Writing Boots

Make sure you:

1. Talk at great, dutiful length about your career, starting in college, working your way through the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s—or was that actually the late 1990s? hmm, let me think …—taking us all the way to the present moment. As if you are Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

2. Talk a lot about your failures. How frustrating work can be, how stupid clients are, how so many people just don't "get it." You may have won a World Series, but you don't want to talk about that. Instead, you want our sympathy for all those injury-plagued 100-loss seasons.

3. When you talk about your company or your industry or your country, talk about how much it has changed over the last 15 years, and how much better everything was in 1997. Share your vision for "restoring" everything to the greatness you once knew. (We'll have to take your word for it.)

If you do these things the first time we meet, I can assure you: There is no chance we'll ever forget, no matter how much information you later provide to the contrary, what a loser you are.

Congratulations.

The problem is, semiliteracy in blog-comment spammers.

I mean, what am I supposed to do with this critique that I received the other day?

"The next time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as a lot as this one particular. I mean, I know it was my option to read, but I truly believed youd have something fascinating to say. All I hear can be a bunch of whining about some thing that you simply could fix should you werent too busy trying to find attention."

They say foreigners are doing jobs that Americans don't want to do. Fine with me. I don't want my daughter growing up to be a blog spammer.

And for a poor foreigner hungry to get ahead in the world, blog spamming is probably better for the brain than boxing and better for the soul than participating in child prostitution rings.

But if you're going to spam, do it right. Spam in English, motherfuckers.

This one goes out to Chris Mykrantz. Because, as the wise old horn-blower said, "You don't play the blues to make yourself feel better. You play the blues to make other people feel worse."