SPAM

When I was a kid, spam was the gross stuff that came out of a can. Now it’s the gross stuff that ends up in your email, your blog, your website. I’m not sure what the purpose is. Spammers must be getting paid by someone, somewhere, to advertise something, but c’mon, some of these spams are ridiculous.

First, there’re the spammers who leave long messages in Chinese, Japanese, or Russian. No telling what they’re advertising or advocating.

Then there are the spammers who write about how women can produce breast milk when they aren’t pregnant. This one sounds sort of kinky to me, but honestly, what woman would want to produce breast milk when not pregnant?

Then there’s the usual porn spam announcing live videos of threesomes! Foursomes! And child porn, yes siree, pull up your seats and bring your popcorn.

But one of my favorites – and this guy hasn’t stopped by for awhile – was from a guy who has a serious mental issue about American women, how awful they are – unfaithful, shallow, the pits. One evening, I actually went to his website, clicking onto it from Google, not the blog, and read a couple of his nauseating posts about how many hits he was getting from men fed up with American women. Asian women were the way to go, they were grateful, wonderful, compliant etc. etc.

Several times, we got spams about consulting a particular psychic. I noted the psychic’s name, tracked down his email address, and wrote him and asked him to stop spamming our blog. He emailed me back and claimed he didn’t know anything about it. Yeah, sure. The spams kept appearing.

Then there are the real psychos, the ones who might follow you into a dark alley some night and do unspeakable things to you if they catch you. I think of them as the shadow people, the truly disenfranchised, bitter, sorry souls who have nothing but time on their hands and can’t think of any better way to use that time.

I don’t get any of it. Why would people who speak Chinese or Japanese or Russian spam a blog written in English? Are they paid by how many spams they send out? Do they, on their job resumes, list SPAMMER as their profession?

I used to see spammers as an annoyance. Now I’m beginning to regard them as individuals with such serious mental problems that they belong in padded cells, pumped up on anti-psychotic drugs.

Then there are the hits that come from government agencies – the NSA, DEA, DIA, FBI, the acronym spy agencies. They don’t leave comments, spam or otherwise, and usually appear on posts we write about aliens, abductions, contact, the truly weird stuff. Early on in this blog’s life, those hits were unnerving. I kept expecting to encounter a man in black at our grocery store. Now they’re just puzzling and lead me to believe that the government doesn’t know much more than the rest of us about alien life or things that defy science, that they’re struggling to piece things together.

So, dudes, spammers and spies alike, go feast on these two books and leave us alone, okay?