There's A Vampire in My Bed

Sometimes I will get my ideas for blogs from readers.  And so it goes that I took this idea from a new reader who made a comment on Facebook regarding vampires.

In my whole rehabilitative, mother role, I kind of like vampires.  I want to take them under my wing and make them normal.  "Hey you...no sleeping during the day now...get up and clean your room!"  That kind of normal.  "Eat-your-steak-and-drink-your-milk" normal.  "Brush those fangs for at least three minutes" normal.



Bela Lugosi as Dracula.

As a young child I loved scarey movies.  I especially loved the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula, and the Boris Karloff version of Frankenstein.  Since then vampires have evolved, just like fashion.  In the Lugosi version, Dracula hid out in a castle in some unknown small village called Transylvania.  There were cobblestone streets and mobs with torches.  There are always mobs with torches. 

Transylvania sounds alot like Pennsylvania, where I live, and our roads are just as bad as Transylvania's, so I figure vampires could be right at home here.  We don't have torch mobs, but we have Talk-Back-16 on WNEP-TV News, and that sure brings out the strangest callers, whom I'm sure if given the chance, would grab a torch immediately and run to the streets searching for vampires to menace.



Cruise and Pitt in the movie Interview
With The Vampire.

In the late 1980's I read the first three books of The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice.  I love to read.  Anne painted a lovely picture of vampires living together and interacting, instead of just hiding out in some castle that needed a real cleaning.  Then in 1994, everything was spoiled when the first book, Interview With the Vampire, came out as a movie starring Tom Cruise as Lestat, and Brad Pitt as his cohort, Louis.  I'm not a big Tom Cruise fan, nor am I a Brad Pitt fan, and while I thought the movie stayed true to the book and some of the cinematography was lovely, I would have cast neither of these men in their respective roles based on having read the books.  But nobody asked me.


Robert Pattinson plays the latest in
daylight vampires in the Twilight
movies.


Still, that 1994 version of Anne Rice's first book, stands far and above the latest vampire epic that's also hit the big screen:  Twilight.  I'm a baby boomer agewise.  These movies are not for me.  While I understand the books are better, I haven't been drawn to read them.  My mother likes the Twilight saga, and so I've taken her to see the first two in the theater, and we rented the third movie via Red Box.  Twilight = vampires meet high school.  Whining, fickle girls, fickle boys, jealousy, texting, and no one being able to make up their minds about anything...that about sums it up for these movies.  They have bad hair days, parents who get on their backs about stuff, and haven't quite mastered the use of make up to get some color in their faces.  The best concept that comes out of the Twilight movies are the fact that the vampires can now exist in the daylight.  See what I mean about evolution?



The common vampire bat.

While vampires, much like unicorns, don't seem to make their presence known much anymore, except in books or movies, there are indeed REAL vampires that exist in the world.  One such mammal is the vampire bat.  This mammal is unique because it is the only one that exists solely on blood.  Feeding on blood has a name.  It's called hematophagy.
There may be only one mammal which feeds on blood, but there are plenty of vampires in the insect world including mosquitos, ticks, fleas, biting flies, and the most-popular-lately bed bug.

Biting flies are a nusance to my horses.  No one has invented a natural fly spray yet that can evict the biting fly for good.  Crosses do not work to fend them off, and they don't stand still long enough to put tiny, wooden stakes through their hearts.

My dogs have the potential to be plagued by fleas and ticks.  So I spend a small fortune keeping them protected with Front Line Plus and bathing them in Tea Tree Oil shampoos.  I examine them every night for ticks, which are the most disgusting bugs on the planet next to spiders.

Mosquitos harbor diseases and breed on standing, stagnant water.  They are the third highest on my list of the top ten bugs I hate, coming in just after ticks and spiders.  So you see, there ARE real, living, breathing organisms that can be considered vampires.

Vampires are not to be confused with gothers.  Goth is a way of dressing which often includes very dark looks such as black nail polish and lipstick (for women mostly, although I have seen some male gothers with painted nails and even sometimes lipstick) and spiked, blue or white streaked hair (for men and women). I am a South Park fan (I love the sarcastic humor of South Park), and the best ever take off on vampires versus gothers is THIS EPISODE called The Ungroundable.  In it Butters mistakes some goth-like students for vampires and hilarity ensues.



My favorite vampire movie.

 Besides this rendition, my favorite vampire movie of all time is The Lost Boys.  Starring such stalwarts as Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric, and Corey Haim, it also stars Dianne Wiest as the goofy, clueless mother whose youngest son discovers evil lurks in the neighborhood in a "vampires among us" approach loaded with tongue-in-cheek humor and some really creepy scenes.

Back to bugs for just one second.  The latest news is that we are under seige by bed bugs.  Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, they have supposedly appeared in mass quantities everywhere you turn.  Late night infomercials would have us all buy "Bed Bug Out!", an ultrasonic plug in deal that emits a frequency only bed bugs can hear and forces them to leave the premises.  Uh huh.

Bed bugs are not new science folks.  When I was growing up, as a small child my grandmother would always say, "goodnight, sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite."  That was over 50 years ago.  I've never been bitten by a bed bug.  I have been bitten by a flea, however, which is why I wage war on them with my dogs in terms of cleanliness and prevention.  I just won't share my bed with vampires.

Aarrooooooooooo!