Only God Is an Atheist
By: Shane Cashman
Tags: Music, Religion, Culture, Identity, Writing

1. The boy with horns

I’ve known about the two horns growing out of the top of my head since about middle school. The one on the right comes to a sharper point than the other. My pediatrician, as far as I could tell, didn’t seem too worried or repulsed. Just a misshapen skull. Nothing a good haircut can’t disguise. As long as you can hide your horns, you can blend right in with the gen pop.

Typically, they’re known as cutaneous horns, which can look like tusks, bones, or tree limbs sprouting from a human skull. Mine are subcutaneous, just below the skin. If you were to shave my head, you’d find two half-inch-wide by half-inch-tall nubs trying to push through. They’re located where my frontal lobe meets my parietal lobe, and I can trace a straight line directly up to them from the top of my ears. When I was a young hypochondriac, I thought they were cysts, but my doctor assured me they’re just abnormalities in my skull. Nothing to fear.

I think it’s safe to say that every kid, even those to whom popularity comes as if by divine right, will at some point feel misunderstood and extraterrestrial. As a kid, my horns, despite their literal location, were the furthest things from my mind. By the end of middle school, there were plenty of other physical features that made me feel like an outsider: buck teeth, braces, a unibrow, puberty, and a mess of freckles that refused to disappear no matter what old wives tales promised about smearing lemon juice on the face.

It wasn’t until a visit to the hair salon that I became acutely self-conscious of my horns.

Haircuts almost always go the same way for me: Hairdressers run their hands through my hair and inadvertently grope the horns. Some gasp, while others go wide-eyed in the mirror. When I was too young to drive myself to the salon, they’d also make sure my mother knew her son had the Mark of the Beast.

“Do they hurt?” they like to ask.

There’s always been something somewhat sinister in the image of two of me, the real me and my reflection, grinning and blushing in the chair with a black cape draped around my body, saying, “Yeah, I know about the horns. No, they don’t hurt.”

You might be wondering why I didn’t just stick to one hairdresser as soon as I found one who knew about my weird skull. The truth is that, as a child, I was on a quest to find a hairdresser who could duplicate a very specific haircut. Specifically, this haircut was inspired by the scene in Casper — the live-action film starring Christina Ricci, Bill Pullman, and Devin Sawa — when Casper is temporarily transformed into a flesh-and-blood boy with a most righteous haircut, sculpted with gel into the shape of an M that arches atop his forehead.

In 1998, I was gearing up to honor the Jewish ritual of one’s passage into adulthood: my bar mitzvah. For the event, I’d wear a suit, a yarmulke, and, for the first time, a tallit over my shoulders — a prayer shawl that’s essentially a sacred scarf only to be worn by those who complete this initiation.

Thus, my ghost haircut had to be impeccable. The immortality of photo albums was a real concern even in seventh grade, well before the age of the hashtag. Photos had a shelf life of at least a thousand years in the homes of Jewish grandparents.

2. Finding MTV in the synagogue

Casper, a dead boy stuck with his family in an old house, cut off from the world of the living, was not so dissimilar from me. In fact, I’d never related to a character more. I wasn’t dead, per se. But during those early years, we didn’t have a computer, the internet, or cable TV. So at school, I might as well have been dead. This wasn’t so much about my parents trying to cut my sisters and I off from the modern world — it was just our living situation on a farm in the middle of the woods. We didn’t even have an air conditioner until 10 years ago.

The library of the temple where I studied Hebrew was a dark room filled with relics: ancient scrolls, shofars, candlesticks. These objects had survived invasions, fires, and death, passed in secret between believers and survivors, and preserved in glass. I certainly recognized their significance. I stared at them for years in that synagogue, and I held them in my hands at Sunday school to feel the weight of time, the word of God, and a people destroyed and regenerated. But there was something far more intriguing to me hiding in the corner of the library, especially when I was 12 going on 13: a television with access to MTV.

By that time, MTV had been around for almost two decades. I’d caught clips here and there, and I knew what I was missing. I knew there were videos that went along with the songs I curated on my DIY mixtapes. But before I found that television, my only chance to hear any new music was on the radio — Hot 97, K104, and 92.3 K-ROCK. The disembodied voices of radio hosts offered my only connection to artists I became obsessed with — from Tupac, to TLC, to Ace of Base, to the Beastie Boys.

The idea that the past, present, and future could be mapped out by something, or someone, far greater than me felt boring and limited.

I’d soon start sneaking out of Shabbat services to catch music videos: Biggie, Third Eye Blind, the Spice Girls, Bone Thugs, Aaliyah, and the Cranberries. Seeing a music video would forever change the way I listened to a song. I studied music videos on an almost anthropological level. I, for sure, studied them closer than my Hebrew. The TV was my vessel to worlds I’d been so eager to explore, but my friends who had MTV at home seemed rather blasé about it. They could survive without it. For me, seeing the bright visuals that correlated with the songs I loved seemed as necessary as air and water.

If a house of worship is supposed to be a kind of bridge to God, and ancient Hebrew a holy connection to your ancestral lineage, the sanctuary in which I was supposed to discover myself as an adult in the eyes of the Lord had instead become my place to experiment with new ways of interpreting the world.

I studied MTV as if desperate to find something new to satisfy my hesitation about becoming a devoted member of a religion. There was a kid, just a few years older than me and born with a Biblical name, whose life I could clearly see mapped out from middle school to death. Law school, Volvo, and khakis… I needed otherwise. To my teenage self, any religion that seemed so sure of human existence likewise felt as sure about the trajectory of mankind. The idea that the past, present, and future could be mapped out by something, or someone, far greater than me felt boring and limited.

Back at school, I was in no way immune to that particular solipsism that tends to manifest itself in the tender hearts of 13-year-olds: the idea that the whole world is working to destroy you and only you. My close friends in seventh grade joked that my bar mitzvah would really be a public circumcision hosted by a DJ, which was better than hearing jokes about my Jewish ancestors killing Jesus. But nowhere was my Judaism more controversial than among the puritanical lunch monitors. These women prowled the cafeteria like the Gestapo in gaucho pants. The most wicked ones made me eat my lunch when I was supposed to be fasting for holidays like Yom Kippur; there was no arguing with them. I dreaded these women more than the God of the Old Testament who, in the book of Job, swiftly murdered Job’s entire family, covered his body in boils, and killed all his livestock just to prove how loyal man can be to the Lord even in the face of absolute despair.

After my mom had a talk with the school about not punishing me for fasting during certain holidays, I began to taunt the lunch monitors. I’d march into the cafeteria some days and make up my own Jewish holidays, just to tell those women I was fasting. There was nothing they could do about it. In a way, I welcomed their animosity. This was about the time I recognized in myself a fetish for rebellion. I was only eight when I sang, at the top of my lungs in the lunch line around Christmastime, “Joy to the world — your God is dead.” That one landed me in the principal’s office. I shudder to think what those women would’ve done if they ever found out about my horns.

3. Liberated by Marilyn Manson

In seventh grade, in the temple library, I got my first look at a Marilyn Manson music video: It was his cover of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams.” I’d already heard the original but his depraved, distorted version awoke something in me. Manson’s image alone was confirmation that there might be others out there who understood what it was like to feel isolated from the modern world. He seemed to rejoice in the fact that life was a mad and ridiculous series of events. Here was this ghoulish, skeletal man covered in mud, riding a pig, and wearing a tattered wedding dress. He was smiling so wide and distantly that it was almost intimidating.

I was hooked. MTV, through the grace of the temple, gave me a new icon. Self-righteous politicians and talking heads in the mainstream media told America to fear his music. Religious groups protested his concerts. (Shit, even a young Katy Perry picketed Manson concerts with her parents.) They said this man was an assault on the children of America; they warned that his music was causing widespread moral panic. It’s hard to imagine now, but this was back when the name Marilyn Manson had the power to shock people. How dare he sandwich the likeness of Marilyn Monroe with the savagery of Charles Manson?

Manson performed bare-assed, in a black corset and thigh-highs, at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards. He screamed at the audience that he could see them out there “trying your hardest not to be ugly… trying your hardest to earn your way into heaven.” His second album, Antichrist Superstar, celebrated the discovery of the individual and gave me a newfound courage to be myself, whoever that happened to be.

I admired Manson because I believed he was exposing listeners to the idea that you should question what you believed and live your life accordingly. For example, “Get Your Gunn” is all about Dr. David Gunn, an OB-GYN in Atlanta who was murdered by an anti-abortion Christian fundamentalist. In 1999, Manson wrote in Rolling Stone that Gunn’s death “was the ultimate hypocrisy I witnessed growing up: that these people killed someone in the name of being ‘pro-life.’”

What I gathered was someone telling me to keep curious. Question everything. I appreciated someone drawing back the curtain. In a 1997 appearance on the TV show Politically Incorrect, Manson said, “I want people to think about what they believe. I want them to consider if everything they’ve been taught, if that’s what they want to believe or if that’s what they’ve been told that they have to believe.” (This episode, for those interested, also featured a wonderful interaction between Manson and Florence Henderson — which, in itself, is the exact kind of balancing act of the American grotesque and beauty that gave birth to Manson’s persona.)

Looking back, my Bar Mitzvah became more of a funeral for my faith than a promise to God.

It wasn’t as if Manson offered me some life-changing epiphany when it came to faith and belief, but he did offer me the chance to feel confident about questioning what I’d already begun to suspect wasn’t entirely for me. At school, my Jewishness became an act of rebellion against the lunch monitors. At temple, my reluctance to worship in the way that was expected of me also became an act of rebellion. Outside the temple, I was the only Jew in school (aside from my little sisters). Inside the temple, I was the only metalhead, rap-loving Jew who’d found solace in music videos.

So when I finally stood before my friends and family for my bar mitzvah on May 31, 1998, my father’s birthday, I felt like an impostor. I wore the suit. I recited the lines. I’d learned this new language to the best of my ability, and yet I was becoming the exact opposite of what I was supposed to be promising to God and family. Looking back, my bar mitzvah became more of a funeral for my faith than a promise to God. (Grandma, if you’re still reading this, please forgive me.)

In the bar mitzvah photograph that still hangs in my parents’ hallway, everyone is dressed up, smiling at the camera, proud, and joyful. I’ve got my ghost haircut but my jacket’s missing, my tie is gone, and I’m looking off camera, squinting at something in the distance, something that no one else seems troubled by. Perhaps it’s a wonderful, lurking darkness, and perhaps I’m wondering what I’ll do now that I’ve shed this skin.

Photos courtesy of the author

4. I’m not attached to your world

Thus began my morning routine: Wake up and spike hair. Paint fingernails black. Snap on faux-leather studded bracelets. Put on three to five fake-silver rings with skulls, anarchy signs, and pentagrams. Step into a pair of JNCO jeans so wide they looked like a denim dress. Throw on long-sleeved, fishnet shirt. Layer black Marilyn Manson tee over the fishnet. Attach wallet to chain and clip to belt loop. Add two more chains that’d hang from waist to knees for no purpose other than aesthetics.

The first goth I ever met was an Edgar Allan Poe impersonator. In fifth or sixth grade, we filed into the auditorium and watched a man in all black pretend to be a crazed-drunk, death-obsessed mad poet, flailing about the stage. This was where we typically sang Christmas carols for winter recitals.

It’s possible that the goth aesthetic appealed to me because I felt like a teenage monstrosity; being goth gave me the ability to become the very monster I believed others saw in me. (Read: an embarrassing amount of teenage angst.) Being goth, if you ask me, isn’t about how you dress or what you listen to. It’s more about the willingness to accept the macabre, the unknown, and all the frights that come with being a human. It’s a way of becoming your very own memento mori.

My parents were teenagers in 1969 when the Manson Family murders capped off what was already a violent decade. Three decades later, my parents had a teenage son who looked up to a man who took on Manson as a stage name, and whose followers adorned themselves with dark, occultist supplies. For their patience, my parents deserve a Nobel.

High school yearbook photo of the author

My father was disappointed, but also encouraging. This is a man who liked to remind us of his time at Catholic school, where punishment was doled out by ruthless nuns. Even though I was aware that he and my mom agreed to raise us in her faith, he’d share with me his own idea of a comprehensive, kind of multifaceted God — a powerful being, sure, but one that shifted shape from person to person depending on age, time, and background.

Regardless of what I looked like, I still went to temple. There were endless amounts of blessed wine to sneak sips of behind the rabbi’s back. Plus, I had a crush on his daughter. The temple, maybe because it was fairly empty, felt like the place where I was most free of judgement. I also wasn’t going to give up my dose of MTV; after all, Marilyn Manson was speaking directly to me in that dark library.

Only three months after my bar mitzvah, the very first episode of Total Request Live (TRL), hosted by Carson Daly, aired on September 14, 1998. It was the day before the release of Manson’s follow-up to Antichrist Superstar, Mechanical Animals. Manson would be live on air to debate with youth pastors about the nature of his image, the meaning of his music, and how he may or may not have been a bad influence on listeners.

Manson became my new, androgynous rabbi during this time.

The streets were mobbed with fans in black when Manson went live. He had a new look: He’d mutated into this androgynous, Bowie-esque glam alien. Meanwhile, I’d become a vacuum of color: a metallic, sputnik-looking mall-goth (as, I’m sure, older, truer goths might’ve called me behind my back if they ever caught me walking out of Hot Topic). But that day I witnessed something far different from what I expected: an honest and open conversation between different types of people from various backgrounds and belief systems. Here were Christians sitting with the “antichrist,” having a genuine and respectful dialogue about art. As someone who’d become so eager to lob insults at anyone who was going to hate on Manson, my rage was deflated by everyone’s eloquence and respect.

Manson might’ve performed beneath the banner of the ultimate freak of nature, but, after this TRL episode, it seemed clear to me that anyone was welcome under that banner, no matter what your affiliations were, so long as you could keep an open mind about people who differed from you. And, above all, you had to show some respect. Manson said himself that day on TRL, “As long as someone’s expressing themselves, I can’t hate them for it.”

In a way, Manson became my new androgynous rabbi during this time. This isn’t to say I wasn’t already learning some morality at temple. The Ten Commandments have some obvious and valid core principles — don’t murder, don’t cheat, and love yourself and those around you in a way that will allow reciprocal love. I think I needed my time at the temple to truly appreciate this conversation between Manson and the pastors. I needed to know there was a choice, and that if you choose to believe in something you’re not obligated to obey it in strict accordance. It was okay to hold alternating, if not conflicting, views of the world. The temple helped me better understand both believers and non-believers. I’d opened both doors.

5. Manson’s downfall (and my own)

I was 13 in 1998. Despite the Lewinsky scandal, the birth of Viagra, the United States Embassy bombings in Kenya, the popularity of the Furby, El Niño, the bomb that went off in an Alabama abortion clinic, and the murder of James Byrd, it felt like an okay time to be a teenager cut off from the news. I had friends, not all of whom were goth. But we were all, in some way, outsiders. As it tends to go, by virtue of becoming a cast of outsiders, we formed a tight group of curious kids who spent nights jumping in and out of shadows in our small town. We were the kind of kids who hung out in the cemetery after school, French kissing beneath the Virgin Mary on some poor soul’s headstone.

But we didn’t know then what devastation waited just around the corner: the Columbine High School massacre was less than a year away. Among all the horrors that spilled out of that nightmare, we also did not yet know how the mass media would falsely accuse Marilyn Manson of inspiring the massacre.

Misinformation spread fast. The news was quick to claim the attackers were fans of Manson. Almost immediately, the news spiraled out of control; it seemed everyone who’d never listened to him, outside the short clips news anchors played for shock value, found it pretty easy to blame him. It was almost as if Manson had predicted this type of smear campaign with the stories he’d been telling in his songs, about how the culture and the media exploit fame, TV, drugs, and violence. Everyone who liked Manson, or who looked like Manson, became a kind of pariah. A new Manson Family had emerged, a loose network of fans in black.

Two months after Columbine, Manson wrote for Rolling Stone: “It is no wonder that kids are growing up more cynical; they have a lot of information in front of them. They can see that they are living in a world that’s made of bullshit. In the past, there was always the idea that you could turn and run and start something better. But now America has become one big mall, and because the Internet and all of the technology we have, there’s nowhere to run.”

6. A message in blood

Sometime around the start of high school, a year after Columbine, I completely shaved off my eyebrows. It was an accident. I was trying to get rid of my unibrow with a razor and I did not yet know what tweezers could do. The razor slipped and took off half an eyebrow so I figured the best I could do to fix it was to shave them both off. Without eyebrows, I looked like I was in constant shock. The look, however, made sense with my whole goth aesthetic. I was working at the local hardware store, so I’d also been cutting all the chain I needed to wrap around my waist and hang from my wallet. When I walked through school, I must’ve looked like Marley’s ghost from A Christmas Carol whose heavy chains were “long and wound about him like a tail.”

One day, in the great, big, white hallway right outside the high school gym, I found a pane of shattered glass. To this day, I do not know who shattered that glass. It was the kind of pebbled glass with chicken wire inside, so although it was shattered, the shards remained suspended in the air.

When I saw the glass, I was curious. I decided to touch it. I wanted to see what would happen if I just pushed on it a little. Would it come falling down? It didn’t. But I must’ve cut my finger ever so slightly in the process. A very small bit of blood appeared. For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to wipe it on the white walls. I wish I could say I stopped there but I can’t. I decided to write words like FUCK and SHIT and the letter X and an inverted cross or two. And, thanks to a true lack of imagination, I combined the words “die” and “evil” to form “dievil.” I hate to say that in the moment, I was very proud of this.

The bleeding stopped and I walked to global studies class. I forgot all about my ghastly painting.

The next morning when I got to school, the hallway was behind police tape. An officer took photographs of the wall. How long would it be until they found me? Any time the phone rang in a classroom, I jumped.

If the police found my blood on a Tuesday morning, it took until Friday afternoon for the call to finally come. Some seventh graders came forward and pointed me out to the principal: freckles, spiked hair, and chains. Easy to identify.

There was no use in denying it. It’d only been a little over a year or so since Columbine. I understand now how proximity in time to that massacre only added to the authorities’ dread. What they saw was a threat. What I saw, and knew to be true, was a really, absurdly, empty-headed and spontaneous act of stupidity.

But I wasn’t done.

Afraid of my parents, the police, and the principal, I blamed my actions on the music. They were so worried about “dievil.” What did it mean? I lied and said it was a Manson song. Of all the things, I blamed it on what I knew they expected me to blame it on. They already had a certain idea about me and I fed them exactly what they wanted to hear. I figured the punishment would be swift, but lean, if I just caved.

The principal swore that I broke the glass to cut myself on purpose, as if I was performing some kind of satanic ritual outside the gymnasium after lunch. They believed I was in that hallway signing a death warrant in blood.

The principal handed me 10 days of out of school suspension and the police walked me out of the school. Not long after, I received word that the superintendent wanted me expelled.

I think she’d already written me off before she ever let me speak. I think her swift decision to rid the school of me was a knee-jerk reaction. My appearance, coupled with my actions, was alarming and, I get it: What I did was not only embarrassing but it scared a lot of people. Violence is everywhere and in one form or another, it always will be. I just didn’t know how to prove to the school, or my parents, that what I’d done was not a threat, only a perverse stunt.

7. Violence and a box-cutter

I often think about what violence awaits me, those I love, or the world at large. It seems like you can’t even go outside anymore. How long have our flags been at half-mast?

Three years ago, the summer my son was born, a young man from my town was in the produce aisle at a nearby grocery store when a stranger came up from behind him and, for no reason other than unhinged meanness, opened his throat with a box cutter. I did not know the victim personally but my proximity to this senselessness shook me. I remember sitting up in bed beside my sleeping and very pregnant wife, trying to make sense of such cruel violence. That next morning, June 12, we learned that 49 people were shot to death at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. I remember looking at my wife and wondering how the hell children could even be allowed outside on this maniacal planet. I marveled at how my grandparents raised children in the aftermath of world wars and atom bombs, and throughout the string of assassinations in the ’60s.

I have no clue what the answers are. What I do know is that we can promote a better future by encouraging the next generations to really listen to each other, to be empathetic, to speak the truth, and to be open-minded, free-thinking people who cherish the planet and themselves.

We’re quick to blame Islam, Christianity, video games, rap, heavy metal, sexual preferences, immigration, Twitter, or, well, you get the point. We’re quick to point the finger in the aftermath of violence.

Being a fan of Marilyn Manson’s music has taught me to always distrust the media, or politicians, when it comes to blaming anybody, or any thing, other than the perpetrators of a violent act — unless, of course, it’s been explicitly incited by a specific person or group. I can’t tell you how many times, as a teen, I had to tell people much older than me that Manson had nothing to do with Columbine.

I don’t remember what I wore when the superintendent beckoned me to her office for one last chance to say my piece before expulsion, but I imagine it was something like what a vampire might wear to a wedding. She said I should stop wearing black, that just the sight of me promoted violence. Her apathetic tone struck something open in me.

“Speaking of violence,” I said, doing my best Manson. I felt like I had to redeem myself in the eyes of my friends who knew I’d blamed my actions on the music.

I reminded the superintendent about “the mouth,” a Rolling Stones-style pair of big red lips that formed a window into the kitchen of the cafeteria. This was where you could order slushies. One popular order had a special name: It was every available flavor combined and the cafeteria called it “the suicide.”

The suicide wasn’t a unique flavor to our school; kids liked to buy “suicides” at 7-Elevens, too. But I evoked it in the superintendent’s office to try to cancel out her argument that I was the only seemingly violent entity in the school. I reminded her that our school was selling suicides as much as she thought my appearance promoted it.

I was back in school within a week.

8. My shadow, myself

Four years after the incident outside the gymnasium, I was hired by the same principal who suspended me to be a substitute teacher at my old high school. Now I wore slacks, boat shoes, and colorful sweaters. Outwardly, I looked like the inverse of my previous high school incarnation — but this was only a costume. Mostly, I was an impostor trying to blend in. I walked with a cane because I’d recently broken my knee while singing on stage in my metal band. I still spent most of my weekends performing in dive bars and college towns, banging my head until it practically fell off and rolled into the crowd.

My first job at school was to “shadow” a kid the school had deemed dangerous; they worried that he was a threat to himself and others. The student had been out of school for a few weeks due to the fact that he was caught trying to mutilate himself in class with a blade he’d picked up from the art supply room. Supposedly, he’d tried to castrate himself.

Perhaps this was the school’s way of dealing revenge, but I felt rather at home with that student. Some teachers and students were openly repulsed by him. He’d sit alone at lunch. The kid couldn’t sleep due to night terrors, so he’d doze off during class. He didn’t talk much. And here I was following him around my old school, sitting in my old teachers’ classrooms. After a few weeks of silence, I learned he was a drummer. So, in a move to open some dialogue, I gave him a copy of Marilyn Manson’s “Sweet Dreams” — the version from the Last Tour on Earth live album. That particular rendition ends with a drum solo that’s listed on the album as the “Hell Outro.”

The kid dug it. He started speaking and he even kind of half-smiled. We sat together in the cafeteria for lunch, the mouth smiling back at us. I think he felt less alone. I wanted him to know it was okay to be himself — even if it felt impossible. Music has a way of helping us put into words whatever darkness has latched onto us. That semester, I watched as the kid became friends with other musicians. They talked about jamming and playing in the talent show.

My first band started in that school. It was, go figure, a Marilyn Manson cover band. I sang. When we played at the talent show, we covered “The Nobodies” from Manson’s Holy Wood. I screamed and threw myself across the stage like that crazed Poe-impersonator.

Someone’s mother shot up from her seat in the audience and started yelling that I was the devil. I was flattered. It’s kind of a family tradition, being called the devil. My family has been passing down a story since the 1940s: When my poppop, my mother’s father, was a teen, this little kid, a neighbor, ran up to him on the street and asked to see his horns. The kid had been told that all Jewish people had horns.

Maimonides, the 12th century Jewish philosopher, wrote that the word “Satan” derives from the Hebrew root “to turn away.” To be honest, I turned away from my faith at 13. I’ve attempted prayer since then, sure, in the same way I’ve experimented with drugs. It’d be disingenuous to tell you that in times of profound grief, I haven’t revisited some of those passages I once studied, speaking those ancient words in an attempt to connect myself with the dead.

My horns act as a physical reminder that I will never know all things.

I wouldn’t discover Flannery O’Connor until college, but I’d find a kindred spirit in her when I did. She and Marilyn Manson have more in common than you might first believe. O’Connor was a devout Catholic and Manson has said he’s not atheist but spiritual. I, at the time of this writing, am a meandering agnostic. But I think we could all find common ground on the idea that you aren’t truly your best self, spiritual or not, unless you are relentlessly investigating your thoughts and beliefs and testing them within yourself and against the world, building a kind of immune system for everything you thought was true and good and just. Not unlike Marilyn Manson, O’Connor didn’t shy away from showing gruesome acts of violence in her art in an attempt, I think, to remind people we should be consistent in our pursuit to better ourselves and others. Both Manson and O’Connor promote the ideas of curiosity and introspection. I believe these are paramount to how one might orient themselves against their world and, hopefully, find even a little meaning.

In her prayer journal, O’Connor wrote: “No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist. The devil is the greatest believer and he has his reasons.”

My horns act as a physical reminder that I will never know all things. I find comfort in this, as not-knowing is an engine for unending curiosity. My horns are also a reminder that we’re all capable of varying degrees of bad behavior, that we all live with some amount of secret shame and confusion. They remind me to embrace the strangest, most freakish parts of humanity. My mom thinks my poppop willed these very real horns onto me. The horns, she says, weren’t noticeable when I was an infant. I’m told there was no sense of malevolence in the delivery room when I was born, either. The hospital staff did not freak as if they’d witnessed the birth of a human baby with, like, the head of a goat.

If I arrived on Earth with horns, they went unnoticed for a few years. My guess is the small crests of bone rising up out of my skull — exactly where you’d expect devil horns to be — grew as I grew. In fact, they might still be growing.