Wednesday's Words for January 13, 2010

I suppose, if those who don’t live in North America have only flashes of our media such as are provided by various stars from Hollywood and the music industry, as well as the odd strange but true tale reported in mainstream news to go by, they could be excused for thinking we are a society of morons.

Let me tell you what has set me off.

Over the last week, for whatever reason—perhaps the moon has entered my fifth house of gullibility, or something—I have received about ten “letters” from so-called officials in various European and African nations telling me that I have 1) been left a sizeable inheritance ($ millions Euros) by a recently deceased relative whom I have never met or even heard of, and 2) won a lottery that I never even entered!

All I have to do is provide each and every one of these individual letter writers with an amount of money ranging from ten to thirty thousand dollars, and the big bucks will be mine!

How stupid do they think I am? Yes, I know, it’s not personal. And I know the odds must be on their side. Someone, somewhere must have been that stupid at least once, else why would these bottom-feeding scum suckers keep trying to hose ordinary people?

You would think that in this information age, if one is well-connected enough to lay one’s hands on a computer, one would be a little more in sync with the world in which they live. They would know there are scams like this all over the Internet, and that most of modern educated society laughs at these ridiculous attempts at fraud.

Hell, these so-called fund directors and lawyers, some of whom bear the title of “doctor” can’t even spell correctly!

“Dear one,” one letter opened, “it is with sadness I tell you of the passing of (here insert a name I couldn’t pronounce with a dictionary at hand) who has recently dyed, and we have discovered that you are the hair!”

Did I mention that these letters have all been sent to my Morgan Ashbury yahoo mail box? Does anyone reading this essay not know that “Morgan Ashbury” is my pen name? When I received my first acceptance from Siren-Bookstrand, I decided to have a pen name, as I eventually wanted to write other genres of fiction. So I compiled a list of names and passed it around to family and friends and asked them to vote, and thus, Morgan Ashbury was born.

Who could have known that I would accidently pick the name of a multi-national heiress(or should I say ‘hairess’) and the luckiest lottery non-player ever?

It is the stupidity of these attempts that galls me the most, not that anyone would try to hose a perfect stranger; there have been con-men and women afoot since Biblical times. The most dangerous ones are the sneakiest, craftiest, smartest who do succeed in gaining the confidence of innocents and then making off with their fortunes. Those predators we should all be on the alert for, all the time. But these clowns who write these phony letters? Where are they? Who are they? And who is the most complicit in this brazen stupidity, them, or the non-thinking idiots who gave them access to computers and the Internet in the first place?

Meanwhile, I just shake my head with wonder when I get a follow-up email from one of these bozos, and inevitably, I do: “Dear One, why have we not herd from you?”

Why not, indeed. Probably because I’m not a member of the herd. I’m just a loner at heart.

Love,
Morgan
Coming Soon
A novel so daring it could only be called....
Brazen Seduction