Preterition

Last year, the brilliant miniaturist Michael Barrish wrote an entry titled “C0cksucker” that begins, “So it’s true: I took a job writing spam headers.”

Things (”c0cks”, among others) have taken a dire turn in the intervening months, to the point where I lately wonder when I check my inbox: will the arms race between spam filtering (Bayesian or keyword-based) and the spammers’ creative deployment of orthographic incorrectness eventually collapse into the complete profane incomprehensibility of pr0n spam? When will we start getting messages where we scratch our heads and say, “Well — there’s m!Lf in that first sentence — and I see something about leAzb14n b_u++5 two lines down — I guess someone’s supposed to be interested in this”?

Well, OK, so I think we’ve already started to get such messages, or I’ve already started at least, and the above is a lot of overintellectualizing to work up to a supremely embarassed admission:

I got a piece of porn spam today that I couldn’t understand.

I like to think of myself as a grownup, mostly, who knows a little about grownup things — like, you know, relations — and how some of them work, even when we turn off the lights. And historically, text-based pornography of the variety common to e-mail advertising has dealt in fairly obvious referents, whether they be body parts (those mentioned above or others), or verbs that take those body parts as an explicit or implied objects, or characterizations of people often based on age, race, physical characteristics, and sexual orientation or status. (There are also, of course, the accoutrements and settings, but I don’t want to get carried away here.)

As is occasionally the case, my spam filters didn’t catch the email in question, so I opened it upon seeing the obviously spoofed “from” address, hoping to find an offending URL to add to my keyword blacklist. I really don’t know how to describe my reaction: I mean, here was some clearly naughty talk — I managed to comprehend things along the lines of “fU_kkin6″ and “S)E)K)`S!”, and there were vague hints at a farm theme with “H0rr_sies with HUGE K0X” and “1nV3rt3d cr0w” — but it simply Did. Not. Scan. There may be fifty ways to leave your lover, and eight million stories in the naked city, but there are six hundred quintillion ways spam can spell “Viagra”. Furthermore, judging from the evidence of that single email, there are even more ways to describe certain sex acts that seem to bear the ineffable or ultralinguistic qualities of some of the eldritch elder gods from the unlighted chambers beyond angled space.

Out of habit, I deleted the message, before I had fully realized just how fully inscrutable it was, or else I’d share it here. So I can only wonder how far such variations can go, and speculate upon the nature of its original kink.

And I wonder: could it be just that? Could the kink be its combination of the obscure and obscene? Could Thomas Pynchon write coded 1337-5p33k letters to Penthouse Forum (last link NSFW)?

I think of the classic Penny Arcade strip that imagines “Bob the Door-to-Door Spammer”: Bob, with hat, moustache, plaid coat, and sample case: “Hey, Brian.” Gabe, holding open the front door: “Who the fuck is Brian?” Bob: “Is your penis big enough?” And with this email I got, the best metaphor I can offer is of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett collaborating on a pornographic (NSFW) revision of the cue-card accompaniment to Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues filmed on the set of Max Headroom, only I’m holding open the door and the words on Bob’s cards say, in sequence,

• R U h0t g3t @ p1c?

• d1d u 63t h3d?

• g3t @ p1c?

• PK roofles

• K THX BYE

• 50m3+1m5 ! f411 d0wn

and Bob’s holding up magazine after slick magazine, each with its own progressively more disturbing conjunctions.

More alarming are the implications. Is this the way our discourse goes? Does my incomprehension admit that I’m already left behind? Should I worry?

Say three years from now, I’m at a conference. I’ve arrived a day early, on a late flight, and I’m at the hotel bar. I’ve grabbed a stool next to someone who’s there for a different conference; something about petrochemicals and environmental ethics. She’s older, and leaving the following day. (Yes, yes. “Dear Penthouse Forum: I never imagined this would happen to me.”) The people she’s talking with leave. We chat about disciplinary differences. She’s still wearing her name tag.

More drinks. There’s flirting. I’m as inept as ever. I try to be suggestive by taking out my thick plastic hotel key-card and placing it on the bar when I open my wallet to pay for the next round, but I don’t have the guts to hold her gaze. But of course she sees it: it’s the clumsiest attempt possible.

She leans close. “Hey,” she says.

In that one moment, I am OK. I’m cool. Ready for it. Six hours from now, we’ll both wake up and wonder how it happened. She’ll drape a tan arm across my much-broader-than-it-really-is chest.

She whispers: “d0 U w4n+ t3h +0uch wh3r3 t3h +w15+ f!0p5?”

I spit the ice back into my glass. “Come again?” I manage. There’s panic in my eyes.

“L37′5 sh0×0rz t3h s0×0rz,” she suggests.

I’m terrified. I try to blink back tears. Garbled lascivious inscrutability. Gnomic aphasiac Tourette’s. Goddamn priapic Foucault.

She’s waiting, her nearly-empty glass inches from her lips. One last chance: “347 t3h p4+h,” she offers.

I remember her laugh, and the way it goes: she doesn’t look back.

Four months later, a different conference. I’ve arrived a day early, on a late flight, and I’m at the hotel bar. I’ve taken a stool next to someone who’s there for a different conference; something about government and financial ethics. She’s older, and leaving the following day. The people she’s talking with leave. We chat about disciplinary differences. She’s still wearing her name tag.

More drinks. There’s flirting. There’s a moment.

I lean close. “Hey,” I say. “L37′5 sh0×0rz t3h s0×0rz.”

She tilts her chin up, her expression inscrutable.

Does she understand?

“Come on,” I say. “Talk dirty to me.”