The Virtues of Vampires

Via Whatever, I found this piece by Matt Yglesias asking why -- if vampires are thousands of years old -- they don't act old:

Across various fictions, why don’t vampires exhibit more cranky old man characteristics? I’m only 28 and already I feel myself periodically overtaken by a desire to tell the young people all about How It Was Back in the Day. I’ll bore people with tedious stories about the old Monroe Street Giant in Columbia Heights before the fancy new stores opened, or about how there used to not be all this stuff on U Street but The Kingpin was the best bar in DC. Just yesterday, I think, a colleague and I were explaining to the rest of the ThinkProgress team that if the new progressive infrastructure and its blogosphere last for a thousand years, men will stay say the Social Security privatization fight of 2005 was their finest hour. If I ever attain immortality, I fully intend to harangue the young people of the future with nonsense about Voltron and how people think of Harvey Danger as a one-hit wonder but really that whole album’s underrated and had other good songs.That and, you know, murder people in order to feast on their blood.

I totally agree with Yglesias. This is what vampires would be like.It's also the only thing I like about vampires. Vampires have the potential to be soooo antithetical to their usual representation. They have the potential to be antiheroes who spoil any epic by wandering off to complain for three hours about this annoying modern lack of chariot races.This is also the reason I enjoyed Angel on his own TV show. Every once in a while -- alas, not all the time -- they would show Angel as an extremely handsome, immortal, super-strong, crime-fighting crank. "What kind of bill is this?" I remember him demanding at a restaurant, though his dialogue is paraphrased here. "I remember when you could get a loaf of bread for a guinea!* Damn kids, get off my lawn!"--*My utter lack of knowledge about pre-Euro English money is here revealed.