Spam for the soul
Who would have dreamed that spam holds the keys to enlightenment? Like many ignorant humans, I used to consider junk e-mail a nuisance. But once I opened my mind as well as my inbox, I discovered an amazing truth: All I really need to know I learned from those weird proverbs and quotations in spam messages.
A few examples:
“Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.”
“If thine enemy offends thee, give his child a drum.”
“If you can’t be happy where you are, it’s a cinch you won’t be happy where you ain’t.”
And the mystically enigmatic, “You’ve built a miniature city out of little plastic stirrers.”
It’s chicken soup for the Internet user’s soul.
Although skeptics insist these axioms are a ploy to help junk e-mails sneak past spam filters, I believe spammers are digital prophets, guiding the faithful to cheap pharmaceuticals, incredibly low mortgage rates and smokin’ hot housewives seeking companionship while their husbands are out of town.
How else to explain the fact that an e-mail sent to millions of inboxes inevitably contains a quote that applies directly to my life, such as, “Never accept a drink from a urologist”?
Try to find that pearl of wisdom in the Bible or Bhagavad-Gita.
The Tao of Spam is an inspiring mix of philosophy, religion and psychology.
All the great sages are represented, including Gandhi (“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”), Aesop (“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted”), Ben Franklin (“Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults”) and Al Capone (“You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone”).
Some of the quotes are like Zen koans, paradoxes that must be meditated upon to unlock their cosmic significance. A recent example: “When beyond mastodon ceases to exist, defendant related to ocean daydreams rebel aquatic zing armpit.”
Once I figure out what it means, I’m sure life will be nonstop nirvana.
In the meantime, my Microsoft Outlook continues to overflow with e-mail epiphanies. The messages cover nearly every facet of life, from dental hygiene (“Be true to your teeth and they won’t be false to you”) to politics (“A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office a Republican wants”) to social skills (“I drink to make other people interesting”) to marriage (“The men may be the head of the house, but the women are the neck and they can turn the head any way they want”).
Occasionally, these eternal truths are attributed. Voltaire gets credit for “Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung,” and Charles de Gaulle gets the nod for “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”
But most spam aphorisms come with no name attached other than the sender’s -- Arbutus J. Deform, Solitude M. Cabinetmakers, Electrocutes G. Fluff, Dickered U. Sailfish. Who are these spam savants and why do they feel compelled to use middle initials? Is Electrocutes G. Fluff worried about being mistaken for some other Electrocutes Fluff? Perhaps such questions aren’t meant to be answered in this life.
Enlightenment
is a click away
However, it is possible to trace the origins of many “anonymous” spam adages. A search of newspaper and online databases reveals sacred spam is distilled from such diverse sources as:
* Mark Twain (“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time”).
* Bishop Fulton Sheen (“The proud man counts his newspaper clippings, the humble man his blessings”).
* Richard Nixon (“A man is not finished when he’s defeated; he’s finished when he quits”).
* Jesse Jackson (“Your children need your presence more than your presents”).
* Frank Zappa (“There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life”).
The breadth and quality of the selections is too great to be randomly generated. It suggests the presence of a divine intelligence. As a bonus, this divine intelligence apparently has a sense of humor. Sprinkled among the life lessons are flashes of wit:
“If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do the rest have to drown too?”
And “I am a Marxist -- of the Groucho tendency.”
Of course, not all junk e-mail is illuminating. To find the pearls, you sometimes have to wade through a lot of porn. But, hey, nobody ever said the path to wisdom was easy.
As the great spam oracle Vera (no middle initial) Quinones once observed, “Man who waits for roast duck to fly into mouth must wait very, very long time.”
In other words, you can’t expect enlightenment to just fall into your laptop. You have to do some work, take some risks. So, don’t hit that delete button. Remember the advice of another spam seer: “A life of no regret is a life of no discovery.”
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Roy Rivenburg can be reached at roy.rivenburg@latimes.com