My decision to become a vampire

"my decision to become a vampire and the consequences thereof"
by SA user, Gatekeeper.

initially, lurking in an abandoned house seemed like an extremely cool idea.

abandoned houses are dark and mysterious and are great places to light enormous candles and stay out of the sun. cats often frequent abandoned houses as well, and as any legit vampire will tell you, cats are very cool and make excellent companions for the Undead. so it was with great enthusiasm that I pried open the plywood boards that sealed up the back window and hoisted my fat, sweaty body up into the dank edifice. It smelled like a Bigfoot carcass, complete with clumps of matted hair and incredibly large turds strewn about the floor, and it looked nothing like any vampire hangout I had ever seen before. vampires don’t do graffiti (except maybe Spike from Buffy, but he’s always been a rebel) and this place was just lousy with the stuff. Crudely drawn pot leaves and massive dongs adorned nearly every wall. not even the ceiling had been spared by these shitty, shitty vandals. I toyed with the notion of cleaning the broken mugs and family photos, ceiling fan blades and such off the floor and maybe painting the walls, but vampires don’t clean and they absolutely don’t paint walls and I was very serious about doing this properly. The graffiti would have to remain, along with the tubs of Herbalife products and the mystery dooks. i'd get a jim morrison poster if i was by the mall and Spencer's Gifts was still a thing.

losing weight seemed like an important next step. see, once you’re a vampire, you can’t lose weight. not in any meaningful sense, even if you watch how often you feed and make sure to run around as a wolf every night. you’re stuck with your preternatural gut for eternity. I mean, you can starve yourself, or live off swamp critters like Tom Cruise did that one time, and you might get kind of gaunt-looking, but you’ll still look skinnyfat. nope, you’ve gotta be in good shape before you get turned. hell, I doubted if any of the local vamps would even want to turn me in my present portly fatkeeper state. I thought of the abandoned church down the block, and the cool vampires who hung around there, and I couldn’t picture any of them biting my blubbery ass. sometimes I’d see them at the deli, buying chocolate bars and inexpensive soft drinks - an encouraging sight, as they all looked like little cobains yet they still ate junky foods without gaining weight. blood is pretty cool but it was nice to know I could still eat candies and drink cherry cola.
so for the time being, I was on a diet. the deli had a lot of Boar’s Head brand cold cuts and according to their advertisements they were low in sodium which, i assume, makes them healthy. i stuck primarily to turkey sammies with lettuce and mayo (“lite” mayo, which means “healthy”) and drank diet Arizona brand green teas. this was some seriously healthy stuff which, as I’ve stated, was crucial to my plan. exercise was probably also a good idea, but exercise sucks and isn’t any fun. there also wasn’t much room for exercise in the abandoned house. i ran up and down the stairs for a bit until i heard someone yell "knock it off, you piece of shit junkie!" and panicked briefly that someone had mistaken me for a crazy person in a foreclosed upon, trashed up house. i waited until things quieted down, and looked for better exercises to do. there was a large mattress in the middle of the living room and sometimes I’d jump on it and try to touch the ceiling, but a spider fell on my face and scared me and i stopped jumping on the mattress after that. i couldn’t become a vampire soon enough. vampires don’t fear spiders.

in addition to the mattress, there were a number of other bits of furniture scattered about the house, but most of it was broken or very gross. my first attempt at a bed was the top of a pretty sturdy dresser. it was uncomfortable, but vampires don’t complain about things like “an uncomfortable dresser” so i go’d with the flow until my legs started to feel numb and my back hurt so much that i couldn’t bend over to tie my shoes anymore. so I started wearing Crocs, and i searched for a new bed.

couches don’t often fare well in abandoned places. for some awful reason, people tear them up, or pee on them, or set the cushions on fire and laugh at the flames. i saw no evidence of fires or rips/tears on this particular couch, but the Skunk Ape aroma permeating the vampire den made it difficult to rule out pee. as an experiment, I peed on some drapes and after about an hour I couldn’t smell it at all, just the rotting Bigfoot and the turds of unknown origin. i’d been drinking Andrew Jacksons, which is coffee and rubbing alcohol (light and sweet), and they produce a very unique pee scent-wise. but i caught not a single whiff of it over the stank of the Sasquatch. i put the drapes in the basement near a bunch of Amway products in case i ever decided to clean them and returned my focus to the couch. it was a very nice-looking couch, like a fancy cat bed but for a person, so my natural inclination was to give it the benefit of my doubts. i threw a large tarp over the possibly peed-upon cushions and made myself comfortable. it enveloped my bloated body like an enthusiastic parent doling out hugs, and immediately i was out. i slept like the dead, like Rip Van fucking Winkle.
i replaced the plywood boards on the back window to discourage other wannabe vamps from taking up residence in my new digs. once I was inside, I had been able to unlock the front door, so now I could come and go as I pleased. there were multiple mean, scary notices on the front door warning trespassers to fuck off, as well as a big useless padlock that gave the appearance of a well-defended door, so i figured the place would be safe during the rare occasions that i left to find food or a bathroom. i also had to find electricity sometimes. i wasn’t too concerned about charging my phone, because really, who the fuck am i calling? but my laptop had several seasons of the television program Supernatural on it and watching a television program like Supernatural was a great way to distract myself from the fact that I’d been living in a filthy smelly abandoned house and pretending to be a vampire. starbucks was an OK place for gathering electricity, but they usually expected me to buy one of their macchiatos and they were only open while the sun was awake. i preferred waiting until dark and then using the outlet on the side of some random house, just sitting quietly in their driveway puffing away at cigarette butts I’d found outside Starbucks while my laptop filled its belly. once it was all filled up, i’d be right back in my vampire nest, basking in the blue glow of the laptop screen, eating a turkish sammler and watching Dean rescue Sam from the ghost of Jesus Christ.

i kept very quiet to avoid drawing the attention of nosy neighbors. people don’t like it when there are abandoned houses near their own house, and people especially don’t like it when vampire hopefuls start squatting in abandoned houses near their own house. part of it, I think, stems from jealousy. not many people are cut out for this vampire lifestyle. it takes courage and serious mental illness, like being in a motorcycle gang or joining the Marines. so I took this opportunity to practice being stealthy and quiet like a dracula, casting spells with my eyes to silence the neighborhood dogs, and pretending I’d transformed myself into a gas so I could move like a tiny raincloud into my new den. for a fat non-dracula, i excelled at these dark arts. there was a mean old van helsing living across the street who would give me the stink-eye from time to time when she spotted me outside, but for weeks I had managed to magick my way into the abandoned vampire den right under her nose. my turkish sanduskies and sweet diet Zonas kept me fit and powerful. none of the cobains from the old church had bitten me yet but I could already feel myself changing. I could move more quickly and silently, I could hear and see things that no one else ever could (even things that didn’t exist) and I had almost no desire for Andrew Jacksons anymore. vampires never drink… ...Andrew Jacksons...

according to one of the spidermen, “with absolute power comes corruption, absolutely!!!”, and i was no exception to this rule. i’d become so adept at the dark art of sneaking into the den unnoticed that I’d stopped imagining myself as a ghost cloud and would just stroll right up to the door with a McConaughey swagger, even during daylight hours. corrupted as hell. but swaggers goeth before a fall, as people probably say sometimes, and before long I found myself at the mercy of that miserable van helsing across the street and her minions, her team of NYPD vampire hunters.

i McConaugheyed up to the front door, sammler in hand, but to my horror the door was locked. had a cobain snatched my den right out from under my feet during the few moments it had taken to order my turksam? i wondered for a moment if i had yet become powerful enough to summon the Fire Gift and burn up this arrogant usurper, most likely destroying my cat bed in the process. but before I had a chance to focus my chi, the van helsing dispatched her blue lackeys and they descended upon me with a terrible fury. i tried to turn myself into a gas and float away until i remembered i wasn’t actually a vampire yet. I had no choice but to submit to their brutality. they were almost certainly wolfmen, the natural allies of van helsings and most other vampire killers, and I wasn’t strong enough to fight them off in my present fat-and-still-alive state. the alpha dog instructed me to put my hands behind my head. i complied and soon found myself cuffed n’ stuffed inside a grody, smelly woofmobile. the alpha ordered his betas to obtain my personal information. i told them they would find my mortal ID inside my bag, beside my sammaturk. like a scumbag, one of the betas threw my sandy right out the window. so typical of cops, you know? lite mayo oozed onto the asphalt as the sandy died, alone and uneaten. betawoof asked me what I was doing at the house. apparently some "neighbors" (read: van helsings) had complained of a "vagrant" (read: cool fucking dude with vampire style) squatting in "the abandoned house" (read: the abandoned house) which was apparently illegal. i played dumb, offering up lame excuses at rapid fire, trying to twist their small dogbrains into fuckpretzels.

“i’m doing an experiment for my sociology class. i’m an activist from the National Alliance for Mental Illness. this is performance art to raise awareness for homelessness. it’s a way to pick up chicks, these days chicks dig poverty. i’m gentrifying the neighborhood, starting with this abandoned house. i’m living off the grid, running water is for Republican shits.”

but as I said, I had been getting very powerful lately, and these wolves in blue can smell power like it was the butt of another wolf. they saw through my facade and i felt compelled to spill my guts. possibly the alphawoof had worked some lycanthropic magic on me. possibly.

“i’m trying to become the Undead,” i said with a chuckle-shrug and a feigned, childish air of nihilism. “i want to die. and then i want to rise again so i can feast upon the life essence of Joe Bag of Donuts. you know, blood of mortals, baby. murder hickeys. i wanna go full kiefer lost boys on a bitch.”

i was labeled a suicide risk and taken to Richmond University Medical Center’s psychiatric emergency room. these shitty animals knew their jail could never hold me. so they put their faith in science. fools, the lot of them.