Alcohol, Tobacco, and Blood by A.J. Cole (bill gates best books .TXT) 📕

 The Unpleasant Truth About Vampires

You have to hand it to the entertainment industry. They can take the most disgusting, horrifying things and make them seem desirable, romantic. The devil becomes a sympathetic character because in some movie or book the writer suggests maybe he wasn’t really all that evil – just misunderstood. Or that ghosts aren’t really spirit beings with bad intentions – just poor, lost souls looking for closure or justice. The list is about endless. But perhaps the one creature on it that deserves the least amount of sympathy (or empathy), and yet has gotten the most in recent years, is the vampire. Trust me, I know.

I am one.

Yep. A genuine creature of the night. A blood-drinker. Undead. That’s me. And I’m here to set the record straight for all you…oh, dear; I almost said, “bleeding hearts!” Never say “bleeding hearts” on an empty stomach when you’re a vampire.

Here, then, is my list of why we don’t deserve all that warm, fuzzy support from you living souls out there. Be prepared to be disillusioned.

Reason One – We Don’t Care About Anyone Else

All that romantic crap about vampire love is, well, crap. We don’t love anyone; not the living, not even each other. We’re autonomous, I suppose you could say. We’re walking islands of self-centered rot who care about feeding. Rather like sharks, really.

No matter how nice a person might be, or how much he or she declares a love for vampires (as if the person has any idea how impossible that is), no matter how attractive, or innocent, or young, or old – now pay attention here – it won’t matter. If you’re breathing, it means you have a pulse. If you have a pulse, it means blood is pumping through your body.

And when released through a major artery, that blood becomes for us what a drinking fountain of cool, fresh water on a hot summer afternoon would be for you. That’s all you are. Get it?

Reason Two – We Smell Awful

You know the expression, “you are what you eat,” and how it applies to your looks and body odor? Think about it. Someone who eats a ton of onions every day is going to smell worse than onions, because the onion aroma passes through the chemicals of the body and out through the pores along with the sweat, and the resulting smell is revolting.

Now imagine what blood, which already has a questionable odor, after passing through an animated corpse filled with death’s unique combination of chemicals, and then out through the pores or the mouth via what we call breath, would smell like. I think the word you’ll be scrambling for is “rank.” We smell like that all the time, and nothing can cover it up. The best we can do is approach upwind of our victims so they don’t realize until too late that we’re there.

Is this how you want to spend your immortality? I mean, we even smell revolting to each other.

Reason Three – We Drink Blood and Sometimes Eat Skin

You read that right. Sometimes, if we haven’t been able to feed as often as we’d like, when we do find a victim, we go a little crazy and tear the throat out instead of merely puncturing it. Those fang things we have are great for that, and in our eagerness to feed, we’ll chomp right through the skin, swallowing it as we go for the carotid, or whatever vein we’re looking for.

Nice, eh?

Reason Four – We’re Alcoholics Who Can’t Get Drunk

The whole reason people imbibe is to get high, to numb the emotions. At least that’s why I used to drink alcohol. For us, though, it starts that way and then becomes something else. See, once a person survives being attacked (more about that later), and realizes the only thing edible is blood, a form of depression sets in.

Since alcohol was the go-to remedy for most of us, that’s the first thing the new vampire does: goes to a bar and has a long guzzle of something with a high proof percentage. Immediately, two things become clear – the alcohol isn’t having any effect whatsoever, and the alcohol is the first thing the vampire has swallowed that has a recognizable taste. In other words, it doesn’t taste like blood…or skin.

Reason Five – We Aren’t Beautiful

Since the hungry vampire isn’t discriminating and always in a rush, the victims aren’t always attractive, and don’t always die. They should die. But because we don’t care about our victims at all, we take what we need, and if we still need to feed, we selfishly don’t make sure the victim is dead.

The myth about the stake through the heart is not only wrong, it’s stupid. Come on, really? If a person is dead, what does a pierced heart do – make him deader? No, you nitwit. Nothing. The vampire’s heart stopped beating long ago, so how would driving a massive splinter through it change that? No, the idea came from us driving stakes – or knives, nails, ballpoint pens, or whatever happens to be handy – through the living, beating heart of the victim.

See, if we don’t kill them, that crazy instinct to fight for life keeps them from dying, and as a result, they change into one of us, who later wants nothing more than to die for real but can’t. Ironic, eh?

Oh, and we’re not “undead” technically speaking. After all, if that term made any sense, you would call us “unliving” and be right, too. I mean, “un” means “not,” you see. What we are is pseudo-dead, or pseudo-living, but since that’s too complicated and neither term sounds “cool,” everyone goes with “undead.” Idiotic, if you ask me, but there it is.

So back to my original point. Because we don’t have any reason to choose only attractive people to drain for sustenance, all sorts are attacked, and among those who we forget or can’t be bothered to kill, are the highly unattractive by mainstream standards. That means there are fat vampires, geeky-looking vampires, vampires with crossed eyes, vampires with pitted skin from acne, and vampires of every age from the toddler to the geriatric stage (we do avoid eating babies, but I’m not even sure why). So much for Team Jacob and all that garbage; most of us are totally unattractive.

Which brings me to a related point, which is why it’s not in its own category: why we don’t hang around when the sun is out. We don’t burn. We don’t sparkle. We’re just sorta dead. Ever see a dead body up close? Even the ones in an open casket at a wake don’t look too good. The same is true for us.

In the glare of sunlight, we look awful. Our skin is a mottled, grayish shade that no one with an ounce of sanity would confuse with a healthy, vibrant complexion. So to avoid the idiotic stares, which would only result in us attacking the starers out of frustration (and hunger, of course), and thus showing everyone who and what we are, we only make an appearance at night. So now, add to that our black gums and pointy teeth, and…yeah. Daylight is not where we belong.

Reason Six - Boredom

If all you could do was feed, regenerate, feed, regenerate, on and on with no variance in that cycle, you’d be bored, too. All this nonsense about vampires having fun, getting rich because they live so long, partying non-stop, blah, blah, blah, is a load of manure. We don’t have bank accounts because we’d have to do our banking during the daytime hours, something I handled in Reason Five.

We also don’t sleep, don’t eat regular food of any kind (it makes us puke and have explosive diarrhea simultaneously), have no relationships, and no ambition other than feeding. That eliminates the need for money altogether – no groceries, no rent or mortgages, no families or “significant others” to support, and no desire for a successful career. There goes your vampirish party animal.

There ya go. Boredom. Crushing, inescapable boredom.

One more thing I forgot to mention is tobacco. Sometimes to break up the boredom, or to give ourselves an excuse for hanging out [interpretation: lying in wait] as we consider our victims for the evening, we’ll have a cigarette or two. Nasty things, but they make us look almost normal. Also a great trap – some well-meaning fool approaches to scold the vampire for smoking, and voila! The meal has delivered itself!

Next time I hear someone wax all romantic about being a vampire, meeting a vampire, or even knowing a vampire, I’ll…what’s that? If I have no emotions and don’t give a flip about anyone, why I am writing this? Good question. I’m not doing it for the sake of our food supply (you humans); I’m doing it because I’m sick of listening to the falsehoods, misconceptions, and childish empathy, and wanted to set the record straight. That way, after making a meal of one of you, I’ll have proof that I’d warned you.

Bottom line, all you living creatures who are so enamored of us, be warned: vampires are nasty and are not to be sought. They will eat you, kill you (most of the time), and if you turn instead of dying, you’ll wish you’d never been born. Okay?

Okay. Come and find me; I’m bored, heh-heh-heh…

Publication Date: 01-26-2016

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