The agony of the first time I killed will forever provide sound bites to my most gloriously maddening nightmares. The whining and hissing screams that seemingly wouldn’t stop. Looking back now I wish I hadn’t ever touched a weapon. Such moments can really serve to define you when you’re in an impressionable state of being.

And now you see, well, the butterfly flapped her wings in Detroit and years later a man in Florida…

So here I sit, desperate in my loneliness, a superhero whose cape is riddled with holes, smoking marijuana out of a pipe fashioned from a Dr.Pepper can, imagining who I could be now…if only I had pretended to be someone else then. 

But I didn’t. Truth is, I enjoyed doing battle with monsters. Still do. And I enjoyed staring into the abyss. And it is into that unfathomable void that I first saw my dragon.

The fire breathing sort that flare their nostrils and spew forth years and years of regrets. The culmination of which results in my black and charred youth. Followed by my singed and seared future.

My dragon was, and still is, the sinner sitting upon my shoulder. Tempting and taunting me. To do the right thing. Which according to many is actually the wrong thing. But according to what I want to do, is indeed the right thing. I don’t require much convincing anymore from the scaly green overgrown lizard.  But it doesn’t stop her from offering advice. 

We don’t really want to do the ‘right’ things do we? (Humans) Don’t we really want to do all the wrong things? Don’t we want to skip school and snort cocaine and steal money and punch the faces of those that annoy us? Maybe even drive a blade into their throats.

You don’t? Then you’ve been brainwashed.

By effective parents perhaps. That’s their job.

By Religion. That’s its job.

Not by society. If you really listen you will hear society demanding anarchy. Like the scorpion crossing the river on the frogs back…It’s our nature.

My Dragon molded me back then. Now she just watches over me…making sure some do-gooder doesn’t get their hooks in and convert me. Every once in a while tightening her grip around my throat, cutting off my oxygen flow. Reminding me of glory.

Tightening the muscles of my fist as I grip my manhood and deliver myself a happy ending into a dirty sock while I recite passages from Juliette or Vice Amply Rewarded. 

My Dragon is my Dragon and she devours me senseless every chance she gets. And I love her.

And I love me! 

  When I was eleven I started noticing the number eleven. Or is it more accurate to report that the number eleven starting noticing me? Hunter or hunted, haunted or spiritually sought after…I may never know. Or may I? Or do I? Or did I?

In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t ever pulled a trigger. But who can deny proper usage of a father’s timely gift. Especially when you don’t really know the father. You know of him. You’ve heard his nicknames muttered daily. ****. Son of a bitch. You know he is a source of great discomfort to your mother. Sometimes at night when you’re parked in front of the television watching Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley you can see her out of the corner of your eye, flexing the deformed fingers of her right hand. The hand she used to create art with. The hand she used to place on your forehead when you complained of a bellyache in an effort to avoid going to school. The hand that her husband, your father, bent backward until the fingers popped and turned the most gloomy color of plum and diseased yellow.

You know whenever she cries and blames her melancholy on the eternally frigid winter days, it’s really him that’s destroying her. Still.

And that’s why I accepted the gift from my father with such joy. Why I taught myself to clean it and load it and fire it. Why when the old man popped up one day and wanted to take me away for the weekend I hopped into his car and begged him to not bring me back. Ever.

I wanted to hurt her, my mother. I wanted to be her Dragon.

Instead, I only managed to make mine stronger.

Still if I could do it all over again…

…well, chances are I wouldn’t. Because even when we finally figure out how to slip into the other eleven hidden dimensions of our being and surface someday in the past, before our births, you simply can’t change a thing. Not a **** thing mate. You can’t kill your own grandmother. You can’t kill Hitler. You can’t save Christ. You can only stand there and do what it is that you are always born to do…drive the nail in.  

And you can’t not kill something that you’ve already killed. Because no one, no matter how much of a deity you or others perceive you to be, can bring the dead back to life.

Not even the dragons.

Once you see the abyss staring back at you…well… 

I was eleven years old when I made my first kill. Yes, I’ve killed since. Yes, I will kill again.

Yes, I have become quite a Monster. 

My cousin caught the mouse in the trailer. It had been terrorizing the food supply and my Dads girlfriend Sophia for a week. He trapped it under a pan. He pounded on the pan with a spoon. I guess the thundering sound was supposed to have a disorienting effect on the rodent. When the pan was lifted, sure enough, it was dazed…confused…petrified.

It was also tiny, brown and white and darling.

I felt its terror. It only wanted to survive. Right?

It didn’t want to hurt. It didn’t want to sin. It only wanted to live. It had no metaphorical monsters. Only us. My overweight, pimply, barefoot and homophobic cousin. And me.

He slammed a clear plastic cup down over top of it. It seemed to come out of its coma as it began squealing around inside the cup, frantically looking for a path to survival. My cousin slid a piece of cardboard under the cup and lifted it up into the air. The mouse stared around with wide, ignorant eyes as its world was lifted into the heavens. 

I am a monster. And I accept this. I am the number eleven. To you and yours, I am sin.

Because I have spread disease. Because I have commanded undeserving respect. Because even though I know the world owes me absolutely nothing, I still consider it condescending to ask for anything.

I am a monster because I held the plastic bag that my cousin deposited the mouse and cup into and I carried it squirming outside to the campfire and it is there that I confronted my dragon for the very first time. And she won.

I am a monster because it is I who tossed the helpless mouse into the pinching and licking flames of the campfire.  

  When I was in college I worked as a busboy for an upscale golf country club. I was very friendly and good-looking and the members, a predominately ‘seasoned’ group, loved me. I made sensational tips and my co-workers were envious. I was also totally under the control of my libido. Fueled by my ego, (a loathsome demon and one of my personal favorites), and an insatiable sexual appetite, I **** as many of those rich, married, lonely, middle-aged woman as I could get my hands on. Some paid me. Some loved me. Some wanted to pinch my nipples and scratch my back. I would wake up in the middle of the night crying, my cock sore from evening after evening of organized sin.

Only, I wasn’t crying out of sadness. They were tears of joy.

I screwed my way through my early twenties cheating every person I could. My idea of justice was ‘do unto others before they did unto me.’

Everyone wants to stick it to someone else, right? Even your god’s highest paid employees want to kill the unholy. So what made them any better than me? What made man so much better than animal that we should invent moral laws that restrict certain individuals from living the lives that they really want to? Why couldn’t I kill? 

Hippopotamus males kill the young for fear that they may one day grow up and challenge them for leadership. Why couldn’t I do the same?

Because the bible said so? Because in my heart I’m supposed to just know that it is wrong? 

Because human beings are the most intelligent life form on the planet and therefore must be held to higher standards? Who determines what those higher standards are?

Morals? Bunk!  

Wolves are alpha predators. And humans learned to control them. With fear. With violence. With murder. We created a new breed of wolf and called it the domesticated dog.

Mans best friend. Obedient. Loyal. Why? Because they don’t know any better? Not smart enough to? Or are they satisfied with being slaves. Small price you have to pay in order to sleep on a couch and get treats whenever you take a ****.  

So what’s to say there isn’t a higher intelligence controlling humans? Managing to keep us obedient and loyal. Orchestrating the rise and fall of grand civilizations. Controlling the stock market. Giving you cancer. Toying with your life just because they can. 

Who is to say that Dogs aren’t our deities?

   Imagine you’re sleeping in your nice warm secure bed and suddenly there is a tremendous noise and an invisible shield is wrapped around you. You know it’s there because you are unable to move off of your bed. You’re trapped.

Then you are suddenly soaring high into the air and being transported across the universe. In the distance you can see a sun…glowing and searing the worlds around it. You travel closer and closer. The heat and bile rising up in your stomach threatening eruption.

Then you’re staring into a contradiction. The brightest void.

And within that Hades you detect your fire breathing Dragon. It hisses at you and it taunts you with its outstretched flaming commandments and billowing spirits of crispy wood scented smoke. You stare into the eyes of your future and you realize what a **** great coward you are. How hopeless you are. How when you’re gone nothing else will matter.

A part of you yearns for the genius of Beethoven’s 9^th to summon you from your slumber. Through the nightmarish flashes of failed relationships and bruises from bullies and useless stolen artifacts of youthful indignation, you see the flashing digital red numerals on your alarm clock. The time is 11:11.

Spiritual Guardians? Lightworker? The eleventh of the eleventh of the eleventh?   

You stretch and groan as you attempt to shake off the emotional sickness of the dream. Only to open your eyes and find the flames ever closer.

And the heat, crippling the thoughts in your mind. For the first time you raise your head up and peer into the chasm above you…into the blackest depths of the abyss. An abyss that never was meant to be an abyss at all. It was meant to be a Heaven. Only instead of seeing the face of God…instead of seeing the faces of the same demons and monsters that have haunted you since inception…you see the most familiar face of all.

Your own. 

I see Me.  

And on my face I wear the most foreign and peculiar look. As if I’m systematically contradicting every single logical thought that has ever charged through my brain. I’m disassembling myself because everything that I thought I lived for turned out to be a lie. 

It is I who has entrapped myself. I who has carried myself to this point in time. I who is dangling myself over the fiery pits of nevermore. I close my eyes and remind myself that there’s going to be a lot of **** pain…and then eternal peace.     

And then I’m free falling. Tumbling end over end into the pit of fire. The realization of certain death upon me.

As the plastic bag melted in around the plastic cup, which then melted in around the mouse, it ceased in its struggle for survival and just stared. Perhaps recognizing that a continued struggle was meaningless, it decided to spend its final moments gazing into the abyss of my eyes. For the first time comprehending life and sin.  For the first time seeing the face of it’s own Dragon.  

Later that night as I lay awake, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had just imagined it. If the mouse had already been dead and that’s why it stopped struggling. Not because it wanted to know me. 

   That same summer I used a BB gun and shot and killed a chipmunk.

Spurred on by my cousin I stalked it quietly as it maneuvered through the labyrinth of the woodpile. My first shot hit it in the side and it yelped and scurried.

My cousin high-fived me and told me to stay alert. I had hurt it but it wasn’t dead yet.

I recall images of the mouse spiking into the backs of my eyelids. Maybe this was my proverbial guardian angel offering me wisdom. Or maybe it was my imp teasing me.

Either way, neither could physically hurt me like my cousin would if I didn’t finish the job. 

I steadied my hand and aimed. And as cruel fate would have it, the animal decided to take that moment as his final attempt at survival. He skittered out of his hiding place and tried to make it across a wide expanse of open range, to the shelter of another large log.

I fired a shot into its back.

For a couple of seconds it just lay there and cried. It sounded like a whining dog. Then it tumbled to the ground with a thud. My Dragon likes to mesh the memory with images of humans jumping off the twin towers on 9-11.

At the very end, they were given a choice on how they wanted to die. Fire or fall. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying I envy them. There is an undeniable romance in not knowing how or when you will die. It’s inspiring. I’m just saying, imagine being given a choice.

I had killed again. And I didn’t give the chipmunk anymore of a choice than I had given the mouse.

And it wasn’t any easier than the first time either. They say it will be, ya know. But it isn’t.

My third kill was a complete accident. Or stroke of luck, depending on your point of view. Chances are there was a clock nearby blinking 11:11.  

I shot a random bullet straight up into the air. Into the dark canvas of treetops surrounding our campsite. A few moments later we heard something tumbling through the tree branches. A bird dropped out of the sky and landed a few feet away from me.

What are the odds? I am a superman who doesn’t know his own power. 

I haven’t shot a gun since.

But I do have an incredible collection of knives.        

I prefer a balisong.

A butterfly flaps her wings in Florida… 

  It would make things less believable to tell you that everything that happens in my life can mathematically be deduced to the number eleven. So I wont bother telling you that.

I wont tell you that that one summer when I took the lives of three animals was to become the cruel landscape for a lifetime of nightmares in which I am a stone cold killer. I wont try and convince you that dogs are just as likely to be gods as the beings that your religions provide. There are UFOs and Ghosts. Tupac is still alive. Elvis isn’t. Big Foot doesn’t exist. Man-Bear-Pig does.        

You would question my mental capabilities or my truthfulness wouldn’t you? 

Fiction? Some, ‘Mos def!’

Non-Fiction? For the lead Alex,’ What is Dog Deities Biography’!  

 I don’t profess to comprehend the many personalities that make up my entire psyche. But I am a leader and I am a creative force. I am an addict and I am proud. I am a dog god and I am eleven. But I’m not the only one. You are too. You probably just don’t realize it yet.

You can avoid the abyss for a while. But in the end, we are all Übermensch.