“Pal, I won’t argue with ya. You seem like a man who stands for something. A man who sees what he wants, takes it, and doesn’t apologize. For that, I envy you. I may not look it, but deep down, I am a coward. Yessir, its true. If I was standing right where you’re standing, pointing the gun at me like how you’re doin’, and my victim started groveling, begging for life. I know I’d cave in a second. I mean, no man wants to watch another man that low, regardless of the power dynamic between the two. No, a man deserves a good death, and I think you might be the man to give me that.

“But rack your mind around this… Isn’t it a bit… silly… to kill me at this point? I mean sure, kill me, I won’t stop you. It’s your right as a gun carrying American to put me down like a dog. But I don’t see you getting much pleasure out of it. You see I am man who has cultivated a odd sort of joy at the thought of dying. Now I don’t wanna say I’m downright depressed or suicidal, but I am, in a way, at peace with death. Not fully, of course, no sane man is.

“You see a while back I realized how much the fear of death ruled my life. I looked behind my back, checked every corner, trusted no one. There wasn’t much of a possibility to live a fruitful life with that mentality, it wasn’t sustainable. So I really thought long and hard, why am I so scared of death? I wasn’t scared of birth, at least from what I recall, and death doesn’t seem much different from that, just going the opposite direction really.

“I steeped myself in religious texts, prayed to whatever God was out there, hell, I’ll admit it, I even meditated. Nothing really worked. I felt destitute. How can I, a man, call myself that while still having such a simple fear. And.. I’m ashamed to admit this, but I hit a low. A low no man should ever reach. I climbed up on that rickety stool, and with a sense of odd equanimity, I fastened a makeshift noose with the belt I had on, stuck my head through the belt loop, and said a final prayer, then kicked myself off the stool…

“But, just my luck, I was a hair too tall to actually complete the deed. So I hung there, ashamed at my ineptitude, no smarter, no wiser for having experienced such a shameful failure. Then the oddest thing occurred. A thing that you’d think would be the last thing on my mind, but being so near death, I have to assume something clicked in my synapses, some unconscious truth my body had realized before my mind could. Why I looked down, and I couldn’t believe it, the whole situation seemed to ignite a fire in my loins.

“I was at full mast, not even as a young buck did I feel this sense of power in my nethers. It was only later I found out the name for such an act: “auto-erotic asphyxiation”. You see, achieving this feat meant that I could achieve an orgasm 1.5 times greater than-“

BANG