'All Grown Up'

Do you remember the day you moved out of your parents' house? Got your own pad (Do we still say that?) Most of you will readily recall that glorious day...some of you haven't experienced that particular feeling of freedom, yet. I mean, really, thirty is plenty old enough to venture out on your own, Wilber...get a life!
I recall my venture into the world at the age of seventeen years of age. Looking back, that may have been a bit premature, but hey, I have lots of stories to tell about those days. (Buy my book, Nineteen Seventy Something...blatant plug by author.) On that memorable day, I carried a cardboard box containing all my belongings from the trunk of my '69 Plymouth Roadrunner into my new party house, which had been haphazardly converted from an abandoned chicken house. The shack had three rooms, two of which were smaller than the closet in my bedroom. I dropped the box onto an ancient wrought iron bed and plopped down beside it and exhaled a satisfied smile. There I sat in a chicken coop I could call my own...I was all grown up!
This week brought back those memories as one of my own set out in search of bigger and better things. Sure, I was right there to help him along. I paid the first month's rent and helped him pack up. That was a chore, packing twelve years worth of junk and moving it from one place to another. Yes at the age of twelve we both thought it was time he set out on a new adventure.
The Rusty Goat website has sat quietly within the shadows of his parent, TexasGoat.com as a sub-domain since his conception back in 2004. The site began as a simple page containing goat jokes...just goat jokes. Back in those days, the goat business was booming with the introduction of the South African Boer goat into the United States. I, along with countless other dreamers, jumped headfirst into the Boer goat business in search of fortune. I created TexasGoat.com to market my goats and things got a little out of hand. TexasGoat.com became a number one ranked website in its niche, with thousands of goat enthusiasts flocking to the site in search of goat information. All those goat entrepreneurs found the Rusty Goat Jokes entertaining and it became one of the most visited pages on the Texas Goat site.
The Boer goat boom and a marriage both crashed about the same time somewhere around 2010. While the divorce was my doings, the crash of the goat market wasn't and to my dismay, the Texas Goat site grew quiet...much like Twitter after those forty something million folks' accounts got locked down. But I didn't have time to fret over such trivial things as a dying website. I, now a single man, had to rediscover how to live a single life. With my forties in my rearview mirror, I found myself devastated at the prospect of having to actually go out and chase women. I was old, after all! Quite sure that no woman would want me, I resolved myself to living the life of a monk in solitude. Yeah, after about six months of that, I began to reconsider my options.
I remember the Saturday night I dug the old black cowboy hat out from the top shelf in the closet. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, staring hopelessly at the crows feet around my eyes and the graying hair that remained on my head, I reluctantly plopped the hat on my head. I cocked it a little lower on my brow and forced a grin.
"I dunno," I mumbled to myself. "Pretty rusty at this sort of thing...chasing women."
"You're a fool," I told myself, "Just an old goat...a damned old rusty goat!"
And that's how it all started. I'd head out every Saturday night to the dance hall, spin a woman or ten around the dance floor, buy them a beer and sneak a kiss now and then. I'd come home and sit up till the sun rose the next morning...writing about my adventures...the Adventures of the Rusty Goat. And I'd publish them on the Rusty Goat. My stories became an instant hit with lots of folks on the internet. And I became the Rusty Goat.
A lot has changed over the years. I've pretty much given up chasing women. Let's face it, after dancing with a thousand or so...and the only women I can catch now are pretty old. The Rusty Goat website has mushroomed into a gigantic online magazine, burning up server space and bandwidth at warp speed. Hosted on some obscure server in Hong Kong, the site threatened to exceed its quota every month, forcing it into darkness until the next month. I couldn't promote it like I wanted for fear it would stumble into a black hole for eternity.
Moving a website from its home of twelve years is not a simple task and, as you might expect, is sure to create a few glitches here and there. For the past few weeks,my time has been consumed getting my boy settled into his new home. I've changed lots of lightbulbs and repaired a few leaky faucets. There are undoubtedly a few more honey do's yet to be done, but we'll get the new site fine tuned in short fashion. The great thing about the move...the Rusty Goat has lots of room to grow and there's plenty of space for everybody to hang out!
So, what began as a humble little goat joke page is now all grown up. We still call him the Rusty Goat but he no longer sits in the shadows, known as rustygoat.texasgoat.com. He has a brand new name...rustygoat.net! A full-fledged online magazine, complete with an arcade, music, trending stories, breaking news headlines, a popular weekly blog post by yours truly, and jokes...lots of jokes. Within this enormous online enterprise I call 'The Rusty Goat,' there's a page called 'Rusty Goat Jokes.' Goat jokes...it all started with a goat joke!