Speaking of intellectual curiosities

Someone has sniffed or sold my personal email address. It happens, and I don't use it out there in the world because of that, at least not often. If I register at a site somewhere, for some reason, I use a yahoo address. So it was with some surprise two weeks ago, that I began to see rather odd name combinations crop up in my email box. Names like:

syllabus M. Splinting
Googled C. Riboflavin
Importantly J. Hooke
Flaunting K. Soothings
Assistance Q. Shutter
Coequal R. Odets
Someone A. Cajole
Swaggerer . Polices
Loki C. Beasts
Torquemada Q. Wigner

The names alone are enough to raise my brow. Some of them are quite inventive. Yet I can see that they are the product of a random word generator. One of them contained my Primary's last name combined with an initial and another word and I nearly had a heart-attack, I thought someone had managed to snag my address book.

The subject line contains the usual misspellings in order to avoid spam filters. They all invite me to view cheating wives, hidden cameras, college sluts, etc.

There is at least two images per email. Usually an unflattering twat shot and a facial shot of some sort.

But then...it gets weird.

I'm sure these are also randomly generated but if so, someone somewhere has put a lot of work into creating the base of work that generates the phrases which appear beneath the tawdry photos. phrases like:

A diplomat these days is nothing, but a head waiter who is allowed to sit down occasionally.

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

God has two dwellings one in heaven, and the other in a meek and thankful heart.

I have read your book and much like it.

See the man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope for a fool than for him. [Proverbs 26:7]

A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.

Why should we strive, with cynic frown, to knock their fairy castles down?
Who goes a borrowing, goes a sorrowing. Confidence awakens confidence.

Man shapes himself through decision that shape his environment.Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had...
The most wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed.

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

If you judge, investigate. Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.
He that dies pays all his debts.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

Those were all at the end of Torquemada's email.

Spam with artificial intelligence.

What is this world coming to?

Rant #3, Taking the Moral High Ground in Low Situations

I am not a monogamist. I don't claim to be, I have rejected the society script of the sanctity of marriage and the death-do-us-part, bit. I have tried, twice, and failed. It makes no sense to me. I have no social or religious conviction that requires me to consider myself partnered because of a legal piece of paper with signatures and a raised seal, in some county courthouse. I have been screwed over royally, mostly financially by two of those pieces of paper.

That said, the above statement does not mean, that marriage doesn't work for others. And marriage does not always equate monogamy, either. For those who find themselves comforted, happy, and secure in marriage, I applaud them for finding something that works for them.

For those who find themselves unhappy, adrift, angry, or wounded in marriage, but who remain for fear of being alone, of being ostricized, of creating the illusion of wholeness for the sake of the children, I pity them, but it is their choice and I will not gainsay it.

My choice? After many years of consideration, I have arrived at the conclusion that I will not marry again. Ever. Which is not to say I will never be paired with or partner with someone. I love my primary to distraction, but I won't marry him. We have both been married twice now, and again, feel no need for a legal document or a social contract to complete or define love. I'm fortunate in that regard. And I am blessed.

So where am I going with all this? Well...that other website, where I often hang out and chat, is a place where people of all types hang out and look for friends and dates. A good proportion of men on the site are married and are either looking for discreet hook ups, or to roadtest a potential threesome with the wife, or are part of a swinging couple, or what have you.

I think the decisions and the responsibility for those decisions rest in the person who creates the ad. If they are up front about the fact they are married, that's fine with me. That is their own issue to confront. I have been on both sides of that fence a few times and have chosen differently at those times, based on my own situation and my own conscious.

There is a particular group of women who decide it is their moral obligation to castigate these guys for cheating on their wives. Loudly, in public, and with more illumination on their own fears than shedding illumination on the sins of another. They can choose to spurn the advances of such a man and say "I don't play with married men." That is their choice and that is their right. But if you're going to hunt about for playmates on a site that sponsors hedonistic and uninhibited behavior, DON'T turn it into the Sunday pulpit for lectures on adultery and infidelity. IT'S NOT YOUR PLACE TO DO SO.

They lecture, long and loud, on the sanctity of marriage, of how the wife feels or would feel if she knew. They speak of heartbreak, betrayal, and anger. Primal and deep feelings, wounds, senses of abandonment. I watch and I listen and I see that many of the woman who climb up on this soapbox of righteousness have probably been abandoned and/or betrayed by a lover or a spouse. I have too. That doesn't make me into Carrie Nation for the moral majority and their concept of family values.

People have many different reasons for seeking friendship (intimate or otherwise) outside of their domestic arrangement. It is not on my shoulders to condone or condemn them for those reasons. It is only on my shoulders to make a choice, according to my own ethics, as to whether or not this person has a value in my life as a friend and/or an intimate friend.

Perhaps the problem is, I have no morals. I have ethics, a strong sense of what is right and wrong for myself. I have a sense of social responsibility in being kind to fellow man, but I shrug off the authoritative, often religiously motivated concept of MORAL behavior. What is considered moral changes too often depending on who's in charge, and who is shouting the loudest.

Remember, it was moral to burn women at the stake for witchcraft in this free country of ours and it was imoral to practice any form of birth control or to vote. Morals are too subjective and too often twisted for me.

Let each man/woman live to their own ethics, to their own conscious, to face the results, rewards, or repercussions of their actions. Let them search their own soul.

This is my firm belief, and I don't expect that others will share it (at least not all) and so I find myself witness to the Moral High Ground in a sex site all too often. I have started to suggest to those women that they use a service like True.Com if they are so outraged by the 'lack of proper moral behavior' in men on the site I frequent.

Their front page says, quite proudly:

"MARRIED PEOPLE WILL BE PROSECUTED
Because we care, we screen members against public records to check marital status."

Their goal, in the guise of providing safe and moral dating online and off, is to criminalize adultery and make it loud and public, in a way that many states or cities will publicize the names of men who solicit for prostitutes. In short, if you seek any sort of solace out side of marriage, with or without your partner's consent, you are a whore.

That is a judgment I can do without. And I will continue to choose my friends and my lovers according to personal worth and quality of friendship, not by whether they have a ring on their finger. I will leave people to their own conscious and their own set of personal values, and I will not project or enforce mine upon them. I will not take the moral high ground in a low situation and cloak myself in righteous indignation. I find it petty, small, and very unappealing.