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C0cksucker | Nov 11 2003

So it’s true: I took a job writing spam headers. I won’t try defend this decision because I can’t. That’s my defense: I have no defense. Anyway I just wrote headers; no body copy. It wasn’t because headers are less disgusting than body copy or anything like that; I just wouldn’t know how to write body copy if my life depended on it.

Not that I was so hot with headers either. Probably I was lousy at it. The guy who hired me, I’ll call him Josh, would pay me by the header. He’d say, “Give me twenty headers about sucking c0ck” and I’d spend half a day writing the world’s best headers about sucking c0ck, which was ridiculous because he was paying me a flat rate and then would use maybe two or three headers, total.

This is a problem I have: I have to do the best job possible or I feel like crap. It’s always been like this. When I was paperboy, I would place each paper directly in front of each person’s door, face up and facing the door, so that the person could read the headline as he or she reached down to pick up the paper. All the other paperboys would throw their papers from the sidewalk, which was obviously more efficient and anyway no one cared if they could read the headline right away; it was just something I decided to do and couldn’t stop myself from doing.

Anyway I quit writing spam headers when it became clear that Josh didn’t appreciate my work. The final straw was the aforementioned c0ck sucking assignment. I wrote one header in particular I really liked but which he considered “overly modest.” It went:

i am not perfect but i do suck c0ck

I got the idea from the signature line of a guy I once hired to do some database programming. His line was: I am not perfect but I do know Perl.

As I saw it, the reader would read this and imagine a woman who was trying to be realistic and forthright about her strengths and weaknesses. This made her seem pretty compelling to me; in fact it made me want to know more about her, but Josh didn’t care for such subtleties. He preferred the hard sell, as it were, which I find distasteful.

I guess you call that professional differences. We had professional differences and I told him to go fuck himself. This is another problem I have: I get upset when I make something that I think is good, but then people don’t like it. Probably I should be less intense about this, more philosophical, but I can’t help myself.