The vamps are being dramatic…

…over a movie that didn’t make a big splash – Let The Right One In. I haven’t seen it yet (it had a limited theatrical release, I gather, and is not yet out on DVD), but it seems that the representation of the vampire in the movie is unnervingly accurate in a lot of ways?

And from poking around on the internet, I see that it’s a book, too – a Swedish author, John Ajvide Lindqvist.

No, I’ve never heard of him, either.

See… the thing is, most vampire movies are NOTHING like the real thing.

Blade? I mean, sure, it was awesome to watch, Wesley is one bad mamma jamma… but vampire night clubs with blood coming out of the sprinkler system?

Ahahahahahhahahah! How ridiculous!

Lost Boys is popular with the vampires – it’s kitschy, clunky and so very 80s. Razor Blade Smile isn’t too far fetched, but it’s just kinda silly, in a quirky, independent movie sorta way.

The old Hammer Films movies, the Dracula spin-offs and the Dracula-wannabes, nobody takes them seriously.

(A good, enjoyable, albeit silly one… Fright Night. Roddy McDowall steals that movie.)

But, I’m digress. Vampire movies are, for the most part, pretty much non-threatening to us. They’re almost always way off base. (And, no, that isn’t because we control Hollywood and make the movies unrealistic on purpose… that’s not to say that a few vampires have influenced a movie here or there… but we don’t pull the strings at all the studios in all the world. Really. Stop reading your White Wolf gaming books.)

That’s the way we like it, of course – the more disinformation out there, the safer the vampires feel.

Which, of course, the halfway intelligent readers out there will realise that this blog flies (oh, I kill me) in the face of that sentiment.

So, there’s a big hubbub going on about this movie. Was it influenced by a vampire? By someone who knows a vampire? Has the security of the vampire been ‘compromised’?

Of course, fingers are being pointed. Critics of V.A.M.P. are saying it was our doing, that we decided to go full bore on things without the explicit understanding that we were doing it – despite the fact that we have explained to any vampire who will listen that we are doing this one step at a time – this blog is only one of the first steps, a baby step if you will.

So, there’s drama. Investigators are being dispatched. We’ll see what comes of it.

Bluetooth and Bloodtooths

Here’s a factoid I bet you didn’t know.

Bluetooth technology doesn’t work well with vampires.

I shit you not. I don’t know what it is, something about the undead biorhythms (that’s a joke, you better laugh) mess with it. Dropped calls are not the exception but the norm.

I know of one vampire, we’ll call his Theo, who claimed that his Bluetooth earpiece would translate the caller’s words into Swahili.

Theo was as white as you could get without being albino.

(That’s another joke. Vampires, white skin? I kill me.)

So, yeah, Bluetooth tech, not a good thing.

Thankfully, there doesn’t seem to be any problems with wireless internet… that would be a pain. I do enjoy hanging out at Starbucks or Barnes and Noble and internetting.

Some good things…

After the last post, I was thinking – maybe I should put up some positive examples of vampire activity?

The Underground Railroad. No, really. It was a success due to the hard work of everyone involved, which included a bunch of vampires. I mean, most of the activity was when? Night time. Vamps were the perfect agents for it. (Of course, it didn’t hurt that they were hurting the powerful Old World vampires who depended on The South.)

But, totally – vampires helped the slaves find freedom in the North via the Underground Railroad. That’s totally awesome.

(Could I have totally said ‘totally’ any more times in that paragraph?)

There’s been a lot of work in the medical fields, funded by, if not actually worked out by vampires. Karl Landsteiner’s work on blood-typing would never have come to fruition if it weren’t for the assistance of vampires.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg – there are some really, really, REALLY wealthy vampires out there who do nothing but fund research on all sorts of things (medical and safety devices and scientific advances… the Genome Project got a LOT of moolah from the undead, let me tell you.)

Evil, Humans and Vampires

We don’t have the monopoly on evil.

Humans are just as bad.

Of course, as I keep stating, vampires ARE human… or we’re people, I guess there is a difference.

The point of this post, however, is that as people, vampires are no more evil than humans.

Put all the Dracula shit aside. Bram Stoker, if you were alive, I’d kill you.

(Slight tangent – no, he’s not a vampire. There are very, very few celebrity vampires. There is no way in hell anyone would Turn Abraham “Dickface” Stoker into a vampire, capisce?)

Vampires are not “monsters”. No more so than humans. People, whether alive or undead, whether human or vampire, have the potential for good, and for evil.

Look at Casey Anthony. For fuck’s sake, what is wrong with that lady? You know she killed her kid. You know it. Everyone with half a brain has known it since the first couple weeks. I’ll admit, I even thought, for a couple days, that she hadn’t, that someone had the baby… but no.

Look at 9/11. That’s evil. Attacking innocents in the name of a Holy War? I don’t know too much about the Muslim faith, but I’ll tell you what – that’s some fucked up shit, there. (And, no, historically, we Christians have been just as bad. Crusades, anyone?)

The list can go on.

There are vampire atrocities, too.

The Lost Colony of Roanoke? Yeah, big time vampire atrocity. There was a vampire with them, Angus MacTavish. He feasted on all of them and went to Croatoan Island… waiting for more to feed upon. When John White returned… Angus was gone, too. That’s our mystery, we don’t know why.

This isn’t going to be a tally. I’m just trying to make a point. See, V.A.M.P. wants to bridge the gap between humans and vampires, and to do that we have to make you see that we’re not that unlike.

Humans fear what they don’t know, what they do not understand.

So do vampires.

So, that’s what this whole thing is about – giving you the chance to know us. To see what we’re like. To realise that we’re here, too, and we can get along. The Earth is a mighty big place and there’s plenty of room for all of us.

We can learn from one another, we can co-exist.

God, I hope so.

I don’t drink….wine.

Okay, so… blood.

Yes, blood.

I drink blood. That’s the name of the blog, so you shouldn’t be surprised. After all, I am a vampire.

It’s an acquired taste, really. The first few times, you do it because of the… I can’t say instinct, really. The hunger. The craving. The first days… you’re bestial. Consumed by sensations. Slave to desires.

After a few days, a week, you’re (mostly) back to normal. That’s when most of us go through the “Yuck!” stage.

I threw up four or five times the first month.

(Now, here’s a touchy subject. How often does a vampire need to drink? Honestly, it depends on the vampire. I can go weekly and be all right, as long as I get enough to drink. Food helps keep me energised. Oh, what’s that? Yes, we can eat food. Our bodies don’t process the vitamins and such… and raw beef is best for energy.)

After a couple months… well, you start to get into it. It’s kinda cool. “I drink blood,” you tell yourself. (If you’re particularly goofy, you start quoting Dracula and other books and movies. No, I have no idea who would be such a tool as a young vampire. Sorry.) You look in the mirror (and see a reflection, that’s a myth) and grin and flash your fangs and think about drinking blood from some hot member of the opposite sex…

Unless you’re one of the ones who try the animal approach. Me, I could never do that – poor critters don’t deserve to be drank from… for the most part, it kills them.

So, you start going for the easy marks, the younger, counter-culture, subculture types. Easy sex, parties, drugs, the whole nine yards.

Until you drink from your first strung-out hippie (or stoner or whatever the equivalent is these days. In my early days, it was the hippies.) Man, you think you see some shit on LSD? Wait till you try hippie blood laced with LSD (and God-knows-what-else.)

After getting ‘burned’ like that, most vampires tend to get conservative. It’s harder, going for ’safe’ blood. That’s when the schemes start. Things like raiding the blood bank.

(No, I can’t make that up.)

This is why a lot of vampires go the thrall route. Again, with thralls, there’s the whole Enthrallment thing, and the drawbacks to that. (See earlier post for details if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

Eventually, after a couple years, you find your niche, your groove, and generally stick with it for a couple decades, if not longer. There’s the Romeos… the ones who romance to get their blood (and yes, Romeos can be girls, too.) Then you have the Pouncers – grab someone, bite, drink, release. Rinse and repeat. Sneakthieves are those who take from people without them knowing – generally while they’re asleep (or deeply intoxicated/high… again, there are risks.) Some buy it, but they’re a small enough number we don’t have a nifty categorical name for them yet.

Now… artificial blood. I caught an episode of HBO’s True Blood, and when I wasn’t laughing my ass off, I did note this.

Thing is… it wouldn’t work. It’s been tried, trust me. There are vampire scientists (yeah, read that line… ain’t that the shit?) who have worked for years… it doesn’t work.

They’ve been trying for a thousand years. Back in the days when scientists were called alchemists, they tried, they failed, and nowadays, they’re still trying and they’re still failing.

So, yeah. This is where we’re at. Drinking blood from humans like our ancestors did thousands of years ago.

Really, what do you expect? Humans still do things the way their savage ancestors did a long, long time ago… no matter how much a civilsation gets cultured, there’s still some bestiality at its core.

Vampires and people, we’re not as different as you might think.

The Lucas story…

I really didn’t want to get into this so soon… but with Lucas being and town (and my being not posting), I feel I owe it to the readers.

Lucas is a vampire, and he’s older than I am. Not by a whole lot, he’s not some Ancient, by any stretch. He’s a good one hundred and fifty years of age, counting from his birth (and, slightly getting off topic here, that’s another thing – vampires don’t count the day they were Turned as the start of their life – we count from our Birth, just like you do.)

He’s also a bit of a rebel. Literally; he was a human soldier in the Confederacy, just a teenager, and was taken prisoner by a thrall of a vampire – nobody knows who Turned Lucas, and he’s not telling. Anyhow. He was captured and taken to their mistress (that’s the one fact that seems to never change from his tellings, it was a female vampire who Turned him), where she played with him for a year or two before granting him immortality.

So, pretty straightforward stuff, right? Well, you’d think so… and you’d be wrong. Seems that his mistress was targeted by other vampires – maybe she was cannibalistic (yes, that happens and EWWW), maybe she was a spy, who knows. Whatever the reasons, the other vampires in the area (Boston, MA) decided that she needed to suffer, to die the final death.

So she was tried in absentia, tied up outside and left to burn to death under the rays of the sun. The only problem is that Lucas was still Enthralled. This meant there was a strong bond, a psychic connection, if you will, between him and his mistress.

Well, perhaps you already know where I’m going here, but just in case – as she suffered (and eventually died), Lucas experienced everything she did… up to and INCLUDING her death.

Yeah.

Think about that.

Yeah. That’s right.

So, Lucas… well, he’s a little different. He’s a lot more rebellious than most. He’s got a fuck-all sorta attitude. He’s got that cockiness that comes with knowing something the rest of the world doesn’t.

Because he does. He knows things. He KNOWS things.

Like the shit that happened couple weeks ago. He looked at me the other night and I could tell he knew. He nodded at me, said, “You almost got caught there, spunky,” he calls me spunky. I don’t know why.

I just nodded; there’s no point denying things around him… and half the time, if you just play things off as no big deal, it’s better than drawing attention to yourself.

(Vampires are still human, remember – most vampires, like most people, don’t want to know too much.)

Lucas wanders. He travels about – he’s a regular vagabond or something. We see him once every decade, give or take. Things always happen in his wake. Some of the wittier vampires out there have taken to calling him ‘The Harbinger’.

Some of us aren’t laughing.

He delivered a message… like most, it was somewhat cryptic and somewhat practical.

The practical bit – there’s gonna be war in the shadows. (Okay, he was a bit more verbose than that, but I didn’t take notes.) It’s gonna be sooner than later (though, for vampires, sooner has a bit wider interpretation than it does for mortals.)

The cryptic part – well… he said that the ghosts shall walk, and it will be heralded by the dead undying.

No, he didn’t explain it. He got quiet after that, and wouldn’t answer anyone’s questions about his message. The next night, he was gone.

Yeah, that’s Lucas. I’ve been a busy bee lately, that’s why I haven’t posted much. Will try harder.

—-

LEXICON: Enthrall – The ability of a vampire to bend a mortal’s mind to their will. It’s like being in love, but it’s the dark side of love. When you’re enthralled, you drink, eat, breathe and dream the object of your desire. You’re not an automaton or anything, but it’s not far off, at least in any practical sense.

Remember when you were a kid and you couldn’t think of anything but little Suzy or Jimmy? Yeah, it’s like that.

It’s also not one-sided. The vampire who has enthralled you? They feel it, too. At least, if it lasts a while, they will. Different vampires feel it different ways, too… for some, it’s almost like being enthralled. For others, their emotions are out of whack. That’s why it’s used sparingly.

Thralls are those who are enthralled… though the term ‘thrall’ can be, and often is, used for any mortal servitor of a vampire.

Oh shit.

Lucas is in town.

This always ends poorly.

Political Change

See, I know many of you are thrilled at the new regime taking control in Washington… and I get why, I totally do.

(I also know there’s a lot of you horrified by it. And I get that, really.)

But, us vampires… we’re a little nervous. Every time there’s Big Changes in DC, we have to wonder, what this means for us.

See, the government knows we exist.

That’s right, your government, the one that protects you and all that jive… they know.

They know about vampires and they haven’t really done anything about it.

Scared yet? PIssed off? I understand, I really do.

(Let me tell you, when I found out vampires were real, I was pretty fucking scared. Of course, I was a soldier over in Vietnam, taking a little personal time with a village whore… but that’s a story for another day.)

Yep, Big Brother knows about the bloodsuckers. Has for quite some time. I’m pretty sure they’ve known the whole time.. but I can safely say that they knew back around the time of the Civil War.

What’s that?

Oh, yeah… you still think the Civil War was fought over Freeing The Slaves or, if you’re smarter than most, States’ Rights.

I’m here to shatter your beliefs. The Civil War was our Revolution. It was the Colonial Vampire’s fight against the European Masters.

It was about slavery all right, just not the Black Man. The New Generation of Vampires was tired of doing things the Old World Way. So we (and by we, I mean they, as I wasn’t around yet) decided to wipe out the bastions of Old World vampires…. who, yes, lived in the South.

I’ll leave you with that to think about…

But anyhow, I digress. With President Obama coming into power, we have to wonder, will the information about us make it to his (noticeable) ears? Will he initiate some program left in cobwebs? Will they start hunting us down?

What will happen?

Back to the grind

So, after the crazyness of last post, I don’t have much to talk about that’s in that vein (hahahahah) of excitement. Work is work… been keeping a low profile for a couple days, just in case there was some backlash from the fight, from the authorities. I keep expecting the Men in Black to show up at my doorstep, that the paramedic kept a straight face, that I showed up as a dead person to her taking my vitals…

Shit, I gotta stop dwelling on it. There’s no way she was part of some big ass conspiracy, right? Hell, I’m nobody special – why would I be targeted, even assuming there was some such conspiracy…

Dammit, I’ve been listening to the elders too much.

See, that’s what happens when you’re a vampire and you live more than a century or two… you get paranoid. I mean, sure, it’s a survival skill, much like it would be in jail or something. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, ya know?

Elders… that’s another group I’m worried about. That they knew I almost got caught. That they’re waiting for me to walk into the wrong part of town and BIMYOW!, I’d be gone. Never seen again, never to blog again.

We can’t have that, can we?

So, yeah, been staying home (other than to go to work) past couple nights. Just hanging out. Laying low. Watching movies. Chatting on the internet.

That sorta shit.

—

Lexicon Entry: SENTRY. Every region has a Sentry, appointed by The Council. The Council of Elders isn’t quite the neolithic image the name conjures up – it’s not like those damn roleplaying games where there’s a worldwide society of vampires working together in three part harmony.

Vampire politics don’t really exist, not like that. We’re too invested in the mortal politics. The Beater politics, if you will. Sentries are the Judge, Jury and Executioner for a region. The Council of Elders gets together every decade and chooses one – and it’s always a different one for that region – once a Sentry serves his or her decade in a region, that’s it. They can go to another region (and most of them do travel from region to region every decade) but they cannot serve more than one term in any given region.

The Sentry has ten deputies. They’re authorised to use deadly force, whenever they deem it necessary. They answer only to The Council of Elders.

It’s pretty Wild West, if you think about it.

So, where have I been?

Man, it’s been a few crazy nights.

I can’t go into too many specifics because, well, the shit is still going down. Let’s just say that we were out hunting, some fellow vampires and I. (Yes, we do hunt in packs at times. Mainly for safety. Lately, there’s been some issues… again, not gonna talk about it right now. Maybe another time.)

For safety, it was me and Velvet and Angelina (not their real names). We were hanging out at the Metro Club (not the club’s real name), scoping out for some young college types to take back and sexify and drink from.

Well, Velvet saw one of her former thralls (okay, quick vocab lesson – thralls are our human servitors. We feed them our blood, which gives them improved strength, speed, stamina, and slows down their aging) hanging all over Roxxi (still not a real name.)

Roxxi and Velvet have a bit of a history. Big time feud type shit. They’ve burned down each other’s homes, forced each other out of business, and Velvet even helped shave Roxxi’s hair. (Vampire’s hair doesn’t grow back quickly. Seriously, it took her a decade before she wasn’t some sort of bald freak.)

Needless to say, this wasn’t a good thing, this was trouble waiting to happen. Well, before you could say “cat fight”, it happened. It turned into a complete cluferstuck!

Well, the girls got into it. The thrall (who’s real name is Carl) got involved. Other guys in the club got involved. Me and Angelina got involved. The cops got involved.

Well, let me tell you, when the cops are called to a barfight, well… paramedics come along, too. They like to check everyone out. They like to make sure everyone’s okay, doesn’t need to go to the hospital, shit like that.

Right, I’m sure the smart ones out there see how this is a problem. For those of you who’re a bit slow following along, we’re vampires. Our bodies don’t exactly respond the same way that your mortal bodies do.

That’s right, we were afraid of the paramedics. We tried really, really hard to get out of there. The cops had shut the doors and kept everyone inside, told us that nobody would be let go until the cops interviewed everyone.

This was going to take hours. Many hours. We were at risk at being exposed to the sun. Again, not good.

So it was a lose-lose situation. We had to choose the lesser ever – get interviewed, get checked out by the paramedics and let go before the sun came up.

The girls got lucky. They weren’t beat up that much and were only given cursory look overs after the interviews.

Me, well, I had some nasty looking cuts on my face. They had to be checked out. I sat there, terrified. If I could sweat, I would have. (It’s a common thing in stories that vampires sweat and cry blood. Please, bitches.)

So, there I was. I thought about using Glamour (it’ll be a lexicon entry later, trust me) to sway the paramedics to my control… I liked my chances; she was cute, young and tired. She’d be easily impressed upon, I was sure.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I think she was a lesbian. (No, stop, it’s not like that. I’m not talking trash because she didn’t respond to my come on. Seriously, if the target isn’t attracted to you, at all, it won’t work. Vampires are good looking – we’re not all beautiful and pretty like that stupid movie, but we’re better looking after being Turned than we were before.)

It didn’t work and she called over a cop, because my attempt to sway her came across as resistance. I had to behave and be subjected to her ministrations. She stitched the cut on my forehead, and she took my vitals, and let me go.

She took my fucking vitals.

And let me go.

Man, I don’t know what the hell is going on, who she is, who she’s working for or what… but damn… that was lucky! Maybe she had faulty equipment, I don’t know.

But I’m glad to be back home and shit…

I haven’t slept for days.