Recent news comes from Bangladesh: our dearest and best of friends Arafat Kazi, one time internet celebrity, is taking the jetliner from Dacca, BD to Boston, MA. He arrives mid-July. Plans are in the works for some form of reunion. Much happiness.

This reminds me: last year I was working with a non-profit during a tumultuous period of board transition. One of the board members did a little Internet Sleuthing on yours truly in the hopes of digging up mondo dirt with which to discredit not only me, but the board member with whom I was allied. A last ditch effort of the desperate. For an individual with a history of Telecommunication use predating the world wide web, there’s surprisingly little dirt to be had. Some curious entries from the days as a text file writer (mea culpa) & some truly unfortunate logs of me being a jerk on messages boards (mea culpa, ages 13 to 19). But otherwise there’s no evidence of illegalities, perversions, drug use, or any other thing that one could use to discredit a lad, unless one was a staunch opponent of the First Amendment.

In truth, there’s more good than bad– the major results are academic work, film work, and historical preservation. But this didn’t stop our anonymous board member. Not only were the aforementioned text files & message board logs turned over in a giant email dossier, but also uncovered was the bestfriendship with the aforementioned Arafat Kazi, a man with an astonishingly checkered Internet past. As our board member was both wild & desperate, and there’d never been a face-to-face, in their exultant frenzy, they made the incredibly odd mistake of thinking that me and Arafat are, in fact, one in the same. I’ll repeat that: this person mistook me for a 300lb+ five-foot-three Bangladeshi man. This board member believed that we were one entity working under two strange names.

This malicious slander was of course laughed at but did present me with the experience of having to explain the existence of Arafat to disinterested third parties. While at work. You try telling your boss how a creature that weird can really exist.

The highlight of this whole affair was the following picture, taken from Arafat’s livejournal, which was included as an attachment to the email expose. Arafat had captioned the photo something like “Here I am with my two wives!” This was sent in, I kid you not, as evidence of my craven use of the internet to further a gay agenda. Yes, I must have forgotten to mention: at least 30% of the expose was about me being a faggot, and said faggotry was framed as evidence of my unsuitability for the task at hand. Meanwhile, this was happening in New York City and New York State, with a New York State incorporated entity, and the anonymous board member in question was a lawyer. New York State, you know, being a place where such an email and a subsequent dismissal for presumed faggotry is illegal to an astonishing degree.

A lawyer.

Anyway, here’s the great brown beast and his two wives: