Here are some of my favorite subject lines from spam emails that I’ve received over the past several weeks. They are written by people who have, at best, a tenuous grasp of the English language. It’s the dubbed dialog from a Japanese monster movie. Most people dread what shows up in their spam inbox but I think that sheer poetry can be found within.

Your new weapon will remove her undies
Get armed with huge love cannon
No need to kill yourself over size
Grow your pole easily today
Get a rod of colossal measurements!
Feel yourself more manly
Amend your problem of small dimension
Gain a voluminous male package

From off the shelves of your local Home Depot:
Your tool is set to grow
More dimension and vigor for your love tool
Get the biggest tool in the town
Dating 101 made easy with large tool

Something I’ve always wondered:
Where do homosexuals get all their energy?

And, of course:
Jamie Lynn is a bigger slut than Britney

This was going to be a post designed to make all of you jealous, jealous, jealous. It was going to be a nauseating brag about how Mrs. Wife and I got to abandon our children at their grandparent’s house for the night and go to the big Bruce Springsteen show at Giants Stadium. Mrs. Wife is related to him in a very roundabout fashion and we are always comped tickets and get to sit with the family in the best seats in the house. I married up!

We met friends about three hours beforehand and tailgaited in the parking lot. M, a manly son-of-a-bitch if ever there was one, cooked pulled pork sandwiches on a little camping stove that he uses when he’s out in the wilderness being manly. He brought some nice scotch, as well. It was a beautiful summer evening and there was liquor and weed and good feelings everywhere. Tra-la-la!

We picked up our tickets at the will-call window, walked down to our seats to marvel at their location and then Mrs. Wife’s cell phone rang. It was a call from home. 2-Year Old Daughter (this being her birthday, by the way) shoved a small bead deep into her ear canal and needed to go to the emergency room. 6-Year Old Daughter was dropped off at a neighbor’s house. Our neighbor, a lifesaver if ever there was one, is very, very pregnant, so we couldn’t say to her, “Thanks for watching our kid! See you when the concert ends at 1:00 in the morning!” We turned on our heels, got into our car and drove home, not having heard one bar chord. I understand he opened with Tenth Avenue Freezout.

Now who’s jealous? Tramps like us, baby we were born to have our evenings wrecked by our kids.

A few months ago, Dennis, 6-Year Old Daughter’s fish, quietly passed away in his sleep. They were very close to one another so there was a tremendous amount of weeping and sorrow and mourning. The only thing she didn’t do was sit shiva or wear black. We let some time pass in order to be respectful to Dennis and last month I bought Goldie, Dennis’s replacement. This morning I changed the water and we went out for the afternoon. I must have done something to the water because when we came home, Goldie was dead, dead, dead.

Mrs. Wife sat 6-Year Old Daughter down and said, “I have something to tell you and it’s sad. Goldie died while we were out.” “Oh,” was all she said. “C’mon,” I said, “We’ll go up to your room, get her out of her bowl, take her out back and bury her.” I took her hand, walked up the stairs, opened her door and she looked into Goldie’s bowl.

“Well,” she said, “that’s certainly an odd way to float. Listen, can we get a cat or a dog this time? I’m sick of these fish dying on me.” I asked if she still wanted to bury her and she said, with very little enthusiasm, “I guess so.” I told her that we could just as easily flush her down the toilet and she said, “Yea! Let’s do that! But I get to flush her!”

She’s better at letting go than I’ll ever be.

Yesterday evening I was walking across 33rd St. towards Penn Station for the long train ride home when I witnessed a horrible sight; thousands of people streaming out of Penn Station onto Seventh Avenue. The last time I saw a mass of people that large all pouring down an Avenue in one direction, a jet had just slammed into a skyscraper. Thankfully, it was nothing that serious. It was a train station power failure—every commuter’s worst nightmare. The dumb masses scattered in search of a way home. There’s a ferry across town that goes to New Jersey and there’s always the lovely, dignity-sucking busses of Port Authority.

To hell with all that, thought I. These problems have a way of correcting themselves in two or three hours, so instead of running around town in the stupefying heat trying to find an alternate way out of the city, I walked around the corner to the Loew’s 34th St. movie theater and saw The Dark Knight instead. It was quite good, although not as good as they say it is. I’ll tell you what they’re right about, though—Heath Ledger deserves an Oscar. Creepy x 1,000.

By the time I got to the theater the movie had already been playing for about five minutes. Under normal circumstances, that would have been a deal-killer for me. I HATE walking into a movie late, but these were extenuating circumstances and it couldn’t be helped. I was a bit euphoric over the quick-thinking originality of my decision to not follow the masses and instead use that time in a more entertaining fashion. Good ideas don’t bubble up in my head very often so when they do, it’s something to celebrate. I flew up four flights of escalators to the theater, threw open the door, chugged up the ramp to the seats and at the top of the ramp, right before you turn left into the seating area, there it was:

A stroller.

What kind of fucking horrible shithead monsters would bring a little baby into a dark, noisy, violent, ugly movie like Batman!? It’s an act of absolute selfishness. A baby is like a sponge. They take in everything that’s going on around them. They were, of course, a very young couple who had gotten careless with their contraception and accidentally had a baby. Children with children. I gave them the hairy eyeball. All throughout the film you could hear the baby babble, cry and coo. I shouldn’t judge. I am NOT the greatest parent of all time, that’s for damn sure. There are times when I want to run and hide from the suffocating responsibility of it all. But JESUS CHRIST some people need to be STERALIZED. That poor kid doesn’t stand a chance.