Many years ago when I was a just boy growing up on the ranch, a friend and I came upon a skunk caught in a trap. That little critter was so hopelessly tangled in the fence that he couldn’t move an inch, at least so I thought. Now, it’s a long story that I won’t bother to tell here, but I decided I was going to let that skunk go. I had done this before, and I knew that if I was careful, I could do it again. Call me a fool if you want to but – well, carefully and ever so slowly, I crept toward that skunk. His angry beady little eyes never left me. I got down within inches of him, and I knelt down to release him. My fingers were just closing around the trap when my ‘friend’ spoke loudly and abruptly from behind me.

“Hey, you’re never going to get him out of there!”

Well to say the least, he startled me. But what’s worse – ah, he startled the skunk! That little beast whirled and sprayed me hitting me squarely in the face and the chest. I fell back spitting, gagging, and choking! Auk! – I still remember that taste!

Well, from there, the rest is kind of a blur. I remember heading for home as fast as I could go, and stripping off my coat and my clothes all the way across the lawn and into the house. I ran straight for the shower. I scrubbed, and I scrubbed until the hot water run [ran] out, and then I scrubbed some more. I came out of that shower as rosy and pink as the sunburst nose of a child. And you know, I thought I’d done it. When I got through, I couldn’t smell a thing.

Then one day not long after that, I was at school playing some basketball with friends. We were playing hard and sweating pretty heavy. Then suddenly, one of my friends said something like this:

“Oo, you smell that? It smells like a skunk!”

Well, everyone looked around, but there was no skunk in the room – that is, except this redheaded one. His spray had got [gotten] in my hair, and for months after that whenever I got hot and sweaty, I would smell like a skunk.

Well, my dear friends, I’m here to tell you that that experience and others taught me one of the most fundamental lessons of mortal life: When you keep company with skunks, you stink!

Now, that is not the end of the story. What has this got [gotten] to do with anything? – Well, just this: What are you keeping company with? Now think about it. Are you surrounding yourself with influences that stink? The music we listen to, the books we read, and the stuff we bring into our world will either make us happy, or they will leave us with the depressing stench of a fallen world. Remember, you can no more be happy surrounded by filth than you can smell like roses when playing with skunks!