I’m glad I’m not Adam – he had it rough. I couldn’t have possibly dealt with the responsibility. Why, if it had been my job to name all of the animals in the Garden of Eden, I’d have been a nervous wreck, and they’d have been cursed for all of existence with names like “The One with All the Legs.”
Most kids, when they get a new stuffed animal or imaginary friend, they settle on a good name. I didn’t like my own much - the first part was too clunky and old-fashioned and the rest was too ethnic – so the idea of choosing names appealed to me. Unfortunately, naming was not one of my strengths.
In the beginning, I tried to get inspiration from my children’s fantasy novels, settling on shitty names like “Topaz” and “Mossleaf.” Most of the time, I couldn’t think of any names at all and I referred to my stuffed animals by their species. Eventually I decided to drop names altogether.
After all, my animals and I all spoke telepathically, so there was no need to distinguish ourselves with something so mundane.
When I was seven or eight, I was a piano novice and I sometimes had trouble telling the difference between all the notes. My piano teacher, who was infinitely patient and accustomed to the carelessness of children, was in the habit of explaining music through a variety of analogies, a tactic she used from the day we met until I graduated high school ten and a half years later. She said that it hurt the notes’ feelings when I mixed up their names – didn’t it hurt my feelings when my parents mixed my name up with my siblings’? That’s why it was important to call them all by the right names. I only had one brother, so it wasn’t necessarily applicable, but I still felt curiously guilty.
I don’t think I immediately became a better pianist; in fact, I think I missed the point. Instead of concluding that I needed to be more attentive to my sheet music, I took the moral of the story to be that valuable things and interesting things deserved names.
It took years for me to evolve into a true namer – I’ll admit that I’m a douchebag novelty-seeker who gives everything a stupid name and a human pronoun.
My piano was named Claude, after my favorite composer. My car, who had been nameless for 12 years, I named Doug Funnie, thus dooming him to a life of ineptitude and uncoolness, though I loved him all the more for it. I named my phone after a character in a show about robots; my laptop, I named after the mothership in the same show – that way, I could dock my phone with my laptop and it made perfect sense.
I was already unhealthily attached to my possessions, but now my relationship with my things more resembles clingy friendship than materialism, so I think it might be a slight step up. When I drive Doug a little more recklessly than his aging mechanisms can handle, I cheer and chant his name like he’s completed an amazing feat of strength. When my laptop (her name is Ptolemaois, by the way) lethargically slides off my legs and hits the ground with a soft thunk, I coo comfortingly as if she’s a child who’s fallen off a swing. I find it to be the most natural thing in the world. But of course, as I write this, I realize it’s weird as hell and probably a behavior I should leave behind now that I’m sort of an adult. But it really seems like a shame, though, to play a piano who doesn’t have a character, or to drive a car who doesn’t have his own personality.
My friends back home and I talk about Doug like he’s a member of our posse – he even has a dumb nickname, Derg. We say, “We’ll get a ride from Doug,” or “You’re a jerk, Derg, cooperate with us here.” It’s that type of thing that convinces me that I will literally never love another car again, or another piano, or another laptop or bicycle or stuffed bunny, not the way I love Doug, or Claude, or Ptolemaois, or Gregory or Florestan.
Now that I think about it, I was wrong about how valuable things deserve names. I was completely backwards. Before he was Doug, our 2001 Toyota Avalon was a good car. It was useful, it had good mileage, and it wasn’t a bad looking car. I didn’t like it much. When he became Doug, I realized that he smelled strange, his doors were sticky, his heater took forever, his batteries were always screwed up, his check engine light was always on. Sometimes, after you park him, he’ll start rolling away. Once, I put him in reverse and he started driving forwards on his own. About a fourth of the time, the engine won’t start on the first try. Before he was Doug, our 2001 Toyota Avalon was a good car; now that he’s Doug, he isn’t so good anymore, but only now do I think he’s really worth loving.