Joe Vampire (9 page)

“No idea.” 

For the time being, I’m okay with raw meat and the blood gravy and other various concoctions that I’ve come up with. They are neither delicious nor entirely satisfying, but as long as they give me a little energy without harming anyone else, that’s all I really need as far as food goes. For now, anyway. Not sure if the Need to Feed will get stronger or if this is the worst of it. I’d feel much better about things if I could just stop smelling people as if they’re a twelve load of Krispy Kremes about to sail beneath the magical curtain of love glaze. It’s under control, though; they may smell virtually identical, but I’m not so far gone that I can’t make the distinction between snacks and people.

Little Debbie?  Totally edible.

Debbie from Accounting? No fucking way.

My bigger issue at the moment is what to do about Chloe… not that women should be my primary worry. I think I’ve got enough to deal with at the moment. But Hube might be right about the wake-up call thing. The idea of having died and yet still being at least halfway alive has made me begin to realize something: the opportunities I’ve let pass me by have probably been snatched up by other dudes who ended up with happiness that could have been mine if I’d just crawled out from under the coffee table a little sooner. So I think it’s time to try a different approach. A better approach. 

Any approach.

And none of this baby games shit of giving her my phone number and waiting for her to make a move. The move is mine to make, and make it I will. Haven't quite nailed down the where or the when of it all yet, but I’m definitely stepping things up. Maybe her situation with the Tool is in a downward spiral, anyway. Maybe all this time she’s been waiting for me to make the first move, and I’ve been too lame to just do it. Maybe it's time to grab my junk and drive the fucking car already, vampire or not. Whenever I think about this, I can feel that primal sort of impulse spark to life again, like my inner vampire is getting his dick stroked a little. It definitely didn’t exist before the change. It’s a lot like when I cornered Buttons in the dumpster and tried to chow down on him. Whatever it is, I get the feeling it’s going to push me in the same way to jump in and try for something big with Chloe. Only this time, I won’t be diving for a cat and ending up with a mouthful of fur. Unless she wants me to, that is.

That was crude.

I hope she isn’t reading this.

Anyway, it may take me a minute, as the hip kids say, but I think I’m ready to take the chance I couldn’t bring myself to take before all of this happened. I don’t see that I have much to lose at this point. What, if she shoots me down am I gonna die?

Been there.

Done that.

POST 14

Tuning In and Tuning Out

Music has always been a big thing for me – listening, playing, collecting. Everything, really. I’m never without tunes, even if it’s just sounds running through my head. After I discovered telepathy in my bag of vampire tricks, earbuds became a sure way to block the thought-noise I was picking up. Imagine listening to the inane stream-of-consciousness ramblings of everyone you pass, from their to-do list to their love troubles to how they like their frappuccino. Sure, it’s a fun little game to freak people out by speaking their minds for them, but the rest of the time, it’s better if you can be selective about what you hear coming out of their heads. So I keep my iPod handy at all times. I’m not trying to be rude by tuning everyone out or anything. Strange as it sounds, it’s just easier to hear my own thoughts with a little Nine Inch Nails piped into my ears, or Sinatra, maybe. Even Tchaikovsky or Bach. Yeah, I know who those dudes are, too. My playlist is diverse by design. I’ll listen to just about anything if it thumps right, or shreds raucously, or the melody is sweet enough. But rarely ever do I listen to my own band’s stuff. 

The music of Vomiting Nonsense is not among my favorite.

I wish I liked our tunes more, and maybe I would if I had a little more input on the direction the music was taking. Things were much more even when we started out, when we all had a common vision for what the sound would be. We’re a laptop band making electronic music; there are a million possibilities for something like that. So I know I didn’t vote for Instrumental Industrial Sleaze Trance when it came up on the ballot. Not to sound snobbish, but my playing tends toward a more free-flowing melodic sensibility. I don’t try for it; it just comes out when my fingers hit the keys. But that doesn’t serve any purpose in Vomiting Nonsense, because our songs have no melody.  And almost no structure. 

They can only be considered “music” by the most marginal definition of the word.

I am so down with modern electronic music and atmospheric dream worlds that creative folk everywhere are coming up with. But our music is not anything like that. And it’s not for lack of talent… for two of us, at least. Hube has a nifty flair for smashing together multiple opposing rhythms and coming up with some mad beats to hold everything up.  I put in some slinky funk over top of that, which really limits my contribution to about three notes per song at this point. Between the two of us, we set up a mighty righteous groove. Then Lazer gets his ham-fisted mitts on it, puts all kinds of crap over top of what Hube and I have laid down – eerie, inappropriate machine noises, ghostly electrified voices, human barking, orgasm sounds – and shits it all up without even trying, really. Overall, it becomes a mess, yet it lends a qualifying sense of truth to the band’s name. His knack for taking the beginnings of a great idea and turning them into looped, squawky dreck with a few clicks of a wireless mouse is almost awe-inspiring. By the end, he’s overridden nearly all of our input and thinks he’s created a masterpiece. And we let him, if only because he has a better synth rack and studio set up than we do. Somehow, this has also given him the deciding vote in the look of the band, which does no one here any favors. Safe to say leather pants don’t belong on anyone over the age of twenty five. 

Or who weighs more than one hundred and twenty pounds. 

To his credit, he has also leveraged his massive Facebook presence to garner a fairly regular following for VN, though they aren’t the most savory of individuals. But they make loyal appearances at the shows, and they all pay admission when necessary, buying up our t-shirts and scuzzy memorabilia like it’s the rage. So if we only split the door, at least there’s door to be split. And if the promise of free glow-in-the-dark condoms and silicone logo wristbands as giveaways keeps them coming, then it’s worth it to have an audience to hear us play our crappy tunes. Someday, though, I’d like to do more with my music. 

Sadly, this is enough for now. 

Hube has talked recently about saving funds for a return to college, to study music this time since his BA in Pre-Columbian South American Pottery hasn’t made his dreams come true like he thought it would. He wants me to do it, too, and I definitely would have been open to it if the vampire thing hadn’t cropped up. Seems there are a lot of things that
This
has moved to the back burner. I would rather that music not become one of them. I’ve always been more creative than calculational, and there will be no fulfillment for me in finance. Eventually, liking my co-workers and having a benefits package isn’t going to be enough to keep me in my job. So maybe Hube’s educational renaissance will prompt me to jump back into university life as well. Although at mid-thirtysomething – or later by the time the piggy has enough coin in his belly – starting anything new is a challenge, especially when it involves placing yourself among people younger, smarter and hipper than yourself. And a vampire diving into a sea of kids raised thinking the Nightfall books are some sort of historical text for vampire life doesn’t sound like such a swell idea. But the music study thing does. 

So we’ll see. 

What musical drive is left over after my enormous and ultimately futile contribution to Vomiting Nonsense I dump into my own compositions. They’re not very complete; some go on for about nine minutes and end up as sort of solo jam sessions. I think of it as the musical version of doodling, something to keep my hands busy while my mind drops to zero for a while. But now that I’ve got the vampire in me and everything has changed a little, the music in me is different, too. It’s gone from tuneful and pop-ish to almost gothic and downright classical. Chamber melodies fall out of me like some kind of Symphony for the Changed – darker than I’d like them to be, and way more pretentious. But pretty, too… tunes I’d imagine Chloe would like, if I ever worked up enough chutzpah to play something for her. It might never happen, though. In fact, depending on how
This
progresses, none of my music might ever hear the light of day. I try not to dwell on it, but I have this horrible image in my head of me being hunched over some decrepit piano in a dungeon somewhere, plinking away in misery, the lonely vampire composing somber ballads and pining for his lost humanity as he pours what’s left of his soul into his depressing music. 

That just doesn’t sound right, though.

I think I have Dracula confused with the Phantom of the Opera. 

Still, I’d love to be motivated enough to do something specific with them. At the moment, though, I’m just Vomiting Nonsense – literally, figuratively. 

Perpetually. 

Our next gig is coming up quickly, so we’ve been practicing every night. Since I rarely sleep anymore, it doesn’t make much of a difference to me. Lazer keeps talking about taking things to the next level. What would be the level above
porn soundtrack for masturbating robots
, I wonder? Probably everything. He may not be the best judge of where to take our music, but whatever he’s got planned I’m sure it’ll be noteworthy at the very least. 

So maybe some of you will be intrigued enough to make it to our concert. If I thought it would lend perspective, I’d post a link to our band page so you could listen to some samples and let you see what you might be getting yourself in for. But I’m guessing that would only drive away potential audience members. Plus: it’s on My Space, so I’m pretty sure you can’t even get to it anymore. (No offense, JT; you’re still the bomb.)

I will keep you updated on the gig as details unfold.

POST 15

Hear Me, O Mighty Google

I’ve always been curious about stupid, useless knowledge – song lyrics from the seventies, the accumulated net worth of celebrities, the early twentieth century tax laws of Micronesia and its surrounding islands. That kind of stuff. It’s almost a sickness, I think, this Need to Know the Needless, my Fascination with the Unfascinating. My favorite books when I was a kid were an almanac and a thesaurus, if that tells you anything – a book full of facts about what trees are best for dunking witches from in Salem circa 1650, and a book full of words you can use in place of other words. 

It doesn’t get more trivial than that. 

I don’t need this information for anything related to my job or my life, obviously. But the question of the average circumference of the North American female areola arises, and damned if I can think about anything else until I know. I’m sure there are others like me out there.

And in more ways than just our trivia whoring.

If so much of nothing can set me off on an informational fox hunt, you can imagine what something as important as becoming a vampire would do. And me, with so few real world resources to learn from. 

Just can’t seem to locate a Vampire Almanac in my local library no matter how I scour their freaking card catalog. 

I’ve made no bones about my reluctance to Live the Life, and it’s safe to say I was something of a cyberchondriac even before
This
. So I could hardly see how digging up more scary, arcane crap to trouble myself over was going to make things any easier to deal with. But if I can’t make it through a day not knowing David Letterman’s middle name (Michael) or how many drummers KISS has gone through in their illustrious, blood-spewing career (only three, though they’ve traded places seven times in forty years so it seems like way more), it wasn’t likely the vampire stuff would remain unresearched forever, if for no other reason than to give me some so-called facts that I could throw my experience up against for comparison.  So in ignorance of my own better judgment – and because Don had been way less informed about vampires in general than I had hoped – I decided to consult the most fact-filled, data inclusive source I could think of: the Interweb. 

This is the part where angels would sing, if my budget were just a little larger.

Of all the dazzling magical treasures offered by modern technology, this one is my favorite. More than car seats that warm your frozen mid-winter’s ass, more than extended swing-arm razors for man-scaping those hard-to-reach areas. Those are one-trick ponies, while the ‘net is all things to all people, all at once. It’s the television/cinema/library/record store/shopping mall/24 hour live nude girlie show we all dreamed of as kids, accessible from virtually anywhere on the planet via a circuit-filled slab of glass and metal the shape of a Pop Tart… which can also be used as a phone, if you’re into that kind of thing. This is the shit we were promised in the Bill of Rights, somewhere between guns and a fair trial, if memory serves. And the best of the best of this dream-stuff marvel for a seeker of the stupid and mundane? 

The Holy Google.

Hands down.