Thursday, March 15, 2012

Name Branding: The Best Thing You Can Do With Your Name?

At the doctor's office the other day, I was standing behind a cherubic man wearing an ugly black back pack across his shoulder. I saw the non-descript name on a tag on the backpack, the bag's maker, stamped into a small piece of metal. It was something so bland I can't even recall it now - Joe Johnson or Frank Corlett or something like that.

And it struck me. So many of us are trying to get our names "out there" for some ungodly reason. And the ways that people choose to do it are increasingly bizarre. All these fashion designers have their names emblazoned across the chests and asses of people they wouldn't even have a conversation with unless they were being forced to at gunpoint. And if you think about the historical significance of these people's names, it's kind of astounding. Many of our ancestors came here on a boat, sleeping in their own shit, starving and acquiring scurvy, suffering for months at a time. When they finally got here, if they made it alive, pretty much all they had was their name. And really, that's the best thing you could think to do with your name, Jack Johnson? Put it onto an ugly black canvas backpack that chubby dudes tote their nerd magazines and viagra in?

Well, okie dokie then.

It kinda makes me think of my own name and what I'm doing with it, what my ancestors had to do for me to be able to fling it around and attach it to so many sexy body part related songs.

I hope I'm doing right by them. If I haven't yet, I plan to make it up with my next piece of merch: a series of butt plugs with my name written in cursive across them. Because the Delfino name is synonymous with an exacting, hey, let's call it "anal" level of quality.

That's just the lineage of fine people I come from.

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