The Name of this Band is The Name of this Band

One of the hardest parts of the creative process for me, still, is naming. Assigning a proper name to a character - or even a non-living object or process - is generally the last part of the journey for me. Maybe I'm a perfectionist, but I feel that an individual's name has to do a good job of encapsulating what makes them unique. Not that I'm about to name a hard-boiled soldier anything as crass as "Ace Shooter", but I think we can find more interesting possibilities than your typical "Jim Smith" or "Lisa Johnson" or "Chris Meyer". Names are literary shorthand for first impressions, and we all know how important those are.

I struggled for a while to come up with a name for this blog. And problems intensified when I found that most of my blogspot title ideas (OK, the best of my ideas) had already been registered long ago. It echoed my struggle years ago to come up with an unused AIM screenname that was still clever and didn't end in an arbitrary string of numbers. (I eventually relented and slapped "720" on the end of my handle. Oh well.)

But, just as I did back then, I was curious as to who had had these ideas before me. Were they of a similar humor? Kindred spirits? Might I befriend these strangers across the vast anonymity of the internet? Or, would I be horrified to find that they appear smarter than me?

Curiosity got the better of me, and I visited all the already-registered pages that I couldn't create. And here they are, if you'd like to join me in exploring what might have been:

expletive deleted: beaten to the punch by a Czech guy who seems to have gotten drunk and trashed the place.
procrastination station: seems to have led a short and sad life, despite sounding like the title of a children's show.
brain cavities: really? not one single entry?
chris is a sexy beast: To be fair, I probably would not have really done anything with this, either.

Those options unavailable, I eventually settled on FEEDING THE SUMO. It's a reversal of the phrase "Starving the Sumo", which is a mantra intended to help adolescents avoid masturbating and was first used in the unintentionally hilarious Christian motivational film Every Young Man's Battle. The idea being that our perverse nature is as hungry as Yokozuna, and if we give him some food he'll bounce us out of the ring. I think.

Not that I'm going to blog about masturbation (sorry), but there is a thematic resonance underneath it all. I'm fond of using the term "mental masturbation" to describe anyone who goes to such trouble to show off their mental superiority that their efforts end up doing more harm than good. But I also think that anyone freely offering up their opinions as if they are of automatic benefit to readers - as I am clearly doing - is kind of engaged in the same egotistical stroking, if less disastrously. Not saying it's a negative (or, if you're Christian, sinful) thing, I just think it's an interesting parallel.

To put it another way: You've got to have some balls to think people are going to care what you have to say. And if your intellectual Sumo does end up informing and entertaining others, why wouldn't you want to feed the guy?