Matthew Maupin is a long-distance human being — a man propelled endlessly forward by some cracked cosmic metronome only he can hear. He runs not for fitness or enlightenment but because motion is the one thing that keeps the universe from collapsing inward on itself. His miles read like dispatches from a fever dream: sunrise highways, half-forgotten trails, hallucinated conversations with deer, the kind of meditative delirium only a runner with too much heart rate data can truly comprehend. When he isn’t running, he’s thinking about running. When he isn’t thinking, he’s probably tuning a guitar he bought during a moment of spiritual unrest.

Music follows him like a stray spirit. He taught himself guitar and piano the way most people learn to make toast — one day it just happened, and suddenly he was making noise that meant something. Improvised riffs in empty rooms, late-night chords ringing with that old American longing, hands moving because they must. He plays with the calm certainty of a man who knows nobody is coming to save him, so he might as well soundtrack the madness himself.

He collects baseball cards with the manic devotion of a pilgrim gathering relics from a religion that doesn’t know it’s a religion. High-grade cardboard artifacts, PSA dreams, the whole 1959 Topps odyssey — a holy quest driven by ink, nostalgia, and the slow burn of childhood memory. He has stared into the soul of a well-centered Mantle and come back changed. Those who know him whisper of the CardGoat, a creature born in auction houses and late-night scrolling sessions, a being both feared and adored.

But the real heart of the story belongs to his family. Stephanie — the axis his world tilts around. There is no audit, no run, no card, no song more central than her. The animals — the four-legged entourage who treat him with equal parts suspicion and reliance — orbit the household chaos like fuzzy satellites. They are witnesses to the madness, confidants to the quiet moments, and occasional participants in experiments that probably should’ve required IRB approval.

And then there were the goats.

For seven years, Matt and Stephanie lived the kind of pastoral fever dream people romanticize in bars but never actually commit to. Goat farmers — honest-to-god, mud-splattered goat farmers — waking up before the sun, milking, feeding, fixing fences, pulling hay from hair, and living on land that felt ancient in its own stubborn way. It was a life made from sweat and laughter and absurdity, a strange chapter where the Maupins lived freer than most people ever dare to. A dream walked all the way to the end, not just spoken about in wistful tones.

He keeps learning, keeps tinkering, keeps teaching himself new things as if knowledge were some combustible fuel that might explode if he ever stops acquiring it. His MacBook remains a traveling carnival of ideas — some brilliant, some deranged, all undeniably his. Songs, scripts, tools, apps, spreadsheets, art — half-finished, over-finished, and occasionally transcendent.

And he keeps going. Always. Running, creating, loving his people, loving his animals, living in the beautiful, ridiculous chaos he built with his own hands. Because once you’ve lived seven years with goats, you understand the truth: nothing in this world is too strange, too wild, or too sacred to be yours.