Better Off Dead
Published July 11th, 2011 | 
I’ve had a lousy week and I’ll admit that I’ve been wondering the past few days if I wouldn’t be better off dead. No, I haven’t been seriously contemplating suicide. Just envying dead people a little bit because they are free from problems and I have too many problems at the moment. You ever see those commercial for affordable term life insurance? You know, those ads with the old people sitting around all jolly because they’ve sign up for a new life insurance policy. One foot in the grave, but happy because they have nothing left to worry about. Hard not to envy that sense of peace. So that’s kind of my new motto: You know you’re still breathing when you’re screwed fifty ways from Sunday and still have to worry about it.
These Guns Shoot Spam
Published June 2nd, 2011 | Got a spam e-mail today:
UNCLE MIKES Holsters are designed to provide a balance of access to your gun as well as safe mobility. Providing a variety of portability solutions depending on your holster needs, our wide selection of holsters provides a range of possibilities for how to carry your gun. Whether you require hip, shoulder or other carrying options, we are confident that you will find the perfect solution to your needs.
I guess if I were in the market for a holster, I’d have to consider why I’d buy one with a name that sounds like a family pedophile. Uncle Mike? ROFL.
A Loser Like Me
Published March 31st, 2011 | This morning, I was trying to compile a list of clients I’d written content for over the past couple of years. I was sifting through my documents (because I save practically everything), and came across some old articles I’d written for clients who were anonymous to me. Just to satisfy my curiosity, I copied and pasted one of these articles into a plagiarism checker to see where the article had been used. What I discovered kind of made me chuckle a bit.
It was an article about life insurance and I found it posted on one of those free article content mill site. The guy who bought the article to publish under his own name was listed as a business expert and entrepreneur. Four or five years ago, you could send email newsletters or use one of those free article sites to get your content out there. These are a bit too Web 1.0 now, but were a pretty good strategy for self-promotion back in the day. You’d post an article for free with a link back to a professional website where’d you drive traffic and make money by selling your expertise, e-books and so forth and getting backlinks and making money from advertising. Google has, of late, punished these free article sites by delisting or devaluing them to the point where they no longer get the traffic they used to get and guys like Mr. X. don’t get the same play from it. But that wasn’t what amused me. Granted, I couldn’t understand why a guy would pay money to me to ghostwrite an article he was just going to use on a free article site, but what screamed at me was the notion that a man who billed himself as an “expert” would need me to write a crap article about a subject I know almost nothing about in the first place.
What I discovered upon visiting his website is that this man isn’t a business expert at all. He’s just some broke ass loser who aspires to one day become a rich man. The website features a bunch of short blog posts in which the guy whines about having no money. He’s just a loser like me who’s been beaten down by the economy and bad luck. Truth be told, I kind of felt better about my own difficulties when I read about how much he was in debt. Unlike him, though, I’m not deluding myself that I’m ever going to be rich. Being as he’s about $500000 in the hole, he’s insane if he thinks he’ll ever be a millionaire. Not at the rate he’s going.
