Please stop sending me email. I am sure that all of the marvelous opportunities you insist on telling me about are, indeed, marvelous. I appreciate the fact that you ensure I never have to face the humiliation of an empty e-mail box when I get home from work. But as much as I appreciate your concern, I want you to stop talking to me. To wit, I am providing you right now with the answers, once and for all, to the questions you keep on asking me. Read this, and you'll never have to email me again.

My name is not John, nor is it Dave, Ralph, Harry, or Michelle. I'm not sure why you're sending me these people's email, but I'm sure they miss it. I am sure, however, that you didn't see me in a chat room the other night, as I don't go into chat rooms. I don't know what you were doing in that chat room, but if it's like the ones I used to frequent when I was a lonely grad student, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

My penis is just fine, thank you. There are only two people who see it on a regular basis, and we are both quite happy with it. I have no lingering issues from my bris, and as such have no desire to add 6 more inches to a structure that's not built to be load-bearing in the first place. I'm not quite sure how you propose to do this anyway, but have no interest in finding out, as I have a nasty suspicion it involves duct tape and PVC.

By the same token, I have no interest in purchasing Viagra online. The plumbing works. Honest. Furthermore, should erectile dysfunction ever strike me down, I solemnly swear that I will have the balls to purchase it face-to-face from a local pharmacist. I do, however, reserve the right to spend the entire visit to the CVS talking about what a man's man Rafael Palmiero is. He takes fielding practice. He takes batting practice. And if you make fun of the fact that he can't get it up without the little blue pill, he'll take your ass to the cleaners.

I do not wish to make scads of money working from home. As nice as my home is, I want to get out of it once in a while. Furthermore, I like talking to someone besides my girlfriend's cats. They're nice cats. They're intelligent cats. They're charming cats. I don't think they'd make good coworkers.

I do not want to see pictures of the hottest naked teenagers on the net. My chance to see naked teenagers came back when I was a teenager, and having missed it, I feel no Woody Allen-like urge to revisit the lost opportunity. North Carolina prisons are reputed to be unpleasant places, and I have no desire to visit the inside of one for the crime of clicking a link to a website featuring topless pictures of an overdeveloped 14-year-old who lives in a town that votes 98% for Jesse Helms. For that matter, I do not want to think about how the question of who the "hottest naked teenagers on the net" are gets settled. One suspects that all of the judges for that particular competition all accessorized with a police tracking ankle bracelet.

I do not wish to see pictures of attractive women getting it on with barnyard animals. These emails are nothing more than reminders that beautiful women have, for years, prefered to have sex with cows, horses, and other trayf, rather than with me. This is the sort of tremendously depressing thought that drives a man straight to the scotch, no questions asked.

Please do not tell me about your stock IPOs. I am quite adequate at losing my shirt in the stock market after months of careful research and analysis. I feel no need to do so on the basis of a poorly written email inviting me to invest my life's savings in the preferred stock of a Cajun Sushi chain restaurant whose house specialty is the fugu po'boy.

I have a college degree, thank you. As a matter of fact, I have two. Neither of them is doing me terribly much good at the moment, so I do not feel compelled to add a third one, especially not online. Besides, the whole point of college is getting drunk and chasing women, and I can do the online equivalent of that without shelling out $5000 for an email pruporting to tell me all about the rise of flogging and its symbolism in the latter works of Harold Pinter.

It is very nice of you to offer me a mortgage online, but I prefer dealing with a banker whose email address indicates strongly that he's not operating from the Cayman Islands.

I do not want to know that more of my old high school classmates have been located. If I really wanted to talk to these people, don't you think I would have looked them up on my own already? I will, however, give you ten dollars to hide them back where you found them, so I don't have to answer embarassing questions about that Tears for Fears tape I borrowed from the lovely Jill Muchnik in 1988 and never returned.

I do not care that there is a sale going on at amazon.com, towerrecords.com barnesandnoble.com or sheckys-house-of-sea-turtles.com There is always a sale going on at amazon.com. There always will be a sale going on at amazon.com. I strongly suspect that long after the heat death of the universe, there will be one last sale at amazon.com. No doubt there'll be a run on books by Steven Hawking. And even free shipping won't make me buy a sea turtle – or a book recommended by Oprah – online.

My penis is still fine. Honest.

I have no interest in buying any aphrodisiacs, natural or otherwise. Whether or not I do all right on my own is irrelevant. The town I live in has zoning regulations about hormone-driven mobs of sex-crazed women pursuing my pheromone trail hither and yon. They fine people around here for that sort of thing, you know. Even worse, the neighbors might talk.

I am well aware of the fact that Lord of the Rings is coming to DVD. I am also aware of the fact that I'm not going to be buying it from you. You should probably be aware of this, too.

I find the opportunity that you are offering me the chance to purchase a stun gun online, no questions asked, to be terrifying. Presumably my refusal to take advantage of this offer will lead to escalation on your part, and I look forward to the chance to purchase submachine guns, anti-tank rockets and suitcase nukes liberated from poorly guarded Russian weapons facilities.

I have no interest in taking any personality tests online. For one thing, I really don't care which boy band member, famous stripper or large extinct ungulate I resemble most. For another, I don't really have a personality, so the whole exercise is wasted on me.

Your willingness to share your brilliant moneymaking ideas is touching, but I can't help but think that setting up a lemonade stand on the sidewalk shows a better chance of a profitable return on investment. Best wishes, incidentally, to those poor Nigerian millionaires who need my help in getting their money out of the country. Unfortunately, money laundering was only my minor in college, and I'm not really up on the latest techniques any more.

I'm sure it's a great time to refinance my mortgage. However, I would rather take care of financing it for the first time instead.

It's great that you have customers looking for my products. I just wish I had some to offer.

I don't really want any great cell phone accessories. My cell phone, frankly, sucks – for one thing, it insists on telling me that my pants are a "roaming area," which causes all sorts of trouble with the girlfriend – and I feel strongly that it's simply not worthy of any of your remarkable collection of accessories. Until it learns to behave better, I'm simply not going to reward it. I'm sure you'll understand.

      All the Best,
      Elfpants

PS-My penis? Still great. Thanks for asking!