Fiends From Suburbia

“I want to bite your neck.”  I always thought that statement was funny and kind of endearing.  With his cape raised in his outstretched arms, in imitation of a bat, Bela Lugosi was intent on bloody fulfillment.  He was resigned to his nature, but when he wasn’t actually sucking blood, he appeared a little embarrassed by his condition. 

Things have come a long way since then.  Once a quaint addition to literature and Hollywood, this idea of sucking your blood seems to have become pervasive and a staple of modern life.  You can’t turn around, without someone wanting to bite you.  Teenagers are especially dangerous.  It appears that vampirism is part of that whole mess called, adolescence, and is unavoidable, if you want to graduate from high school. 

In the last quarter of the twentieth-century – I love to say that – the author, Ann Rice, revived vampire mania with her books.  It was exciting.  The Interview was maybe the only book I actually stayed up all night to finish.  (Unemployment makes for cultural possibility.)  But after two or three volumes, the obsession with blood became too much.  It was all these characters thought about.  All of us were potential donors.

I was relieved to leave them in the wake of Gravity’s Rainbow or George and Martha Go to the Zoo.  I thought of it, as just a phase in both my own development and our advancing culture.  Boy, was I naïve.

Things were pretty quiet, for a while, until Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt had to make their fangs known to all.  You can still see them on cable.  Hollywood B movies, once forgotten, were raised from the dead and are now all over the Web.  Everywhere, the Living Dead, vampires of various descriptions, and Zombies from Denmark, seem to have taken on a life of their own, so to speak.  Books, movies, apps.  The paranormal is now much more normal than you think.

Some of our children are possessed.  They wander the streets, Goth-garbed, in search of pale, low-energy, but deadly sensation.  I am, once more, afraid of the dark and suspicious of anyone with a certain glint in their eye.  It’s possible they’re not really my friends.  They might want to recruit me to their ranks. The ranks of the living dead - those who must live by night, complicating their lives with an endless search for an almost orgasmic kind of bloody sustenance.  Kind of creepy.

But that was okay by me; everyone has a right to pursue their dreams.  Sure, it was obsessive.  And, gross.  Not to mention, anti-social, which is probably the point, but you have to draw the line somewhere.  Despite the incredible boost to literacy that all this has provided, I knew I had to speak out when I encountered the book, Abraham Lincoln – Vampire Hunter.  That is going a little too far.

My memories of Abe have been informed by history, or somewhat factual anecdote, as it’s often called.  Of course, we don’t know everything he did, but I’m sure he had his hands full with the Civil War and his own domestic challenges.  The poor guy can’t defend against this kind of historical revisionism.  And, though it’s more complimentary than, Abraham Lincoln – Incompetent Chef, I can’t help but think this is just plain wrong.  What’s next?  George Washington – Wife Beater?

I’m a fan of imagination, but imagining weird stuff, just because it’s weird, seems weird to me.  If you actually have an imagination, wouldn’t it be more imaginative to think up something that moves the world (and us with it) forward to an ongoing, imaginative fulfillment of true love, cosmic exploration, and spiritual enlightenment?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Pollyanna.  I still howl, when the moon is full.  But, even Frankenstein wanted to be friends with that little girl and, by extension, the rest of us.

I’ve had it with blood.  And, guts.  And, scary stuff.  Discovery, possibility, and redemption seem to be much more in line with the spirit of everything that life’s about, rather than fear, possession, and darkness.

I’m all for donating blood, but not to these guys.