Name Change ©2010GaryCGibson fiction

I awoke in the night before daylight savings time ended. It occurred to me that if it's impossible to find work, perhaps one must find a new identity. I have had a damaging slump with my own name; Carbon Story.

Finding a new name isn’t a simple matter. One can look over the most common entries in a phone book and consider taking one of those. Maybe after changing it some problems one hadn’t thought of arise that are associated with it, or some of the actual families with that name have issues one isn’t aware of either.

I think I might wait to change my name until after I can afford to purchase a used sailboat in order to leave the land of mythic and legendary dreams. My dream is not of the collective marketed sort, so it marginally actualizes just at the periphery of the new world order.

The Antilles islands where ants lived along with legendary free women of color seemed a basic attraction. To leave one’s identity behind in Corporatopia as expropriated seems good enough to be a plan.

If I were to skip the Smiths and Jones, Powers and Freeburgs maybe I could select something from the elements or gems. My is a good enough first name, and maybe Hydrogen or Zircon for a last. Something that would have the placid commonness of Steve Smith or Tom Jones—just another of the unit labels that don’t attract notice. Something not associated with my career and soon to be former life as a writer of a famous religious poem targeted for obsolescence by Corporatopianists.

It would be a cruel thing to set someone up for reverse identity theft-before I go- making him assume the identity of a somewhat obscure famous soul journeying on to another life away from that of the world of authors and establishment opinions. The dupe taking the persona upon himself would discover some of the liabilities of the identity soon enough. No, I will move on to the windward isles without pasting that name upon an opportunistic foreign invader on the way out of the country.

Mike Diamond is a good name. For the rest of this story Mike Diamond will be my name. You may think of me as Mike, and call me that too if we should happen to meet at some writers conference in a joint somewhere south of Havana. Also you should know that like my coffee very hot and with two sugars.

This name changing decision was brought about for several reasons mostly for convenience though. One wants to survive without being a target of expropriating authority stoking up power and revenue streams with one’s work. There are too many causes to move on to blame any one though.

Consider the problem of the church. It isn’t the body of Christ when it is not a priesthood of believers. With a one-level church all believers are priests and share with the regular service operations. Reinforcement of the well being of every Christian is ordinary rather than exceptional when there is no hierarchical priesthood to usurp the leadership of Christ as high priest over the egalitarianist priesthood of believers. This is a reason to change one’s name too as strange as it may seem. God will give a new name to each Christian one day, one that no one else besides God knows. For the time being, a name to leave behind- one’s identity as a writer and the triangulation of high-caste co-ops, is my own concern.

As I consider these issues the snow is still falling outside the tent. Another winter in America’s Siberia this time in a cold camp. Another drink of ice coffee making me more cold then falling into the Chena River in January-because the chill lasts and the river immersion shock that sets in fades away after the iced clothes thaw and some days of torpor pass.

I will probably go ahead and buy a passport and change my name on it later- not trying to hide my identity, simply creating a new one to make it difficult for the social zeitgeist to have the same lem to lean on. Maybe Paul Zircon isn’t too bad a name either, there can’t be many zircons out there and everyone probably likes them if they think of them at all.

Being self employed most of the time when I have work times not stranded in this northern globalist resource colony, I have no concern about losing the use of my college degrees in applying for work. They were never worth anything anyway. Only the actual learning had a value for entertainment.

A short list of things to do before setting sailing eventually (sure I know the 1000 sailing things and won’t mention them here); talk to attorney about effects of name changes at copyright office registrations of my written works. Discovery how one updates a birth certificate regarding name changes in order that one has a birth certificate. Is it easy to change one’s name on and I.D. card or Driver’s license to the new name?

Naming a new sailing boat, or renaming an old one is nearly a sacred thing… It is probably a fun thing to do for oneself as well.