Stop me if you've heard this before "... and pass along this inspirational tale to everyone you know because God loves us all."  As the title says, I'd rather pass gas than pass along unoriginal tripe to my loved ones.  I'm referring of course, to glurge...

From the Wikipedia:

...The word [glurge] is used mostly in a derogatory sense to describe a certain kind of feel-good story. The defining characteristic of glurge is that, while its purpose is to make the reader happy, the feel-good aspect is so overdone that it is more likely to nauseate rather than to inspire. Glurge often has a religious theme and is most commonly circulated via e-mail in the form of a chain letter...

Believe it or not there is actually a website (glurge.com) which collects these dippy parables and makes them available through a searchable database.  The fine folks at Snopes also maintain a list of glurges and make some attempts to actually verify the stories.  Not surprisingly, many of them are fictional.

Everyone who knows me even remotely well knows that I positively loathe getting recycled forwarded crap mail in my inbox.  I hate being excited to see that I got a message from someone I care about, and then cracking it open only to find that they didn't write me anything at all, but instead just forwarded on either some bad joke that might have been funny in 1983 or worse yet, some vapid preachy hokum.

In fact I really have to emphasize that last bit.  Please don't send me God stories.  If I told you I was a vegetarian you wouldn't give me a cheeseburger.  If I told you I was keeping kosher you wouldn't give me a ham sandwich.  So if I tell you I'm an atheist, why would you send me unctuous religious blather?  I don't send my religious friends e-mails about how there is no God, because I respect their right to believe in a god or gods if it makes them happy, and my religious friends reciprocate in kind by respecting my beliefs and allowing me to live as I choose.

Sorry if I sound huffy, but I've been needled recently for my beliefs, and tonight I got a godded glurge email from the needler.  As therapy, I've decided to respond to the "points" in this email, and waste your time in the process.  Be warned, if you choose to read on, this is first class glurge, so you may want to douse yourself in gasoline and have some matches handy just in case you get the urge to kill yourself.

I received this from a friend who had a choice to make. It said that I had a choice to make too. I've chosen. Now it's your turn to choose.

[Ordinarily I would choose to delete e-mail like this rather than read it, but since it came from a friend, I guess I should read it, even though I know it will make me sick.]

The story goes that some time ago a mother punished her 5 year old daughter for wasting a roll of expensive gold wrapping paper. Money was tight and she became even more upset when the child used the gold paper to decorate a box to put under the Christmas tree.

[Yes because when money's tight we always yell at our kids for using wrapping paper exactly as it was intended to be used. WTF?]

Nevertheless, the little girl brought the gift box to her mother the next morning and said, "This is for you, Momma."

The mother was embarrassed by her earlier over reaction, but her anger flared again when she opened the box and found it was empty.

She spoke to her daughter in a harsh manner "Don't you know, young lady, when you give someone a present there's supposed to be something inside the package?"

[Right this is what parents do when they get substandard gifts from their kids. Hands up, everyone who has ever castigated their child for giving them an imaginary present. Come on, aren't we amazed our kids thought to do anything at all? Hello? Who wrote this story? Someone with a spike through their skull?]

She had tears in her eyes and said, "Oh, Momma, it's not empty! I blew kisses into it until it was full."

[That acrid taste is called vomit. You just threw up in your mouth. But don't get the lavoris just yet, there's more shlock coming.]

The mother was crushed. [...by a twelve hundred pound sumo wrestler named Jin-Yong wearing a dirty diaper... sorry... just trying to turn down the suck] She fell on her knees and put her arms around her little girl, and she begged her forgiveness for her thoughtless anger.

An accident took the life of the child only a short time later, and it is told [by spike-skulled morons] that the mother kept that gold box by her bed for all the years of her life. Whenever she was discouraged or faced difficult problems she would open the box and take out an imaginary kiss and remember the love of the child who had put it there.

[ARRRGH! Someone make it stop!]

In a very real sense, each of us, as human beings, have been given a Golden box filled with unconditional love and kisses from our children, family, friends and GOD. There is no more precious possession anyone could hold.

[Except maybe a really good spam-filter that could recognize dipshit stories like this and delete them for me. That or a nice e-mail from a friend... that was actually written by that friend. To me.]

You now have two choices: [Hari Kari or Killing Spree... Hari Kari or Killing Spree... hmmm.]
1. Pass this on to your friends [Thanks but I'd rather keep my friends] , or
2. Delete it and act like it didn't touch your heart. [I'm sorry you seem to have confused my heart with my duodenum, and now if you'll excuse me for a moment...]

As you can see, I took choice No. 1. [Why oh why didn't you take the blue pill?] Friends are like angels who lift us to our feet, when our wings have trouble remembering how to fly. [What the hell are you on? Wings having trouble remembering? This sounds like something from a random-blather engine... or a State of the Union address.] If you receive this more than once in return just know that your friends have also thought of you.

[I daresay that I know my friends are thinking of me when they delete cornball pablum like this instead of forwarding it to me. Why didn't you?]

My typical response when I receive stuff like this is either to just delete it without reading it, or if I'm really peeved, I send back a quick and clean "Please do not send me stuff like this.  Thanks."  But that doesn't always work and can sometimes insult the sender.

One idea that I got was to respond to every glurge you receive with five glurge e-mails.  You can get hundreds of glurges off glurge.com, just grab a bunch at random and fire them off to the sender.  Hopefully your friend will soon tire of the nonstop tide of shite and cease sending it to you.

Another possibility is to parody the glurge and send it back but that has two drawbacks. (1) It takes a lot of time and effort, and (2) your friend may think the parodies are so funny that they send you more glurges to see what you'll do with them.

Another possibility is to write anti-glurges and have them handy to send to people who send glurges to you.  Like this:

Ted was a fun-loving guy who had a lot of friends. Then one day Ted discovered an inspirational story sitting in his e-mail inbox. He loved it and forwarded it on to his friends. The next day it happened again and again he passed the mail on. From that point forward, every day Ted would forward on to all his friends the funny or inspirational stories that showed up in his inbox.

Then one year he sent out an e-mail to his friends announcing that he was throwing a big party at his house to celebrate his retirement. Weeks went by and nobody responded or even wished him a happy retirement, and nobody even showed up at the party. The catered food went to waste... where were all the people Ted thought were his friends? In a fit of despair Ted swallowed a bunch of sleeping pills and ended his own life.

When he arrived at the pearly gates Saint Peter took him aside and said "I'm sorry Ted, you know we don't let suicides into Heaven. There's no place for you here." In a panic Ted said "But you don't understand, all my friends turned on me! After years of being a loyal helpful person to them, none of them even took notice of a major event in my life. They didn't even have the decency to wish me luck and say they couldn't come see me."

"Ted, Ted, you don't understand," Peter responded, "Your friends stopped reading your e-mails years ago. All you've ever sent them was impersonal messages that you didn't write yourself, or worse yet preachy condescending stories that insulted their intelligence. They all loved you so much they didn't have the heart to tell you. Many of them had their inboxes set up to automatically delete your messages simply because there was never anything worth reading in there."

In that moment, Ted realized his mistake. His friends cared about him. They just didn't care about his e-mails, and that was nobody's fault but his own. As with the boy who had cried wolf too many times, people had stopped listening. Finally Ted understood, but it was too late... now he was going to Hell, where he would be forced to read inspirational stories for eternity.

So the next time you get an inspirational story or a funny joke in your inbox, keep in mind Ted's sad tale. Don't forward it on to anyone else. Instead, why don't you take ten minutes to write a personal message to a friend? Ask how they are doing? Catch up on what is going on in their lives, or just tell them how you are doing. Make your e-mails the sort that people will actually read. Don't make Ted's mistake!

Do not forward this message to anyone.

How do you deal with glurge?  How do you make it stop coming without hurting the feelings of the sender?  I'm open to suggestions!