About every 2 or 3 months I get mail from individuals who must get my contact info off of websites. This mail is not usually personal, though it was when we were advertising for a new counseling professor. There are several similarities to these pieces of mail:
1. The end of the world is at hand. The planet is about to crash or the world will come to an end (and they include very complex and detailed reasons from political news, astronomy, and biblical data as to why they know this about to happen now.
2. They write extremely complex sentence structures that have no meaning. You can define each word, comprehend a phrase, but it may not have much connection to the prior phrase. For example: “certain celestial & terrestrial transactional events due for occurrence in the prophetic year xxxx per the present solar calender in extension, strictly as timed in the book of XXXXX.”
3. Neologisms. Word or words that are newly created by the author. For example: angular separation; inter steller emigration purposes.
4. Persecution. The writer is being mistreated or persecuted for their knowledge.
5. Clip art/cut and paste. The writer uses multiple type-faces, colors, clip-art, and cut and pastes quotes from other sources to bolster the letter
6. Many pages. Most of these mailings have double digit pages.
These letters always break my heart. I can sense the torture they must endure because of the rate and power of their racing thoughts. Imagine knowing the world was going to blow up and everybody ignores you or calls you crazy.
Musings on Faith and Psychology 