Gone from the charts but not from our hearts

Out of the mouths of babes emerge comments that make me feel like an old fuddy duddy.

 

One of the occupational hazards of being a photographer is that, occasionally, I run into kids who remind me that I’m no longer one of them, and they would know. The latest instance occurred a few weeks ago when I was grabbing some shots at an after-school youth program in Biddeford. I was chilin’ with a couple of fourth- grade girls in a study lounge – do kids still say “chillin’?” – when the conversation turned to music. 

 

Music is a subject that’s right in my wheelhouse, so I thought we were covering safe terrain. But when I asked one of the girls what she enjoyed listening to, her answer left me positively flabbergasted.

 

“I listen to a lot of stuff, like Eminem and Shania Twain,” she said. “I like a lot of different kinds of music. I don’t really like heavy metal, though. It’s old people music.”

 

Wait, what?

 

It wasn’t a response I was prepared for. I was shocked. Stymied. Mystified. If my jaw had dropped any farther, I would have whacked myself in a sensitive man area, and spent the rest of the day cursing my fate, all in the voice of Mickey Mouse taking massive tokes off a helium balloon.

 

See, I’m a metal guy. Like the young lady, my tastes are varied – gimme some smooth jazz or classic rock any day of the week, brother – but when I hear a crunchy guitar riff that could singe eyebrows from across a football stadium, that could peel the paint from a sports car, that could melt the wax holding together Joan Rivers’ face ... well, it does something to me. Something primal. It stirs up my innards with an iron finger, stoking a joyous rebellion that would shame the warring Scotsmen of “Braveheart.” If it were in any way socially acceptable, I’d respond to the opening riff of Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” by felling a mountain lion with my bare hands, hosting it above my head in the town square, and yelling “Freedom!” until my vocal chords were so much charred meat. Then I’d slink away for about a week, because that would be stupid.

 

But you know, I look at some of my metal heroes today, and while they still rock the house, you can see the crows’ feet and gray hairs sprouting like dandelions. Dave Mustaine, the frontman for Megadeth and a legendary drug fiend, is starting to look like a rumpled mail sack. Time makes fools of us all; that’s true for musicians and fans alike, except for the members of the Rolling Stones, whose organs are preserved under a thick crust of cocaine.

 

When the girl spooked me with her old people comment, that’s when it occurred to me: If I can make it to old age, I’ll be listening to this stuff in a retirement home. It’s hard to imagine how that would work. 

 

A couple years ago, during a different assignment, I found myself at one such retirement home shooting some photos of a pianist who had come to entertain the residents. The songs he played, naturally, were selected from the era in which that generation came of age; the set was heavy on Sinatra and Martin and some of the public domain ditties from the great American songbook, tunes that the house bands on late-night shows can play without cracking open the company wallet. It was fun. The piano guy was a good player, the residents were clearly enjoying themselves, and even as I was contorting myself to get various angles, my toes kept tappin’ to the rhythm. If I had stayed any longer I’d have played a few rounds of canasta in a pair of pink slippers.

 

That kind of music, naturally laid back and mellow, is a nice fit for the age group. More difficult to imagine is Piano Man ripping into a frenzied acoustic version of Slayer’s “Angel of Death.” I picture a cluster of elders leaning on their canes in a geriatric mosh pit, with Dolores from 309 hip-checking her friend Beverly into the snack table during the blistering solos. Then, when Slayer morphs into “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter” by Iron Maiden, all the World War II veterans who fought in Iwo Jima can stage-dive off the beverage cart and crowd surf while dousing themselves in beer.

 

Seems like a farfetched scenario. But when “old people” like me reach that age, there’ll at least be a handful of us still taking bands like Anthrax and Black Sabbath for a spin. This should make for some interesting musical requests during these special events; maybe future musicians who play the retirement home circuit will be dragging around Flying V guitars instead of settling gingerly behind the keys of a stately Steinway. They’d better be prepared. Not all of us are hip to Shania Twain.

 

Granted, metal’s a fringe genre. It mainly appeals to people who have unruly body hair and wear lots of leather. I’m sure that others in my age group who’ll be enjoying their twilight years will be perfectly content to whistle the day away to the soothing strains of Michael Buble or Adele, and that’s fine – I’m a man, I can take it. But no amount of aging will ever convince me that Megadeth’s “Holy Wars” isn’t the greatest things since the invention of Fluffernutter. 

 

Mmm. Fluffernutter.

 

Maybe the young girl is right; maybe metal’s made the leap from empowering youth music to rusted artifact of a time gone by. Gives a guy some outside perspective on his life, at least. What’s comforting is that the accumulated years have given me some perspective of my own; and I know there’ll come a time, one day, when someone says to the girl’s grown-up counterpart, “You know, I don’t really like Shania Twain. It’s old people music.”

 

Won’t that be the day. And I. Can’t. Wait.

How tweet it is

“Hashtag” used to be a word used solely by computer programmers and pale men with really bad acne. The tiny club of people who knew what it meant could have fit inside one of Shaquille O’Neal’s shoes. Now it’s a prominent member of the English lexicon, and we’ve got stupid Twitter to blame.

 

Not that I’m bitter.

 

Social media isn’t evil, in and of itself. It can be used for evil purposes, like bullying a classmate, or posting various pictures of the gross injury you sustained while pogo-sticking over a stack of empty Fruit Loops boxes. But the medium itself is a fairly neutral thing. It can even be used for positive change. Sparking democratic revolutions in Middle Eastern countries? Check. Spreading inspirational messages falsely attributed to sensuous headshots of Johnny Depp? Check. These are things with the potential to improve peoples’ lives, despite the uncomfortable fact that Johnny Depp always looks like he’s five minutes away from directing a porno. I think it’s his hats. They’re porn hats.

 

But these instances are more common to traditional social media platforms like Facebook, which allow users to post comments, engage in discussions, and share links to videos of ferrets who headbang to Slayer tunes. 

 

Twitter’s a different animal. It’s the ugly stepchild of social media. In case you’ve spent the past few years hunting wild game with a tribe of pygmies, Twitter is a website that allows its users to post short messages – called, obnoxiously, “tweets” – that are limited to 140 characters in length. This is just long enough to share something banal and trivial, like “I enjoy ham,” and just short enough to discourage fully formed thoughts, like “I enjoy ham because it reminds me of Sunday dinners with my Uncle Horatio, and here’s four paragraphs about the mole on his neck.”

 

And that’s basically it. If Twitter had any less substance, it wouldn’t exist. It’s not completely devoid of usefulness; fine publications like the Journal Tribune can use it to post public notices. (Go team!) This scant functionality, though, is hardly enough to explain why it’s become such a ubiquitous obsession. It’s everywhere. The lingo it’s spawned is even creeping into the common vernacular, with news anchors and late-night TV hosts forced to conceal their disgust whenever they mention a “tweet” or a “hashtag” – the latter sounding like some kind of shady, arcane drug paraphernalia.

 

A hashtag, in Twitter terms (twerms?), is a word or phrase with a number sign affixed to the front of it, like #stateoftheunion, or #paulyshoresucks. Tacked on to the end of an annoyingly brief Twitter message, it groups a particular posting with other posts that have the same hashtag; this serves the dual purpose of facilitating searchability while giving a harsh noogie to a rapidly eroding English language. It depresses me that I know this. That a non-user like myself can define a hashtag in detail speaks to how thoroughly it’s permeated the social landscape. It spreads faster than STDs on “The Bachelor.” And in five minutes there’ll be a Twitter post about how gross that analogy was.

 

Astoundingly, there are distinguished people of letters who have taken to the form. Among the more notable is British comedian and Mr. Potato Head look-alike Stephen Fry. While he isn’t super well-known in the States – due in part to the fact that he’s never egged a Beverly Hills mansion from the back seat of the Kardashian limo – he’s a big deal across the pond, rounding out a career as a writer and director with an education in English literature from Cambridge. Dude’s got about four million Twitter followers, despite routinely avoiding phrases like “tiger blood” and “edible underwear.” On the Canadian radio show “Q with Jian Ghomeshi,” Fry explained that he’s drawn to the site’s format because it forces a writer to be creative, to pare away extraneous language and deliver a message succinctly. I don’t share his passion for brevity (obviously), but I see his point.

 

The sentiment is nice in theory. In practice, the most active and followed users tend to be celebrities – and not to generalize, but when you combine a dumb medium with a mostly dumb user base, the results are, well, dumb. Here’s a sampling of messages posted by various celebrities:

 

From Sherri Shepherd: “OMG just woke up and my rear is plugged – tried everything – yawning … pinching my nose, closing mouth and pushing out breath … won’t unstop”

 

From Paris Hilton: “No, no, I didn’t go to England; I went to London.”

 

From Miley Cyrus: “Good morning everyone. Life is good, I am laying in bed with my mommy right now scratching her bug bites.”

 

From Lil’ Kim: “I’m driving right now”

 

People actually spend time reading this stuff. What’s worse, people spend time writing it. Fry may be correct in that it forces a writer – at least some writers – to be creatively brief, but the flip side is that it also lets people off the hook. It actively encourages half-formed thoughts and ill-advised brain droppings. The resulting drek is forced down our throats during news broadcasts, with anchors now reading tweets from viewers  reacting to the big stories of the day. As if our understanding of world events will be deepened by the musings of Satanic _Kitty69, and his highly trenchant observation that “oBaMa shuld rspect the constitushun!!!11”

 

But what am I doing? Here I am using all these words when I should be excoriating Twitter in 140 characters or less. So here it is, my 137-character warning to this evil scourge:

 

“If I catch you around these parts again, I’ll wrestle you into a headlock and squeeze until your face is red as a basket of strawberries.”

 

Hmm. Maybe Fry was right. That was actually kinda fun.

 

Time keeps on slippin'

If I had a time machine, I’d travel back to the heyday of the Roman Coliseum so I could watch toga-wearing schmucks use broadswords to fend off armor-plated lions. 

 

Yup.

 

Picture the scene: I’m wearing a homemade robe fashioned out of a faded Care Bears beach blanket I used when I was four. There’s a fig leaf in my hair, which, for the purposes of this fantasy, exists as actual hair. I watch a few rounds of testosterone--percolating bloodsport. Then, when someone notices I’m wearing Reeboks and taking pictures with a fancy metal memory-maker, gifted to me by the gods of Olympus, I dash outta the joint, hop into my flying DeLorean, and punch it right back to 2014.

 

Or maybe I zip back about a billion years and have lunch with a stegosaurus. Or travel to ancient Greece to watch the legendary battle of Thermopylae. Or prevent Nicholas Cage from making “Ghost Rider.”

 

So many different things we could do with a time machine. Most of us have fantasized about it at some point in our lives. It’s one of those hypothetical questions that pops up, more often in youth perhaps, during dreamy, star-gazing conversations late at night with a close friend – one who had the foresight to bring along a few nips of brandy in a pocket flask. 

 

“What would you do with a time machine?” they ask, and you think, “Gee, I’d go back to my childhood and warn myself not to blow my entire allowance on Jawbreakers and Spider-Man comics. Then I’d take those savings, invest in Google stock, and spend the rest of my life on a yacht, sipping Seabreezes from the navels of Florida State volleyball players.”

 

I don’t know whether this is unique to my own experience, or if it’s a more universal thing, but the people I’ve jawed with about this tend to think in terms of visiting the past rather than the future. Maybe they’re afraid to catch a glimpse of themselves in old age, or fear that the coming decades will see society dissolve into a dystopian hellscape, in which Mad Max-style renegades trade arms to terrorist groups in exchange for free bowling passes. Could be that there’s comfort in already knowing what the past has in store. 

 

It’s a pity, because time travel to the future is theoretically possible.

 

Over the past century, physicists have discovered that time is intimately linked with gravitational fields – you know, that old story. There’s a lot of math and technical mumbo jumbo associated with how this works, but the basic gist is that time flows differently in different parts of the cosmos; a year on Earth is different than a year on Mars, which is different than a year on Jupiter, etc. The stronger the gravity, the slower time flows.

 

So if you want to send someone to the distant future, you start by rocketing their butt into outer space and having them orbit a celestial body with an insane amount of mass, like a black hole. (As New Jersey Governor Chris Christie can attest, gravity is stronger around massive bodies. Zing!) If our intrepid astronaut orbits the black hole for a couple of years – or what feels like a couple of years to him – he’ll return to find that, on Earth, many centuries have passed. In this way, by sacrificing a couple years of his life, a brave journeyman could potentially travel to the year 2514, where he’ll likely find that Jay Leno is in his eighth stint hosting “The Tonight Show.”

 

Travel to the past is trickier. It involves contradictions. Physics dorks like Brian Greene and Michio Kaku are fond of invoking what’s called “the grandfather paradox”: Let’s say you go back in time and kill your grandfather. Never mind why; maybe he stiffed you at Christmas. That means he never met your grandmother, which means your mother was never born, which means you never existed and couldn’t have gone back in time to kill your grandfather in the first place. If this is confusing, you can read about it in more detail in my upcoming memoir, “Musings of a Man Who Hasn’t Dated in a Long Time.”

 

What it boils down to is that time-traveling backward is, in all likelihood, impossible. That’s disappointing. It means I’ll never see the sprawling armies of Alexander the Great. Or watch John Hancock sign the Declaration of Independence. Or convince Francis Ford Coppola that two “Godfather” movies were quite enough, thank you.

 

But it’s still fun to think about. One of the neat things about the time travel question is that it teases our imaginations. It forces us to think of ourselves in terms of a broader historical context, and to wonder how things might have gone differently. If a butterfly flapping its wings in China triggers a ripple effect that produces a tornado in Oklahoma, just think what conscious human intervention in the past could accomplish. We travel to the late 1930s and stop Hitler from invading Poland, and back in the present day we find that Americans speak Swahili and commute to work on the backs of genetically modified pterodactyls. We stop Lincoln from being assassinated, and find that Lady Gaga is a straight-laced investment banker, and the federal reserve is overseen by a hard-drinking circus clown named Bubbles. World events are ripples on a pond, and what power we’d wield if we were the stone.

 

And now I pass the flask to you, dear reader, and ask you to consider the following: A crazy-eyed scientist shows up at your doorstep and hands you the keys to a flying DeLorean. What would you do?

 

Go ahead and mull it over a while. You’ve got all the time in the world.

 

A faint impression

Charles Dickens loved to write about prostitutes. They were never the main subjects of his work, but the more you delve into his novels, the more you realize how consistently he features them as side characters, usually covered in chimney soot and espousing the hard-boiled wisdom of the streets. One might expect that such denizens of the underworld would have fairly strong constitutions, able to pluck birdshot from a baron’s buttocks if push came to shove. But in “Oliver Twist,” when a prostitute is relayed some particularly shocking information, she faints on the spot. Just drops like a sack of dead haddock.

 

If even sex workers are prone to fainting, then what hope is there for humanity?

 

Well if that’s the criteria, then a lot, as it turns out. Because nobody faints anymore. Not Southern belles, not children, not people who work with large quantities of meat. Nobody. At some point, it just stopped being a thing. 

 

Kind of. I mean, if we’re being totally honest, then it does still happen from time to time, mostly among the elderly and people with nervous system disorders. According to WebMD, fainting accounts for about three percent of all visitors to the emergency room. The other 97 percent were hit by projectiles thrown by Justin Bieber.

 

But that’s not the kind of fainting I’m talking about. I’m talking about the flushed swooning of London gentry, the breathless, “Gone With the Wind” kind of fainting that befalls a person struck by scandalous news. Over time, that particular affliction went the way of polio and scurvy, something experienced by the scowling Dust Bowl farmers of yellowed tintype photographs. Certainly nothing that would happen to someone reading tech blogs on their iPhone at a Chuck E. Cheese.

 

And this wasn’t a condition unique to movie damsels and Dickensian prostitutes. Nosiree. There’s an abundance of documented cases of this kind of thing, some of them found in the Journal Tribune’s very own archives.

 

In a couple of rambling run-on sentences published in the Biddeford Daily Journal in January 1914, a reporter – who I’d like to think was wearing a fedora – recounts two unusual occurrences at the close of hearings in a supreme court trial in Saco. The first was the burning of a hotel owned by the plaintiff. 

 

“(The) second,” writes the reporter, “was the fainting of the defendant while on the witness stand, Mr. Emerson becoming practically unconscious, his sudden illness necessitating his removal from the witness stand after his revival from the stupor into which the excitement had thrown him.”

 

A stupor! Holy cow! You know, I’ve been to quite a few court proceedings over the years. Sex crimes, murders, manslaughter. Not once have I been witness to an honest-to-goodness stupor. Fingers crossed, I guess.

 

So there it is, hard and fast proof that fainting spells were a real-life occurrence, not solely the stuff of melodramatic, bodice-ripping dime novels. But this begs a question that, by now, should be fairly obvious: Why are these types of fainting spells no longer as common? What happened?

 

I’ve read a fair amount about fainting over the past few days, which brings me close to having conducted actual “research,” a genuinely adult activity that makes me feel ashamed for decorating my windowsills with Ninja Turtles figurines. It would have been nice, during the course of this reading, to have discovered a satisfactory answer for why fainting now exists almost solely as an adjunct to some greater affliction. Such an answer, though, doesn’t seem to exist. The disappearance of Victorian artistocrat-style fainting spells has slipped by relatively unnoticed.

 

Which means I can attempt to explain it myself. Cue knuckle-cracking noises.

 

Obviously part of it has to do with an increased awareness of how to maintain one’s general health; let’s face it, fainting is pretty lame, and with better access to healthful foods and medical care, nobody collapses anymore unless something serious and non-lame is happening, like a heart attack, or a roundhouse kick to the head from Chuck Norris. But while knowledge is power, I don’t think that’s the whole story.

 

My guess is that fainting’s diminished role owes largely to desensitization. You can’t shock someone into unconsciousness if nothing shocks them. In the days of corsets and frilly teacups, when children were taught handwriting by monacled old men at their family’s estate in Pigbuttshire, a normal life was sequestered from scandal and intrigue. So when something even mildly dramatic and unexpected happened, like a handsome man splitting the seam of his pants dismounting a horse, then sure, let the swooning begin.

 

Now, nobody’s sequestered from anything. At six years old, kids are watching YouTube videos of would-be stunt bicyclists getting sideswiped by minivans. People play video games in which the object is to pry a shotgun from a dead farmer’s hands so they can mow down an army of zombies. At this point, there’s nothing a person can see or hear that would cause them to spontaneously faint, because they’ve seen and heard it all already. 

 

Technology and access galvanize us against shock, but the tradeoff is that we lose our innocence before we’re old enough to remember what it’s like to have it in the first place. There’s something a little sad about that.

Dickens had a vivid imagination. But even he couldn’t have predicted a world in which a child would have a stronger constitution than a London prostitute.

And now, an urgent message from the planet you live on

It happens every time. I make it through an entire day with my temper relatively unperturbed, I’m feelin’ good about life, and then I make the mistake of seeing what the cable news people are saying. These pundits, who seemingly spawn like rabbits, and engage the world with roughly the same level of competence, are more effective at dousing optimism than a cold bucket of ice water. Crushing hope for humanity is their most reliable skill; does congress have a medal for that kind of thing?

 

“So how ’bout this weather?” asked one of them during a recent broadcast on – shock of all shocks – Fox News. “You know, this whole cult of global warming ... I really think this is the year it dies, considering the weather we’ve had this past weekend.”

 

Wow. Just ... wow. Open palm, insert forehead.

 

It’s hard knowing where to start. In a lot of ways, it’s easier to understand why an everyday John or Jane may not grasp the science of global climate change, because even though that science is relatively simple, it’s not a layperson’s job to follow it. One can certainly argue – and I do – that it’s in a person’s best interests to keep abreast of scientific developments, because it increases our understanding of the natural world, and our place in it. But there’s nothing forcing anyone. That’s disappointing, and can lead to frustration; but hey, if I’m the only guy at the party talking about the quantum theory of gravity, I’m that much more likely to score the phone number of the nerdy bespectacled woman sipping tepid wine by the Barcalounger. This has never once happened, by the way, but my random foray into fantasy has a point.

 

Which is simply that a TV pundit is supposed to follow these things closely, and to understand them properly. They’re the ones disseminating ideas to the very public that may not have the time, or the interest, to dig closely into the matter themselves. And if they’re not going to impart proper information, then their only ostensible purpose is to raise my blood pressure to levels that would explode the heart of a Shetland pony.

 

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I’m a huge dork. Considering my professed interest in space exploration and Batman, this should hardly come as a revelation. Due in part to this nerdiness, I know that the “warming” in global warming refers to worldwide averages, largely focusing on ocean temperatures – it doesn’t mean you and I will be wearing shorts in January anytime soon. It’s winter in Maine, and it’s going to be cold. That doesn’t unravel decades of climate research. Saying, “It’s cold today, so global warming is a hoax!” is rather like looking out your window at night and saying, “It’s dark out, so that must mean there’s no such thing as the sun!” And if it happens to be an unseasonably warm day, then the whole argument collapses under its own faulty interior logic. If five minutes of unscientific observation makes someone an expert at something, then I’m poised to replace Bill Belichick as coach of the New England Patriots.

 

So what do rising ocean temperatures mean? Well, it means arctic and Antarctic sea ice will start to melt (ahem), species of animals will become displaced from their natural habitats (AHEM), and weather patterns will change, increasing the number of extreme weather events like hurricanes and blizzards (ahemAHEMcoughcoughcough). Turns out that’s what happens when you take the sludge left over from dead dinosaurs and pump it into the atmosphere. We call this the greenhouse effect. It’s like the planet is swaddled in a blanket of triceratops farts.

 

This is backed up by multiple reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international consortium of climate scientists. This is a group, by the way, which is unburdened by make-believe pressure from the “special interest groups” of cable pundits’ impressive imaginations. Yet these “news” boobs persist in ignoring evidence, and spreading the notion that global warming is somehow a matter of opinion.

 

It isn’t. It’s a matter of fact.

 

Somehow, a combustible mix of cable punditry and anti-science nincompoops have turned this into a political issue. A narrative has evolved that giving credence to climate science is an inherently liberal trait, and skepticism an inherently conservative one. So those who take their cues from their favorite talking head programs – who hew unapologetically to one ideology or the other, facts be damned – are influenced by politics when politics aren’t the issue. This isn’t right versus left, red versus blue. It’s truth versus fiction. And unless anti-science, pro-ignorance forces eat some humble pie, truth is going to lose.

 

I know I blow the trumpets of science a little loudly at times, but that’s only because of how shockingly misunderstood it’s become in recent years. It’s not a set of unchanging, arbitrary instructions foisted upon countryfolks by an antiquated Greek god. It’s a picture whose resolution gets sharper with each passing day. Lines become clearer, smudges resolve themselves. There are missteps and misunderstandings, it’s messy and imperfect, but the course always corrects itself in the end, and we’re continually arriving at milestones of understanding. The picture gains clarity. And then one day, we take a step back, view it from a distance, and realize we’ve learned something about ourselves. That’s really kind of beautiful. 

 

It’s a shame that doesn’t make for ratings-grabbing television, because if pundits wanted to impart something positive and real for a change, that’d be a nice place to start. A little something to warm our spirits during a cold winter, perhaps.

 

So. How ’bout this weather, huh?

 

What's in a name?

Sometimes I wonder how different my life would be if I legally changed my name to something outlandish, like Jeffrey Garfunkle Tyberius Dimplebottom III. This is the kind of handle that demands a silk bathrobe and an overpriced sports car. At the very least, I could start smoking pipes indoors and nobody could say a darn thing about it. “Do you know who I am?” I’d ask defiantly, and by the time I was done telling them, they’d forget about their gripe and migrate to the chili dip.

 

It would be an odd thrill to have one of those laborious trust fund names – or even something simple and cool, like Billy Blaze, or Andy Awesomepants. The fact that this is actually possible – that there exists a means of legally changing our names to whatever we want – is kind of scary in a sense, as if we all harbor the potential to alter reality in some fundamental way. I’d never be able to pull the trigger, myself; I’ve grown into my name, and even though it sounds like an uncomfortable gastrointestinal disorder, it’s my identity. It’s me. I don’t know if our names define us or if we grow to define our names, but after a span of decades, I’m in too deep at this point, doomed to spend eternity sounding like a man who farts loudly in hardware stores.

 

Yet people change their names all the time, mostly married women who have adopted their husbands’ last names to indicate that I may no longer consider dating them. As a man, I’m relegated to the role of wondering what it would be like to practice a new signature, which would have the potential to complicate things in the future, since it’s still technically possible I could become a famous Major League pitcher. 

 

Obviously, it’s become tradition for a woman to assume her husband’s name, although there are instances when this practice is reversed – New Hampshire politician Dick Swett may want to consider this. The problem here is that it brings to the fore some thorny issues regarding gender inequality, issues that aren’t easily resolved. Unlike less progressive parts of the globe in which women are relegated to secondary roles, like homemaker or Vice President, the Western world is increasingly cognizant of the benefits of unchaining the fairer sex from antiquated values. But even if a woman decides to keep her birth name upon marrying, as is her prerogative, a marriage often produces children, and those children need names. You can’t altogether drop the practice of having surnames, because then the very idea of family would degenerate into confusion and inbreeding. And we’ve already got one Alabama.

 

So in this situation, choosing one name over the other in is one of those mildly uncomfortable necessities, like picking the music for that weekend drive to Laconia. (She says Shakira, I say Metallica. I will fight her to the death over this.)

 

Here, I recommend starting a new tradition: Choosing the name that would result in the fewest instances of schoolyard taunts and swirlies. This is where the process starts to get fun, because picking a handle for a child – or a pet, or a car, or the mole on the bridge of your nose – is one of life’s great arbitrary pleasures, one of the few instances in which one can let loose with unrestrained creativity. 

 

Let’s say Billy Boogerbeater marries Betty Butterballs, and both decide to keep their names, since both families have a rich tradition that can be traced back to Colonial Williamsburg. They saddle their firstborn with Boogerbeater, since in the 1980’s, Betty Butterballs bore the brunt of brazen brutality from boorish bullies in backwater Birmingham. Now the fun begins. There’s an entire encyclopedia of boys’ and girls’ names from which to choose, and if none prove satisfactory, Billy and Betty can simply go the celebrity route and name their offspring after acorns, or their favorite brand of saltwater taffy. All they need to keep in mind is that the life of this kid will, in some measure, be shaped by a name that defines their identity. Choose unwisely, and the child will grow up confused and resentful, and write meandering rants that indicate deep mental disturbances.

 

I suggest Bobby or Becca. No need to get fancy.

 

Thorny gender issues aside, the very concept of the name is almost as curious as the languages and cultures that spawn them – these words that mean us, that arrest our attention across streets and playgrounds and office buildings. 

 

Can an identity be reduced to letters and syllables? In 1973, Elton John recorded the original version of “Candle in the Wind,” which was written as a kind of farewell letter to Marilyn Monroe, who had died 11 years earlier. But Elton never mentions her by her stage name. The first line of the song begins, “Goodbye Norma Jean.” No matter how famous she became, “Marilyn Monroe” was never anything more than a phrase, a fiction that allowed her access to a certain kind of world. She was Norma Jean Mortenson. The world may not readily recognize that, but even during the height of Monroe mania, if someone had shouted “Norma Jean!” to her across a crowded theater, she would have turned her head to look. We can call ourselves whatever we want, change our names to symbols or the brand names of all-weather tires; but when Billy and Betty sit down to name their child, they’ll bequeath to it a jumble of letters weighted with more meaning than any other word in any other language. It’s the name that will appear in songs written about it, the one that will turn his or her head when spoken aloud. That’s a lot of responsibility for the parents, inventing a whole person in the space of one quick breath. And for the child, it’s an inescapable part of them, as intractable as height, or the length of their forearm.

 

So I guess I’ll keep Jeff Lagasse, out of respect. But let’s face it, Jeffrey Dimplebottom has a certain ring to it.