I'm Starting to Enjoy My Spam

In a sure sign that I'm much too isolated, I've started noticing the nice names and cute titles of the various bits of spam littering my inbox. This latest flurry -- I have been remarkably good at keeping my inbox free of spam, but lately, probably because of this blog, there's been an upswing -- has incorporated a new, dovetailed strategy of (a) making up real-sounding names and (b) providing interesting-sounding subject lines.

When one pops up in my inbox, I pretend, for a millisecond, that it's a real bit of mail from someone new and interesting. Here, courtesy of my Mail program's "trash" folder, are some of my new, interesting milli-friends:

Elijah Moon
Joachim Phelps
Lucia Leary
Cornelius Horn
Maxwell Stephenson
Rudolph Vickers
Lottie Lozano
Lorenzo Flores

I mean, these are GREAT names. One of the stupidly difficult things about writing fiction is making up character names that don't sound like fanciful made-up nonsense that you doodled in the margins of your notebook. Somehow, probably with the help of a randomizer and a baby-name site, these spammers have come up with perfect candidates for "the vice-principal guy" or "the boyfriend from a dozen years ago that still haunts the main character's memory." I mean, Rudolph Vickers! Didn't he woo Bette Davis' character in Now, Voyager?

As for the subject lines, who wouldn't want to read about these?

blackout day
tepee
imbibe blister
mutter leash
fortuitous luxurious

It reads like found poetry. Well, I guess by definition, it is found poetry. It reads like a random line from a book of Kenneth Koch. (I still don't know what a fricking bluet is.)

Of course, my personal favorite, yet saddest, random subject line -- which says volumes about the perceived audience, about the loneliness of inboxes, about the grasping needs of spammers -- is this slivered slice of genius-cheesecake:

You're not ugly

Anyone who can resist clicking on that deserves the cleanest, spam-free inbox the world has ever known.