Shorthand for Nothing

From Joey Comeau’s Overqualified, which I previously reviewed:

It’s Joey, not Joe or Joseph. My grandfather was Joe Comeau, and Joseph is my mother’s name for me, but I have always been Joey. I worry sometimes that it’s a childish name. Would a “Joe” tell jokes in bed, perform puppet shows after sex, and give every body part a different high-pitched voice? It seems unlikely. The names we choose for ourselves aren’t meaningless. They’re self-fulfilling prophecies.

When I was a kid, my mother called me Robby. It was just the name I went by, and I was fine with it for a while. Then at some point I decided I didn’t like that, and I told her that my name was Robert, and that I would like to be called Robert, if it’s all the same to her.

I remember feeling that Robby was a silly name, and that I wanted to be taken seriously, so I would wear a serious name. My grandfather was Bob, and that was fine for him, but I would be Robert. There’s still a chair at my dad’s house that has “Robby” written on the back. It bothered me when I was a kid.

Sometimes I wonder if that was a mistake.

In late high school my name stopped really mattering. Maybe before then, but by then everyone was calling me Mason and it didn’t bother me. I had no preference. I even preferred it to Robert sometimes. Robert is a name I never liked seeing typed. So when I made a Myspace profile, back when that was a thing that you did, I put my name as Rob. I didn’t figure it would matter.

But then a few people called me Rob, and suddenly I had a new name. I used it in a few other places. It suited me: it didn’t speak to me of anything in particular. So, with the exception of my family, I was now either Rob or Mason. There were distinct groups which stuck with one or the other, and they mostly stuck with their own. It was here that I started letting other people introduce me, so there would be no confusion.

Then I moved to Boston and there were no more distinct groups, and I had to do the introducing myself. People never quite knew what to call me. Sometimes an introduction required explanation.

I keep going back to the time when I was a kid, though. I couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4 years old. I decided then I wanted to be taken seriously, and I gave myself a name that would be taken seriously. Would I have been different if I was Robby?

I can’t bring it back. You can’t just change your name. It’s an organic process. But I wonder.

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I had a dream tonight.

I was living in a house (I think it may have been the old house in Medford) with some people, and the girl who lived there had brought home some of these little pocket black holes. I don’t know what their actual intended purpose was, but she was proposing we use them to help clean up some of the garbage around the house. They were kept in these little white packets that were sort of like those silica gel packets, or maybe like moist towelette packets. Something like that. Anyway, I went up to my room to collect some of my trash. I assumed she was going to use them outside, because they are hazardous. Then suddenly she was in my room and threw up one of these portable black holes. It made a sort of ominous noise but not too loud. She hadn’t used one before, so it very nearly destroyed the house, but she managed to keep hold of it.

She started throwing some garbage in, and I shrugged and started doing so myself. But the pocket black holes only lasted so long, so it went away before I was done. Then someone else was talking about everyone chipping in three bucks or something for more, and I said “look, I can just use one of mine.” Apparently I had like six of them in my pocket. I’m not sure why. I had apparently never used one before, however, and when I set it down it started drifting to the ceiling. I managed to contain it, and when she glared at me I said, “Hey, you almost did it, too.”

We finished cleaning up, sending our garbage to be devoured by these little micro black holes. Finally, an environmentally friendly way to get rid of garbage!

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I’ve been reading through House of Leaves again recently. It benefits from being the type of book you can read through several times, at least in part due to the fact that it is fragmented and convoluted, to say nothing of being nightmarish. It’s the sort of book with encoded messages and obscure references, some of which are pointed out in the footnotes. It has footnotes. The footnotes have footnotes.

I’ve just reached the labyrinth chapter. For the first part of the book the typesetting, at the very least, is relatively normal. There’s nothing too weird going on typographically; sure, the story is a bit strange, but it’s simple. It’s straightforward. Then there’s the SOS chapter, where the paragraphs get broken up into Morse code. At the point of the Labyrinth, it starts coming unhinged. It’s difficult to describe, but there is an image online of one of the pages here. It is these pages I show people when explaining the book.

From there on the book fades in and out of lucidity. Some parts seem almost normal, others are still bizarre. There’s a chapter which concludes with a page which contains nothing but a single, enormous full stop. And I haven’t really even gotten into the contents of the book yet. The house is the sort of thing it is best to explore for oneself. (Highly recommended. Go read.)

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It is probably not accurate to say I learned a new trick, because I’m sure I’ve always done it. But recently I was talking about magazines with someone and I wanted to express how perfectly they capture the moment in which they were published, in a way that things like newspapers don’t do very well, and I paused and said, “I guess they really capture the zeitgeist, if you want to be the type of person who uses that word.”

This does nothing to prevent the impression that I am a self-conscious linguaphile with heavy affectations in everything that I do, but it does make it seem like at least I’m not the sort of person who uses the word zeitgeist! It’s a great trick. Like scare quotes, it distances you from the word, but it goes further than that. It says “you and I both know what this word means and I, at least, dislike its connotations, but nevertheless, there it is.” It is another self-conscious affectation that people can politely laugh at, or maybe even sincerely laugh at. For all I know other people hear certain words and phrases and sit there thinking “he just used ‘zeitgeist’ unironically–to think I liked that guy!”

In which case I may just be hilarious.

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