Anyway, I ask strange questions. Here's one: How would a vampire give up being a vampire? Would he join AA? And if so, how would the 12 steps work for him:
Step 1: We admit we’re powerless over our addiction.
Ok. Tough one that. And self defeating in my opinion. I mean, if you admit you’re powerless, then you give the addiction (and the group but we don’t say that without raising “issues” over whether 12 steps is a path to success or a path to a different kind of addiction) power over you. “I drink blood. I’m addicted. Totally. In fact if I don’t drink blood I have a tendency to die. So I’m addicted. Totally. Oh and sunlight too. If I go into the sunlight I spontaneously combust in a burst of carbonized bits like in Blade. But not like the disruptors that the dudes with ears like Klingons use... Romulans. That’s it. Not like that. Much more like Blade. But it hurts man. It really hurts like buggery.”
Now I don’t hesitate to suggest that any alcoholic would have a tough time coming up to that standard, I doubt that any drink addict is likely to stand up at an AA meeting and say “Oh by the way, if I don’t have 2 pints of scotch a day I’ll die. No really. I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean really DIE. Furthermore, if I get further than 10 feet from a pub I’ll burst into flame and die a horrible agonizing death. And not with meaning like Buddhist priests in Vietnam. I mean just plain VOOM and I’m on fire. For no reason other than I strayed 10 feet 1 inch from a pub. And there are no Romulans involved.”
So. Seductive and easy to admit, but self defeating.
Step 2: Came to believe that some supreme Dude-Power could restore ourselves to sanity.
Oooookaaayyy... Where do I start? First up, vampires are gunna have to believe in some higher power. In fact they know where he is. They’ve watched Underworld and Shaun of the Dead. He’s a dude that looks remarkably like Bill Nighy and hides in a underground tube in a castle and moonlights as a zombie as a favor to Simon Pegg.
Now I ask you. Any vampire that seriously wants a dude who looks like Bill Nighy to be their supreme overlord is nuts. Not because the dude is also nuts. He is, without doubt, completely 6 cans short of a six pack. So what are the alternatives. God you say? That hebrew nutter with serious impulse control problems that burns cities to the ground? Or the latter one that recants his earlier madness and sends his only son to be nailed to a bit of wood? I don’t think so. Especially since any vampire coming within touching distance of two bits of wood stuck together at right angles causes them extreme pain.
So it’s not the hebrew god, and by extension not any prophet of that god which eliminates Allah. So who else? Perhaps Enlil or Enki from the Sumerian civilization? After all, the Sumerians had a rather depressing view on life involving tears, anguish and depression. With “evil fates carrying off their lives.” Ok. Sounds more like it.
So. It’s likely that vampires have accepted Enlil or Enki into their world view. Now this bit about sanity...
Well frankly after reading about Enlil and Enki one doubts their sanity. But can they restore a vampire to sanity? Well, that pre-supposes that a vampire is insane.
So perhaps some made up God like Cthulhu perhaps. Yes that’s it. Rubbery feelers, scaly skin and prodigious claws. Calls to us during dreams. That sort of thing. I mean, even Cthulhu uses that weird fishy symbol that Christians use. Go look it up. I mean really. Yes really.
Step 3: Turn our will and life over to supreme-dude as “we understood him.”
Again. Oooookay... But not the hebrew god as explained previously. So. We admit Cthulhu into our lives. Cool.
So it’s off to the H.P.Lovecraft society to get a stone statue to turn our will over to.
Step 4: Make a fearless moral inventory.
No problem. Had a lifetime of doing that. Not bedtime reading. More of a sitting around a campfire with torches under our chins kind of reading. Then more of a kind of running and screaming into the forest where nameless and unspeakable demons rise up from loathsome depths and drag us down into their pit of despair and eternal torment kind of inventory. That kind of inventory. The kind of inventory of drained bodies that Pol Pot or Stalin reads and decides that they just didn’t cut it in the world of murdering f**kheads kind of inventory.
Step 5: Admit to supreme-dude, ourselves and a human what we did.
Now this one is a bit tricky. Cthulhu is far more likely to send a kind of “pat on the back,” so that doesn’t help. No point in admitting to ourselves, ‘cos let’s face it, we have virgins necks in our faces on a regular basis, so we’re pretty much aware of what’s happening.
So the main problem is finding a human to admit our wrongs too. My point is this. The longer a vampire lives the longer their catalog of brutal and meaningless but tasty deaths is going to be. I suspect that the average 800 year old vampire has sucked the blood out of 800 by 365, roughly speaking, people. That’s some 300,000 humans. Now given that it takes an hour or so to detail who that person was, what they did and how f**king sorry you are to have drained them of blood, that would take some 36,500 days to achieve given that the average human can only concentrate for around 8 hours a day. That’s 100 years.
So. Any vampire is going to have to wait until the 22nd century when life-spans have reached an average of 110 years, given that the average human takes 10 years before becoming “conscious”, before kidnapping some poor f**ker and keeping them alive for at least 100 years while berating them for 8 hours a day about who they sucked dry before that poor f**ker was born. And since the vampire will have to feed in the intervening 100 years, the poor kidnapped f**ker will likely have to endure a Xeno’s paradox of eternal “just one more dead human I have to explain about..” issue.
Step 6: Be entirely ready to have supreme-dude remove the character defects.
Hmm. Difficult. Unlikely that drinking blood from a dying corpse is unlikely to make Cthulhu strain a blood vessel if he/it even has one. In fact it’s far more likely that the scaly old one is likely to say “Hey. Dude. Good fun eh?”
So not much luck on this front.
Step 7: Humbly ask him to forgive our shortcomings.
Well, that might work. After all, Cthulhu might think that only one virgin per night is a bit on the under committed side of things. So admitting that you drink blood from ONE virgin per night is definitely a short coming.
Step 8: List all the poor b*stards you hurt and make amends.
Oh f**k. As before, Xeno’s paradox and the intransigence of time make that one somewhat difficult to achieve. Unless you take Elijah Baileys approach and work for millennia to bring humanity to some “perfect point” you’re likely to get a D- for this one.
Step 9: Make direct amends to people you hurt wherever possible except where this would injure them.
Oh f**k again. This is just getting so mind convoluting that even Asimov would have a brain hemorrhage trying to work out the robotic law that fits.
No luck here.
Step 10: Continue to take personal inventory and promptly admit it.
Now anyone who has ever had a job understands the CLM. The “Career Limiting Move.” You know what I mean. If you are a bus driver and admit that you like to crash buses, or are a postman who like to shoot people and so on you’re not likely to blurt it out in the lunch room. Not if you don’t want a SWAT team to turn up and spend the rest of your life admiring the padding in your cell.
Any vampire that drains a person, then runs out into the street and admits to a passer by that they have done so is likely to receive a somewhat stoney response, following by dialing 999 or 911 or whatever.
Step 11: Seek, through prayer, to improve our conscious contact with supreme-dude praying to understand his will and to carry it out.
Oh. Right. Sort of like hearing voices then. So let’s say we pray to Cthulhu to understand his will and carry it out. Ok. So not much change from having fun draining virgins then. Kewl. Ok dude, let’s do it.
Step 12: Having spiritually awakened, transmit the message to others in the same position.
Excellent. Let’s open churches to Cthulhu, plan cruises to the south pacific to find the green goo dripping multi dimensional home of our lord and hasten his awakening from his slumber in R’Lyeh. Infect as many humans as possible (which is self defeating but we won’t go there right now), and let’s go on a rampage of star spawned carnage.
In fact, while we’re at it, let’s get that fun guy Yoggoth involved.
By the way, this whole thing also applies to serial killers. mass murderers and true terrorists.
So, in conclusion, I doubt that vampires are likely to be queueing up to join AA. It’s just not practical. And furthermore, if they did, then they’d all start opening florists and start sending flowers to graves worldwide. This would cause a complete failure of the international flower business and the inundation of graveyards with piles of flowers.
Actually now I come to think about it, maybe we should investigate some of the inter-flower, or whatever, named groups as they may have links to vampires making amends.
Now. I’m off to book a cruise to the south pacific.
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