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.

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.

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...