6/24/2024

l was born too late, and perhaps to too well-intentioned parents to participate in the early age of personal blogs on the internet. In today's social media economy, the blog has turned into a video game, where one must chase after numbers on various platforms. I remember that both my mother and father had their own websites with personal blogs, which no longer exist today. My father posted cooking recipes and my mother discussed being a stay-at-home mom—a career that has not survived.

One of my most striking memories of this blog occurs before May 2nd, 2011. My older brother had asked my mom how we could know that Bin Laden was not hiding in the woods behind our house. For a reason I cannot understand, she told him that we really couldn’t, that no one knew where he was, and he could be anywhere. To my brother, Bin Laden was a boogeyman from a fairytale that played on the television; he could appear under his bed at any moment. And, to my mother, Bin Laden was unknowable.

Yet, this burgeoning internet technology that connected everyone probably could’ve filled the gaps in my family’s knowledge. National security protocols would make it almost impossible for Bin Laden to enter the United States, and even if he could, why would he?

In this blog, which I begin today, and shall write as a respite from my more intense creative work, I hope to tell stories neither true nor false, to examine whatever comes to mind on a specific day, and see what can be said about through this structure that we so absurdly call the English Language. As a student of history, of righteousness, revolution, and oppression, I cannot conclude on what Bin Laden tells me. But, I think, that I can certainly say that he wasn’t hiding in the woods behind my house.