ChocolateForDogs.com

By now, I'm sure you've noticed the name of the site: Chocolate For Dogs.  As any one who has ever had a dog can attest, chocolate is not a very good thing to give a dog.  In fact, it's one of the worst things you could give it -- not only can it kill the animal, but it's not a pleasant way for it to go either.  However, there is a reason I've named this site that, and though related to dogs and chocolate, it's more closely related to something else entirely.

Spam.

Now, I don't mean the mystery meat in a can, I mean the spam that has taken over the world in the past decade or so.  Email spam.  The stuff that crowds your inbox with offers for Viagra and Breast Enlargement and HOT XXX SINGLES IN YOUR AREA!!!  That kind of spam.  I'll explain.

One night several years ago, I was checking my email and, of course, I had quite a bit of junk in there.  As I was going through them, I decided to scan one or two of them, although I have no idea why -- most of the time, it's simply "Select All" then "Delete".  However, one of them caught my eye for some reason, and I actually read it.

Spammers have lots of tricks up their sleeves, and one of these is including "regular" text -- maybe from a novel, or a magazine, whatever -- so that your spam filter will think it's a "normal" email and let it through.  This particular email had such text in it, and I'm guessing it was a novel or short story -- some work of fiction, at least.  It was just a couple of paragraphs, taken entirely out of the context of whatever story they were part of.

I've forgotten the majority of the details, but the gist of the spam was concerning a man who's dog needed to be put down for some reason.  He loved the dog dearly -- you could gather that from what was there -- and had nothing that he could have used to do it easily (i.e. a gun or drugs).  He grabbed a chocolate bar from his cupboards, wrapped it in a salmon fillet, and fed it to the dog, hoping to give the dog a "treat" of some kind as its last meal.

The way it was written hit a nerve in me.  I mean seriously, I almost choked up.  We'd just gotten our beagle, and that might have contributed to it, but the care that the man took in trying to put down the dog and the fact that he obviously didn't want to just tore me up.  Now, I know there's all sorts of holes to those couple of paragraphs -- namely that anyone who knows anything about the effects chocolate has on a dog wouldn't think of it as a good way to put the dog down.  But damn did it hit me hard.

And the kicker is that it was just a couple of paragraphs in junk email.  That's it.  It wasn't a book I'd gotten involved in, or a TV series, or anything like that -- two paragraphs.  Maybe 200 words, and it tore me up.  I decided that that was the kind of impact I wanted my writing to have, that if someone happens to come across a couple of paragraphs of one of my works, it'll get them as hard as it got me -- maybe different emotions, of course, but just as strong.  Naming this site ChocolateForDogs is a way of reminding myself about that little piece of spam.

For what it's worth, I've never been able to track down what those paragraphs were from, and like an idiot I trashed the email not long after I read it.  And I don't remember any of the actual wording of it either.  But it left a deep impression on me, and I'm glad that, that one time at least, I didn't just "Select All" and "Delete".

Oh, and just to reiterate, don't give your dogs any chocolate.  Please.