Unknown Pleasures [1]

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I.

Oh Perdition no!

The dancefloor is packed with mopey kids
in Byronic hipster drag.
They collide like bats in a vacuum
to an earnest Bauhaus darkwave remix.

Kill me again.
Now.


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II.

Betchay chose to meet here because
she thought it would feel natural to someone like me.
Ha!

Fangs,
Blood-thirst,
Sickly pallor,
Hyper-metabolism –
All of these are just functions of biology.

Heck, even the charm must be
some kind of neurogenetic programming.
Doubt if anyone like Betchay would be interested in my...
"vita-normative" self (as the newly-turned college kids put it).

But all those Goth trappings?
Purely a lifestyle choice.

It was just strains of Romani aristocratic culture
– one among many that crossed over to the New World –
before it was standardized by Hollywood,
and codified by lore nerds.

I happened to like dressing in black long before I was sired.
The rest might as well be cuneiform to me.

Sure, I know my Orlok from my Vlad Tepes,
and I can recognize when a holy symbol poses legitimate risk to me.
But that stuff is like the post-vital equivalent of a citizenship test.


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III.

Note to self:
Do not start dwelling on the whole nature-of-the-soul issue.
Again.

Just because I was a Metaphysics scholar
in an era when it mattered
does not give me an excuse to lose myself
in abstract navel-gazing,
or worse: to be an asshole about it.

Must ... focus... on... something else...

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