1. 1978. Black baby born. Name him Moses Africanus. His parents are dreamers. In 1989 Moses will wear a clock for a necklace, and dream of being a big boy fighting powers that be. Strange, when he was six, just five years prior, there was nothing in the world for him but cowboys. But I said hold on.
2. Also 1978. Me. Horace; a family name. What's in a one, indeed. Not this name, this name isn't so bad. It is the cognomen in addendum: I can't forgive my parents, not for naming me Horace, but for the nickname Nate, and missing what looks on paper like the greatest opportunity for a child nickname in history.
Horace. Hor-ace. Ace. I could have been an Ace. I should have been an Ace. Had I been Ace rather than Nate, things, well, things would have been different. What a miss.
3. No good Nates in this world. Nate worse than Chazz. Nate is a T-Mobile salesman at the mall. Nate is a bartender, and not just proud of it, (pride in a job well done is a good thing), but thinks it a superior position, say, than being a garbage man.
(Expound: A bartender named Nate thinks he makes friends and picks up women because he is cool, never thinking: they are drunk. If Henry the Garbage Man pulls the same number friends/ladies, Henry is a Man Man. Put your collar down, Bartender Nate; take off those leather bracers, you, sir, are a wolf in a preserve of caribou; look at Henry working that desolate swath of Greenland -- this dog hunts game, he leads a pack, he can't miss.)
4. The name sucks. So much effort to turn it around, to etch meaning to it. Type Nate into Facebook worldwide -- how many pages before you find one Nate who doesn't look like a tool. I tried overriding this name with too much personality. My major malfunction.
Ace would have cooled me out. Like Styles in Teen Wolf I would have surfed on vans. Ace would have done wonders to my amateur poker career, a 20% profit for sure. Just think how amazing an excuse for weirdness this quote is: That's just Ace being Ace. Indeed. But I couldn't be Ace, because some joker named me, and spoke names at baby-Me. Titled me. Like Hamlet says, "You can fret me, but you can't play me, Crackers." (Something like that). But parents can and do play you:
5. The name you give your child is personality development. Names have meaning, stranger, more instinctive connotation than the base of, "I hate the name Manda because Manda was a bitch to me.". You know when you see a certain kind of tattoo and it is a time stamp, your brain does the math: This guy was searching for identity in right about 1998 -- not sure what Chinese symbols had to do with Waterville, but they have a lot to do with 1998. Charge that to The Search. When you name a kid in this way, you've tattoo'd them with identity: there is a generation of eighteen-year old men born to eighteen-year old mothers in 1993; these women thought Soul Asylum were the next Beatles at the time they had these babies. Don't get mad when 2027 is full of Republican senators named Easton and Icarus, that runaway train is never coming back. Rejecting everything their crunchy teeny-bopper moms believed in 1993, (correctly), sends them careening to the other side of the scale, it is a barbed wire tattoo on the soul. Had you named that kid Ace instead of Easton, he would not be at Tea Party meetings in the bunker counting out 7.62 rounds.
This goes for you as well, Tap Out Shirt Guy: I know you are tough; if you name your kid Leonidas, he won't be.
Like bad novelists, people think a florid name will make child/protagonist interesting. Stop this.
6. Solution. Don't name your kids. When they reach school age, let them name themselves. If you ask a six-year old what he wants to be called, he will say, "Joe.", if you ask, "Why Joe?", he will say, "I like Joe". Perfect.
7. Moses Africanus when he reaches what age is that age when he cuts the bullshit, and his heart aches for the time before life's hard lessons, and he remembers before he got smart enough to recognize cowboys as silly white people shit, that he loved cowboys, and silly white people shit isn't the worst thing in the world, (except when it is), he will, at that age, (call that age fifty-five), start dressing like a cowboy. Because he's earned it. Had he not been saddled with someone else's hoped for identity he might have got there sooner. Think about Moses sitting on the porch, reading Louis L'Amour, sipping whiskey, chewing on a cigarillo. He wanted to be a Joe. It has taken most of his life to get back to what the six year old kid was right about all along.
8. Even if the dog's name is Indiana.
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