In 2019 and early 2020 it became very important for me to warn new vampires about the dangers of the “vampire community”. After seeing so many exploited, abused, and damaged by various “community leaders”.
While these things are still paramount in my mind, 2020 has slapped us all back in time to a place where more primal needs take precedence – such as our own health, family, security, and for some, basic survival.
I was fortunate enough to watch the virus ripple across the globe from a perch of relative safety. From my privileged vantage point I could see vampires and mundanes around the forced into seclusion. And more importantly – how they dealt with that isolation.
Reflected back at me I saw the same need for socializing and social validation, the same seeming carelessness and willful ignorance. Mundanes across the world suffered the loss of their freedom, and lost their minds. Some even going so far as to expose themselves to a deadly disease in order to gather and socialize in dangerous indoor restaurants or attend pool parties.
The need to be seen, heard, and among their own was greater than their need to protect themselves – and others.
As I watched this, I saw that it was a clear reflection of our own kin experience – a new Hysteria Siberiana at work in the mundane world.
Have you heard of the illness Hysteria Siberiana? Try to imagine this: You’re a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plow your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it’s directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep. And then one day, something inside you dies. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone, possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That’s Hysteria Siberiana.” – Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
An eerie portent of current events, indeed.
Like the notorious anti-maskers, vampires abandon common sense and their bank accounts to feel the same sense of belonging. They willfully ignore the deluge of warnings against community leaders who have been accused of and even charged with heinous, sometimes violent, acts.
We are living in new times and while the first shots have rung out – in the form of a fast, fatal virus that cuts us down at the knees – it’s the slower still-unseen ripples coming that are the greater threat. Devastating and long-term consequences that are only now being whispered about in proprietary medical journals and economic think-tanks.
Likewise, the damage that has been done to our kind since the inception of the vampire community continues to roll on with similarly quiet consequences, a cull of our kind that since the early 1990s has being absorbed into the pockets of unscrupulous criminals. The now-defunct parties, goddess cults, and “true blood” role-playing from American “courts” have been silenced by the virus, replaced by con-men and women desperately seeking to revive their relevance through outrage vlogging, hypocritical white-knight posturing (even while court dates loom) and magical “Tik-Tok”.
As Halloween approaches vampirism will become fashionable and financially lucrative again, but there is little reason to appease the greediness of these self-aggrandized community leaders who have always put profit ahead of your security.
Like all great crises, 2020 has provided us with an opportunity to turn a negative into a positive. Technology has afforded us the ability to create authentic and free connections that don’t endanger us on a global or individual level.
Most of all it has struck down the power and influence of corrupt community leaders whose only interest in you is self-interest. They are no longer as easily able to take advantage of your loneliness and bank account through the facade of vampire-validation. There has never been a better time to separate yourself from their exploitation of our kind. In that spirit I implore all vampires to celebrate All Hallows using all the gifted resources available to us – without involving the mundanes, the role-players, and the empty puppets who have attempted to elevate themselves as social media pions, using your existence to feed their need for exaltation.
2020 will be remembered as a destroyer of worlds but it is up to us to make it more than that. We can look back at 2020 as the raging wildfire that destroyed the vampire community or as the catalyst we needed to rise from the ashes unencumbered by the past.
The Messenger 