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Fear of the Dark – Chapter 1.8

After explaining the events that had gone on at the hospital to the Reverend, Timmy already had God’s journal opened on the desk, and was contemplating whether or not to continue with it again. The Reverend had assured Timmy that he had no problem getting the day’s tasks in order for just the opportunity. That dreaded book was looming hideous on the desk and practically speaking to Timmy, and for some ungodly reason he was trying to ignore it. His fascination with the creature known as God and his actually affection for the entity he knew as God was perhaps becoming a bit too close to his heart. Timmy was a failed Catholic at best, and perhaps it was the vindictive and borderline intolerant God that he had been encompassed by in the Catechism classes growing up that chased him to a separate religion to continue his fascination with God in general. Then there was this almost dirty fascination with another God that disturbed him more than anything.

He decided to just continue where he had left off the day before, “There was none of that magical healing powers that I had seen in the movies. The hole in my body looked like a festering, non-bleeding wound from the moment I looked down at it, and given over to the holy fury of my mind, rage swept through me like the blood that once flowed,” and Timmy stopped short. He threw in his own observations at this point by saying, “You have to admit, he’s a pretty good writer anyway?”

The Reverend nodded to him and then said, “I was thinking the same thing myself. He must have been a reasonably avid reader before his,” the reverend trailed off and then after a moment said, “accident, I suppose would be the easiest way to say it,” and then he grimaced, thinking of the weird semantics involved.

Timmy continued from the tome, “My mind obviously didn’t work any faster than that of a normal mortal, or else my confusion wouldn’t have been so pronounced. I was linked in many facets of confusion. The lack of blood, the lack of death, the crazy little creature I had created, and of course the fact that every account I had personally ever read about vampires was null and void,” and at that Timmy had looked up to see the reverend nodding along with him. “The lack of blood actually made sense, since I had created my spawn or whatever I should call it by drinking his veins dry. This was a given. My thoughts were almost sane compared to that of the vermin running away from what he thought would be my destruction. On that note, what would be my destruction, or worse yet as things were going, his destruction, and laying here by my knees is yet another one of us that I don’t know how to deal with.”

The reverend spoke up at this point, “I had figured out the ‘shredding’ mystery a while ago. I peeked into ‘The Vampire Lestat’ from your shelf there, one night when I couldn’t sleep. Of course reading that didn’t make it any easier to sleep, but there was a theory on ‘utter destruction’ of the body that made sense,” and then he looked thoughtfully at the bookshelf. “I wonder if Craven had read any of the vampire books out there to get ideas?”

“He seems rather well read, and from what I am gathering he had happened along a few of the gothic thrillers along the way before he had changed. Whether or not he researched afterwards, I’m assuming we will find out as we go?” Timmy added before going back to the journal. “I got the cure to my malady correct from the beginning when I separated the head from the dead woman, and heaved it. I had read many times that separating the head of the vampire from their body would end their existence. In fact the next day when the body was found, and later the head was found, there was quite an uproar in the news, but no vampire to deal with. Later my own personal fear of bodies and heads being brought too close together on an autopsy table, had led me to destroy the bodies beyond recognition,” Timmy gave a nod towards the reverend. “I have never created another vampire, or taken the life of any human that didn’t deserve to die. My fear of become so craven that I would take the life of an innocent again has led me to the path of preternatural vigilante, and in time self righteousness justifies it.”

The reverend smiled as he stated, “Chalk another one up to self righteousness.”

Timmy continued, “Of course I am getting off the point of where I was leading, and that would be strait to the demise of that freak walking around, and treating everyone he comes across as food, and he treated quite a few of them to the death kiss. At that time, I wasn’t too excited about broadcasting our presence. He on the other hand was callous to everything and everyone. That next day when the news hit about the woman separated from her head by three city blocks, I was scared. He was indifferent, and for all I know unaware of anything,” and that was when Timmy added his own words in warning to the reverend, “This is about to get gross.”

“Passion of Christ gross, or Halloween 3 gross?” the reverend asked with a bit of a snigger. “I’ll throw up on something when it gets to objectionable for me, and that will be your que to take a break,” he laughed a bit more heartily, “because I’m not missing any of this,” which he ended with a wink.

“Definitely Passion of Christ gross,” Timmy said thoughtfully, “those Halloween movies kinda make me laugh, the violence just gets silly about fifteen minutes into the movie.”

“Good, you got my point anyway. Continue, please?” the reverend finished with a wave of his hand. Probably more humorous than that was the fact that he started pulling out the lunch that his wife had packed for him and was starting to casually eat it. Timmy didn’t even bother to comment.

“My confusion was put at a standstill by what was now inert instinct inside of me. At the core of who I had become or was at the very least becoming, was the heart and mind of a killer. I could feel that. I didn’t have a clue, how to kill myself or the little beast that I had created, but I could kill anything that was human, or still in the shell of a human form, as I had demonstrated on his first victim,” Timmy licked his lips as he continued on, “then came the fears. It took me time and concentration to realize what I was actually afraid of, and it wasn’t the normal things that transpired in vampire lore. The cross that hung around my neck, and the sunlight I had woken into were good examples of the mistaken assumptions of vampire lore. The gaping hole going through my torso was another one. At the same time, I realized as I stared down the road that I had not been afraid of these things either. Instincts are things that all creatures are born with and even us beings that have the opportunity of being born twice must have them.”

Timmy stopped for a moment, and the reverend piped up, “He’s a good thinker anyway. I would think that it becomes an advantage over the far more carnal creature he had created.”

“Funny that you bring that up,” Timmy said from his own brain before he went onto the next line from Craven’s brain. He inhaled and then started, “I knew almost within that instant, that my conscience and intellect were an advantage, as I took the time to think things through. I wasn’t given the superhuman ability to think, like one would have been taught through the books on vampires. There was no ageless knowledge that had simply come to me, but I for the most part had exactly what mental faculties that I had brought into the afterlife, in the afterlife. That also scared me to be honest with myself, because that could be a double edged sword,” Timmy already started comprehending the point that was being rationalized as he pressed onward. “As a college educated theologian, in his mid twenties, I had the capacity to intellectualize, and perhaps carry a bit more morality into what I did from this point on, and a twelve year old, at best, boy probably only had the ability to be carnal and selfish. This made him far more dangerous. It also made those that he turned far more dangerous, as I wouldn’t have a clue as to what sort of personality they brought into the afterlife with them, and so on and so forth. It could turn into armies of vampires fighting throughout the streets with humans caught in the crossfire. My next concern was how many of us were already in Manhattan, and how we would all react to each other,” and Timmy gave a pause before he finished the thought, “well aside from the instinctive fear that I had pulled out of the back of my mind, as all of these thoughts came to me. My body trembled the moment I thought of the running water.”  … To Be Continued

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This is my first Saturday night in a while that I haven’t had plans. It’s not a bad thing really as my plans over the last couple of weeks had led to misery, and tonight I actually looked forward to not having plans. I’m sure in a couple of weeks of not having plans I will be miserable about that, and the vicious cycle shall continue. Still it’s all part of the plan for the new Jeremy, and it appears to be going on schedule. Never too quickly, often too slowly, but steadily moving along with or without my permission. Of course it still has more to do with who I am and what I am than what I want to be or where I want to get to. Confused yet? Well that is a small sample of what it is like to have my brain, the big bag of marbles and not the slightest clue of how to play with them.

The one good thing that I can say about myself is that I at least can identify the color of the marbles, despite my lack of knowledge on which one to knock into the next. That’s a start, so I should be happy with what I have, and that is the largest part of settling into the new me. Needless to say there are probably a few people that will say that I have been settling into the new me for the last 6 years, with a few set-backs along the way. I should look at my progress from the day my last wife left me. It was startlingly deep to figure out that it wasn’t the end of the world, but if you had seen me after the first two then you would say it was major improvement to begin on, build on and perhaps even grow with. I managed to even be comfortable alone for larger quantities of time than I had in the past, but inevitably, I could never do it forever. There’s the rub.

People like me have an innate tendency to desperately need people, while at the same time a desperate need to be alone. This is a bit easier than it sounds, despite my ability to complicate things. I hate not having someone to call “my own” but at the same time I hate having more people depending on me. I’m actually pretty good at the whole “being needed” thing, but the problem on top of that is that my slots are a bit full. At this point in my life, as it had been for quite a while now, I have 3 kids, a grandmother, and {part of the time} a father, who relies on me for various “adult” responsibilities. What little time is left over I of course wish to dedicate to building a relationship of a “different” kind of adult nature. Rub number two comes into play here.

Despite the opinion of “most” people, men tend not to be so encumbered with responsibilities. There are plenty of single fathers out there, and aside from working a bit of overtime to pay off their responsibilities, they tend to be the same as a single non father, with a day or two here and there where they are otherwise “occupied” playing daddy. The type of single father that has actual custody of their children usually falls below the “half” mark in divorced families, and in my case the “single father whose ex-wife has nothing to do with their kids” percentage is nearly zero. To be honest with you, I get around a bit, and I know of very few, and of those few none of them have more than two kids. This would place my predicament into the range of a conundrum even.

I tried it all ever since I gave up on the half way across the world online romances. Dated a few women that “fully understood” my need to keep my family out of my relationships. This of course to them meant that they would wait a week or two before they started fiercely detesting it. Dated one where we tried to simply include our families together, which was misery incarnate as both sets of kids selfishly disrupted the whole affair. I’ll leave it at that. Dated a single mother that completely proved my case that single mothers don’t want single fathers, because they don’t want to share, and most importantly I realized that I tend to gravitate towards “damaged” women anyway. Most of them end up damaging me a little more in the process. Last Saturday I came to the conclusion that I am just plain damaged. It wasn’t a bad week really after that acknowledgement. The trick realistically, which I always forget to implement after a long enough period of time is ABSTINENCE! The second I start slipping back into the belief that I can have a moderately healthy relationship, I have already started damaging myself, because sometimes it is best to remember a joke I had said for a long enough period of time, and somehow had talked myself out of. I can have an adult relationship as soon as I learn to be an adult. Until I get to that point I should simply prove that I have what it takes to keep a cat alive for more than a couple of years.

I do have some good news as far as the last crash and burn session went. I didn’t walk away from it blaming my kids. It wasn’t their inherent “neediness” or the time that it took to take care of them, or even their need to destroy the whole thing before it could even start. It was my ability to finally locate a very damaging problem before it was too late, and the ability to walk away that had ended it. In the end I had found solace in my kids, as they were what I had to come home too after a couple of horribly distraught Saturdays. In fact they had been pleasantly surprised by my walking into the house dejected and far too early to even be explained away. By dedicating my time to them in these hours of “pissed off” that mark the end of any miserable Saturday, I had come through the weekends slightly less damaged than would have been expected. Progress and not perfection, is a good start after all. It could have been the death of Singledaddyman {as the name had originally been} but in the end it was the same ol' same ol' ;8o)

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Well I guess it depends on what you actually find amusing, and what you do not. I do know that I am willing to say that I grew a lot over the last year, and it was probably for the better. I know quite a few people probably miss my tales of misery over the stupidest things but realistically I don’t. That in and of itself has got to be the best news to my sick and suffering ears, but let’s be honest here, I have had misery this year, and it just doesn’t faze me for some reason. Christmas came and went relatively uneventful, and that would easily put it in my top five Christmas’s of all time. It was all that time around it, and the reason why this blog is almost two weeks late, but that will come in time.

Again a run-down of my wonderful year’s end, would start in November and follow us strait into the new year. November my grandmother and the rest of the family got so sick that it exhausted all of my savings. I got no sleep at all for almost two weeks until I finally got my grandmother into the hospital, and got the kids off to my former in-laws so that I could start the reconstruction of the miserable shell of me, my finances, and my house, to start December. December found me in destitution, and through more work hours than I would ever want to admit, I got caught up. That was when the power went out, and we were all forced to huddle around a fireplace for five days {and need I remind you I can barely handle these people as it is} and with that I went hard into debt again. The power came back on, went back out, came back on and went back out. It was a rotten ten days, but oh well, I got through it. I started my Christmas countdown in the nick of time, wrote a decent enough three-parter for the finale, had to work too much again through it all, and was all set for my usual Christmas finale. That was when I got up Christmas morning to find out that all the rolling grey outs had fried BOTH of my beloved 19 inch flat screen monitors.

This time last year that would have crushed me. My cyber life was practically over. I would have had to run out and spend the last 300$ worth of credit that I had left to replace them, and I would have been miserable. I found that this year I just didn’t have it in me to give a crap. Perhaps it wasn’t as much not giving a crap as it was, I ain’t getting an ulcer over it. I found a couple of old monitors in the house and hooked them up, and started writing. Within two paragraphs it started hurting my eyes, and that would have been the ultimate blow to force me to run out and buy a couple of monitors and be damned the expense! Nope I guess it was a raging case of I don’t give a crap, because I didn’t. I just decided I wouldn’t write until I got new monitors. Simple enough huh? Well not exactly, because I hadn’t really realized how many people actually do pay attention to me, and it was a steady stream of people who were concerned for my well being, who had found my cell phone number here or there, but in any case, I still wasn’t getting an ulcer over it.

Soooooooooooo I was adjusting my finances in my spare time so that I could replace the monitors, and my stupid Zune died. Now on top of everything this created a far more vital necessity that would require me to put myself in debt to replace the stupid thing. I loved that thing for the first few weeks and then it started tripping out on me every other day, then daily, then hourly, then poof! The problem here is that without my Zune I was forced to listen to the logic of the various idiots that I work with. I hadn’t realized how important Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, Stu Redmond, Straker, Belgarian, Sir Sparhawk, and various other characters in my audiobooks had become to keeping me sane when I was surrounded by morons. Within days of having to listen to the people I work with I could actually feel my IQ dropping like a dead satellite! I tried to use that stupid IPOD and reality of that sunk in when it would only play the chapters it wanted to, and infrequently at that. UGH!

I started writing a bit on my laptop but wanted to wait until this entire saga was over which would be today, for the most part. I found a place online that would sell me two Dell 19 inch widescreen monitors, and send me a free 4gig Sony Walkman Digital Media Player for 249$. This was my Christmas present to myself this year. With shipping and handling the whole shebang cost me 257.98$ and more importantly, I didn’t order it until all of my credit cards were at 0, my car insurance was paid for the year, my cell phone bill was paid, and the refrigerator, was full. My entire debt balance is 134.69$ because on the first of the year I got my 1 percent rebate put into my credit card for all of last years purchases, and I hate to have to admit it, but this might have been the Christmas that I finally grew up. Here’s hoping that next year I can finish it all up with a black pen instead of a red pen, but all in all I did pretty damn good, even if I don’t have the balls to say that it couldn’t be any worse. Besides i think I am ahead of the game here, because these new monitors have swivels so you can view them sideways, and with one in wide mode, and the other in tall mode, this has been the easiest writing I have ever done ;8o)