a speech from my spider hole

I recently found a website that linked my name to, of all people, Osama bin Laden! That's the sort of thing that gets a person's attention!

I should state that wasn't a comment on my quite ordinary political views. (Perhaps ironically, one of my readers actually set up a website opposed to "aggressive Islam".) No, the truth is quite simple. One of my old high school classmates set up a website to track everyone who graduated with him. So far, he's found about 75% of our graduating class. My name seems to be on the top of his list of those not yet found. While there have been a couple "sightings" of me listed on his website, he hasn't found any concrete evidence of my whereabouts. Hence, the comments about me being as hard to find as the infamous terrorist mastermind.

Have I been truly reclusive since my return from Hong Kong two years ago? That depends. If your only point of contact with me has been this blog, that I must seem like a hermit! Yes my postings have been rare indeed. Finding things to blog about in Hong Kong was almost effortless. Even mundane activities -- like riding a bus -- yielded multiple posts. Compare that to my life here. I have started a lot of posts about the high points of this year for me: my sister's recent wedding and the imminent arrival of my brother's first child. But those posts remain unfinished. There is little of interest for me to say that hasn't been said on either my brother's blog or my sister's wedding website. Sure, I've been to Ottawa, Toronto, and Chicago in the past year or so. But most of my readers have visited or lived in those places too. The mundane activities of my daily life nowadays -- driving in traffic, working in a cubicle -- have so far only inspired entries too negative to ever be posted here. So it's not my being reclusive, but simply the dearth of writing ideas that has made my presence on this blog scarce.

In real life, I've been anything but hard to find. I've seen over a half-dozen graduates from my old high school in the past year or so. Rarely a month goes by without somebody recognizing me at a store, a gas station, or a restaurant. I get plenty of visitors to my cubicle at work. And the amount of time I spend talking on the phone nowadays has to be measured in hours instead of minutes. So it's not like I'm spending all my days in a spider hole, cut off from civilization!

Does that mean I plan to email the webmaster who's looking for me to update him on my whereabouts? I'm not sure yet. I do have a vague curiosity to see how the people I grew up with have turned out. A lot of the people I grew up with must be curious to see how I turned out. If I do email him, it will be at a time convenient to me. Saddam Hussein, of course, had no choice in when to emerge from his spider hole.