People I know, or knew.

She maintains a library of perhaps ten stories about her life that she retells. In any conversation I’ll hear at least one of them. It’s impossible to agree with her, as she’ll change her opinion so that she’s always in opposition. There is no good news for her; everything is in decline. She hasn’t got up before noon in years.

He’s an innocent egotist. In the years I’ve known him, he has only contacted me when he needs me for some practical purpose or has an achievement to present. I understand his promises now only as sounds that meet his own psychological requirements.

Haunted by the respectable brutality of her upbringing, she is frozen in den mother mode. Everyone is her wayward child and will be fed, and corrected, and encouraged. At regular intervals she explodes in rage against everyone around her, railing at the massive and sole responsibility she has incurred upon herself. Her real personality is kilometers below somewhere.

She has boiled down the art of conversation into twenty catch phrases which she tosses out nervously. She doesn’t understand much of what goes on around her and doggedly sticks to routine to avoid being overwhelmed with complication and detail. She smokes three packs a day of Marlboros. She can’t meet your eye. She calls everyone “babe”. Her mother died on Mother’s day. She hasn’t bowled for twenty years.

His life is woven together from fantasies, half truths, and overheard ideas. You can hear him inventing a story as he stumbles through each sentence chasing its end. He gives everyone qualities in his mind that are their opposites: fools he calls smart, mean-spirited people mean well, drunks are pretty together. He hides his actual heroic life, in which he cares for a dying mother. He’ll never be out of debt.

He mistreats his dog, talks constantly about his wealth, and parades a pretty blonde or two around to show the world he’s made it. When he walks into a social setting, you can see him trying to find the most advantageously cool person to approach. He can talk for hours about his possessions. No one knows about his terrible medical history, pain, disability, and life long limitation. His taste in music is terrible, and he has his father’s politics without question. He didn’t have a childhood.

summer is icumen in

The hazy light and warmth of a Southern California summer causes me to have multiple Proustian experiences, of which about half are pleasant. It’s evocative of the last day of school in June, running happily over the grass to an endless vacation. It makes me remember going to Europe in the summer as a kid, with that happy expectant feeling of Going on a Big Trip.

There’s a lot about summer that I’d like to forget, though. I spent an inordinate amount of time fighting with my mother about whether I’d done various chores well enough to be allowed to enjoy myself, and the fallout from that piece of family psychosis is still causing problems for me in early middle age. A good chunk of my childhood was spent refusing to clean up my room and therefore being confined to it as the sun shone on the neighborhood’s happier children. This is at once traumatic and pathetic to remember, and unfortunately the dynamic situation of those long nasty Saturdays is still haunting me.

Summers later on got worse. Perhaps the low point of my life was the summer I was the summer of 1986, when I was in college. I lived at the bizarre and filthy UCLA Coop with an angry Iranian Communist room mate who didn’t let me use the phone. Most of my friends were gone for the summer. I couldn’t or wouldn’t find a summer job, so I was poor and fighting with my parents constantly about the money and job issues. I was deeply depressed, undiagnosed and unaware of it, and constantly either anxious or dysphoric. I took on a nocturnal existence in which I walked down to the Dolores coffee shop and read bad mysteries all night and then walked back up in the early morning light to sleep until 4 pm or so.

This state was interrupted by a brief love affair followed by a total nervous breakdown.

Finally, it was on a bright pretty summer day in 1993 that my father suddenly died. The shock and horror of that experience is still peeking around the edges of every pretty July day.

The experiences above are all tied together with the memories of sailing. We had several boats when I was a kid, including a 28-foot sailboat in which we sailed out to Catalina Island or down to Ensenada. There are a lot of great memories there of the beauty of the sea, the excitement of diving or hiking on Catalina, strange sights out on the water. But at the same time I disappointed my father terribly by not being as interested in sailing when I grew older, and I regret not being able to share that with him in my teens. I still enjoy sailboats, and I’d like to sail again some time, but like the other summer memories, it has become a mixture of sunny freedom, family expectation, guilt, and regret.

Spam, fraud, and the "controversy"

Lately there are a lot of news stories about various U.S. governmental and “industry” officials discussing the “problems” and “controversy” about spam and spyware. The impression given is that there are legitimate businesses doing reasonable things who will be harmed if spyware is made illegal or if attempts to regular spam are made. A typical quote will be something like “We want to make sure that companies with a legitimate need to contact their customers and market their products don’t suffer from the actions of a few bad apples”.

To me, this is curious. I receive a pretty good volume of spam, maybe 300 per day at my main address. Looking into my spam filter folder I see that almost all of the unsolicited commercial email I receive is in some way already a violation of law.

The main categories include

1. Solicitations for illegal pornography. Almost all of the porn spam is for pornography that is specifically forbidden by law: acts involving minors, bestiality, or other activities almost universally prohibited in the United States.
   
2. Offers to sell illegal prescription drugs, most of them Schedule III opiates. There is a lot of penis pill stuff, which is either illegal or gray area, but the ads for prescription pain killers are not legitimate in any way. These are what we call “drug dealers”.
   
3. Fraud. There are lots of password phishing attempts, contests you’ve won that require a payment, 419 scams, illegal lotteries, and pyramid schemes. Most of these are well-known mail fraud scams now done via email.
   
4. Loan-sharking. A tremendous number of “unsecured loan” offers with interest rates far above the legal limits.
   
5. Fraudulent medications. “Herbal” remedies for everything from impotence to cancer, all of which are violations of law.
   

When you strip it down to the actual legal (if annoying) uses of spam, I’m left with a few pitches for coffee, collectibles, electronics, and other consumer products and a big load of mortgage ads. If my spam only consisted of this category I’d get maybe 40 a day.

So what’s the controversy or the problem? Only BOFH would complain if we got a few ads for Gevalia Coffee or miracle cleaners a day. It’d just be like the mail we get in the box that we throw away. The problem spam that chokes up the inbox and annoys is almost all completely illegal for reasons unrelated to email.

Who’s making money off all of this emetic porn, wire fraud, drug dealing, and loans at 35? Who’s hiding behind the respectable guys, hmm?

My brown eyed girl.

CELEBRITY ANUS BLEACHING!.

Now you’re not going to click. I should have labeled the link text something like “How cute is THIS kitten?” or “Goatse” instead. Don’t worry, no pictures.

I am also going to have my ileocecal valve bronzed.

“Kojic acid” sounds like something extracted from the bones of Telly Savalas. Hell, maybe it is.

Link courtesy Chuck Shepherd’s News of the Weird, to which you should all subscribe.