I'm five and standing deliciously in a puddle in the rain and waiting for what, I don't know, I'm looking back through the fog at the glowing windows of my home.

A


  would-be malicious spammer seems dedicated to the Elly cause. Whoever he may be, he is certainly persistent. Shortly after 2am last night he began sending me repeated identical emails, each less than 1k in size, at the rate of about one per minute, from the services of America Online. Here's what the email said:

To the Evil Gus-- It's come to my attention that you've been harassing some nice people, for reasons no one is quite sure of--nor do I care. Fact is, Gus, that no one cares about your opinions. When you deal from ignorance, as you seem to, it makes little difference what message you're trying to deliver. Your opinions have little relevance and serve as nothing but an ignorant disruption to people who are attempting to do good. If you don't agree with them, that's your prerogative. But don't disturb someone else's flow of information. Until your get this notion, you will be on my e-mail list.

The pro-Elly spammer was working at a serious inconvenience in as much as he appeared to be limited to the rate of only about 1k of spam per minute.

The emails came in for perhaps an hour, then they stopped and didn't pick up again until 11am, when the weary spammer rolled out of bed and managed to hammer out a half dozen or so more, this time using a different AOL return address. Apparently my defense measures (see below) had rendered his old account useless. I was struck by the fact that the emails were all cranked out manually. The subject headings all contained random strings of characters that were obviously pounded out by one hand randomly over a sector of a keyboard. The pro-Elly spammer was working at a serious inconvenience in as much as he appeared to be limited to the rate of only about 1k of spam per minute. My response, using the considerable bandwidth available to me, was to attach copies of netscape.exe to mail sent to the return addresses, which appeared to be valid AOL addresses. It's not easy to track exactly where spammers reside within the AOL kingdom; they're not really on the Internet, you see, so they have no IP addresses. I could see that this particular spammer's mail was being handled by a variety of different machines.

I would think that anyone who was willing to kill an hour performing the thankless task of sending me anonymous email bombs manually would better invest his time in researching the use of automated spam programs. Certainly there was no danger of my mail box filling up.

I wonder how Elly, the webmistress of NARC (a organization promoting politeness and elegance on the world wide web) feels about receiving the support of such people. If you peruse the few emails Elly recieved from Hortense, it should be apparent that such benign criticism doesn't warrant this laughably pathetic harassment from among the AOL unwashed.

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No one should care what I'm thinking as long as I send back a reliable picture of the wonderful world I have descended into.

I


've decided that I regard myself as a machine. I feel like my thoughts and feelings have value only insofar as they affect the outside world. Other than that, I'm a black box with a sticker on the back saying "no user-serviceable parts inside." I do my thing, I leave my impact, I wear out, I become obsolete, I die, only to be replaced by a newer model from some future generation. When I am among my friends, I think in my subconscious I regard myself as a space probe, a spy, an intelligent fly on the wall. No one should care what I'm thinking as long as I send back a reliable picture of the wonderful world I have descended into. Of course, I'm more than that too. I interact extensively with the world I am probing. But every one of my interactions seems to be an experiment. I'm no more human than the Viking Martian probe testing to see whether or not there is life on the Red Planet.

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The only punk rocker I know who actually was born in the gutter hasn't even been born yet.

T


oday was so hot that all I could manage to do outside of an airconditioned room was take a long siesta until maybe 8pm. Then it was obscure movie hour with the housemates.

I'm pleased to see that the responsible parties have cleaned all traces of the soot from Sunday night's grease fire.

I would like to think Zachary is suddenly going to start controlling himself, but I know him too well. I find myself having difficulty regarding him as completely human.
And his evil spawn, which Peggy calls "Babboose" but which I first knew as "Mouth": what sort of misshapened creature will that be?
All my friends want to think of themselves as punk rock, and trying continually to prove this seems to be important to them. This usually entails breaking things, things that Mommy and Daddy can replace.
There's inertia to continue breaking things even after Mommy and Daddy are out of the picture; but that can't last long.
Punk rockers would like you to think they emerged spontaneously from the gutter, but most of my friends come from upper middle class backgrounds.
The only punk rocker I know who actually was born in the gutter hasn't even been born yet.

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