Each day the ol’ Midlife Crisis Crossover spam filter catches a few would-be advertisers and funnels them into a gravity well for handy reevaluation and inevitable permanent disintegration. For my first depressing month on WordPress it was simple to discern spam comments from real, live comments: if it was a comment, it was a spammer. My undying gratitude remains perpetually owed to those longtime followers who wrote real, live comments in subsequent months so that I could eventually form a basis for comparison between sincerity and superficial salesmanship.

Nowadays my daily spam dosage tends to be the same few varieties over and over again. It’s quick to flush but boring to glance at. It’s rare to see one of their lowly kind be creative enough to merit more than four seconds of my time.

When one of them fails at their quote-unquote “job” in spectacular fashion, then they have my undivided attention for all of a minute, the equivalent of an eternity in their world.

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