Design, Murder, and Metaphors

Having been the benefit of some small but encouraging success recently, I’ve been forced to reflect on my career life to date. Specifically, I chose a career path in the graphic design field. For the last fifteen years or so, I’ve been stumbling about a profession that on the surface may seem creative, but is highly tempered by business needs. (The latter portion has been a hard learned lesson on my part.) I can sometimes taste the dissatisfaction—bills must be paid, however! The need to pay those bills, I’ve realized, and the path I have travelled too far on, have distracted me from what I find most satisfying: killing.

 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in murder, crafting plans as far back as I can remember. My first kills were sloppy affairs rendered with whatever household objects I had at hand. I killed my way through the grey haze of high school until I joined the Marine Corps. Once there, despite many distractions, I found time for occasional homicide. Several months ago, I stumbled across some of the evidence from those days, twenty years ago. Interesting stuff. After the Corps, I found fresh material in art school. Now and then, I would find time to kill with a partner or two and even made some long term plans. Alas, I was a graphic design major and that took precedent. Money would need to be earned if I were to survive and everyone knows you don’t earn an honest living by killing.

 

I was never encouraged to murder, my homicidal nature came naturally. Likely a result of my mother reading comic books to me when I was but a wee child. Perhaps the Comics Code Authority had been correct in their zeal to regulate the mind-bending content of comic books. My mind had been bent.

 

Beyond college I continued my homicidal spree, but never made much of it. I didn’t know anyone who had the audacity to make a full-time go of it. My family had no connections to assassins or mercenaries, nor did any of my few friends in the neighborhood. What I did with my spare time made me something of an outsider. A loner, prone to murderous outbursts that ended nowhere. Well, that’s not entirely true. I was hired to assassinate a subject once for a semiprofessional group. Nothing came of it, however, and no evidence remains. 

 

I’ve never been recognized for my designs or my killing, achieving only some small fame locally. All too easily forgotten over the years. I never fully realized the carnage I was leaving in my wake, the heartbreak, the utter and consuming nothingness I’d forged for myself. But I had design, so I stopped killing with no one the wiser. Murder slipped down from at least my number two goal to below six or seven. This unfulfilling, soul-sucking sashay wouldn’t last.

 

I kept track of ideas to get back in the business of killing until I couldn’t take it anymore and sat down to concoct a plan for the most ostentatious murder I’d ever committed. Two years later, the killing urge died again after the exhausting run. At the time, it didn’t amount to much, this involuted execution. Years later, I began to seek out fellow serial cutthroats to hone my craft. After another strange two years pussyfooting around the self-satisfying act of pulling the trigger, the commitment paid off. After a number of small kills were left behind me, my first successful hit. A short, bloody, concise strike that pushed through the clutter and will hit the ocean of death that we already drown in. I’m happy for it and I hope next year you will be as well.

 

Oh, ‘kill’ is a metaphor for writing. I overused it. Sorry.