“You are the center of the wheel”, my father would speak into my ear as he rocked me to sleep in his arms on the nights that from among his wives my mother called him to come to her. “All things revolve about you. You are the only god; your strength the greatest strength; your arm the fellest arm.” These words he whispered even as his massive biceps pressed me about the ribs restraining my breath, and my head rested no differently than some fragile paper thing, unarguably crushable in the gulf of his huge hand.

My father was quite fond of reading and quoting a Nietzschean supremacist poet who called himself King Darius, or “The King”. He wrote, “Glorious son, go up from the nightside and look down on us. / Where the lights shine brightest, there! There are we. / Where darkness alone resides, yet there are peoples whose one resource is wishing. / Go up because you can. / It will remind you of who you are.

“Making love”… While no Nietzschean ever tends to use that Human euphemism, my grandfather, Temujin II, would say that no man is to be trusted who doesn’t subsist on a steady diet of sex and violence as well. Of course, from a Nietzschean perspective, no man is to be trusted regardless, but why waste a perfectly valid turn of phrase for the sake of a technicality? My grandfather, whom I admired, was a bit of a Dragonian lunatic, if I may use it as a term of endearment; a less extreme incarnation of his old namesake, Temujin I.