VIA MONSTREUX
Once again I’ve come to the conclusion that I hate all uptight innercity parents. Everything is always their fault, my own misery included. But this time, I don’t hate them ‘cause they block the entire sidewalk with their stupid hipster strollers. I hate them because they name their kids silly dog names and creepy hollywoodish shit like Destiny. But now that I listened to KI-C & JoJo’s “All My Life”, my stone hard hateful thug heart melted a little. So I added a societal perspective to my egocentric whining and started this whole name thing perhaps isn’t just silly bullshit. Because even if it feels like a redundant upperclass syndrome when Gwyneth Paltrow and The Beckham couple complains over the difficulty in naming their kids after fruits (Apple) and areas in NYC (Brooklyn), there’re actually some revolutionary tendencies in this shiiiiiet.
I remember when I was was a kiddo and wanted to change my name to Veranda (verandah in english). I thought it was the best name ever, but my parents refused. They didn't want people to think I was a roofed opened porch thingy. I “needed” a name that showed I was a human being. Something like Clara Linn Josephine. But what mom and dad didn’t think of (or probably it was just what they did) was that with such a name, everyone would categorize me as a girl. Something pretty much as constructed and inhumane as a verandah in this society. Because the composition of the letters L-I-N-N constitute a name encoded in a linguistic system. A system that requires a constant maintenance of meanings to make us understand that it’s not a piece of furniture, but something we call a person with a specific sex determination.
Society's dichotomies and categorizations are of course much more complex than that. We’ve had people named Dick, Axel (Shoulder) and Clementine for a long time, so naming a kid to Apple perhaps isn’t that revolutionary. But doesn’t it fuck a little with our structural system of assumptions and knowledge? I would like to see it as an unconscious beginning of a deconstruction of the language.
This summer I’ve met Ira (kid), Alice (dog), Kenneth Svensson (goat), Sigge (kid), Mio (kid) and Milou (kid). Mom thought I’ve joined the IRA and got pretty hysterical when I said I’ve been hanging out with Ira. My psychologist thought Mio was a horse for three weeks and I had to get rid of July’s hotty aka Control Freak who got jealous when I said I’d been out walking with Alice for three hours. Alice, a dog I later described as very beautiful to the Control Freak, but not someone I planned to fuck with since I’m not into bestiality.
And it's all these misunderstandings. These conscious or unconscious things that somehow fuck with the structure of interpretation and understanding. A structure that constantly produces illusions of specific meaning in a system of knowledge and a social construction we call language. Name your kid Mixtape. Let Anna be a (hu)man. Call me woman, call me boy. We’re a bunch of 2FACED1’s who constantly will re-invent and change it's definitions. Because there are no women and there are no boys. We’ve deconstucted the words, they were all just empty illusions. And I promise that you’ll be my post-structural hero when you name your kid Veranda. But you better not buy a fucking hipster stroller.
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