Taste – good, dubious, and lacking
Greetings faithful readers,
As cold weather and low skies make the northern hemisphere a gloomier place, I’d like to take this opportunity to inform you that I am in Hawaii at the moment. This isn’t, by any means a choice I would have made on my own. I like cold, dark, gloom. Ideal lighting for a midafternoon abduction and dismembering of a used car salesman.
Hawaii, on the other hand has little to recommend it. After a few hundred years, even the wittiest of undead humor grows thin (“My last meal disagreed with me. So I ate him. Har Har.” Aaargh!).
And yet, here I am, trying to avoid direct sunlight in a place where the sun seems to be permanently smiling on beautiful tanned bodies. Not a place where the undead walk joyfully. And the humidity is just hell on zombies – they get moldier and riper. As you can imagine, I am here by invitation of the Big Island’s royal ghosts. I’m currently sitting deep inside a natural cave formed by a lava floe, and my wireless access is patchy (what does it say about the world when you can actually get internet acces in a CAVE?).
Being here has, once more, gotten me thinking about the relationship between money and taste – mainly because I’m surrounded by tourists who were able to afford the price of admission, so presumably have at least some disposable income.
Most people hear the word taste and equate it with money. Good taste seems to be something that everyman is not allowed to have. Now, while I will be the first to admit that it is in short supply, and would like nothing better than to say that yes, it is the exclusive domain of those wha are well-to-do, I simply can’t do so with a good conscience (and before the moralists out there point it out, yes, I am a multiple mass murderer. But it doesn’t affect my conscience, since they are only humans. Lying about this or anything else, however, would be beneath me).
Now, while I’ve often been accused of being a snob about money, the truth is that I’m a snob about taste. I would much rather spend my time with the ghost of a penniless maid who’s spent the intervening years haunting a library than even the most aristocratic vampire whose idea of elegance is a pimped Cadillac Escalade. Hell, I’d rather spend time with the Old Monster than this particular aristocrat. Earthy as the monster is, she is at least honest and unpretentious.
To those with even a modicum of taste, the above will seem obvious, a waste of a few hundred words. But those of us who are here at the Aikanaka Reunión and Bloodbath, there is a single self-evident truth, a new first law of everything, if you will. One that, when broken, will cause gods of the underworld to cry: Zombies. Flowered shirts. NO.
I have seen things here that no undead was ever meant to see.
Regards,
H
