Life in the Spam Folder

Dear Ev,

I just thought I’d drop a line and see how all the folks back at evehrlich.com are doing. It’s been a couple months since you sent me out along with a few hundred other e-mails in one of your weekly posts – I was “Baseball Memorabilia,” in case you’ve forgotten – and like so many of my brothers and sisters, I ended up in somebody’s spam folder. It was very abrupt. But now that I’ve had a chance to settle in here, I thought I’d say hello and tell you what’s been going on with me.

You know, when I first ended up in a spam folder, I figured I was about to experience a lonely, pointless existence trapped in a dark corner of one of your subscriber’s laptops pretty much forever. I guess “spam” just has that kind of bad connotation.

But life in this spam folder has turned out much better than I anticipated. For one, far from my expectations of endless isolation, I’m not alone. Far from it -- there are thousands of other spam messages in here to hang around with. In fact, many of them are my fellow evehrlich.com e-mails, and it’s great to see some old, familiar faces – the Hurricane Iota post, for example (no one gave a rat’s ass about that one!), Oarsman Bob, the Public Service Announcement -- they’re all here. No wonder they had such low click rates!

I’m a little hesitant to come out and say it because it plays to all sorts of stereotypes, but living here in the spam folder is just about the most fun I’ve ever had. I know what you’re thinking, but, it’s not just the sex trade. For starters, the place looks like that village from The Prisoner. And it’s like a party around here, with all sorts of gifts lying round, everywhere you look -- gift baskets of fruit, wine, and chocolate, floral arrangements, candles, macrame, crafts, wall decorations, ceramic mugs and honey in baskets, and all sorts of stuff . And I haven’t felt this well in forever. I don’t have fungus, tinnitus, hernias, diabetes, stomach pains, hair loss, or a shortage of catheters. I know the telltale warning signs of more diseases than I knew there were. And if I ever did get something, there’s a complete arcade of homeopathic, New Age, chi-related, herb-based, meditative, jellyfish, magnetic, and prayer-centered remedies for it, none of which are proven to be effective, but they’re there for the taking. I eat paleo, gluten-free, high-fiber, sugar-free, high-omega, lactose-free, kale-based, and vegan. There’s exercise equipment everywhere – treadmills, Stairmasters, Soul Cycles, quad extenders, stationary bicycles, straps, mats, ropes, bands, free weights -- and if I hurt myself, I can rub CBD oil on it. And I mean lots of CBD oil. I’m living in the Saudi Arabia of CBD oil, as well as CBD tablets, CBD capsules, CBD creams, CBD powders, CBD ointments, CBD gels – all of it guaranteed to cost a lot of money, stain your clothes, and not get you high.

Then there’s the seamy stuff. Sure, it’s here. There’s plenty of porn, particularly if you know Cyrillic. I’ve never seen so many ways Tab A goes into Slot B. And you can acquire companionship over any time frame – you can get a date for an hour, an escort service for an evening, an Eastern European or Southeast Asian mail order bride for a few years until it reaches its logical conclusion in either divorce court or a mortuary, whatever you like. It’s like the bond market – you can find something for any duration with a predictable yield and a corresponding level of risk. And, of course, you can get opiates – Fentanyl, Percocet, Vic

odin, Dilaudid, Oxycontin, everything this side of a poppyseed bagel. One guy took so many he got a headache. And you can get Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, Stendra, implants, herbal supplements, tantric mantras, what-have you -- the only thing not stiff around here are the teetotalers. We try to file them next to the politicians who want donations. And you can get guns, too -- AK-47s, Uzis, street sweepers, all sorts of stuff the Founding Fathers must have had in mind when the British were firing pellets at them out the bell of a trumpet. And you can get concealed carry permits, too, in case marching around with an assault weapon gets tiresome.

And there are plenty of steroids around here, too, in case you need some ‘roid rage to go with your weapon. You could spend a few hours going through the list and before you knew it, three National League General Managers would be offering you a contract. Then there are the fakes, fake everything. You get fake UPS, fake FedEx, fake American Express, fake Social Security Administration, fake IRS – if it’s got any possibility of getting some idiot to give away his credit card number, some impersonator is asking for it. The other day, I saw a fake enrollment form from The National Directory of Mothers Maiden Names. Nobody likes these phonies, though -- they give all of us a bad name. In fact, we were all icon-ing around one day when a couple of the supplement users noticed that Nigerian prince asking for money and took him off to the Recycle Bin and messed him up pretty good. Nobody saw a thing, know what I mean?

But the most surprising thing about being here is the culture, the social character of this place. For one, everybody accepts everybody else – within reason – because they’re all in the same boat – they’ve all been dumped here without any warning and have to make a go of it. Everybody feels like that girl in Outlander on their first day, but then they get the hang of it. No one’s any better than anybody else, although some of the politicians asking for money and the people from The Ministry of One Thing or the Other will put on airs. It’s like a society of misfits, a community of the unwanted, where everyone’s accepted for what they are and that’s the end of it.

But – there’s always a but, isn’t there? -- the person in whose computer you’re living in has the power of life and death over you. Maybe she needs to free up disc space, maybe she was searching for something (although, sorry to say it, it doesn’t seem like she’s searching for old evehrlich.com posts very often) and are surprised by how much stuff is in here, or maybe her friend told her to go to Control Panel and delete all her temporary or extra files, or maybe she just don’t like a lot of clutter. So, they hit a key and erase the entire spam file. It’s like the Black Death, but even less selective – more like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Poof – we’re all gone.

Nobody likes to think about that. But the paradox is that, once you accept it, there’s no need to think about it. And that’s the point for all of us, isn’t it, Ev? We all show up without asking to, everyone around us is in the same boat, and it all will end suddenly one day, but who knows when? You just have to go about your business and when the erase command comes, it comes, nothing you can do about it. When you get right down to it, we’re all spam in somebody else’s folder. The difference is, we spam e-mails don’t pray to whoever put us here, but you do,

Well, that about sums it up! Keep in touch, and keep sending out those weekly posts. We need some new company and fresh blood to liven up the conversation.

Maybe another baseball post, if you don’t mind the suggestion.