I don’t get a lot of junk email anymore. I guess the Nigerian scammers finally figured out that I don’t accept the logic of sending them money in return for an imaginary fortune, and the bottom has apparently fallen out of the all-natural male-enhancement market. Either that, or I’ve finally got the filters tuned properly. Regardless, my “spam catcher” account — the one I use for commerce and newsletter subscriptions — doesn’t receive a lot of unsolicited traffic anymore. But every once in a while, one lone ninja manages to slip past the defenses in the dead of night and remind me of the weird and wacky (and yet strangely sublime) crap that used to be such a common part of the online experience.

I got one today, for example, that was mostly inscrutable in its randomly generated nonsense text, but it contained a single vibrant line that caught my eye, because it comes so close to sounding like it actually means something:

“Yes, we must rave. I went out for a activate, and it was so individual I longed to shimmer in the classification.”

My first thought was that somebody had programmed a ‘bot to rewrite A Clockwork Orange in the voice of Jack Kerouac. This line dances in my mind, coming achingly near to comprehensibility, and then skating away again like the pretty girl on an ice rink who teases and flirts and never quite lets you touch her as you flail about and grab for the side railing, and curse your clumsiness even as you find you just can’t take your eyes off her tiny little skirt and the way it flutters in the breeze…

Yes… yes, we must rave. It’s so obvious. I, too, long to shimmer…