Goths are alright.

Last night Peter and I attended Goth Night at a club deep within the sorrowful heart of our fair city. Far from the morose D&D NIN-listening slackers brooding on the bleakness of this life we remembered them being from high school, we found that goths are actually a pretty fun bunch.

When I say "a pretty fun bunch" what I really mean is "goth chicks are hot". I've always been a sucker for pale-skinned brunettes with tears tatooed on their faces, but slap a tight vinyl skirt on their forlorn loins and I'll sing KMFDM by moonlight anytime she commands it. Sure it might sound a bit sexist, but I never found Trent Reznor's screeching whines particularly stimulating until they were accompanied by the undulations of a corsette-wearing tangly-haired mistress of darkness out on the dancefloor.

Closer to God? No my dear Azrael, you're just really pretty.

Goth males are a different story altogether. On one hand we have the creepy guy in the white t-shirt and slacks who just lurks in the corner and looks faintly menacing all night like Dylan Klebold incarnate, and on the other we have the hardest-core Snow Nazi wearing fishnets, a mink coat and a military officer's hat rubbing his hands all over his pale sweaty chest like he was driving his own nine-inch nail into some young buck back in jolly old Stuttgart. And between these two extremes come everyone else, the fat goths and the black goths and the guy wearing the "Foetus" world tour t-shirt. Husker du, mein fraulen! Imagine the musical Cats but instead of cats the actors play dead mimes and instead of coming into the audience to sing and dance they just writhe around and write gloomy poetry on their LiveJournal.

It is a night of subtlety, a song of sorrow,
wolves vent their pain. The ethereal one
awakes.

I don't know. They aren't all that bad, and to their credit they've got their hearts into it far more than the assholes who think that turning a baseball cap sideways gives them any sort of credibility in a youth sub-culture. I've certainly never met a mean one, and one of the only three bona fide goths I've ever had a real conversation with wanted to be a physician's assistant [Paging nurse Dark Chylde, please report to the maternity ward]. At the heart of the movement seems to be a sincere middle finger to the status quo and some scary skulls thrown in for good measure, but somewhere between Poe's "Annabelle Lee" and the Cure's latest album the movement became mired in a sinkhole of self-caricature. Hell, I was friends with a bunch of these kids in middle school before they went to the dark side, now they've found a niche just like everyone else and if it involves silver crosses and blood, big fucking deal. And perhaps beneath all my glorification of goth chicks is a latent desire to be a goth chick myself, like an after-school special where the kid in the wheelchair discovers that the treasure he's been looking for has been inside him all along.

No one feels my pain.


But this is just stupid.