There's something to be said for the sheer consistency of content on craigslist. I've been scouring that site for close to a year now looking at posts I never would have considered otherwise. What I've come away with (aside from a distinct lack of sympathy for my species) is a sense of strange stability in life. Craigslist is like some network of villages on the Internet, each one going about its mundane daily tasks with surprising regularity. That it supports such wanton strangeness without devolving in chaos is actually rather admirable. Today, I'm devoting this column to three fine examples of regular awfulness on craigslist. These entries may not be particularly unique, but they represent the bread and butter of the site's weirdness.

Some Cool Collars!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I HAND MAKE COLLARS AND CAN DO PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING WITH A COLLAR LET ME KNOW IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS MENTION THIS AD AND I WILL GIVE YOU000000000000 BUY ONE GET ONE FREE ON MY STUDDED COLLARS (url) SMALL TO LARGE JUST LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE IN MIND

Ah, the all-caps sales pitch. I wonder what it must have been like back in the early days of Internet marketing when this was the best idea a salesman could devise. It always reminds me of the time I stumbled across a Star Trek novel in the school library. Two of the characters had an argument that the author depicted in increasingly large text. Ya know, just like Faulkner and Hemingway did. And the above craigslist post? Definitely high literature in the world of the Internet, especially the "YOU" punctuated by a string of zeros. Real art.

Secret Pick Up Artist Society


Hello, people of Seattle and its area. Have you ever heart about pick-up artists? Have you ever considered become one of them? Are you successful with girls? Or maybe you aren't that successful with getting girls but eager to learn how to do it?
I want to organize a group of 5-10 people, who are or aren't successful with girls, but have the potential to become REAL pick-up artists.
Are you still reading? Great, because this is not-for-profit thing, and I'm doing it because I want to meet new like-minded people to get into new adventures and more trouble with them.
You'll qualify if you are:
- Straight
- Decent-looking
- Picking up hot chicks
- Adventurous
- Have some some traits of a real asshole
- But what matters most is that you should be intelligent and being able to hold conversations and getting control of situations.
Sounds good? - Then contact me.
Tell me about yourself, your age, and about your skills.

Normally I don't like to feature posts as big as this. When I do, I usually truncate them a bit to make them fit without losing the essence of the madness. But with this one, I felt it was both necessary and appropriate to include the full, unedited text. Not a single sentence in this entire post, at least in context, is respectable. There seems to be a new trend on craigslist for the wanna-be "pickup artists" to make long, jerky, deluded posts looking for other creepy assholes to join them in their quests for strange. It's so very craigslist, the lonely social malcontent looking for some sign that others share his particular set of flaws. The emotional core of these posts, a guy looking for friends, would possibly be sympathetic if it weren't for the fact that the poster is the very definition of sleaze.

Free Love Seat w/ Ottoman

Love Seat with matching Ottoman up for grabs. Very comfy and in fairly good condition. Furniture will be on the front porch-the first person to it is the owner!

The picture attached to this post is the epitome of the Free Stuff page. The furniture in question is some ancient floral monstrosity that looks like it might have once lived in quiet indignity with some old widow. It has the air of a thousand Werther's Originals and the slow march toward inextricable senility. Of course, that was in one of the chair's better lives. The one it occupied at the time of this ad was more along the lines of re-purposed patio furniture for a dilapidated college house. The fabric is covered in a tapestry of mystery stains from countless stereotypical party stories. It doesn't matter if it was the time Paul got smashed on Jaeger and tried to do a back flip off the love seat or that one time the chick from Ki Theta spilled her Bailey's all over the place. This poor, abused piece of furniture should be allowed to die but instead it's being pushed into increasingly awful places by craigslist Free Stuff.