Naming

For our son, the middle name of Eliot had long been chosen.  My wife and I may have even plucked this name from as early a time as our last year of college.  We'd had no definite plans of children then and, in fact, we'd only just been married during the spring semester of our senior year - but we both agreed that, should the opportunity arise, this name was wholly agreeable, great even.  I chose the spelling.

For quite some time we had liked the first name Byron, mostly as a literary nod though neither of us, while not opposed to Lord Byron, were not tremendous fans.  For quite some time Byron Eliot seemed like a foregone conclusion.

To be honest I've never truly liked my own first name - Joshua.  During the 1980s and up through this year the name Joshua has remained fairly popular.  I was born in 1985, however, when it would seem the name reached a peak.  I can still remember elementary school and how the teacher would call out the name and several boys would all answer.  Add to that the fact that the namesake was of one of the worst of butchers to be found in the Bible and my lack of enthusiasm should be, if not understandable, at least justifiable.

The Magic in My Life

“Better than a thousand hollow words

Is one word that brings peace.”

~ Dhammapada, The Sayings of the Buddha

- Oliver affirms life – not because he looks like me but because he's my son and because, through the fact of his existence, he's an affirmation that I can create and create on a heart's scale and more, as opposed to the simplicity of destruction with which I often felt more at ease.
- José Saramago's novels exist.

- Becky “took away all of my reasons not to care” in ways both practical and invisible.

- There are roughly seven billion people on this planet.

- As I write this, I am sitting on a bed on the second floor of a building. That building sits upon a tiny round rock that is currently hurtling around a medium-size plasma orb at 67,000mph. That orb of plasma is currently traveling through an interstellar cloud it entered roughly 44,000 to 150,000 years ago. I could go on about our location within the Orion Spiral Arm in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars – but let's stop there, for now.

- The music I loved as a teenager still moves me but the lyrics take on new meaning.

- The boy who thought he'd not live to see 18 is now 27.

- Faerie figurines are perched all around me.

- My wife had a short story accepted for publication – on her first attempt at submitting work since 2010 or earlier.

- Inside this apartment building there are people all around me, just on the other side of the walls or floors, living out their lives just as oblivious to me as I often am to them.

- There are three furry felines in the living room – just sitting in there, like it's the most natural thing in the world for them to be there.

- Joy Division

- My son is currently sleeping and sighing while he does so.

- I am the improbable sum of all of my ancestors.

- iLiKETRAiNS

- Hamlet (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2009)

- Whether we will it or not, we are all bound to one another.