Impetus

“You desire to know the art of living, my friend?
It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.”
– Henri Frederic Amiel

A person with less of a philosophical bent (or one less effectively medicated) might tend to see the events of the past week as cause for tears to be shed into the evening’s glass of wine, or tooth-gnashing, or hand-wringing, or fist-shaking toward the silent, pitiless heavens. But in this eleventh month of two-thousand-eleven, a time that finds me in terms of work, family, finance and fuckery almost shockingly content, I perceive this misfortune as nothing more than the barely audible whinge of the universe’s tiniest midge, ineffectually circling my head before scurrying off to try, with what I hope is the same degree of success, to make someone else’s life miserable.

My goal, once past the first stunned shock of moral outrage, is to transmogrify suffering into art; to make my own small tragedies and minor tempests into something useful — even beautiful — for myself and others. This little episode therefore becomes the impetus to perform some tasks that I should have completed months and months if not years and years ago. I will start small, with this brief group of statements to be produced when advertising dollars, website creation fees, or items for review change hands, and which by all rights I should have codified when the very first offer to be gifted with some delightful piece of sexual equipage wafted into my email box:

Want to send me something? Awesome. Here’s some information you might find useful:

Items sent to me become my property forever. I will neither return the item¹, pay for it, nor provide reimbursement in any other way.

My acceptance of a product in no way guarantees that I will write a positive review or in fact any review at all. I may write a post with many words about the product or only a few. I may include an image or not. Please understand that if I choose not to write about a product, it is probably because what I would write would be so unflattering that it is to everyone’s best interests that I say nothing at all.

Advertising on my website is pre-paid, final, and non-refundable for any reason, including but not limited to an advertiser’s perception of the amount of clicks and/or sales the ad in question generated. In no case shall my positive, negative, neutral, delayed or incomplete review affect in any way a previously negotiated advertising arrangement.

I reserve the right to publish via website, Twitter and/or Facebook part or all of emails sent to me that verge upon an abusive, ridiculous, nonsensical or illogical nature. If a missive contains multitudinous spelling and grammatical errors, crude references to sexual behavior, uninvited images of genitalia, threats to consult a Legal Counsel on retainer or to sue for Defamation of Character, please expect to see that correspondence mocked and derided electronically and (possibly) physically set aflame in my own personal backyard.

Perhaps you can extrapolate some of the events which have lead to the creation of this document?

Do you have terms and conditions for receiving toys for review purposes? What am I missing from mine? Suggestions and expressions of commiseration are welcome in the comments below.

1. Yes this has been asked of me. Yes it was gross. [↩]