After your blog has been up for any period of time, it begins. You get spam from all over the world. Sometimes in Chinese characters, sometimes in English, but always uniformly irritating when you get ping back notifications to approve comments in your e-mail. You look at it hoping for feedback on your post, only to find a pitch for a fake Louis Vuitton purse.
Spam is a reminder that no matter where you go–as A Kempis says ‘there you are’–there also is the world. We cannot escape the world. It invades our real lives and our digital lives. Spam reflects the worst of the world because so much of it is a lie to appeal to our basest instincts and drives. And since it is a lie, I don’t have to tell you who it is from. As Nala, my daughters Basenji, is being house trained and leaves little gifts, next time you see spam in your in-box or on your comment post, just think, ‘Oh look, another little gift from Satan.’
