I Admit it's a Strange Fascination

I get a lot of email and most of it I don’t read because they are from social networking sites with links to articles that don’t interest me. Once in a while there’s a title of a topic I should learn about because it’s good for me, the way vegetables are good for me.

I’m not really interested but I read it because it pertains to social networking and that’s the whole point of these articles, right? Put information out there as a way of getting noticed and attracting people to you? Like in high school. You know, when you would go into the bathroom of the opposite sex and write smack about yourself on the wall. Remember that?

So I click on the link and right away I can tell me no likey. The guy pitches his books and business too early. He’s a premature spectaculator. He comes on too strong and doesn’t know it, the way church ladies don’t realize that spraying expired Avon to create an intoxicating toxic cloud around them is going to send anyone in a five-foot radius into anaphylactic shock. Frankly, it’s why my church attendance is low. Safety.

That premature self-pimping in the third paragraph ruined my mood. Right away I started looking for things I didn’t like about him. His comb-over.  His jewelry. How he put his drink directly on the wood table instead of on the coaster. And kept all his fingernails closely manicured except his right pinky. I don’t even want to know what that’s for.

He could have waited to plug his book in his third or fourth email. Maybe just brag about himself in the final “About the Author” paragraph. And put it in italics, please. Italics say, “The bread is on the table. You may partake if you wish. Your choice.”

Putting it in regular font, way up in the third paragraph is telling the reader, “Open up! Here come the boiled, flavorless vegetables!” A reader with more pride would have clicked on the little red dot in the upper left corner of the page the second they saw that forkful of vegetables coming. Not me.

Something caught my eye. It was the use of “implicate” instead of “implement”, “affect” instead of “effect” and “for all intensive purposes” instead of “all intents and purposes.”

I hung around. Kept buying him drinks reading his links. I pretended to be interested to put him at ease. I wanted to see what would happen when he let his guard down, and his comb-over. I held out to see what he was going to do with that pinky when he thought I wasn’t still reading.

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