Emailing Creepy Folks on Craigslist: The Gift that Keeps On Giving

As some of you might have inferred by reading my blog (or by simply knowing me), I have a tendency to email strange people, most especially strange people from Craigslist. It's a source of incredible entertainment, to be sure; if you haven't tried it, I definitely recommend seeing what happens when you email such posters as "M4M: I SEEN YOUR BOY AT MICKIE D's" or "I NEED A MAN TO MARRY - NOW." (If you want to try it out but can't get past the fact that you might be corresponding with a psychopath, you can always use a free temporary email from GuerillaMail.com.) While the initial responses are always delightful, there's also the long-term benefits of emailing such scuzz, such as this little beauty, which arrived in my inbox at 1:37 a.m. this morning:

"I Slept with Sixteen Different Girls this Week

I have the morals of a SEWER

RAT .. yes I'm a mean, dirty, unethical son-of-a-bitch.

Why? Because I manipulate innocent women into having sex with me
within hours of meeting them .. at clubs, at the gym, online, on
Craigslist, dating sites like PlentyofFish ... or just walking down the street .. WHEREVER!

It's almost as if I slip them some sort of 'worship-me-like-a-god' drug that makes girls drop
everything - and everyone - to serve my every need ...

But there is no such drug. In fact, it's all science. And it's a system as easy as step 1, step 2, step 3 ...
that you can use starting NOW to suck any girl you meet into your bed in a matter of hours.

Look, I'm talking about some really dirty mind-control tricks ..

this isn't ethical, nice, or moral ... this is simply about GETTING LAID. Can you handle that?

HEY! Stop being jealous of your friends who have girlfriends and get laid every night ...

Isn't it time to just say 'enough already!' and learn how to pick up girls?"

While I'm tempted to steal this and turn it into a poem, I suppose I'm more interested in the fact that someone, somewhere, wrote this delightfully crude email, and moreover, that they probably making money doing it. Well god damn. Where do I sign up?

Truth is, I don't know where to sign up, because if I could, I would. I've tried explaining this to friends, and while they usually respond by sucking air through their teeth, changing the subject, or simply looking at their shoes, I stick by my convictions. This dude is probably sitting in his flannel pajama bottoms right now, (can't you see him? there's a bit of mustard crusted to his swollen, uncovered belly), writing these emails in all of three minutes, firing them out, and then letting the insecurities of the internet public get him paid.

At least, that's what I'm inferring from the automated messages that you inevitably end up with when you do any sort of scandalous emailing on the List. Most often, they're not bro-tastic messages like this one, but grammatically-challenged emails penned, supposedly, by real women. And while I'm sure that there are some real women, i.e. prostitutes, sending out some of these messages, for the most part I'm inclined to believe that some dude in Alaska (or wherever) has built a website and posted a bunch of photos of scantily clad 19-year-olds (which he pulled at random from the web). At that point, your clientele's loneliness has done the work: all that's left to do is charge the poor fuckers with the promise of meeting Cindy or Veronica or Miracle, eventually.

Perhaps that's terrible. Maybe this system is feeding on people's weaknesses, and leads only to more hurt, to further estrangement. Perhaps, perhaps.

Personally, I think it's a kick-ass entrepreneurial idea. I've been swimming after that sailed boat for like, 9 months. I usually reply to these emails by asking how much money is to be made doing this sort of work, or how they got started doing it. They don't ever write back. Or maybe they do. Maybe the email that showed up at 1:37 this morning was a long-delayed response to one of my inquiries. Perhaps the writer, that mustard-spattered guru, sensed my desperation through his computer. Maybe he sensed my loneliness. Maybe he was trying to tell me something.

Or maybe he just doesn't give a fuck. He has the morals of a sewer rat, after all.