When I was in middle school in Massachusetts, me and my two best friends started our own religion to try and take over the world.

I was just starting the DUNE series by Frank Herbert. Dan Richmond was the one who introduced me to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the comics, thank you, not the cartoon). Alex Netten's life dream was to join the Navy, which I could never understand, since I swore I would never join the military (and isn't that ironic, even if only in an Alanis Morissette sense, that Alex refused to join after Clinton signed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," whereas I wound up enlisting in the Navy after college failed to work out).

So, between the three of us, we shared a taste for high adventure and starkly defined conflicts with perceived enemy forces. We wanted to conquer and to rule, with all the power that comes with those things, but just as importantly, we wanted the thrill of fighting our way toward those victories.

And then, I learned about a man named L. Ron Hubbard, and it all just clicked.

As a kid, I loved the idea of being a con man. I enjoyed imagining myself convincing other people to believe in outrageous lies, through sheer force of will and creativity, and just as importantly, I was obsessed with figuring out how to get something for nothing.

My desire for reward without effort was my philosopher's stone quest, and once I started reading about what Hubbard had done, I dared to dream that it was actually possible, because as far as I was concerned, this was exactly what he had achieved. I instantly recognized Scientology for the scam that it was, and it gave me the outlet I needed for everything else.

The Church of No was based on my insight into Hubbard's career (made before I'd ever even heard of his infamous quote to this effect) that religion is the greatest something-for-nothing scheme ever invented. Its beliefs were based on bullshit and in-jokes, but that didn't matter, because it was just an excuse for me, Dan and Alex to play.

I wrote stories about our founding of the Church of No, set a few years in the future, after we'd all finally graduated from high school and were no longer living with our parents. I remembered hearing once that bad writers borrowed, but good writers stole, so I stole like a motherfucker.

I stole characters and concepts wholesale from DUNE and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I became Duke Kirk Muad'Dib, Dan became Baron Dan Harkonnen, and Alex became Count Alex Fenring. I liked the Great Houses portrayed in DUNE, so I lifted them cleanly from the text, and grafted them together with a previous series of nonsense running gags between me and Dan, so that I ruled House Spacial and he ruled House Expansive. When I read the story where the Turtles teamed up with Cerebus the Aardvark, I decided that I liked Renet the time-traveling Valley girl, so I swiped her without even filing off the serial numbers, and made her my fictional girlfriend.

When I became a fan of James Brown's music, I decided that the Church of No needed a spokespriest as boss as him, so I wrote him converting to the Church of No into the story (this was still in the wake of one of his spousal abuse arrests, so in the story, we broke him out from behind bars, and in keeping with the religion-as-scam theme, he agreed to join us because we were willing to pay him).

One of my other friends, Angel Oyola, used to tease me good-naturedly about "that Church of No bullshit," so I laughed and told him that I was declaring him an "Enemy of No." When he saw that I'd actually written him into the story as a leader of the opposing forces, he laughed and said, "YES, you crazy fool."

In my stories, the Church of No declared multiple jihads, set itself up as a sovereign nation-state, built itself an impregnable fortress (as long as I was plagiarizing the fuck out of anything and everything that I came into contact with anyway, I took Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin, rechristened it the "No Bin" and added about sleventy baskrillion weapons to it), and even traveled through time and space.

Even when we graduated from middle school, and Angel went to a different high school, and when Dan moved away after freshman year of high school, the Church of No kept chugging along, with Dan and Angel's personalities long since permanently encoded into its makeup. I met Angel later on, when we were both still in high school, and when he heard that his fictional avatar was still waging war against the Church of No, he smiled and told me that he thought that was cool.

It became my way of keeping them around, I suppose, long after they'd gone, so that Dan and Angel could still share in the same adventures as me and Alex, and all those running jokes could live on, along with the memories of the experiences they represented.

Ultimately, the end of high school was the end of the Church of No. Me and Dan had founded it, and Alex was our first recruit, with Angel kind of being our second recruit, albeit as the opposition in residence. It could sustain the loss of one of its two primary founders, and even its original enemy, since I soon found other kids at school (albeit who were far less friendly foes) and other fictional characters to fold into the ranks of the opposition, but once we graduated, and me and Alex went our separate ways ... well, you can't really sustain an empire of one, can you?

Not that I was willing to admit this at first. I told myself that I just needed to find a new entry point to the Church of No. I started telling stories about characters who'd been in the background of the Church of No saga (purely fictional ones, not meant to be me or any of my friends, and entirely original, not ripped off from any other stories), thinking that their adventures could serve as a prequel to the Church of No that I knew.

Funny thing was, those characters' stories took on lives of their own, and as they became more complex and more detailed, they also grew more independent of, and perpendicular to, anything that I could connect to the Church of No, until one day, I finally realized that they'd made a clean break from that line a long time ago, and started their own, in a new and uncharted direction.

In time, those characters begat other characters, who in turn spawned a whole world of their own, and my writing has become better for it, but I'd be lying if I said that I don't still miss the Church of No, with all of its hacked-out plots and self-serving characterizations and amateurish writing.

I have never been able to fully explain what the Church of No meant to me. It was a collection of swiped ideas wrapped up in adolescent, nonsensical gags and presented in a crudely unpolished format, and yet, it meant the world to me.

None of the things that I wrote us doing in those stories ever happened, and after a while, the people who we were blurred into the fictional characters that we wanted to see ourselves as. In the strictest literal sense, it was all a lie, but in the most important emotional sense, it was more real than anything else could have been.

When I was a kid, I built an entire empire out of sand and words and thin air, and traveled to places that didn't exist, with two fellow world-conquering scam-artists. Those fictional characters were my friends, and those made-up stories were our lives.