Crutching

By late morning the sun’s scorching rays glare straight down on everything. The birds, so boisterous when the blindness of night began fading into the daylight, are nowhere to be seen or heard. A small goanna lizard slowly walks across the gravel drive that never needs to yield to any weeds with the pioneering spirit. The mountains in the distance wiggle with the hot waves of air rising from the frying pan.

As the day’s laziness sets in, down the road, further than one would care to walk on this day, a group of station workers are busy working on lambs. It’s crutching season, and “only mad dogs and Englishmen work in the midday sun.” Today they are crutching.

Crutching is a yearly maintenance activity that sheep need, which greatly facilitates the ease and value of the most important season which follows after a brief rest: shearing season. Genetically bred far beyond the ability of being self-maintaining, sheep need crutching, which is mostly about trimming areas where the wool can grow to be detrimental to a sheep’s health. Sheep are a lot like people.

On this day, under the shade of a gum tree, lambs are getting their first taste of ovine maintentance. On an apparatus that is best described as the complete opposite of a merry-go-round, lambs revolve around five stations where something painful, but necessary, is performed at each stop.

Castration
Ear marking
Ear tagging (the other ear)
Detailing
Disinfectant

The Marqui De Sadd would be hysterically delighted over this contraption. Upon watching this abomination of pedophilic molestation go on for a while, one begins to ponder the twisted meanings of being so totally out of control to things being done to us. What feelings are emanating from this spectacle? What permanent scars are being inflicted into each poor lamb’s mind? What happens to the ego of the people performing these diabolical acts at each station?

Just like a merry-go-round, don’t all amusement rides involve strapping us in and taking us somewhere we ordinarily wouldn’t venture? …to our delight? How much of this is about past lives? Animal past lives? Isn’t being out of control something that happens during SEX, too??

To take this one step further, what type of merry-go-round can I imagine that I might let someone stick me in for my personal pleasure? Dare I to enter this haunted house? Wouldn’t adults want something sexual?

By all means, strap me into a cradle and spin me to my first station. Have a world class model in a bikini rip my clothes off and strip me naked. Spin me to the next station. Here, a topless beauty quickly shaves every hair off my body, then on I spin me to the next station. Now a naked maiden electrifies my entire body with a cattle prod that also gushes out lubricant. On to the next station. A nude goddess mounts herself on top of me to bring me to an uncontrollable orgasm… Is there any other kind?

Is this about submission? Am I sick? Do we desire it if we haven’t had an initial bad experience with it?

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in”>What stations would you design into your merry-go-round? Or do you have memories that keep you from thinking in this direction? Would yours resemble a doctor’s office? Perhaps a beauty parlor? Maybe a dentist’s chair? How about a manicure?

Of course, remember to make the last station the stage where they hand your empty wallet back to you and send you back out into the hot, scorching day. Again. As always.