Any of you who’ve been running blogs for awhile will be familiar with receiving “eccentric” emails. Some you answer, some you delete, some you leave in your inbox to marvel about and puzzle over. Mostly, I try to be nice, or at least Thumper-nice: If I can’t say something nice, I don’t say nothin’ at all.
But some of them… Words fail me, yes. But silence also fails me, this time.
Today’s example, in its entirety, spelling and capitalization exactly as original:
y DONT I SEE MORE F/f SPANKING FULE NUDTY HANDS OVER HEAD? WHERE CAN I FIND A YOUNG SEX SLAVE ABOUT 18
I stared at that, not even cataloging its manifest failings at first. The CAPSLOCK flail, the lack of pleasantries, the two completely unconnected questions, the radical disparity in difficulty between the two questions, the creepily specific focus on youth, the crap spelling and punctuation, the utter lack of effort to make smalltalk and a human connection before importuning me — none of these jumped out at me individually, not at first. I was too gobsmacked by the sheer alien feel of the thing.
I did not feel, do not feel, any of my normal instincts to be nice, to be helpful, to respond to this person (?) with something useful, or else to hold my peace. And why not? Because, at some level, this person has failed to behave in a way that feels human to me. There doesn’t seem to be enough in common, at a basic cognitive level, between us. My effort to construct a mental model of them (as we all must do when we interact with others) has aborted, and I’m staring at a metaphorical internal command line displaying blinking amber letters: “(A)bort, (R)etry, (C)ontinue…”
If you’ve gotten mails like this, I wonder whether you’ve tried to imagine the mental and physical universe from which such an email could originate. I literally cannot comprehend the mental and physical state of the human being who could compose that email, and send it, and think sending it to me was a good idea. What are their circumstances? What could they be thinking? What are their motives? What do they hope to achieve? And by what leap of self-delusion do they imagine that this email, composed in this fashion, might advance any of their goals?
It’s all a big mystery to me.
On the bright side, I’m wondering whether the DMV would sell me a FULE NUDTY vanity license plate…