Wearing old shoes

I love thinking about names. Playing around with pure syllables until semantic satiation sets in and meaning is lost, then, gradually, elemental and subconscious associations creep back in. When so much of language is hereditary, the idea that we can invent new concepts by mashing together phonemes is a real mindfuck. I wish this was how Greek and Latin roots were explained to us, growing up. They weren't just arbitrary lists for memorization, but a cipher for intent. We should have spent more time making up words and writing our own dictionaries.

I'm still proud of my fantasy names. Corathir, my high priest of wisdom. Niliasa, the miscreant half-drow rogue. Valixes, the grizzled dark knight. They're fun to say out loud, flowing off the tongue with any intonation or energy (Valixeees! Valixes...Valixes?). They sound like what they are, characters with built-in momentum for roleplay. Houses of identity that come with some furniture but plenty of space on the walls for more art.

I always thought of online monikers as another extension of this roleplay. Usernames are a theme for my interactions, a way of seeding expectations. I was surprised when so many of my roleplaying friends took to Facebook in 2008 with their real names and faces. It never made sense to me - why is everyone so eager to plaster their most boring selves front and center? We could be anything, and you want to stay with the first roll you got on the character generator?

That's part of why I've stuck with thunderfunking for so long - it's aspirational. I'll always treasure the moments that someone came up to me and said "oh, I see it now. you are thunderfunking" - does existential validation get any better than that?

But I haven't felt like cranberry thunderfunk for a long time. Is it hibernation, evolution, or deterioration?

There's the obvious culprits: home and car ownership, suburbia, and parenting are all consuming some of the thunder. I feel the inexorable pull towards the mundane. I keep waking up at 8am and tucking my shirt into my jeans because goddammit it's just practical and shit needs to be done and nobody at Home Depot gives a fuck whether my nails are painted. Sometimes I try to convince myself to flair up for D's sake - positive representations of masculinity and all that - but that's not sustainable. It has to come from within, something I want for myself, and the thunderfunking fire isn't there right now. Right now I am a dad whose chief concerns are paying bills, cooking dinner, and teaching my kid how to remember the days of the fucking week.

Even if it's false advertising, I do still like it. Maybe it isn't the person I am right now, but it is definitely the person I was, and that's a person I'm proud of. I'm becoming someone a bit different, and that person might have a different name. For now, cranberry thunderfunk is a beloved pair of shoes with soles that are coming unstitched. I love wearing it because it reminds me of all the places it took me. Maybe I could go to the cobbler and take it along for another 10 years, but that feels like it might be arrested development.

A year or two back I was trying on different 'real' names. I never liked Tim. It's so flat, so impossibly vanilla. The way it lands on my ears can feel caustic. The best alternative I could find in a year of ponderance was Otto. Germanic origin so it's authentic, gets me out of Christian / Biblical / Abrahamic territory, easy to say in many contexts, fun to write (one line to cross 2 t's, baby), uncommon but not unheard of, no obviously detrimental associations unless someone's really got beef with the Holy Roman Empire. Even feels a bit more gender-neutral in modern parlance. D shot it down for no particular reason, and being on fragile ground in my relationship with him, I chose to defer.

I'm sure I could push the issue now that things are more stable, but I don't think I feel strongly enough. While I might have preferred Otto to Tim, it's still not a name that I would wear with unflinching pride. It's just less of a burden to hear, and it comes with a new cost of switching names and correcting people and all that bullshit. If I'm gonna switch, it has to be moving me in a direction, towards a place I want to be.

This problem has been dogging me for years now, so it seems like I'll have to make a choice eventually. But it's hard to pick anything when I don't know what direction I'm moving. cranberry thunderfunk was easy because it was an exact match. My life was in chaos, I was so hungry to be perceived. It's a motorcycle, and now I need a fucking minivan.