Goatscaping

Half of being a good farmer is knowing which animal noises are background music and which ones mean something is dying.

33 minutes old and still looking for the teat

The lawmakers who wrote Act 181 say they’re being misunderstood. The Vermonters living under it say they’re being erased. After a month of reporting, I think both of them are right. That’s the part nobody wants to talk about.

A goose has zero ability to assess risk and one hundred percent confidence in its assessment. We should all be so lucky.

Paper Wealth vs Spendable Wealth. Property value is paper wealth. Property tax is spendable wealth. When the gap between the two grows faster than your income, you’re technically getting richer and practically getting poorer at the same time. open.substack.com/pub/morgango...

I’m very mad at myself for procrastinating and failing to update my passport sooner.

Can anyone explain to me why everybody keeps reposting my ATM and voicemail code everywhere?

So I just put out a new video…it’s a deep dive into Vermont Act 181 and why rural Vermont is so angry. Please watch. I learned a lot making this video. I think you’ll learn a lot watching it. #vtpoli youtu.be/c-8QlVyFeHg

In 1950, the median house cost about 2.5 years of a single income. In 2026, it costs about 5 years of two incomes. We’ve had fifty years of polite euphemisms for what those numbers mean. open.substack.com/pub/morgango...

I was wrong…

Ran out of wet cat food tonight and now Lil Barn Cat is threatening to pack her little kitty rucksack and leave the farm. #caturday

Had a normal cup of coffee and experienced the deeply suspicious feeling of things maybe being okay

I love when goats are like “oh, we didn’t realize the fence was supposed to hold us”

Never trust Pablo Barn Cat when he shows his belly.

The last of the snow…I think.

What the hell are we even watching right now?

Still expecting

So this was a comic I posted a couple of weeks ago…

At this point, I can’t hear any story about a ghost tour and not think about this sketch… www.sevendaysvt.com/news/chitten...

From this week’s comic… open.substack.com/pub/morgango...

This week’s substack…abridged.

This is an objectively funny recruiting strategy. #burlingtonvt #burlington #vermont

Rooster: I will crow at dawn as God intended. [crows at 2:47 AM] Rooster: That was a spiritual dawn. You wouldn’t understand. I answer to a different clock.

More from this week’s comic newsletter

A chainsaw is the only tool that makes you feel simultaneously powerful and like you could ruin everything in less than a second. There is no casual chainsaw use. Every cut is a commitment.

Q: What do geese want? A: Violence. Grass. More violence. To be left alone. To never be left alone. To scream at a thing and then scream at the absence of the thing. I have studied them for eight years and I know less now than when I started.

The Northeast Kingdom is what happens when beauty and inconvenience reach a permanent truce and agree to coexist forever without resolving anything.

Nobody has ever studied the social hierarchy of a feed store parking lot but I’m telling you it exists. The trucks are arranged by something. I don’t know the rules but I know I parked in the wrong spot once and a man looked at me like I’d insulted his bloodline.

I remember when $5 at Tractor Supply got you a 5-gallon bucket. Now, $5 gets you a of bucket that could serve as a shot glass for a very depressed garden gnome. Shrinkflation is a literal demon. @tractorsupply

Before the Act 181 rally I sat on the Statehouse steps with a dairy farmer, a builder, and a logger. We talked for an hour. Didn’t agree on everything. Agreed on more than I expected. Might just release the whole thing. Would you watch/listen to that?

Went to the Act 181 rally yesterday. Stood with a few hundred people on cold steps in Montpelier. Didn’t agree with everything I heard but I’m glad I went. You learn more about a law by watching who shows up scared of it.

I’ve watched a lot of creators burn out. This essay is about why it happens and how to see it coming before it does.

I heard inhuman screeching from downstairs. I go downstairs. Cat sees me. The cat is off and running with something in its mouth. A mouse, I assumed. WRONG. No. It's a starling. I yell at cat. Cat drops bird. I wrangle cat. Then I wrangle bird. Bird outside. Everyone lived.

The longer you make content about your life, the harder it gets to just have one. New essay on what that split actually costs.

“You Can’t Pause Toast, Larry. It Loses Its Essence!” www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/b...

You clean out a drawer you’ve ignored for five years and find a receipt from a version of yourself who had very different plans.

Sometimes you feel like you’re being watched…

We should all collectively hold onto screen caps of this tweet so that it can be played like an Uno Reverse card when he finally kicks it and the cult members start clutching their pearls.

There’s a specific silence after something doesn’t work. It’s not sad exactly. It’s just the sound of the room recalibrating around the fact that you’re not who you were ten minutes ago.

There’s a particular kind of hope that arrives wearing orthopedic shoes and carrying a casserole.

It’s starting to wake up…

There should be a word for the specific sound a house makes at 4 AM when you’re the only one awake and the wood is contracting in the cold and you can’t tell if it’s the building settling or your entire life settling.

One of the most unsettling parts about earning your living by documenting your life and putting it on the internet is knowing that your worst day will outperform your best day because people prefer suffering to craft.

“The whole day felt lightly cursed, like a town hall meeting held in a former Pizza Hut.”

Cemeteries should plant food forests instead of grass. Let the dead feed the living. You want a legacy? Become a chestnut tree.

Geese should be used as home security systems. I’m not joking. They are louder than any alarm, more aggressive than any dog, and they work for grass. The fact that ADT has not explored this is a market failure.

Tapping trees and fighting geese... (Does that rhyme?) youtu.be/OiruLANr_zo