I once killed a dog

When I was in high school, like in '97 and '98, I used to drive this 1985 Ford Country Squire station wagon. It was a navy blue with fake wood grain paneling on the side, and even though some of that fake wood grain had started to peel, it was still a pretty sweet-looking car. It had power everything including a front seat that moved in about 80 different directions (fully superior to the one in my old man's BMW) and a back window (not for the back seats, but for that back cargo area) that you could roll down all the way from the front seat.

After about 6 months, everything stopped working except for the engine (a huge, gully V8) and the stereo (suprisingly capable for an old station wagon), but that's really all you need anyway. Also, I had a bad run of luck with leaving the windows down and having the damn thing get rained in. After a while, I just stopped worrying about it. If I had somewhere to go and the seats were wet, I would just grab a trash bag or something to lay over it and go about my business.

Anyhoo, when I used to drive in this thing, I would do something that I'm sure millions of other teenage boys had done before me and millions still continue to do to this day (no homo): If I was driving, and a small animal appeared anywhere on the road ahead of me, I would swerve and try to hit it so that I could hear that ba-da-bump effect under my car. It was especially awesome if you could find a possum because a) those fuckers were so easy to hit and b) that was about the biggest jolt you could get without risking damage to your car.

So one evening I'm out driving (down Olive towards Creve Coeur Mill Rd, by the Taco Bell, for anybody who knows where that is), and this dumbass dog runs out into the street. Just based on sheer reflex, I swerved to hit the fucker. At first, I was like, "Yeah, this is gonna be the greatest roadkill of all time," but then, about a split second before contact, something flashed in my brain like, "Bol, you're about to fuck up somebody's family pet!" Of course, I didn't have time to swerve back once I realized what was happening. It was the loudest and most glorious ba-da-bump that Ive experienced to this day.

I immediately felt bad about what had happened, but of course I wasn't about to stop and have motherfuckers thinking that I'm some kind of crazy dog killer. Still, for a while after that (at least several hours), I couldn't help but thinking, "Man, I fucked up some little kid's pet dog. On purpose." I'll still think about it from time to time when I see a dead dog lying in the road. So my bad to whoever's dog that was. I didn't mean it or anything; I was just young and didn't know any better.