The more things change, the more clichés are used to explain why humanity can't deal with it. Things have changed so much in the last fifteen years. What I marvel at the most is the speed at which the years have passed. My name is Donovan McElroy, and in this blog I have a lot to talk about. I think maybe I should start with my friend Dan.

I met up with Dan recently and we talked about The Black Swan, a bar in Phoenix that I used to work at. The Black Swan was torn down in 2007 so that a grocery store could be built on the lot - still under construction actually.

Next door was the business complex/strip mall that both Dan and I worked at back in 1995. While the company we worked at there was a phone sex operation, Dan and I both hacked away in their tech department. Scratch that -- we were the tech department. We called ourselves Telephony Network Administrators. Yes, that's right, we were T.N.A. experts. Sorry, it's an old joke but one that still makes me laugh. Dan worked the day shift and I worked graveyard shift.

This is after I had worked at The Black Swan for a couple years. I started off as a bouncer at the bar and eventually tried my hand at tending bar. I had no skill for mixing drinks, however. Not that I was really a very good bouncer either, but then again there was hardly ever any trouble there.

It was because of my uselessness at the Swan that Dan mentioned a job at Tech-tel, or Tel-tech, or whatever the fuck Scott wanted to call the business that month. While he worked during the day creating reports and billing and loading customer data, he also had to make sure the phone banks were live. When there were problems at night, he'd get paged and would have to go in, reboot servers, etc., to get the girls back on and talking.

When he mentioned this to me one late night when I was actually tending bar, I told him that I'd dig a job like that. Dan talked to Scott and helped get me the job. I was paid even less than Dan, poor bastard. Dan eventually quit and moved on to a better job once he got married, but I stayed at that rat's nest about another year after that.

I consider myself a digital alchemist these days, but back then I hadn't worked with computers professionally. I did go to night school at ASU for computer science and got my B.S., but until this first gig, I was just a hacker nothing more. It was actually at ASU where I met Dan.

We had some classes together and he was probably the only friend I had there. ASU is a pretty big campus, so two geek natives of the Valley of the Sun have to stick together. That's why fifteen years later we are still friends, though we don't hang out as much as we'd like to. Things change though.

Fifteen years ago something else changed and Dan knew it. I dropped out of school for health reasons. Dan came to check on me a few times. He knew my parents died earlier that year, and that an old friend of mine came to stay with me. Naturally he feared the worst, but I couldn't tell him what was wrong. Not right away. In fact I didn't tell him until about a year later.

You see, I died. No shit. I'm still dead -- well, un-dead actually.

I'm a vampire. Seriously, I couldn't make this shit up.

After I told him what happened, he said people needed to know. Know that vampires were real. At some level, I agreed with him, but told him that not only would no one believe him, but that he'd better pray that no one believed him. Still, he wanted to document my story for posterity. I asked him that if nothing else that he change my name and everyone else's that I knew and loved.

He agreed, and also embellished the story in places, changed a few other facts to keep anything too revealing from being obvious. He wrote the story and eventually self-published the book, however he lists it as a novel. His name is Dan Shaurette, and the book is called LILITH'S LOVE, if you care to read it.

Yes, he changed my name in the novel, and I'm using that same pseudonym right now. What, you didn't think I'd be stupid enough to shout out to the world that I'm a vampire, I'm real, oh, and go ahead and Google me so you can fucking stake me, burn me, or cut my head off. (Probably do all three just to be sure.)

No I'm not stupid, but I do agree with Dan -- the truth of our existence is important. Trust is key though. I'll trust you with my story, and maybe, someday, we can all trust each other to truly come out of the coffin.

Oh, speaking of which, Dan is a podcaster. Fucking new media bandwagon whore that he is. His podcast is called Out Of The Coffin, and you guessed it, it's all about vampires. He's promised not to out me on the show, and he'll probably never have me on. (If he does, I'll alter my voice so no one gets wind of who I am.)

It was his podcast that got my attention recently and so I called him up and left him voicemail. It had been too long, and I have another story to tell. He suggested that I blog it. Did I mention his web 2.0 fetish? Yeah. Anyway, I'm more of a lurker really, but I thought, what the hell.

So here I am, and I've got a sad story to tell. Fifteen years ago I was a naive kid of 21 and I was in love. In love with a woman named Lilith, the light of my life. She was a vampire; the one who turned me. She's gone now, and all I have are my memories.

Memories I'm going to share with you.