neither is this. You’ve been here before.

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2025, essay, Louisville Stories, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose

The Porch Bee’s Lament

I realized that Porch Bee hadn’t really had any warning; how does one give a demolition notice to a carpenter bee? Should I have pinned a notice to the porch? Should I have tried to find an email address? Certified mail?

The old steps, unearthed. I’d forgotten they were painted blue.

Sometimes Porch Bee would be the first to greet me when I got home from work. Little bug would just hang by the front door, waiting. I knew a cat like that once; as a kitten it got caught up in a car engine and as a result lived with a permanent splint on one of her front paws. That cat lived with my first ex-wife and her parents when we were both in (separate) high schools. They lived in the country, in a small trailer, and my then girlfriend was highly allergic to cats. Country cats have hard lives, and that cat was no exception; but she would wait for me to come back (I was told) when I left and was always happy to see me when I showed up. While it’s difficult to tell precisely what the emotional state of a carpenter bee is, clearly it wasn’t disturbed by our comings and goings.

The front porch was added on in 2012; this was before I moved in. The hand rail on the cement steps had gotten increasingly theoretical and dangerous, and Amanda’s dad offered to have a new porch built. The idea was to let the wood season for a year and then treat it. After I moved in, I should have made sure we did that. I didn’t, and it got away from us. I’d replace a wood screw from time to time, keep them clear. Salt during winter snow didn’t help. Over the last eight or ten months, severe weather and time made the steps increasingly unsafe.

If it were just a matter of one board, I could probably manage that. I say probably because while I’ve gotten pretty decent at plumbing and I’m more comfortable with electrical work than I used to be. Wood work is… complicated. Or maybe not.

My grandpa, my mom’s dad, was a carpenter. His name was Clay Dunn. When he and my grandma moved from the house on S. Charity Street to Bantam, outside of Bethel, Ohio, he built his wood shop off the back of the garage. The other grandchildren — my brother and my three cousins — were allowed in the wood shop. I wasn’t. Sickly with weak lungs, the prevailing wisdom dictated that wood dust would kill me, as would the second hand smoke from the menthol cigarettes he smoked. Sometimes I would sneak into the wood shop when he wasn’t working. It was an organized space that smelled of wood shavings, cigarettes, with a hint of oil from the equipment. He had a wood burning stove that he would light to keep warm in the winter. But the prohibition to participate in projects, to learn anything about his world except to see the end result of his labors, was a hard line that no one crossed.

Porch Bee stopped by while I was taking down one side of the banister. He landed on a baluster I was removing a wood screw from. I realized that Porch Bee hadn’t really had any warning; how does one give a demolition notice to a carpenter bee? Should I have pinned a notice to the porch? Should I have tried to find an email address? Certified mail? Porch Bee lingered several seconds, then flew off. I thought I detected some sadness in the flight pattern.

I’d decided to try and salvage some of the wood, which meant this wasn’t just a crowbar and hammer job. I also decided to try and save the wood screws that could be saved. I started out making two piles of wood… one with pieces too far gone to keep, the other wood that could potentially be salvaged. This added to the amount of time I’d allowed to tear down the porch, but the price of lumber isn’t much improved and you never know when you will need a wood screw, right?

Getting down to the wood stair frame made me think about Grandpa. He’d once built a staircase in the home of a girl I went to school with, Nancy Hauserman. This was my 7th grade year, and once she found out the guy working on her house was my grandpa, we had something to talk about. It did and didn’t help that she was the prettiest girl in our grade, and basically a nice person. Of course, I couldn’t count on Grandpa NOT to share embarrassing stories about me, in particular the one about my not being allowed in the wood shop. I was about as mortified as a 7th grader can get, which for me meant I was unable to look her in the eye or maintain even a passable conversation. Ah, teenage hormones. What a motherfucker.

The last part of the deck frame ended up being cut with a reciprocating saw. The builder had screwed the back board into the posts before setting them, and it was almost 5 o’clock. I’d been working on deconstructing the deck since around 10 in the morning. I found myself enjoying the process. The decision to salvage the some of the wood and screws meant having to take it apart in a particular way — trying to work what I imagine was almost backwards. Amanda and I decided to leave the box around the cement stairs and use them as planters — for a season or two, anyway. And I left part of one of the rails up to work as a temporary banister until I sink a more permanent one or until we build, or have built, another porch. I also need to either trim down or dig up the unnecessary posts.

I’m probably going to go ahead and paint the steps before winter, just to brighten them up and to help protect the cement. Interestingly enough, the cement steps you see in the pictures were built on top of another set of older cements steps. I showed this to Amanda and she shrugged. “And someday, there’ll be a ziggurat here.”

Porch Bee stopped by one more time, clearly displeased with this turn of events. I was working on getting that last bit of deck framing loose. Porch Bee buzzed in a far less friendly manner. But I simply apologized, said it couldn’t be helped. One bee’s condo is another city code enforcement stooge’s code violation. Gentrifying assholes.

Now, to get rid of the wood. Sorry again, Porch Bee. I really am.

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