Party Time on Garbage Mountain

I just had a terrific idea for a novel.

If I can find Thomas Pynchon (I'll probably need the assistance of the FBI--he hasn't so much as had his picture taken in 40 years) I'm going to suggest it to him.

If you're familiar at all with the works of Pynchon, you know that he was to paranoia what Lawrence Welk was to champagne bubbles. Conspiracies of every conceivable kind abound in the works of Pynchon, including, in one of his early novels, a shadow post office. I kid you not.

Well, if Pynchon is fascinated by conspiracies, I've got a hell of a notion for him.

Supposing the spammers are organized.

Scary, huh?

Picture it: right now, at this very moment, a couple of thousand of the sleaziest creeps this planet ever puked up might be meeting in some off-the-beaten path little town like Bullhead City, Arizona where they won't be noticed by anyone, all of them keeping a low profile by staying in scattered motels along Interstate 8, getting together in little pockets of eight and ten at a time to share trade secrets and arcane software that they developed themselves: "FilterBuster," "Back Door Man," "Under The Radar," "MegaWorm." At night they have a secret conclave in the back room at Denny's, where some malignant Poindexter wearing Nikes, Dockers and an Arnold Schwarzenegger T-shirt, speaking in a low voice and using a PowerPoint program on his laptop (with the door closed) explains the logarithm system by which he has just figured out 3,560,956,743,289 new ways to spell "Viagra" and "luxury watch."

Did I say I was going to tell Thomas Pynchon? Oliver Stone would love this.

I'm drawn to these musings because I got up this morning and, after my second mug of Folgers (I've had to give up Eight O'Clock whole bean due to budget constraints) I went to check my e-mail.

Now, I always expect to see spam in my inbox, and just as methodically, I go in each morning and mark each spam message, whether it's some slimebag offering me the Dick of Death that will Keep Her Moaning All Night, or a great new opportunity with an up-and-coming company that's so legitimate they're farming Craigslist for e-mail addresses to call in the suckers, or a chance to buy a $5,000 Rolex for $39.95, "ADD TO BLOCKED SENDERS LIST."

Generally it's a question of one, two, maybe three pieces of such garbage at the most. But this morning when I opened Microsoft Outlook, I had nine new messages, and every one of them was spam. I went in like I always do and started clicking away, siphoning all of these chances for great sex and great bargains right off into the cyber-sewer where they belong.

But lo and behold, more kept coming, even as I sat here. I went to refill my coffee cup, came back and there were three more.

In other words, I'm getting the impression that spam somehow runs a cycle, like a woman's menstrual periods. But unlike a woman's menstrual periods, this cycle has nothing whatever to do with natural causes or biological evolution.

This has to be PLANNED somehow, somewhere, by someone. I mean, all the spammers in the world wouldn't suddenly become active, like fleas on a summer afternoon, unless they were somehow (shudder!) organized.

You know, I think this scares me almost as much as the idea of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.

Once, in Berlin, I stood before the now-defunct Berlin Wall and saw where someone had spray-painted on its western side "Tyrone Slothrop, where are you?"

Tyrone Slothrop was one figure in Thomas Pynchon's epic novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973.) He's the object of a massive, supersecret conspiracy involving Germany's V-2 rockets, the ones that rained down on London during World War II.

I'm thinking about poor old Slothrop this morning. Where is he? And is there a coven of techno-maniacs hiding somewhere inside a mountain cave somewhere in Maryland, plotting the creation of some modern-day Schwarzgeraet like the one in Pynchon's novel, this one with the purpose of jamming every inbox on earth, at the command of the Grand Spammer, (who lives in a town in Norway so small that it's not even on the map) with so many advertisements for sexual potency and bogus real estate mortgages that, at a stroke, all the world's governments will be more paralyzed than usual and some latter-day Blofeld out of Ian Fleming, only wearing thick glasses and sporting a bad haircut, will be Master of the Earth?

Sean Connery, where are you?