This Story Was Almost About Bulls

Wow, two days late and all I have to deliver is a recycled creative writing piece. Shame on me! Oh well.

I wrote this devotional over spring break at about three in the morning with a 100+ degree fever. Apparently, while semi-intoxicated I have a penchant for run-on sentences and lack of punctuation, as well as bizarre scripture choices. Yet, I can't bring myself to edit it...

Electric Fences

Bulls are one of those things that are better enjoyed on the other side of solid electrified steel. I know this from experience.

There was a time when my grandfather owned somewhere around ten bulls. I have no idea why because bulls have only a limited number of uses. You cannot milk them, you can only kill and eat them and we were vegetarians so that made them useless. We only had like three cows on the ranch and they were off by themselves so all these bulls, which were all bull by the way, had only each other’s company. This means they had no company at all.

They were all in one pen and angry about it. At night you would hear them a quarter mile away screaming at the moon. Bulls do not moo. They scream bloodcurdling screams of death. It was a chorus of perpetual agony.

I do not blame them because I know that if I was locked in a pen with nothing but other guys and no ladies ever came to visit I would start screaming at the moon too.

Anyways, I found standing outside their pen and observing their lonesome suffering to be a source of great amusement. They would turn and look at you, then bawl at you until saliva formed froth around their lip and started to come out in streams. It was obvious that they hated you with all the hatred they could muster, but they couldn’t do anything because there was an electric fence in the way.

Touching that fence hurt. I know for sure that electric fences hurt, because when I was in kindergarten my kindergarten girlfriend came to the farm and I tried to explain to her how electric fences worked. She asked how I knew they hurt when I had never touched one. I didn’t know either. So she dared me to grab it and see. We were such a caring couple, as you have observed.

I was smarter than that, though. I knew about conduction. I knew how electricity worked. I figured that if I touched it with something else I could see if it was really hot or not. So I grabbed a rubber garden hose and put it on the fence. Then I touched the garden house. I was surprised to see that nothing happened.

She still wanted me to touch the fence, and I did not want to disappoint a lady. Besides, I knew that electricity went through things, and since it didn’t come through the rubber hose then this fence must have been dead. So, in typical “see how manly I am” fashion, I grabbed the fence with both hands. I stopped crying some time the next day.

I still regret that our relationship did not survive the perils of first grade. I imagine that today she’d have me jumping in front of trains or shooting myself with a nail gun just to see if it hurt. Regardless, I learned a valuable lesson about materials with nonconductive properties.

Come to think of it, I learned another lesson, too. No, not about showing off in front of girls, I wouldn’t that lesson for quite some time, if at all. My parents had told me not to touch that fence, and not to put anything on it. I had unquestioningly obeyed until that day, when it seemed that my five year old manhood depended on touching that fence. I had to see if it hurt or not. I had very little if anything to gain from that knowledge, yet I still had to find out. It’s the same mindset Adam had when Eve brought him the Forbidden Fruit. He knew that eating it was a bad idea, but he didn’t want to look like a wimp. There are things out there we don’t have to experience to know if they’ll hurt us or not. We don’t have to experience that pain for ourselves to know that, we can look at the examples of so many other people who have already grabbed the fence and got shocked.

But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as is fitting for saints; neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks. Ephesians 5:3-4