Codname Beardgoat

Back thirty years ago there were various people I remember seeing around campus repeatedly. No idea who they were, but they stood out.

One such fellow I remember, he had severely parted blond hair, lank and straight and dull. A sparse, scraggly, untrimmed beard. He was tall and thin, with a scrawny neck and a prominent yodeleedle adam's apple. Dark eyes sunk back into sunken hollow eye sockets. The type who wore a motheaten cardigan sweater twenty years out of style. Oh, and on his bony finger he wore a gold ring that might've looked in style for a fellow twice his age back around 1910.

I came to think of this odd duck as "Beardgoat," no doubt because of his scraggly beard. And then the heading that attached itself to this name was Codname Beardgoat. Not "Codname" as in "Codename." More like "Codname" as in "Codpiece."

And then there was something about how Beardgoat would shift into an alternate mode of reality, a "fight mode," going into combat like a stop-motion kung fu slide show, shift from still shot pose one to still shot pose two to still shot pose three, all to the sudden tune of Bachman Turner Overdrive's Roll on Down the Highway.

Thirty years later these quizzical memories of Beardgoat come drifting up in my mind. I suspect underlying the micro-life-details of many of us are intricate little webs of nonsense like this. Stream of consciousness, and one step beyond...