An Absence of Blogging

My friend Kate McKinnon is teaching beading classes in Detroit this week and hasn't posted on her blog for three or four days now. Given that I consider Kate to be a serial blogger - she took her laptop to Europe last summer and it was not unusual for her to blog two or three times a day - I find this silence to be highly unusual. Of course, she is certainly under no obligation to blog every day and I am reasonably sure she is safe and sound, somewhere in Michigan.

But as I am missing the entertainment provided by her regular blog postings, my mind starts to wonder - why hasn't she posted? Did her laptop break? Did she forget or choose not to take it with her? Does the hotel she is staying at not have internet access? (okay, that would be a little hard to believe, in this day and age, wouldn't it?) Is it so cold in Detroit that the keyboard froze? Did some disgruntled and soon to be unemployed GM worker run over it with his or her car? Just random speculation with little or no basis in reality. I am assuming that she is just too busy and/or having too much fun to have time to blog - I hope for her sake it is the latter.

These days, it seems like everybody and their cat is blogging. Now that I'm blogging myself (and trying to have the discipline to do it daily), I find the topic of blog posting frequency to be an interesting one. From time to time, I hit the "next blog" button at the top of this page and scroll along checking out other people's blogs, to see what they're talking about and how often they're talking. Or people I know will tell me they too have a blog but when I check it out, they haven't posted a new entry for several weeks or even months. Why not, I wonder? It's like reading a book and then finding out the last few chapters are missing. I always want to know, what happens next?

I "met" this guy online a couple of years ago - okay, it was a dating website and we chatted a bit but never did meet in person, I don't even know his last name (come to think of it, I don't even know if the first name he gave me is his real name) - but he told me about his blog, I started reading it and found it to be rather entertaining so I'd check in from time to time to see what he was up to. He usually wrote about his dating adventures, as he travelled a lot with work and always seemed to have an interesting or amusing and sometimes racy story about the women he met on his travels. He tended to blog fairly frequently, not every day but pretty regularly. At least, he did, until about January 2008. Strangely enough, he hasn't posted a word since then, which I find strangely fascinating. This was a guy who loved to talk about himself and all of a sudden...nothing. (He still has a profile on the dating website but hasn't logged on to that for about a year and a half either.)

Which leaves me to wonder, whatever happened to this guy? It could be something as simple as, he finally met a girl he could be serious about, settled down and stopped having dating adventures. Or he could have started posting somewhere else and just didn't tell his loyal blog readers where he had moved to. But what if it is more serious that that? What if he's in jail? (they say most guys on dating websites are serial killers or jailbirds, so that would fit). What if something really bad happened to him? What if he was in an accident or, God forbid, died? He's just some guy I met on cyberspace and I don't know who he is - in real life, he could work in my building or be standing behind me in line at the Tim Horton's and I'd never know - I hope he's okay, wherever he is, but it's a bit of a mystery and every now and then I think, where did he go???