Joe Vampire

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.

I rarely make a move in life without consulting it. It’s like a Magic 8-Ball with an infinity of answers. Ask, and ye shall learn; seek, and ye shall find.

Google, and ye shall know.

I do understand that not all knowledge bestowed by Google is fact-based, something I’m actively trying to teach my father. Separation of virtual fact from digital fiction eludes him. He still falls for e-mail scams that have been debunked for the past decade or longer. If he had a dime for every time he fronted money for displaced Nigerian princes or donated funds to sham charities like Knee Replacements for Retired Hookers, he’d probably have at least half of his money back.

I’m working on this, though. For him, and everyone.

I like to think after years of practice I have mastered the art of telling what’s what and who’s who out there in the cyberverse. It’s a simple equation, really, a formula I’ve derived after much trial and error. I think it may be a revolution in online data-mining, and it makes Search with a capital S far more dependable than just taking results at face value.

It goes like this:

[(Wikipedia entry + verification of Wiki source links)

MINUS

anything posted by Perez Hilton]

DIVIDED BY

a direct hit on Snopes

≈ 75% true



I’m no economist, but I figure in today’s market – allowing for a twenty year inflationary model – approximately 75% true is as good as 100% true.

Give or take.

I figured it might be wise to arm myself with as much online knowledge as there might be on the subject of being a vampire. And I’ve ponied up way more than my pound of flesh in the last several weeks, so I know I'm deserving. So with great reservation about pissing off the Oracle of Approximate Knowledge, I laid my offering at the digital altar and plugged in the word vampirism.

As expected, the oracle accepted my sacrifice.

Wikipedia popped up first, as expected, but with so much folkloric detail about ancient European burial rituals – such as decapitating a corpse and shoving its head up its ass, essentially, to make sure it didn’t rise from the dead – it didn’t inform me as much as it made me want to go throw up and then cry myself to sleep cradling a bottle of Captain Morgan. So I scrolled through the other links, certain I’d find something devoted to true-ish factoids about the topic. Wrong. I knew when I started this blog that there might not be too much information floating around out there, but I had no idea that there would be so much garbage. Among the online gaming reference sites and pages devoted to the sexy blood eaters of the CW, one lonely site devoted to the tolerance of others filled in some of the blanks and confirmed much of what I had already learned. But it was cluttered with pop-ups, and my antivirus is about six months past expiration. So I backed off the whole fact-finding mission and flipped over to GirlsGoneNaked.com, where, since I visit there quite often whatever viruses that site has to offer have long ago infected my hard drive, the danger of new contamination was far less.

Okay. That’s a lie. The part about my anti-virus, anyway.

It’s totally up-to-date.

I didn’t stop searching because of the pop-ups. I stopped because I started thinking that maybe it doesn’t matter what’s in store for me and my vampire-ness. What’s going to happen is going to happen with or without my knowledge, and with or without my consent. And with Don being the only other vampire I have to compare to, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that my experience isn’t going to be the same as anyone else’s. It was good that he didn’t appear to be suffering much from it. From the crack use? Of course. But not from This. In his own warped way, he has his shit together. He has a means of income, however lacking in ethical righteousness it may be. At least he maintains a cycle of give-and-take, supply-and-demand, this-for-that. I can’t condone his form of currency, but he has thrown together a method of survival that makes sense for him. I just need to do the same. Let’s be real, people: I’ll never be down with biting on hobos, and there’s nothing I’m willing to sell in order to maintain my need for a blood fix – not even on eBay. And it’s proven possible for me to conceal my condition just by keeping quiet about it. But I’m building this bridge as I cross it, and so far I’m holding up pretty well with what little information I have. I may be addicted to learning myriad superfluous minutiae (and yes, I obviously still have that thesaurus), but I think for now this vampire is going to steer clear of Googling any unnecessary information that might make his life more complicated than it already is. Nobody has all the answers about their lives anyway, whether or not they’re undead. Why should I be any different?

Ignorance may not be bliss forever, but I, for one, am willing to wallow in it as long as I can.

How much money Shannen Doherty made in 2009 after signing off from 90210: The Geriatric Years, though? Well, I’ve already opened a second browser window so I can do a little digging.

Some kinds of ignorance there is just no excuse for.