I lost my cell phone yesterday, something that happens so often I’m beginning to wonder whether I should change my medication. I see men who wear holsters for their cells so they’re never far away. That seems like a good answer for men who still have hopes of becoming a cowboy, riding bucking broncos and roping steers, but I’ve been to several rodeos and seen men thrown off horses like a wet rag. So, I’m passing on the holsters. I’d rather lose mine than see myself stomped by one of those two-thousand-pound bulls. No, I don’t think a holster’s my thing.
So, when I lost my cell, the last thing I thought to do was the first thing I should have done, which is to call the phone. Instead, being a creature of habit, I resorted to ranting and raving, blaming others, and opening every drawer in the house to find it. Even with a post graduate degree, it took me fifteen minutes to remember that I could call it on our home line, which I promptly did and found it ringing under a pile of magazines.
Problem solved, right? Yes, except for one minor detail. My cellphone was scrolling the words SPAM RISK on the screen.
Now, mind you, this is a call I made to myself. I thought, WHAT?! How can I be a spam risk to myself? Up until then, I always thought the function of being notified of spam was to let me know there is someone suspicious calling, but I never thought in a million years that person would be… me!
As I stared at the screen and tried to digest the part of my character that is like spam, I realized a couple of very important things about life, little spam nuggets if you will. First, no matter how hard you try, the spam of life will find you. In other words, wherever you spam, there you are. Secondly, and this fact may be difficult for many of you listeners to swallow – we are, in fact, our own worst spam. We bring it on ourselves. We create the conditions for spam to spam us. We are living breathing, walking, talking spam magnets.
By the way, for those of you who like the latest catch phrase, I’ve combined spam and enemy into one word, spameny, or the condition of being your own worst (spam) enemy.
Yes, we are. In fact, according to my phone, I am a constant spameny to myself, and when I say, “my phone,” it is a sad commentary that in today’s culture, our phones have become the final answer, the last word, the final image we look at before we go to beddy-bye and the first one we see in the morning. Sad America, but it’s true.
Naturally, since the range of human behaviors are so sweeping, so prevalent in so many variations, the act of spamming oneself most likely will be picked up under the umbrella of mental health and psychological research, eventually surfacing on the news cycle, and very possibly as a college major at Harvard. I’m imagining highly respected journals on behavioral research such as Psychology Today carrying articles about people who are at a spam risk to themselves, complete with double blind studies and hundreds of documented cases. Behavioral psychologists from around the globe, fascinated by spameny habits, will meet at international conferences to debate the ethics and dangers of societal spamming.
As history tells us, most of these conventions will be held in Oslo, Norway, home of the Nobel Prize. There, brilliant scientists, neurobehavioralists and brainsmatologists will gather in a hotel lobby next to kiosks with life-size cardboard cut-outs of self-spammers and they will counsel guests who are at a spam risk to themselves. Jokes will begin to circulate, jokes that begin, “Did you hear the joke about the guy who spammed…,” and knock-knock name cards will be placed on every table setting at the ceremonial awards dinner. Waiters wearing glistening uniforms that glow in the dark, like a ringing cell phone, will present the attending guests with narwhal d’oeuvres, and beverages will have mini-icebergs floating in them to help with any inflammation.
A brilliant industrial psychologist with a goatee by the name of Odør Kænoruier-Rafsnörhadden, having spent the first two days of the conference cold plunging in an ionized wooden tub made of Norwegian cedar, will come up for air on a cognitive frigid high, and coin a new term for the new spam-yourself condition. As a result of his research, his picture will be on the cover of the 100th issue of Psychology Today, standing with a gold medal around his neck, and a commemorative T-shirt that says “Roses are red, violets are blue, I spammed myself, and so did I.” Standing proudly there for his cover shoot will be all seven members of his Kænoruier-Rafsnörhadden’s family, along with a distant uncle who repaired their gutters one icey winter.
Unfortunately, Odør’s ground-breaking article, when it was released a month later, was nineteen pages of boring flow charts and statistical diagrams. A picture of Odør’s third child, a boy named Roar, was mistakenly printed over the fold, contorting him in such a way that he appeared to have only one eye. This printing error distracted readers away from the central spam point, the long-awaited new term that Odør had come up with, which was impaired cognitive autospam defiency. As a result, Odør’s research was poo-pooed by the psychological community, and the term had to be scrapped, resulting in all twenty-seven thousand copies being pulled from newsstands worldwide.
I know. That is a lot of newsstands, isn’t it?
Still, for those of you who have also spammed yourself, Odør’s article is still available at Norwegian yard sales and on the black web, and provides evidence that cell phones pose a threat to the general sanity of the human race, and may be contributing to most other problems as well, such as floating islands in the ocean made of discarded phones, and schools of fish that swim around them and watch Finding Nemo all day long. Sad America, it may be true.
For those of you who want to see an abbreviated version of Odør’s article, you might take a look at the insert to a later issue, volume IVXXIII, where clinical research was carried out on chimpanzees who would receive spam calls from one another and have to determine, independent of satellite intervention, whether to pick up the call or let the call go through to voice mail. That’s a tough decision for a chimp that may have only began using their opposable thumb for a week ago.
Research aside, I don’t care for the idea of being a spam risk to myself. I’ve always thought of myself in quite different terms, with qualities not associated with spam or risk. I believe I could handle one or the other, spam or risk, but honestly, when those words are put together, well for me, it seems over the spam top, like carrying around three or four spare tires in your car in case they all blow at the same time. It’s too much.
And thus, when my phone decided without my input that I was a spam risk, I kind of took it personally. I thought of a lot of things in my own spamocious personality, things I’ve never talked about with anyone, that would be very cellular if someone outside my own phone, knew about them. For example, the other day when my granddaughter wasn’t looking, I ate three or four of her chicken nuggets. I had this kind of pit in my stomach that a cell tower might have picked up on this distasteful habit of stealing food off my grand-daughter’s plate when she isn’t looking. Will that put me on a national spameny list? If it does, it makes me sad because I love my granddaughter so much and wouldn’t want a chicken nugget to spoil our relationship.
This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. I lie in bed and stare out my window, the clouds scattering across a rising moon. Sweat brakes out on my forehead, and I begin to see impaired cognitive autospam defiency floating across the billowy mantle of my brain. I am wondering why I am paying hard earned money for this cell phone that has so much against me, a device that has it in for me, whose purpose, in essence, is to embarrass myself over my own phone. It seems like I could do that just as easily by going out the front door of my house with two different kinds of socks on, or in most cases, just by going out my front door. Sad America, it’s true.
Since I have been discovered by my phone, revealed so to speak, I have a litany of mistakes I’ve decided to air publicly at some point just to clear the spam air. Doing it here and now, however, would put this podcast at risk of becoming a nineteen-page research paper like the one Odør Kænoruier-Rafsnörhadden wrote. What I really want to do is call a friend for support, but there’s the risk that I, Mr. Spam Risk, will scroll across their phone. Of course, by the time they call me back, I will have misplaced my phone again and will have to call it to find it ringing under an old Norwegian issue of Psychology Today.
Sad America, it is true.