Ever since our ill-fated, but ultimately successful, trip to the zoo, my 12-foot-tall purple 3D-printed naked plastic statue of Buddy Hield has been really obsessed with goats. Most of his days are spent streaming YouTube videos of goats from my laptop onto the big-screen TV in my living room. I don’t even know how to stream stuff to my TV but he figured it out all by himself. He’s really smart.
So he’ll just sit there on the couch watching with rapt attention as goats (baby or adult, it doesn’t matter, he loves all goats) run across the screen doing funny things or making funny noises. Apparently there’s such a thing as “goat playlists”, which are YouTube playlists full of nothing but goat videos. So he can just sit there for hours watching goat video after goat video without even having to click the mouse or move at all. And it doesn’t seem like he cares if he sees the same video twice. Just having all those goats on the screen is enough for him. If one of the goats does something particularly funny, he’ll laugh his deep laugh and, I can’t help it, I laugh with him.
Sometimes I’ll see him somberly looking at pictures of the local zoo and that makes me really sad. I already explained to him that we can’t go back to the zoo any time soon ever since they caught us sneaking in to pet the goats. He understands but he obviously longs to be with and touch real goats again, and that breaks my heart. I just want him to have the things he wants in life because he’s been such a good friend for me.
Then, he somehow found out that there are other zoos other than just the zoo in our city. So he’s looking at pictures of these zoos and they’re really big and fancy and better than our zoo, and he figured out that we could go to one of those zoos since they’re not on the lookout for big purple statues trying to break in after hours. So he’ll just bring the laptop over to me and point at the Google map that shows where the zoo is while he babbles his weird “language” that only he understands. Then he’ll switch tabs and show me a picture of the petting zoo there, where there’s a bunch of kids on field trips feeding the happy goats.
So now I’m thinking, there’s no reason why we couldn’t make a roadtrip to go to a different zoo. Car rides aren’t very comfortable for Buddy, but I could rent a moving truck or something so he has space to move around. He deserves to be happy and he loves goats so much, I don’t think he can wait until the increased security at the local zoo is cancelled. So I’m making plans for that. It will be so fun and exciting for both me and Buddy. He’s my best friend.