I get slammed with spam e-mail, like everyone does these days, but I was a little intrigued to find that my spam had created a new person to send spam to. In the course of throwing out random names — anything to get past a spam filter, right? — one of the spams generated the name “joaprh ellis.” And then somehow that name got affiliated with my e-mail address, and messages addressed to joaprh ellis started arriving.

As it stands right now, joaprh gets more spam than I do. Which seems a little unfair somehow. Don’t I matter? Aren’t I good enough to receive all the valuable and exciting offers that go to joaprh? What’s he got that I don’t have?

But then, of course, you can’t help being intrigued with this man of mystery. Who is this joaprh? What siren call haunts him that he wants so badly to make $50;000 overnight!! and yet CLEAR UPP B.AD CRED.IT at the same time? He seems to be someone that has a lot of problems, and yet he’s out there, taking life as it comes, trying to find the best prices on hotels in Milan, making all those inquiries to find out how to finnally bee t.he BOSS!!@ And he never gets tired of finding solutions to life’s thorniest problems — sometimes he wants to read the same information eight or ten times just to make sure that it’s not just too good to be true! What a guy!

So I realized that since joaprh was working to make something of himself, the least I could do was to help out. It seems to me that joaprh’s biggest problem is that he doesn’t have a reality. Well, I’m no Dr. Frankenstein, but since you have a whole digital industry focused on creating avatars — the little characters you make up to represent you in everything from a computer game to a blog comment to a instant message — I could certainly give my good friend joaprh a push in the right direction by giving him his own avatar.

But when I Googled “avatar creation” I saw that I had a problem. The ones you get that way are all just too dippy, too perky. They all came from Anime world where tiny noses are upturned and eyes are huge. And they’re just too darned young to have enjoyed the full life that I know joaprh has. Even when I was trying to give my avatar the dark, brooding look of a man who is very, very interested in skankky-chix-all-the-time, the best I could do was this annoying little nerd at right. Phooey! That won’t do for mr. ellis.

In the end, I had to employ a low-tech solution calling “drawing” and make joaprh’s avatar myself to try to capture the many sides of this multi-layered individual. I mean, consider what I know of him:

• He has problems – He’s obese. He’s going bald. He’s got sleep apnea, dandruff, allergies, sexual dysfunction (poor mrs. ellis!), fungus in his toes and goodness knows what else. Modesty didn’t allow me to keep prying into his private affairs.
• He craves escape — He’s just got to get away on a 14-day cruise, round-the-world travel package or get a valuable timeshare in Europe and Asia in spite of the fact that he NEEDS CASH NOW-No WAITTING.
• He’s got an eye for a bargain — Joaprh never inquires into anything that isn’t so ridiculously underpriced that he has to see it to believe it. I don’t want to find fault, but it sounds to me like he’s just cheap.
• He’s a health food nut — No preservatives for this boy! He wants to buy his gen.er#ic alll-NATRal vittamins in BULKK.
• He desperately craves higher education — It’s just heartbreaking that someone with joaprh’s complete inability to spell correctly is forever looking into getting a GED, BA or MBA.
• He loves free verse poetry — Many is the time that I’ve reflected on the deep meaning of the strings of verse that close out so many of the appeals that come his way. What a cultured individual he must be if even the toughest sales pitch has to end with “library eggbeater frigidaire frankly scarlet i dont give a damn theater blender diamond coffeecup” to catch his attention.

So my joaprh ellis avatar is below. I think I’ve got him started here. I hope you’ll all get to know him. He may not look like much, but he gets a lot of mail, so he must be important.