If I could extract
from you every Joule of energy by the action of a lever, I would not hesitate
to press it down as long as you have breath in your lungs. Alas, I cannot take
anything by force, but must manipulate you into offering it as an act of freewill. You
might still think I would prefer to drink your blood, but I would not. No, no,
no, there is no medium more effective to channel energy from your
bosom into mine than the medium of human emotion.
Human emotions are subtle and manifold. Some are intense like rage, some
seemingly dull, like apathy. But an emotion’s conductivity is not measured
by its extravagance or “loudness”; it’s measured by its negativity. All conductive emotions are
negative. There are no known positive conductive emotions. This is not to say
that positive emotions do not have merit. They can sometimes serve as
a springboard from which to send you plummeting to depths you would not otherwise
sink to. Only from such depths could I extract from you certain samples of
human hopelessness and despair. But such techniques must be employed with caution:
these depths are not bottomless; there is always death, and a dead man produces
no emotion of any kind, positive or negative.
Let’s keep it
simple.
To begin, you must
be sure to place your man at a constant disadvantage (men and women alike). Caloric extraction works
rather like electricity: there must be a positive and negative pole for the
current to flow in any direction. To ensure that it flows in yours, you must
maintain your man in a permanent state of disadvantage. By contrast, you
yourself must always be positive. At the very least, outwardly; what you feel
inside is of no consequence. You must always seem upbeat and winning, while
your man must always, in some fashion or other, be losing. To highlight this,
you must on occasion extend to him a straw for him to clutch at; it might serve
to heave him partially out of the swirling water, but only so long as to give a
positive emotional fluctuation. This is to be catalytic at best, but never let
it lead him to safety. By definition the straw must break. How soon you wish this
to occur is left to your discretion.
The preferred
emotional bracket is fear, anxiety, despair, longing and guilt. These are most
readily accessible. It is beyond the
scope of this exposé to comment on all of these in detail. Suffice to
say that each emotion has its particular wavelength, intensity and taste. Much as
you may prefer fish over meat, I too have my preferences. I tend to go for the “stickier” emotions; emotions that enforce a certain adhesion or dependency…
on ME. To wit: guilt and longing.
Guilt is perhaps my
favorite. It is, indeed, practically a lever I can push down, so easily is it fabricated,
so easily multiplied. There is no fonder taste than the taste of guilt. Saccharin
and bitter at once. It is not even necessary for your man to squirm under it;
it is quite enough to watch him drop his head at his imaginary wrongdoing. The
procedure is simple: anything you do is to be minimized with one of a hundred
pat justifications. Anything your man does is slipped under the magnifying
glass and blown out of proportion. It is important to constantly harp on a selected
grievance, regardless its pertinence or truth. Repetition is key. Lay down the
narrative; work it hard and then draw down the guilt straight into your gullet.
Yum. Oh, and one more thing: never, ever, ever forgive.
Longing. This is a wonderful
tactic and can provide a heady flow of emotional calorie. However, it may
require that you interact with your man en nature. Let us not beat
around the bush: you must be intimate, as you must instate physical longing.
Once in place, it is quite wonderful and vampiric. You will watch him grovel
and act like a monkey and be quite beside himself with desire, and it will be child’s
play to squeeze out of him any measure of caloric bounty. The procedure is
elegant and simple: never offer anything; shun as a matter of course, but in random and
infrequent instances open up in a show of abandon. This will place your man on a
wrong footing and lay him bare to wholesale vampirism. These Joules can be
sour, at times even vitriolic, but they are perhaps the finest.
The pallet is so much
broader than the above, and there are many sub-emotions as succulent as these headliners,
but the principles for extraction are the same: it is a zero sum game; always remain on the
right side the zero; smile a lot and win.
