You know the handwriting’s on the wall when a personal ad I respond to on Craigslist turns out to be spam.  Whoops. 

Now before you start ragging on me for surfing Craiglist, I was bored, ok?  BORED.  I was checking out apartment prices and then out of curiousity (and absolutely nothing else) I checked out the personals for my area.  That’s when I came across this one:

Okay so here is the deal: I am an attractive 28 year old woman who tends to attract emotionally unavailable men….of course! So basically I am trying this out too see if this “dream guy” actually exists. I would be interested in a man who is attractive (I am a face person) with a great smile/great teeth. I tend to be attracted to men who are not thin or overly muscular. I like a man to have a little meat on his body. I love to laugh and am looking for someone who can make me laugh. I am a born again Christian and would like him to be the same. I love music and love to sing. I also love animals and could not imagine someone not loving them too! I am fairly low maintainance (who also may not be able to spell the word…HAHA). I am somewhat of a homebody and dont need to go out all the time. I am interested in a man who is caring, thoughtful, a “team player”, handy, outgoing, moderately successful, and “real”. I am a very genuine person who’s biggest weakness is my “big heart”. I am thoughtful, caring, and have been told I can “light up a room”. Being my own worse critic I would like to be a little thinner. However, I do have great curves and the softest skin! I came to this website because I really believe that I am a “great catch”. PS) hair is red by choice not by nature!

Seems like a nice enough girl right?  So I emailed her and asked her how strong she considered her Christian beliefs to be.  I got a response shortly afterwards:

Hi, I got your email and wanted to get back with you to see if you might still be interested.  I know you don’t know much about me but you can at least go see what I look like at http://www.eimages.info/barbera21. I posted them on this free site to make this whole “getting to know you” thing a little easier.  Just tell me what you think & if you want, a little about yourself and we will go from there.  Thank you.

When you click on the link however, it actually turns out to be a phony one and is in fact a redirected AFFILIATE link that takes you to the signup page of a dating site.

This whole time I had been communicating with an automated script that had been set up by an affiliate marketer spammer. 

I should have had the foresight to Google some of the phrases in the Craigslist ad to see if it showed up elsewhere, and sure enough the exact same wording shows up on a profile page at PlentyofFish, only this time she hails from Michigan.

Sigh.  And people wonder why I’ve become so bitter and cynical in my old age.

I consider myself to be a somewhat intelligent person, and if I got fooled by this, I’m sure many others have as well, especially as these bottom feeding scum of the earth affiliate marketers get more and more sophisticated in using deceptive methods to make money.  Just make sure, if you experienced something similar and you were tricked into clicking on an affiliate link that leads to a signup page, flush the cookies in your browser, so even if you happen to sign up for that very site in question a few months or so down the road, the spammer won’t get credit for it (affiliate links typically insert cookies into your browser that can last several months to over a year.  Read my article on affiliate spam for more info.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be drowning my sorrows in Dairy Queen’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Blizzard.  Oh wait, there’s no Dairy Queen around here.  Sigh, not even this huh, Lord? 

Here we go:

“Well, I’m a pastor, not a pundit,” {Rick Warren} told CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux on Thursday’s “Situation Room.” “One of the things we’re going to do is I’m going to ask identical questions to both candidates, which will be different.

“I’m not going to play ‘gotcha’ with one candidate and not with the other. This way, it will be totally fair. You compare apples to apples,” he added.

Among the questons that will be asked:

“What’s your favorite color?”

“Do you prefer sunrises, or sunsets?”

“How do you like your steaks: medium, rare, or well done?”

“If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?”

Ok, I might have made some of those up, but I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if Warren really did ask them. You think it might be too much to hope that this Hawaiian-shirt wearing fat-ass might actually bother to ask Barry-O how he can reconcile his quasi support of infanticide with his “Christian” beliefs (especially since he’s been a “Christian” for, what… 5-6 minutes now?) And yes I did say infanticide, because seriously, that’s how F%&*ED UP Obama’s position on abortion is.

You could almost hear the collective sound of balls hitting the megachurch floor as those half eunuch weenies (beginning with their Head Weenie Rickie Warren) abandon all sense of principle so they could entertain a couple of presidential hopefuls, because God forbid we should offend anyone you know, especially with the truth. Horrors!

There must be a reason why I keep confusing Saddleback with Brokeback these days.

I’m sure a few Warren fans will come out of the woodwork now to tell me what an idiot I am and that Warren is such a wonderful guy and everyone wubs him and he gives so much to the community and blah blah blah. Well sure everyone loves him. It’s easy to be loved when you don’t stand for anything.

I’ve been reading LGF on and off for the past few years (I was even on their blogroll), but I only recently began to notice a growing anti-Christian bias primarily born out of their head blogger’s distaste for Intelligent Design (ID).

While I’m a creationist at heart, I’m not a fan of the idea of ID either, since to me much of it represents a narrowly focused movement with disingenuous motives, and any movement that scraps its spiritual integrity in favor of political ambitions simply isn’t going to be blessed of God.

LGF’s continual bashing of ID though seems to be attracting a new demographic of readers, and to put it charitably, they are completely bugflip out of their heathen darkened minds.

After yet another ID bashing post, I happened to notice a comment by one of their more level headed readers:

I don’t support the intelligent design folks, but are they really so influential as to warrant such understandable hostility at this blog?  Have the(sic) made such inroads in education that they can no longer be casually dismissed?

To which another reader responded:

Considering they’re in bed with islamists and other haters of democracy- YES.

Uh oh, they’re on to us.  I better call my Al Qaeda buddy Omar and my commie friend Ivan to tell them the jig is up: them brilliant LGF folks have uncovered our conspiracy to destroy America by coercing an entire generation of children into believing that we were all intelligently designed.

Really, how much crack does a guy have to smoke before he starts coming up with nutty conspiracy crap like this?  Not only that, it would suggest that all creationists are of one mind in spreading the evils of Intelligent Design across the globe, and by God, we’ll enlist the aid of hardcore Muslims to do it if we have to!

Yet this very notion violates maybe 3/4s of what the New Testament teaches in regards to evangelism.  The emphasis has always been on preaching (and living) the Gospel, while leaving the rest up to God, because really, if the very act of observing the natural world cannot convince a person that we have a Creator, what more is there to be said?  It puts into question not only the wisdom of the extreme elements of the ID movement, but whether they are really even Christians to begin with.

But for those bare assed baboons hanging out at LGF, evidently we are esteemed in the same manner a black man is esteemed by a Ku Klux Klan dweeb: we all look and act alike to them.

Whatever.  LGF never really grabbed me anyway, as I’ve always been more partial to those sweet folks at Ace of Spades.  Only there could I get cuddly feelings of warmth and wubs just by being called a moron. 

Why is it whenever I hear someone expressing boundless excitement over watching the Olympics, I just want to bash their faces in with something hard?

I dunno. Could be because it’s taking place in Beijing, which is about as appealing as having it take place in say, 1936 Berlin. Really kinda makes it hard to root for the home team when they’re dancing around in smog filled Communist China:

They’re killing and persecuting Christians over there by the way, but that’s ok, Michael Phelps just broke a world record! Wheeeeeee!

Oh, and did anyone happen to notice (when they weren’t busy checking out the bare asses of Team USA’s volleyball team) that there’s a F&^*ING European war going on in Georgia?

God I hate this world.

As if concern over the quality of the preaching wasn’t bad enough, now I have to worry about Christian dweebs running over me with their bikes too.
(Kudos: The Limitless)

Now that it’s been two years since I created this blog, where do I go from here?

Looking back, it’s interesting to see how things played out.  When I first started out in 2006, I blogged under the assumption that I would be eventually be attending law school later that fall.  I thought the name “Habitation of Justice” was a suitable name then, and the blog would have basically been a chronicle of my adventures in law school, as well as my subsequent journey into the legal profession.  Since I was so focused on getting everything in place so I’d be ready in time for school, I rarely posted for the first year.

Eventually though I had to defer my enrollment when my hopes for a scholarship fell through.  The deferment lasted a year, but nothing had really changed by the time it ended, so I had no choice but to withdraw.  I made one more try by attempting to go to school part-time at a local university instead, but eventually those plans fell through as well.

When it seemed like my whole future had collapsed, I eventually became fixated on making money off my blog, and spent the rest of 2007 working towards that end.  I devoured everything I could find about making money online, getting more and more frustrated because most of what I read were actually tips that I had already read off dozens of other sites, so I ended up reading the same fricking material over and over again.  Yet this was an idea I wanted to work so bad because I hated my job, and the allure of being able to live off the Internet was a really strong one.  2007 was all about establishing my blogging identity and doing whatever I could to bring in the traffic I needed so I could turn my blog into a money making machine.

That of course also met with miserable failure.  I had a huge identity crisis to deal with in that I just didn’t know what my blog should be about, and I knew I had to find a niche I was passionate about but still could make good money in.  I dabbled in doing paid reviews and other gimmicks here and there, but nothing really met with success.   All I could do was burn with envy at those who had become wildly successful with their own blogs, and nothing I could do could even remotely come near to their level of success.  The kicker was reading about a 19 year old weenie punk of a teenager who was raking in tens of thousands of dollars a month by running fake review sites containing hidden affiliate links.  They seemed to make money without even trying, and they did it with impunity.

Eventually I just gave up.  2008 began with me resigning myself to the fact that I would never get anywhere in life, much less with my blog.  I had no skills, no talent, nothing I could offer that could make this whole endeavor worthwhile.  The initial hope I had during the beginning of the year quickly dissipated as my health started to deteriorate, and I sunk even lower in despair and loneliness, fearing that I would forever be trapped in a dead end job and a dead end life.

But then somewhere along the way, in the midst of all that self-pity and despair, hope once again began to spring eternal.  The more I thought about law school, the more I began to believe God was doing me a favor.  I was happy enough to accept that such was His will, but what I was NOT happy about was being strung along for over a year when I kept asking and begging for confirmation that I was going down the right path.  Yet when I think about it, maybe it took so long to get an answer because I was meant to learn something in all that, and who knows what kind of chain of events that whole experience set off too, which I may not ever truly realize the depths of until later on in life.  They say sometimes the journey itself is more important than the destination, and I think that wise proverb applies here as well.

I also started to realize that part of the reason I had such an identity crisis was because I was trying to mimic other people’s lives (and subsequently the successes they enjoyed.)  I was trying to fit the square peg that I was into the circle of life, and as long as I continued to do that I’d never be able to move forward.  When I finally began to accept that my life was being defined by a complete different set of standards apart from the world’s own, I started to feel much better.  And my blog at long last began to take coherent shape.  My journal here is ultimately, a personal one, a catalog of both my physical and spiritual journey through life.  And that is probably what it will always be.

It also occurred to me that the driving force of my personality was my humor.  It was both sardonic and sententious, expressing an outright disdain of life’s petty silliness and the world’s stupidity, especially those of Christians who should know better.  Laced in sarcasm and saltiness, my voice was a fire breathing one, crying out in the wilderness that is the Internet, and because of it I would alienate all, and yet somehow, I would also allure all.  My life was nothing else, if not a paradox.  Here the laws of physics come to an end, and the laws that only God can control begin to take hold.

I still dream of a life of self sufficiency, where I no longer have to be tied down to one place, but can travel freely and live freely, (writing about these experiences on my blog of course), and doing those things that never would have been possible had I had a wife, a family, and a house that surely would have kept me chained down with obligations I doubt I could ever fulfill.

That’s why I feel the road calling out to me.  It beckons, with its hidden dangers (as well as hidden promises.)  There may soon come a day when I will don my leather jacket, and ride my Black Stallion to wherever that highway takes me, hoping to find that spiritual and physical dwelling where true justice reigns supreme.

The Habitation of Justice.