TIFU by Boiling a Goat’s Head in our swanky kitchen.

The headline will make you think I’m a Satanist, but I have a perfectly plausible explanation. This was from the Spring of 2022. Stay with me here. It started with my buddy Dan who is an old friend and who kinda-sorta got stuck here during the pandemic (He lives in Hong Kong) and now live in my guest house (It's a long story) Anywho, Dan is an expert arborist whose affinity for cacti and succulents coalesced with our need for low water xeriscape, and low cost (read FREE) landscaping/gardening service. (Dan is in my legendary r/trees post “Dan With Pygmy”)

Now the FU: Dan has created little vignettes in the cactus garden, some are rocks and branches or brass lizards there are also quite a few bones: bleached old steer heads, a deer jaw or antlers. So occasionally one of us or my wife will find a bone in the local state park and bring it home to go in the yard.

Today was different. Dan came back in our patinaed old red truck as I was leaving. As I walked up to the truck, my dog Larry starts going apeshit. Dan says “Look what I found in a dumpsite”(Dan is a notorious scrounger). Lo and behold, the severed head of an adult goat, horns, ears, eyeballs, and all, oh and was it meat locker fresh. Whoever did this, is still digesting the little fella. There was talk a neatly folded hide but couldn’t bring himself up to the gnarly task of bagging the bloody thing.  

Most regular guys would be horrified if one of their roomates brought home a goat’s head, but I’m not going to lie, I thought it was awesome. Now what to do?  Check YouTube!  After a couple of perfunctory glances on how to clean a fresh animal skull, we went shopping, with goat head still in the bed of the truck, and continually enthralling the dogs. We acquired a giant cheap ass metal pot from Goodwill, and cleaned out the local CVS of hydrogen peroxide.  

My wife goes to bed early, she knew about the goat’s head and had been surprisingly tranquil about it, for a girly girl, she has a herpetologist’s heart. Because the tolerant an naïve thing didn’t ask us how we were going to clean it, we felt, we didn’t need to tell her. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

In the lush expanse of our marble counter and high-quality appliances, we started boiling it. We threw in a half a cup of Oxyclean to help the process along, (thanks DahlmerGuy23@YouTube!) Things were going pretty well; the dogs were getting more and more agitated. My Parson’s Russel, Wally was making novel dolphin-like sounds I’d never heard before. Larry our 100-pound mutt was pacing nervously in and out of the kitchen. Good new smells were afoot, the room was heavy with predation and blood lust. 

That’s how it smelled to the dogs. 

But to everyone else without a canine’s olfactory endowment, it smelled like a Chinese tallow rendering plant with notes of vomit, shit and a hint of lamb. 

Looking into the boiling pot, trying not to breath, the humanlike short black hair was most disturbing, until we pulled the well-done skin away from the skull, exposing round eyes balls looking up as us asking “why why?” Perhaps due to the Oxyclean, the whole messed boiled over, covering too many surfaces for me to list here. We decided it would be better to keep changing the water as the stench grew worse and worse. We poured the first batch of goat head soup directly into the sewage cleanout. It was impossible not to wretch, carrying that huge bubbling cauldron of foul what-the-fuck. 

At this point my wife unexpectantly walks into the kitchen (she goes to bed early). The look she gave me was the look that any successfully married man spends all of his time trying to avoid. “What the fuck! The house stinks!” I should add at this point that my wife hates lamb as in I can’t even eat or order lamb when I’m with her. It’s real trauma stuff from her childhood on a ranch (not Silence of The Lambs shit, but adjacent) And nothing smells more like lamb than the boiling head of a dead ritual goat found in a random empty lot. You may ask “How does Flint get lamb?” (which I enjoy) Well, I’ve taken to sneaking out to have “lamb dates” with Dan (who carries a jar of mint jelly at all times).

 We’re still cleaning out the kitchen and spraying Febreze and other shit to help get rid of the stench, for some reason, the Rosemary and Thyme Yankee Candle seemed apropos. My wife is texting me, afraid to venture into the kitchen, I’ve been texting her reassurances. Ironically, I do almost all the cooking and the swanky kitchen is my mancave (along with my real mancave) 

The lamb aversion just wasn’t thought out. 

The goat head is now surprisingly clean, with all flesh, hair, and brain removed, and soaking calmly in a hydrogen peroxide solution. Thanks, BuffaloBill628 on YouTube.

TL/DR We Stank up the house or Author buries hidden satanic message in boiled goat skull

If this gets any traction I will post photos.