The story I’m about to relate doesn’t have a moral. There’s no lesson to learn. There’s nothing to take away. You will gain nothing through reading this.

To begin, let me explain something: I am, tragically, something of a basic bitch.

Try as I might to project the air of a cool, roguish, ne’er-do-well, the prevailing impression I seem to give to others is that I am Soft and Meek and Nonthreatening. This is a problem, because I never outgrew the stage of my life where being seen as “cool” is extremely important to me. I try constantly, and mostly unsuccessfully, to convince the people around me that I am a dangerous woman to know in a vague, unspecified way. My efforts to cultivate this presentation feel wasted, but I Strive nonetheless.

Toward this end: one of my favorite things to tell people is that I once worked for the Russian mob. This is a thing that is not necessarily true, but it is statistically highly likely to be true, which feels close enough to truth.

Most importantly, of course, it is a critical weapon at my disposal in my desperate attempts to claw at any available form of Cred.

In case you are preparing to inform me that, actually, the Russian mob is a group of criminals of the Scary kind who do serious, horrific, violent Legitimate Crime, and thus perhaps not an association one ought boast about: yes, that is true. In case you are preparing to inform me that the Russian mob is not a single outfit at all, but actually a multitude of individual groups of Seriously Bad Dudes, some of whom are aligned and others whom are at odds: yes, this too is true, you pedantic shit.

My association with the Bad Dudes in question is in fact extremely tenuous, which is why it’s a fun fact to weird friends out with and not a confession of all the Myriad Crimes what I have done in my day.

In short: once upon a time, when I was very young and even more poor than I am at present (and I am quite poor) I wrote “advertising copy” for SEO abusing spam blogs. You know those shitty WordPress sites with weird poorly-written “reviews” for every product under the sun that show up in your Google results? I wrote those! I wrote countless reviews for household appliances, consumer electronics, beauty products, and suchlike, which then showed up all over Google in a harebrained scheme to convince your dear, aging grandmother to click Amazon affiliate links.

I had firsthand experience with exactly none of these products, but that didn’t matter of course; the grift neither required nor would support that investment. I pumped out 500-word articles in fifteen minutes, three hours a day, three to five dollars per. About $48 per workday all in total, which isn’t much, but it sufficed to enable a closeted, self-loathing trans girl in an abusive home to attempt to fill the gnawing void in her soul with plastic robots.

(The plastic robots, incidentally, did not suffice to fill the void, though to this day it remains my regrettable, deeply uncool opinion that plastic robots are Neat.)

There is, however, an important fact you should be aware of: I am a perfectionist. I’m the type of person who takes pride in my craft, in working to the best of my abilities and producing something that is as beautiful as I can make it, within the bounds of the possible. Even when that thing is stupid, like a plastic robot.

Or a spammy blog post.

So it was that one of the mostly-anonymous figures from Eastern European countries who seemed to have entirely too much money to spend on words worth exactly none – we shall call him Dmiitri, because I do not remember his name, but he was a Dude and to my recollection was in fact Russian – came to notice me, specifically. Most of the people he bought work from spoke English as a second or third language and produced the sorts of weird, unnatural copy one tends to associate with this particular genre, but I was a native English speaker with a sense of rhetorical flair who was willing to work at extremely low rates. And that tickled Dmitri, so he came to me with a proposal.

He offered to pay me something like twelve dollars per article. Under the table, via Paypal – so the full twelve dollars would be mine, without the article-mill middlemen taking their cut. Being, as I was, broke, this was a highly agreeable deal for me, so I took it.

For a time, things were good, if one uses an extremely low bar to determine what is in fact “good.” I wrote abnormally high-quality spam copy – one might even call it boutique spam copy – for Dmitri, and he paid me significantly more than I had been making previously for my output. Of course, Dmitri’s requests didn’t match the volume of the whole article mill – but the pay bump was sufficient that it quickly became possible for me to stop using the article mill itself as a source of work. I didn’t need much, and once one has sold spam for twelve dollars, it’s difficult to justify putting the same amount of effort into spam that will sell for three.

Alas: this partnership would not last long.

One day, Dmitri came to me with an ordinary batch of requests. Dry, utilitarian reviews of random Amazon items I’d never seen or used before, lists of keywords and their desired frequency, etc. It was typical, but for one item on the list: Dmitri was interested in having me review Zack Snyder’s opus Man of Steel, which was soon to release on home video and would, of course, thus be seeing many a Googling.

Dmitri saw this as akin to his other requests: encourage the reader to consider buying this consumer product, and thus to click the affiliate links throughout that Amazon might toss some pennies his way.

But remember, reader: I am a perfectionist. And I saw things differently. I had no realistic option to write reviews of the toaster ovens and dishwashers and televisions Dmitri sent me from my personal experience, leaving me to synthesize the opinions and experiences of others who had in fact used those things into articles that were to reviews as hamburger patties are to steak.

But this? Why, I could pirate movies. I prided myself on my ability to pirate movies, for I was that sort of child. And for the princely sum of twenty dollars I could certainly justify watching Man of Steel myself that I might fully appreciate its character as a creative work. This would not be a sham. No, I would digest the work, find the things it made me feel, and etch those words in stone. If I liked it, I would relate the things within that touched me, resonated with something deep inside my soul; if I did not, I would speak truth to power, lay down the list of Zack Snyder’s crimes against the art of cinema, give my wrath – unfettered and raw.

Man of Steel is a dogshit movie.

My review, of course, said as much, albeit in more words.

Dmitri was displeased, because my white-hot Critique of the film in question would not in fact serve his goal, which – if you will recall – was not speaking frankly about Art. No, he wanted to bamboozle the elderly into helping him exploit Jeff Bezos’ largess.

He did – bafflingly – decide to pay me the agreed-upon sum. Honor among thieves, I suppose. However, he made it quite clear to me that he was unhappy with my critical lambasting of the product I was to Shill, and for some reason seemed not to want to work with me any more.

As I said in the beginning: there is no moral to this story. If I were forced, though, to find one, it would be this: perhaps it is best for one to know when one is trying too hard.