Has anyone else noticed that spam seems to go through phases… like it arrives in weird clusters and groups like a flash mob or something? It is almost like there is a directing power out there, organizing the spam, directing it, massing it together to eventually send it at us in assault waves of obnoxious marketing.

I would like, at this point, to pause and thank the crack squirrels that live inside the vast unused portion of my head. This is one of those mornings where I had no idea what to post, but I wasn’t ready to get right into the Eric Idle picture of the day or do some more ‘name that piece of Art’ posts yet. I was almost considering going into the notebook full of crazy ideas for posts that the crack squirrels give me on days when they are particularly awake, but I figured I would check the spam folder as I do everyday… because sometimes real comments from you people end up in there… and I noticed that I have a bunch of folders for weight-loss pills, and now, thanks to squirrels on drugs, I can just sit down and type with virtually no thinking at all.

The weight-loss spams reminded me of something I have been noticing lately; I often open the spam folder and find that there are 20 or 30 spam messages in there, and as I go through to delete them, I see that many of them seem to be focused on one specific topic. This same topic might continue to appear in the majority of the spams for days or even weeks.

But the thing is… and this is actually sort of a scary thing… but it sometimes seems as if the spam senders know stuff about me.

The sad truth is that since I switched from regular cigarettes to the e-cigs… vapes, as the cool kids say… I have gained back some of the 50 pounds I spent a year losing. And now all of a sudden I am swamped with weight loss pills.

And then there was a really long period of time where I was getting adds for all kinds of medications aimed at people with mental issues… schizophrenia, manic-depressiveness, inability to stay focused, wild delusions… okay, that might have just been a lucky guess on their part.

But then again, and I say this in order to try to stop myself from getting too paranoid about all this, I also had a few moths were almost all the adds were for erectile dysfunction and male enhancement, and… you will just have to take my word for this… I am all good in that department…

So is this all a coincidence or is there some central command structure marshaling the evil armies of spam against us to try to overwhelm our defenses? Is this just mass marketing that is sent to everybody or are they reading our emails and posts and Facebook and targeting us specifically? Should we be paranoid?

***(If I start getting a bunch of spams tomorrow that sell pills that cure paranoia, I will let you know, because that means we learned something valuable)***

My last word on the subject of spam is this; I once thought it would be funny to type up a fake spam paragraph that I used the search button to find, and I will now share it with you…

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Thanks you much for the fine article of wich much information I have been needing is inside of. I will be sure to pay much visits and atention to all future articles of such good information. Keep up with the good hard work. And speaking of hard, I have for selling some magic pills that will make you like a tree in your soft areas. Only fifty glabotniks for a bottle that will give you much happy pants for a long time.

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See, I got bored one Sunday long ago and thought it would be funny if I copied and pasted that paragraph into hundreds of blog posts in the comment boxes… of both people I knew and strangers.

And it was fun.

It was also stupid.

I ended up getting kicked off WordPress for like 5 days. Their anti-spam bots determined I must be a real spam site. So take it from me, it is not fun to have to send hundreds of emails… and have your blogging friends send hundreds more… trying to convince a bunch of underpaid staffers and volunteer help techs that you are indeed a real human being.

Learn from my mistakes.