It's been occurring to me that perhaps I should try to explain some of my more recent posts. Several of you have inquired whether I really have a girlfriend who towers above the Denver skyline. I wish. But no, this is not (as others of you more astutely guessed) physically possible. Nor is that an image of any actual woman of my personal acquaintance. She is strictly a creature of spam. As my email address, clocke@panix.com, is fully ten years old this month, you can only imagine the amount of unsolicited commercial email I receive each day. For years now, I, not unlike yourselves, have been outraged by this egregious violation of my electronic boundaries and personal digital space. For years now I've wondered, as you've no doubt asked yourself, what could be done to stop it.

Then, one day this Spring, as I was marvelling at the wonder and beauty of Nature -- how she neither forces or allows herself to be forced, how she accommodates herself to the mindless predations of Man -- it struck me that I was looking at the problem from a typically High Modernist perspective. Was there another, a more fully PostModern way to view the situation? Was there a Zen-like mindlessness I could achieve with respect to mindless spam? Considering these new questions was at first disturbing. My equanimity hung in the balance. My mind was fogged with misery and confusion. All was koyaanisqatsi.

And so it was that, in a blinding flash of insight, I realized I could deflect, divert and coopt the nefarious purposes behind the very phenomenon I had come so much to despise. I could learn to love spam, especially that naive Korean spam, and begin to embrace and study it, searching for images that could be bent to my own ends (as soon as I discover what these are).