Today, dear reader, I’d like to talk about two of my favorite books, for both of which today’s date is significant.  On this day, Fate coughed up one literary vampire and swallowed a master swordsman whole.

First, let’s spin the globe to Higo Province, Japan, circa 1656.  Miyamoto Musashi – a name that should be spoken with a clenched jaw – is checking out.  Not with a blade in his gut, as anyone who faced him would have bet, but from thoracic cancer.  The universe, as always, has a sick sense of humor.  This is a man who clocked over 60 dules, dispatching rivals with everything from a katana to a carved-up boat oar, only to be taken down by his own cellular mutiny.  Zero losses on the battlefield, one big L to biology.
Of course, badass Musashi wasn’t about to go quietly.  Propped up and dying, he dictated Go Rin no Sho, or The Book of Five Rings, to a disciple.  Dictated.  As in, too busy dying to write, but not too dead to drop a metaphysical nuke on the philosophy of combat.  It was a philosophical kill shot aimed at the heart of mediocrity.  “The true science of martial arts,” he wrote, “means practicing them in such a way that they will be useful at any time.”  It’s the samurai versions of “stay ready so you don’t have to get ready.”
Musashi fought his last duel with a boat oar, not because he had to, but because he could.  Because when your kill count reads like a census, you start improvising with driftwood just to keep things interesting.  Then he retired to paint, sculpt, and write.  Real warriors don’t just kill their enemies; they outlive them in ink and stone.

Now, spin the globe again and fast-forward 191 years to Dublin, where a sickly boy named Bram Stoker is born.  He spends his first seven years horizontal, marinating in fever dreams and Victorian gloom – the perfect origin story for the man who would birth Dracula, the literary equivalent of a black velvet glove filled with broken glass.
Stoker grew up to be a respectable civil servant, a man seemingly destined for quiet mundanity.  But beneath his tweed-vested exterior, a different beast was stirring.  He stalked London’s grimy underbelly for research (as we do), interviewed sailors about the spectral horror of shipwrecks, just soaked in the city’s dread like a junkie.  He poured this Victorian anxiety – colonial dread, sexual, repression, the terror of syphilis – into one aristocratic, blood-sucking fiend from the Carpathians.
The result was a cultural contagion so unsettling that Queen Victoria’s own librarian allegedly tried to have it banned.  Fat chance, monkey girl.  His line, “Listen to them – children of the night.  What music they make,” is the ultimate horror flex, a sentence of pure, uncut goth swagger.  Carve that shit into obsidian.  Every vampire that his flickered across the screen since owes a debt to the sickly Irish boy who dreamed of a monster that could never be truly vanquished.

So here we are, dear reader, on a day and night of death and birth, a sword and a stake.  One wrote the manual for killing with purpose; the other wrote the manual for living with fear.
Raise a glass.  Sharpen your pen.  And remember: immortality isn’t about living forever.  It’s about leaving behind something that refuses to die.

Happy Deathday, Musashi.  Happy Birthday, Stoker.  The night is yours.

N.P.: “Secret Skin (Extended PIG Version) – PIG