I'm Dumber Than My Email

My email system is smarter than I am. I rarely think to check my spam folder, and even when I do, I rarely get past the button my email system provides that reads "Delete Contents Of Spam Folder And Nuke Visigoths Who Sent It."

So I usually click that button and never actually read any of my spam, but tonight I leafed through some 289 emails looking for commonalities. It's the same kind of aberrant mentality that occasionally makes me keep a notebook and a pencil handy so I can keep track of what sorts of commercials appear on which TV channels.

What is the plural of spam? "Spams" is a verb meaning "to spam". "Spam emails" sounds redundant. We could give spam a nice cutesy Schwabische nickname like "spaemle" and refer to it collectively. But my point is that I had 289 spamen, as reported by my selfless email system. Of them, all but 17 had to do with penile enhancement in one way or another. Of the other 17, about five I could not classify without actually opening them, and I'm not *that* stupid.

So I had 272 inquiries from total strangers who were not just solicitous as to the state of my manhood, but positively giddy with excitement about the whole thing. And that's just thirty days of spam! Imagine if my email system didn't automatically dud-jett old spam. The number of people eager to know more about my genitalia could number in the thousands!

But let's confine ourselves to the 272 confirmed examples. For the sake of discussion, let's also assume I've been with ten women in my life, though the number varies up or down depending on one's exact definition of "been with". And let's start the timer of my life at age 17, not that that was when my timer actually started - it just makes the math easier. That's ten women in thirty years, or 0.33 women per year. At this rate, it would take me about 824.24 years to meet 272 women who were interested in my anatomy. Factor in traffic accidents, meteorites and other hitches in my getalong and it probably rounds up to a full millennium.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I appreciate the sudden surge in interest in my nether regions.

Some of the subject lines were pretty amusing. Most are unprintable. There are those who would probably say that this whole post is unprintable. But my favorite was the set of spamen that proposed to arrange for me to "have a visit from the big dick fairy." I can't help but think that this entity would look like a smaller version of Ron Jeremy with wings. He would flutter into my bedroom like the Lunesta moth and light on me, and I would wake up in the morning foul-mouthed, covered with body hair, and prone to wearing sleeveless t-shirts and disco medallions.

Then there is the product known as "MegaDik". Is it just me, or does that sound like an Indonesian dictator to you too? Sukarno, Suharto, Megawati, Megadik. Would it be wise to send the Secretary of State to meet with Megadik? Or should she stay in Washington and snigger from a safe distance? And does the use of the prefix "mega" simply beg for comeuppance?

And then there is "DickHelp 911", which is apparently a branch of EMS with special training in urology. The only time I can think I would ever call upon such a service is when I take a heavy impact in what might be tactfully described as the "upper thigh", though I have heard of people getting themselves wedged in swimming pool intakes, vacuum cleaners and toilet paper rolls. Would this version of EMS have a suitably downsized set of the Jaws of Life?

Then there was the oddly worded "How do women see you?" The short answer, one imagines, is with their eyes. The somewhat longer answer would be with their eyes, optic chiasms and striate visual cortexes. But I did once know a woman who claimed she could sense energy fields, sort of like Kirlian Photography without the apparatus. My energy field, for those who are curious, was described as yellow with blue speckles. Or was it blue with yellow speckles? I don't honestly remember. When pressed to explain if this was good or bad, she merely raised one eyebrow and and wordlessly hoisted her Coors Silver Bullet to her lips. So I am forced to admit the possibility that some women see me with ESP or their pineal glands or something.

But my favorite was the cryptic "Wow..Mens love this". Mens love lots of things. S&K socket sets, carbon-steel barbecue tongs, sleeping in on a Saturday morning, 24-hour marathons of MXC on Spike, triple Whoppers with cheese, the smell of napalm in the morning... So what is the sender really offering? The author of said spam was one "Antoinette Hutchinson", and all of a sudden all I could really think of was cake and guillotines, neither of which this particular mens loves all that much (though if faced with the choice, I'd prefer to eat cake than go to the guillotine).

Illumination, I fear, will never come. But I still thank them for their interest.