Naming (Day?)

On names, changing them, and JD leaving

Points to consider:

• Initials
• The meaning of ‘Madison’
• Jesse as first dog
• Keeping Scott - why, why not
• Clary and that baggage
• Author names (keeping MJSC as a pseudonym)
• Plurality
• Being weird
• Meaning of the name as a whole
• Coming up with names as a writer, all that time on behindthename
• JD story:
  • Do I start from marriage? From dating? From his mother’s death?
  • I should try to keep it from just being a bitch session.
  • But also bring up Jujube losing Zephyr and him.
  • Discussions in the past about him leaving

What text?

• Could do some Jeff VanderMeer texts? Like, there’s Ghost Bird in Southern Reach, and there’s the strange bird, and there’s Borne who was named almost deliberately…
• Texts with weird names (esp in ‘normal’ contexts) that just treat them as normal.

Do I write this as a prose poem?

Names bear power, I promise myself, my characters promise each other. Names bear power and are in so many ways beholden to them. They bear power over us, even if we beg that they not. They bear power over us sometimes because we beg that they not. We so rarely, if at all. The vast majority will never name themselves — nice name, did your mom pick it out for you? — and of those that do, how many name themselves in a vacuum, without considering the whims of the world around them?

It’s true enough, more often than not.

I was born Matthew Joseph Scott.

My mom, when asked, said that the choices for my first name were either Nicholas or Matthew. “They were just the two most common names for boys,” she said. “If you’d been born a girl, we would’ve named you Sarah.”

She wasn’t wrong, of course. In one class of eighteen people, there were six Matthews, and two of my close friends through most of elementary school were Nicholas and Sarah.

Joseph was my grandfather’s first name. My dad’s dad. I’m told that he lived past my birth, that he got to hold me and know that I was his grandson. I’m told that I went to his funeral.

Scott was my dad’s last name, so of course that’s what I wound up with, too. I’m not sure where that comes from, beyond that. I know little about my paternal grandfather, from whom the name comes, other than he was half black, half Huron, according to my dad. ‘Scott’ isn’t exactly a name I associate with such a background, but I admit that this is an estimate made largely on vibes.

I was Matthew Joseph Scott. I was Matthew to my teachers and even most of my friends.