Mah Homeboy Randall Goes Ballistic, and for GOOD REASON

Music Rant, AKA Real Music vs. the Shit *You're* Probably Listening to

Dear modern "music" admirers,

Does it ever bother or scare you that U2 could destroy all your favourite so-called musicians with a single note from any song in their body of work?

Case in point: during the age (or a little after the beginning) of the Techno-Rave, U2 became their *own* Techno-Rave, just because they could. That's what real musicianship is about, being able to stretch your bound...aries, define and redefine yourself and the music around you, exploring the far reaches of creativity.

This is why U2 still exists. This is why Depeche Mode and Duran Duran still exist. This is why Annie fucking Lennox got to sing a song for The Lord of the Rings instead of any auto-tuned fleabag shitkicker with a -9 dress size. This is why Jeff Lynne is being plagued by thousands to give them some new music whilst Justin Bieber is begged by thousands to just...stop it. This is why Paul McCartney and Elton John are KNIGHTS. This is why Shriekback and XTC have cult followings that actually border on being CULTS.

Now, after that rant, let's rave with my boys from Ireland.

I'm actually writing!

It's the beginning of another Cadmus short story that may or may not show up in 'The Harming Tree' simply because I don't really want to kill the Vampire that Cadmus encounters in this one. I still haven't figured out how Flint will actually survive meeting Cadmus so, if he doesn't, the story will go into 'The Harming Tree' anthology. If he does, well, I don't know what I'll do with it. This is the rough draft of part of what I have so far, introducing Flint, a Darkblood Vampire.

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Flint let his large hazel eyes dance across the endless stream of Los Angeles traffic as he sat on a high hill that was one of the more secluded spots just outside the city. There had been quite a few bodies found on this very spot, which would have given him a case of the creeps if he had not been guilty of placing a couple of bodies there himself.

An almost sentient went blew across Flint's face, making his long dark-blonde hair tickle his high cheeks and worry his fluttering eyelids. He absently brushed the hair away, waiting...watching...  The lights of the city below him reflected in his eyes, making them ripple into a phosphorescent malachite strangeness before returning to the more human hazel. It was his eyes that gave him away to humans as being something other than they, and to Vampires as being one of their own.

But Flint was a kind of aberration in the New Hive. He was several hundred years old and had never transformed anyone into a Vampire. It wasn't because he was a Redemptor, which he was not. He simply had never really thought about it. And he had never encountered anyone else he wanted to take that kind of responsibility for. There was that oddness, and there was his name. The Vampire who had transformed him had named him Absinthe because of the odd effect his eyes displayed upon coming into the Hive, but he did not keep it; instead, he reverted back to his mortal name of Simon Flynt, and then modernised it decades later to the simple name by which he went today.

Flint.

Being ordinary in every way he could when he was essentially anything but made him irresistible to a wide range of potential food sources. It served him very well. Even though he preferred not to kill, mistakes did happen, but those mistakes were usually straight men who came to their so-called senses before Flint was finished with his meal, and tried to fight Flint off in some misguided attempt to reclaim some imagined gender-centric honour. Many of those men ended up right here on this dusty desert hill with their necks broken.

Thinking about it, Flint shrugged. He identified as straight...ish. Vampires really couldn't be bothered with mortal sexual hang-ups, but even when Flint was mortal, he simply just didn't care about trivial things like this. All of his mates, both mortal and Vampire, had been female, but it did not bother him to admire the male form or be admired by other males. His male-bonding bordered on the romantic simply because when Flint was fond of you, he was very very fond of you. And if he were not fond of you, you simply did not exist in his world.