Writing Prompt: Beach, sand, ocean, tide
I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to come up
with the perfect name for my very own retail boutique, finally
settling on Wind, Sun, Stars. Or maybe it was Wind, Rain, Dirt.
Perhaps it was just Dirt. No, this was years ago. Dirt is far too
now to have been then. Come to think of it, it was the early
2000s, so there must've been a moon in there somewhere.
Before that I worked on band names finally settling on Whoremoan.
Stupid, yes. Original? Perhaps if you lived somewhere other than
the self conscious S/M Bay Area in the 90s. Or if you didn't go to
grad school self conscious of your lack of interest or acumen with
dialectics and Lacanian lack. Maybe if you didn't live up the street from
El Rio, or forgo curtains because you figured the neighbors
deserved the show if they were looking through your illegal
mother-in-law studio at the bottom of a house on stilts on the north side of Bernal.
When I was even younger, I tried to come up with a nick name for
me that didn't involve the words "burger" "lard ass" or "shake it,
don't break it." I settled on Fir, since it was sort of part of my
name. My dad, however, wanting to protect me in some perverse and
extremely uncomfortable way second only to the articles he left on
my bed about the dangers of Paraquat, told me that "fir" was
shorthand for pubic hair. So I settled on Pepper, even though I
didn't like pepperoni.
When I was much smaller I fantasized about names for my future
children. My favorite was a combination of an exotic flower I had
never seen, but was familiar to Buddha, and the Northern Lights.
It wasn't about the beautiful name as much as the need for my
specialness, my uniqueness, my misunderstood past and invisible
mother.
As it turns out, I'm not the one who names people or animals in
the family. My partner never likes the ones I come up with and I
end up so self conscious and superstitious, I'm just glad to hand
off the responsibility to someone else.
Ocean Blue. That would be a nice name. Or Balcony. People don't
spend enough time appreciating nouns as names.
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