There are some regions of craigslist I just haven't spent much time exploring for one reason or another. By far the most neglected section is the staggeringly extensive forum. Subdivided into dozens of specific topics and sloppier than a 1995 Angelfire page about super-secret cheat code rumors, the CL forums somehow distill the already dangerous levels of depravity and stupidity of the site down to an intellectual poison. Reading these non-sequitur threads is like freebasing a combination of the personals and Rants & Raves. It's astounding that people even seek some form of connection in what can easily qualify as the single worst place on the Internet, the sewer-within-a-sewer of pure human awfulness. If I was going to go into this mess, I was going to go in deep. So, I decided to put down stakes in ROFO.

What is ROFO? That's the first question I asked when I first ventured into the forum. Unlike self-explanatory subforums like "queer" and "jokes", ROFO is a sort of acronym. It stands for "Romantic Advice Forum", which may seem redundant seeing as there are several subforums for related topics like l.t.r (long-term relationships) and the doubly overlapping m4m (men seeking men), w4w (women seeking women) and queer forums. But no, ROFO is a sort of transcendent concept of mind-bending irony.

Also, my research indicates that "rofo" is Australian slang for sex with a kangaroo. I don't know how much I believe that one because as far as I can tell, Aussie slang consists entirely of nonsense words designed to make people sound like mildly autistic pre-teens on a sugar bender.

So, what does ROFO actually look like? Here are is a representative sample. A thread from Los Angeles contains, in order, the following responses:

• Get Rich or Die Tryin'
• black power!
• by any means necessary!
• black? No, no friend... JEW POWER!
• back powder

You might notice that none of this has anything to do with romance and/or advice. But this is craigslist, nobody really follows the rules. There is no rhyme or reason to ROFO. Just when you think you've found a moderately reasonable discussion about, say, how to please one's boyfriend or the kinds of things women talk about when their husbands aren't around (aka topics from Cosmo), the thread devolves into some form of ugliness or completely unrelated content.

My favorite part about ROFO is that one response topic pops up at regular intervals. Namely, "I thought you were a chick". That's just beautiful, as well as serving as a kind of key to understanding what this forum actually is. It is a static-filled reflection of the Internet itself, a kind of dream-logic example of what you're likely to find just about anywhere online. It's ignorant discussions about money between people who have none, ramblings about sex by people who never get it and most importantly, it is a collection of people who allow themselves to believe they are actually talking to real females, only to be disappointed when reality strikes.

I don't know how many times I have to write or say this: There are no real women on the Internet. None. There are bored little girls, trannies and snickering male trolls, but no actual adult females. Arianna Huffington is a sentient, chess-playing computer. Porn is just footage of Eastern Europeans in their natural habitats.

So, if you're talking to anyone on the Internet, especially on the craigslist ROFO and you have to ask, "Are you really a chick?" You've got your answer. No. Never. The OP is a kangaroo.

*Speaking of kangaroos, why don't you readers hippity-hop over to craigslist to find your submissions for the Craigslist Files: Citizen's Arrest contest? Just send your found posts and a description of them to us via the "Contact Us!" button to see your horrible attempts at humor on our front page. G'day, or whatever.