Do you have any friends or acquaintances who are chaotic energy vampires?

You know the type. Their lives are whirling vortexes of chaos into which you may be sucked if you get too close.

If there is any bad luck lurking in the area, it will find them and leap upon them with a vengeance. You feel like a horrified bystander at a hideous accident scene just knowing them.

If they took a cruise, they'd book passage on the Titanic.

If there's a horrendously ill-advised piece of real estate around, they buy it.

Their lives are filled with mishap and misfortune of every stripe, from poisonous snakes in their yard to insect invasions to financial difficulties that would try the patience of Job.

And most of their misery is of their own invention. When they should be making repairs on their property, they're buying luxury items. Their bill payments lag behind as they choose to spend the money allocated for their debt to purchase whim items of no particular usefulness. Their children plan futures that are no futures, and the parents heartily endorse their ill-advised notions. And their dreams are always far and away greater than their resources or talents.

They are beset by illnesses and accidents, but nothing even remotely normal. Mishaps and diseases that one would normally only hear mentioned in some obscure textbook hidden in the dusty bowels of a medical school library seek them out and foist themselves upon these people with glee.

Tales of their day-to-day lives sound like something out of a truly dire black comedy. You worry that God will condemn you because you can't help laughing at their unlikely, never-ending, brain-frying predicaments. And no sooner has one emergency in their life been brought under control but another has arrived and blossomed into yet more dire and hair-raising mayhem. They proceed through a life so outlandish as not to be believed, reacting to one catastrophe after another. Order, planning, and serenity never rear their ugly heads in their world.

And worst of all, they call you every few days and talk long and fervently of the latest chaotic atrocities that have occurred in their lives until, when you finally pry yourself loose from the phone, you collapse in a wilted heap, beaded with cold, clammy sweat, your heart palpitating and your energy drained just from hearing what has happened since you spoke to them two days ago.

The husband suffers an angina attack while trying to save the mange-ridden family dog from a Cottonmouth that crawled out from under the tow truck while their car was being repossessed. When he falls over, he hits the end of the picnic table bench which catapults the lantern that he was servicing for an upcoming fishing trip onto the roof of their house. As the roof catches fire, the wife rockets out of the shower to escape the flames and is arrested for indecent exposure. Their daughter is so traumatized that she begins plucking and eating her own hair, and now they can't find a way to pay for her therapy because their seventh grade son replumbed their home and the bilge pump couldn't remove the water from the basement fast enough to keep the foundation from cracking, which is going to be terribly expensive to fix. This of course exacerbated the young cousin's (who stays with them because his parents were killed in a horrifying wood chipper accident) eczema, and now the neighbors are complaining because he won't stop rubbing his ass against the rough bark of the hickory tree out front. Meanwhile, they have no one to babysit for their seven younger children, and an epidemic of impetigo and hoof and mouth disease has broken out amongst the urchins. But they're all going to Cabo San Lucas, the whole family, for two weeks next month, would you feed their llamas while they're gone? Watch out for the gray one, he bites, just ask the mailman, who is now suing them for medical costs for the dreadful llama bite. Oh and keep an eye on Tippy, the family dog. When he's not humping someone's leg or scratching his mange, he combs the neighborhood, seeking out and pissing on cottage cheese. He ruined Mrs. Malworth's DAR luncheon last month.

I can't take it anymore. I refuse to answer the phone if they call. Let Mrs. Sauron deal with them. She spoke to them a couple of days ago and is still exhausted. And every time we look at one another, we crack up laughing which makes us worry about our karma.

Do you know anyone like this, or do they only find me and haunt my life unbidden?

I call them chaotic energy vampires. If they touch your life, it could unleash the apocalypse. And talking to them sucks the very marrow from your bones.

Cheers!

Rick...

I wish it were only one. I have more than a couple of them that I am dealing with. Two of them are family.

Thankfully I have been spared any in my family. That leaves me free to shun them and hide from them, and to refuse to answer the phone. It's the only way I can weather this with sanity intact.

Just listening to the secondhand reports when Mrs. Sauron finally gets off the telephone makes me want to drink heavily and deliberately deafen myself with loud, tympanic-membrane-damaging noise.

Cheers!

Rick...

Oh

My

God!



That does it! I'll have to be institutionalized!

The chaotic energy vampires gave us some eggs from the chickens they raise. Like fools, we took them.

The Lioness has just now made a reluctant admission.

These people had a cockroach problem in their home. They couldn't seem to solve it, even when handed foolproof advice.

We were talking about that when I said, "What if she decided that cockroaches were protein and fed them to her chickens?"

I thought I was being funny. Maybe a little gross.

The Lioness then said, "Well, I didn't want to tell you, but..."

At this point, the alarms began going off. Bad, urgent alarms.

"What do you mean? Tell me what? What is it?" I demanded with a rising sense of panic.

"She did," The Lioness told me.

"Did what? NO! She didn't!"

"Yes, she fed cockroaches to her chickens. She said they gave them the first batch and the chickens wolfed them down. They ate so many they couldn't eat any more when they gave them the second batch!"

"God in Heaven woman! This was AFTER she gave us eggs wasn't it!?!?!?" I queried with madness rising within me like Godzilla conjured from Tokyo Bay.

"No. She didn't tell me until afterwards. I didn't know. I gave you some of those eggs the other morning," The Lioness confessed. "I didn't know. She didn't tell me until after we'd eaten them," she said timidly, expecting me to froth at the mouth and turn into a werewolf immediately.

"WHAT IN GOD'S NAME IS WRONG WITH HER??? SHE FED US EGGS FROM CHICKENS GORGED ON COCKROACHES???" I shouted. You may have heard me if you were listening. And it doesn't matter where you are.

The Lioness just nodded, and then started laughing uncontrollably. "I didn't want to tell you," she managed amidst her frantic, spiraling-toward-madness laughter. "I was afraid you'd do something to her!" More laughter.

"What exactly do you find funny here woman?" Her laughter intensified. The Lioness was now unable to breathe. She couldn't look at me or her windpipe would seize up from mirth run amok.

"The shells were green!" she exclaimed amidst tears. "I wondered why the shells were green!" and that was the last sane thing I heard from The Lioness.

Henceforth, I forbid this woman who gave us the eggs to come anywhere near here. If she comes here, I'm going to put her in a feed sack with a cinderblock and throw her in the pond. I might put hungry rats in the sack with her.

What kind of demented, depraved sorceress would deliberately feed people cockroach chicken eggs and think nothing of it???

That's it! I've had it! I'm mining the friggin' driveway!

Where the hell did these people come from? How did they get into my life?

The kids. That's where. The kids know each other from school.

That's it, my kids are leaving public school immediately and attending a private school where people don't nonchalantly feed cockroaches to chickens.

I don't think my gag reflex is ever going to calm down. I sound like Gollum from Lord of the Rings. I can't stop gagging.

This is just...just too much! Freaks! Mutants! Call me an exorcist!

GOD HELP ME! I HAVE EATEN COCKROACHED EGGS!

Cheers!

Rick...

As posts go I'm thinking of copying most of this because it is a well written piece by any measure and a life lesson worthy of repeating but, before I make your head swell.
Dude, you seriously need a film crew in your backyard cause I'm pretty sure from Sasquatch to the Addams family you'll probably be making first contact by Halloween.

Off topic...but I'm reading Patrick O'Brien's brilliant series of books...Master and Commander etc... and every time Aubrey goes in to battle. I imagine Sauron is there somewhere on deck!

PS. I have met quite a few people like the energy vampires you mention. I call them "battery dischargers."

So, Sauron, did you ever drink Kopi Luwak?

Well, it doesn't sound like you have Salmonella...yet.

Can't you train your dogs to not let them on the property?

Oh yes, I know a few of them. The sad thing is they're all really nice, genuinely kind people who just can't seem to get a break from Karma. I prefer to see them as "Sources" rather than "Vampires" though. To me, I am the Vampire, the one absorbing all these chaotic and negative vibes and transforming them into positive energy. And it works the same with all kinds of situations : You're exhausted, I'll feel pumped up, sad, I'll be glad, crying, I'll be laughing, depressed, I'll be on top of the world. Sadly the same is true in reverse, which is why I never go to nightclubs.

This probably means I have no soul, but it's always worked for me, and so the more these people seem to be swamped in problems of all kinds, the more my own life feels pretty organized and not so bad after all by comparison.

That said, none of them ever fed me cockroached eggs...

Cheers

Nico

Oh yes, there's this person on a forum I read.

He gets thrown off horses, gets bitten by dangerous spiders, snakes etc.
Then he also had a ghost and a bigfoot in his garden, friends who sell him cockroached eggs etc...

I'm totally trying to stay away from him, who knows what might happen if I get too close?!



Other than that, hmm, not sure, I usually avoid such people I guess, and I'm good at it.