Neanderpundit

When I was a kid, I remember seeing Il Trovatore on some public channel, and they had the anvils wired electrically or some such thing so that when the guys hit the anvil sparks flew out. I thought it was the coolest damned thing there was.

I got the idea, hey, why couldn’t I do the same kind of thing? Turns out I could

Remember Stallion Caps? the little round self adhesive caps that certain kinds of capguns used? well, I had a big handful of them, and i loved using them. Beat ’em with rocks, lay ’em on your skin and hit ’em with a ruler, I thought they rocked. SO I thought nothing of it, when, in the middle of a roof construction job I’d put a whole bag of them on random roofing nails.

Dad was re-roofing the house, see, and since he had a day job, he was doing it a little at a time, at night. Turned out to be a big pain in the ass, but what the hell. Anyway, one night, as it’s getting darker, he asks me for more nails. I climb up the ladder with the box, whch he puts in his apron, and immeditatley grabs one of the “modified” nails. He takes one swing, the cap pops, a little yellowish flame jets out from under the hammer, and he grabs me by the straps of my bib overalls, and smacks my ass in midair.

hey, i thought it was cool.

Dad, busy with the roof, was less than amused. Imagine that.

There’s a history of fencing and electrification in our family, and the earliest example of this is my grandfather’s prize bull.

This big mean bastard would break out of anything, and if the SOB started feeding in Gramma’s vegetable patch, you can bet your ass that someone was gonna get an asswhipping.

Now, gramps wasn’t adverse to asswhippings, in fact he delivered them with a sort of a flair that you don’t see today- when MY father was of such an age, the asswhippings consisted of a couple of strands of barbed wire- dad’s back, all his life, looked like raw burger meat, having been flayed and healed badly over and over. By my time, it was usually the old man’s cane, a bamboo thing that hurt badly enough that you wished it were barbedwire.
No, Gramps had no problem delivering asswhippings, but I suspect he was getting his own asswhipping, figuratively, as the bull had already worked it’s way through a whole goddamned row of leaf lettuce. Gramma was pissed.

SO gramps bought a fence charger. We strung two lengths of wire, eighteen inches apart, one at the top of the existing board fence.

We tied rags onto the wire at regular intervals so the bull knew it was there. Couple times it got hit, but it was still working out a way, and we could sense it. Finally, one day, we SAW the sonofabitch life up it’s hoof, and snap first one wire then the other. And walk on through.

SO the old man got a mason jar of sorghum molasses, and soaked two ears of dried field corn in it. They soaked there a week, until the ears swelled up and the kernels were nearly popping off.

Gramps tied those ears to the wires with red shop rags, and we sit back and wait.

The bull, having just been carefully herded back into the pen, waits until we’re out of sight, and wanders up to the wire. We see it pick up a hoof to try to snap the wire, and then it spots the corn.

Now, a bull has a tongue that will put even that freak of nature Vman to shame, a couple of feet of sinuous flesh long enough to clean it’s nose or give itself a reacharound. This big bastard slips that tongue out and wraps it around that ear, and gives it a big old lick. It draws back (gramps has the charger unplugged)and smacks it’s lips, and then wraps that tongue around the ear a couple of times. Gramps turns the charger on ‘steady’ (the setting that keeps it on all the time) and the bull opens it’s eues so large you can see substantially more white than dark; then it lets go and the tongue hangs lolling out of the mouth like a big limp dick, and it says “muaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhrrrrr”

deep breath “MMOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHRRER” and kept doing that for an hour.

From that momenht on, the bull, though still mean as shit, would stop in it’s tracks and piss itself if you pulled a red rag out of your pocket.

Nice, too, because there was a nice big apple tree in the middle of that field.