Empty Monkey (Dot Com) - The real-time story of how the book is written

Names have a strange power, they convey something more than the letters of the name, the sound of the name, the look of the written word, or the historical connotations. They mean something more than the word itself.
Who could be fearful of Alan-the-Hun? (talking of names, the name for ‘tartare-sauce’ in Polish looks like a familiar English ‘cream-cheese’ - but I assure you - it tastes awful on crispbread, I have just made that mistake, so ’sound-alike-names’ can be misunderstood).

Do we become the person our name stands for? And where do names come from in the first place?
In any language Ha-Ha is not a curse, or a warning, it is the sound of laughter.
As a child, I wished I had the name ‘Dominic Shackleton’. Why or where I got the name Dominic from beats me, but Shackleton was my mothers maiden name, and the next best thing to ‘Goldsack’, which was already taken by my friend.
Why do I tell you all this?
Because some-one gave me a new name. I did not choose it, they did, for very logical, down-to-earth reasons.

The name they gave me was ‘empty monkey’.
EM for short.
Or to turn it back to front, ME.
At first I was a little put out, but one cannot be unkind to one’s friends.
Then the name grew on me, it seemed opposite to what I am (Over-full and lacking in the ‘monkey-around’ sort of humour).
So, now I am EM, which sounds a little like ‘M’ - with overtones of 007.
However, there are other problems lurking behind the name.

Imagine you are a farmer. You rely on your combine-harvester to bring in the crop. One day, you go into the barn, and lo-and-behold, it has turned into a Maserati.
That is what people like me suffer from. one minute reliable combine. Next minute - unreliable Maserati.
Dreamers and Idlers. Busy Workers. different people. What happens when they occupy the same head?
An Idle-Worker. That is what I am.

I pretend not to be. It is possible to dream and pretend to work at the same time, mostly I have got away with it.
There are further complications though.

Some-one in my head keeps telling me to stop dreaming, while when I am busy, another says “what are you doing, messing around when you could be creating”.
That makes three. Dreamer, worker, critic.

Then there is the person who only talks to the ‘dreamer’ when he is idle.
I call him ‘Hubert’ but we won’t go into the reason here.
Hubert is the cause of all the books and poems and schemes. He gets me into a great deal of trouble, but what would life be without him?
His ideas have kept the wolf from the door for a long time.

So now we have dreamer, worker, critic and now ‘overseer’.
He is a pain-in-the-butt.
He, and i’m not sure about this, he may be a ’she’, pokes his-her nose into everything, casting the ‘weather-forecast’ of doubt over everything.
Overseer stops me killing myself by telling me “look at all the trouble you will cause; unfinished business, bills to be paid, inquest, gossip among all who know you, some people may even miss you for a while”.

Finally we have ‘Marvin’ I call this one Marvin for obvious reasons.
Marvin is a gem. It looks at all the others and comes up with some inscrutable phrase that demolishes all the bickering and pettiness and takes the ‘long-view’
If only I could listen to Marvin more often, but Marvin never butts in, has no ‘axe-to-grind’, no pride. I sometimes wait for Marvin to speak to me, and sometimes Marvin does. When that happens, I take the words I hear to heart.

Maybe we become what others expect of us. What our name implies? Uniforms, disguises, actors, we all ‘play some part’.
I now try to allow myself to be who I am at any moment in time. It’s fun. It’s living. It does little harm, and makes some people smile, once in a while.

Dreamer is writing this, it will be e-mailed in a moment, before the others mess it all up. Five persons in one head, gets a bit crowded and confusing at times.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 6:11 pm and is filed under stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.