Artificial Nomenclature

Does the world really need another blog?

I imagine the "blogosphere" as something real, an ethereal sphere rolling around in virtual space just waiting to reach some critical mass of self-involvement whereupon I can only assume it will achieve Asimovian self-awareness and promptly wear black and listen to The Cure. I think that may be why I've avoided it for so long, for fear of guilt by association. However, if I could have been convinced to stop inflicting my thoughts on the world, it probably would have happened by now.

It's not like I don't write enough. But, that's supposed to be all fancy and professional and objective, which represents a largely uncommon process of thought for me. Given my druthers - and who doesn't want their very own druthers? - my professional author-droppings would unleash a stream-of-consciousness which might very well sweep away entire towns in its undertoe, breaking off on tangents from tangents from non-sequiter anecdotes of questionable truthiness, all of which would tangle together in a map of thought that looks less like a readable flowchart and more like a cross section of a cotton ball. So, I turn to this bastion of poorly thought-out musings, ye olde blogosphere, for what I can only think of as an experiment in intellectual narcissism.

I'd like to say that this train of thought - the #10 Express to Non-Sequiterville - is what led me to the blog name "Elastic Thought", but in reality I spent a half-hour exploring strangely turned phrases in search of an at least adequate available name, an effort as frustrating as explaining a joke to a chicken. What I discovered is that single word names are, quite obviously, no longer available. Shame on me, a bemedaled (not a word) internet veteran of more than a decade for having the temerity to be surprised. I know it was a pipe dream to imagine that Elysium, Sean or even Interrobang would remain an available option as a future home for all this awesome blogging I'm going to be doing. I suppose I'd have been a fool not to try.

I'm fascinated by names, which is a shame because I'm terrible at coming up with them. Whenever I write an article I struggle most furiously with the title, and to have so much potential material immediately stricken from my Big List O' Naming Options was a deficit in the same way that, say, polio might make it hard to become an NFL kicker. I became fascinated by the process, and in trying to think of the strangest possible combinations when I found they were already taken I had to visit the blog to see who actually would take a name like, say, Plastic Monkey or Smell The Cheese, both of which are the address of blogspot users.

How I came to settle on the name Elastic Thoughts is a delicious marriage of frustration and synonyms, and it really isn't important. Then again, this is the blogosphere; if unimportant has a zip code then it's somewhere here.

That's not really a bad thing, I suppose. There should be a place, the virtual equivalent of a rug underneath which we can sweep the dust of our opinions, where topics aren't necessarily relevant, where I can talk about how much I like the new Springsteen CD at one moment and why I think Hoboken is a silly name for a city the next. It's refreshing in a way, I suppose; a place where I can stretch out my thoughts at the end of a long day, like a writing comfy chair.

I'm gonna make this name work if it kills me.