Moobert

Moobert was having a hard time keeping focused.
Moobert was a cow.
Well, he wasn't really a cow,
but he wasn't exactly a bull, either.
That was one of those things that Moobert was supposed to accept.
That was one of those things that Moobert had been assured that he could accept
if he could only stay in focus.
Staying in focus supposedly would have helped Moobert accept all sorts of things,
like standing outside in the cold rain all night long trying to ignore coyotes,
or having silly tags stuck to his ears and his skin seared with red hot pokers,
or being fed all sorts of weird chemicals,
only so some day he could be taken away and chopped to bits.

Lord knows,
Moobert had tried.
He had chanted the sacred mantra for hours on end,
both forwards and backwards,
and he had listened to the words of the Old Wise One,
telling him the futility of even trying to be anything more than what he had been destined to be,
and that was a cow.
But one thought kept coming back to Moobert.
One thought would not go away.
One thought kept Moobert out of focus,
and that one thought was:
"This life is insane!"

And that thought kept at Moobert,
until one day,
right in the middle of a moo,
right when Moobert should have been focusing on his eternal oneness with all
instead of even noticing that the steadily falling sleet had no intentions of ever turning to snow,
Moobert said,
"The hell with this!"
And Moobert walked out the gate and across the grate that hadn't fooled anybody,
and he headed down the road into town.

It was there that Moobert got a job working in a factory
that made implosion devices for nuclear bombs.
Well, yeah, of course they knew he was a cow,
but they didn't care as long as he was willing to work twelve hours a day for minimum wage,
which was hardly enough to pay the rent.
Well, it was enough when he added in his evening job down at Bob's Burger World,
which also gave him enough extra to afford basic cable.
He wasn't home enough to have gotten his money's worth
out of any of the premium channels, anyway.

Day in, day out,
pretty much seven days a week;
that's what Moobert did for the rest of his life,
right up to the day he died.

Sure, Moobert could've retired
if he'd only made it another fifteen years,
and maybe then he could've spent the rest of his life off in some field somewhere,
but cows don't live nearly that long.