The junk mail spam I get is far more interesting than the email. The Twelve Best Penziones in Scudari, Learn Coding Overnight, Natural Erection Medicine and Is Rose the New Riesling? All pull me in with the eagerness of a kid at a carnival midway geek show.
The search engines have me pegged. Wine, New York City travel (hey, it’s nearby and sometimes cheap) and porno; but they just haven’t gotten that last one quite right. I get tons of girl on girl action solicitations and a pretty regular MILF’s in Your Neighborhood newsletter (They’re sopping wet and nearby!!!). But alas, I’m homosexual. Take that in the ass Palo Alto. Wrongy Wrong RONGO. Bad Algorithm, bad metadata, down boy, sit.
These junk mails, these sponsored contents, this commercial intrusion(s) are welcomed, but the ones deleted first are from pure hucksters. Kohl’s, Matador, Bob’s, Bob’s Big Boy, Bob’s Discount Furniture, and Jordan’s, another furniture store with climbing walls, raw bar and a pedicure and vasectomy section. Once people went out like once every four years and bought a couch, no climbing, disco slides or karaoke rooms. Now, like sopping MILFS right in your closet!!, they blind you with bread & circus so that thirty feet up the climbing wall you spot the sofa of your dreams. You came for cotton candy and selfies with the two headed alligator and were tricked into going home with a daybed. I have no idea what a daybed is, but it sounds divine. My next job, when they show me my new desk, I’m going scream; “What no daybed!! This is fucking barbaric.”
Jordan’s pissed me off when they advertised that BUFFET would perform at the grand opening, and I wore my parrothead shirt and filled a slurpee cup with strawberry margarita’s. I was quite let down when the crowd, which consisted of soon to graduate Yale School of Management students, cheered for a dude, who, while years older than me looked less haggard and was not Jimmy, but Warren. They hung on his every word about the failure of interest rates to keep pace with junk bonds and M1 money supply.
Top of the Kings and Queens of the Spam Age were two called Saveur and Greatest. Greatest had this article called the “The Seven Questions that Changed my Life” by Susie Moore.
They were simple: you want my phone number?, let’s talk about salary, can I buy you a coffee?, can I ask a favor?, can I write for you? How can I get a discount? and what do I really want from life? But they have the effect of boosting confidence, clarifying life and being open and conditioned to rejection. Saveur has some simple recipes and one that’s just Persian cucumbers and watermelon. I try not to pry into ethnic backgrounds so I used seedless English cucumbers marinated in cider vinegar and lots of sugar.
I wanna write for this drivel sheet called Fatherly, which bills itself as the Dr. Spock blog of the tattoo generation, but my article “Why I Hate my Kids Even More Now That Their Grown Up” was rejected.
I am bitter and sad when I get anything about wine. Wine is such a ripoff. If Vodka changed year from year, vintage to vintage, the FDA would close them down. Lazy vintners blame the weather and harvest conditions when it’s really that they couldn’t get off their fat asses and choose the right artificial additives to sex it up.
And finally the emails about birds. All my life I loved watching birds and raptors and kites and storks and herons and hawks and kestrels. My favorite bird moments: a flock of seven flamingoes flying over Tampa, eagles floating down the Connecticut River eating a fish on an ice flow, two eagles stealing fish from ospreys, huge condo like monk parakeet nests filled with squawky, colorful resident birds, two adult Sand Hill Cranes and a baby walking on a rain soaked golf course, diving ducks, pelicans, bluebirds, scarlet tanagers, orioles and owls.
Before the interwebnet of all things (my smartphone dishwasher tells my toaster how dark I want it and my television places orders for food and booze while I sleep, and that’s why I paid $32 for a bottle of Tuaca, a butterscotch liqueur which the dishwasher drank with the stove before they banged each other and gave birth to a nosy, self-cleaning oven that keeps telling me my milk is sour.) birdwatchers had newsletters to report their ornithological triumphs. “Saw two phoebe’s, a pie billed grebe, a titmouse and a dickscissel.”
At Hammandeggit State Park they keep a bird log, which is a throwback to gentler times. Birders,
NOTE: birdwatchers have changed their name to birders, they no longer go birdwatching, they bird. I am going birding Hurrah!!! However, I call myself, a bird voyeur; stalking, snooping, peeping tomming on their reproduction rituals and actions. Creepy.
manually write with pens and pencils what they have peeped in the park. The log was informative and funny. From the log I learned that seals,sun themselves on the rocks at Meig’s Point, that hundreds of larks and falcons and cranes and egrets and ducks pass through. Once in a while some jokey kids write things like; Honda Accord, dog, crow, pterodactyl and landshark. It’s funny.
The zenith of birding watching was the interwebnet posting board, now gone away with long distance charges, words in phone numbers, remember Maple 2-3259?, faxing, dial-up squeals and trills from AOL and long distance operators. Here were the precious Rare Bird Alert posts. The entire site chirped with excitement as someone, probably Dori or Mike, spotted a Red Necked Phalarope in Stratford. Thousands descended to watch and stalk and peep. Unfortunately, a major defence contractor was located near the sanctuary and the poor bird was sucked into the intake of an S-61 helicopter and mulched. Connecticut seems to have a thing about grinding living things up. An idiot put his wife’s body through a wood chipper, a small boy was pulled in when the stick he was grinding up snagged his jacket sleeve, a senior citizen was ground when the same thing happened, leaving just his right leg, severed but intact.
The Bird Peepers still post, but now, since nobody is ever away from the phone, they use twitter and the death knell of western civilization; the phone app.
Want pizza? There’s an app. Tunneling into a bank vault?, use the app. Wanna find hot MILF’s, app it. So all these bird gazers get a text or alert or ding and they drop everything: brain surgery, childbirth and grinding stuff up and fly to the sighting. It just seems too Metropolis, too City Lights. Fuck you Big Blue, suck my dick Watson, open the goddamn pod door Hal or I’ll grind you up too. Gotta close me and the refridgerator are apping AILF’s (Appliances I’d like to Fuck)